At dawn, a thin veil of mist hangs over the canals of Hawizeh, where sky and water blur into a single mirror. In the stern of a slender wooden boat, 23-year-old Mustafa Hashim scans the shallows, cutting the motor before switching to a traditional pole to avoid snagging on roots or thickening mud.

It takes him half an hour to push through the dwindling wetlands to reach Um al-Nea’aj, once a thriving lake alive with boats and birdsong. Today, its waters are barely half a metre deep.

“Two years ago, there were families and fishermen everywhere,” Mustafa says, leaning out of the boat. “You could hear laughter, the splash of fish. Today, there’s nothing.”

On the horizon, flames from the Halfaya oilfield flicker.

Iraq’s southern wetlands – the Mesopotamian marshes – are among the most endangered ecosystems on Earth. Some believe their vast expanse once encompassed the biblical Garden of Eden. Declared a Unesco world heritage site in 2016 and protected since 2007 under the Ramsar Convention as a wetland of international importance, the marshes once stretched almost 200km from Nasiriya to Basra, forming a rich aquatic world.

Beneath the water lies another resource: oil. Three strategic concessions overlap with the protected area – Halfaya, Huwaiza and Majnoon. The last, Majnoon, takes its name from the Arabic word for “crazy” and is considered one of the world’s “super-giant” oilfields, holding reserves of up to 38bn barrels (5.2bn tonnes).

But extracting that oil consumes vast amounts of water. In a land already battling drought and desertification, the marshes are being drained dry.

Mustafa’s grandfather, 87-year-old Kasid Wanis, once poled his boat from Hawizeh to Basra, a journey of some 70 miles, relying on memory alone. His son, Hashim, grew up fishing the same waters. Four years ago, he put his nets away for good.

“There’s not enough water to live,” he says quietly.

Crude oil is Iraq’s economic lifeline, making up more than 95% of its total exports and 69% of GDP. The country is the sixth-largest crude producer, and the fate of the marshes is bound to that of the oilfields. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Europe has sought alternatives to Moscow’s crude and turned to Iraq as a key supplier.

The link between oil and water scarcity is brutally direct. The Halfaya field –  part-owned by France’s TotalEnergies but led by PetroChina – sprawls across an area three times the size of Paris. It holds 300 wells, three processing plants, a water-treatment facility, and even its own airport. It is PetroChina’s largest overseas project.

Soon after operations began, six pumping stations were built along the Tigris, the river that feeds the marshes. Each day, they divert about 60,000 cubic metres – the equivalent consumption of a medium-sized city – to inject into oil wells and boost extraction.

The Tigris is already running low. Since the 1970s, dams in Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan have cut southern flows by more than half, while Iranian dams on the Karkheh have further choked the marshes. Now, industry’s demands are costing residents their water, their land and their way of life.

For locals, access itself has become fraught. Canals that once carried fishers and buffalo herders deep into the wetlands are now patrolled checkpoints. ID cards must be surrendered to armed guards. The marshes have become militarised. Officials insist this is to stop smuggling and secure the nearby Iranian border, but residents say the real aim is to quell dissent.

“The occupation follows the oil,” Mustafa says. “They want to cut us off from our land so they can exploit it without resistance.”

As the wetlands dried, Mustafa joined the very industry he blames. In 2023, he and his father worked as subcontractors for PetroChina. “I saw it up close,” he recalls.  “They call this development, but it’s destruction disguised as progress.”

By summer, he had quit. That same year drought peaked, protests erupted, and Mustafa joined the blockades at oilfield access roads.

“At first I told Mustafa to stop,” Hashim says. “But then he made me see it: this is political, and we can’t stay silent.”

Oil’s toll is not only on water. “This economy is literally killing people,” says Majid al-Saadi, head of agriculture in Maysan province. In late 2024, his office compiled a confidential report detailing alarming concentrations of hydrocarbons and heavy metals in drinking water, alongside the collapse of local farming.

“This is not just pollution – it’s expropriation,” Saadi says.

Submitted to the environment ministry earlier this year, it has so far prompted only vague promises of talks with the oil ministry. Saadi doubts action will follow.

Meanwhile, expansion continues. Leaked images, verified by satellite analysis by geo-analysis studio Placemarks, show new excavations, pipelines and heavy machinery cutting into the protected Huwaiza zone.

A February 2023 contract between Iraq’s Maysan Oil Company and China’s Geo-Jade Petroleum opened the way. Though Ramsar rules prohibit such development, compliance relies on voluntary enforcement.

Neither PetroChina nor Geo-Jade responded to requests for comment. Iraq’s ministries of oil and environment also remained silent.

n July, the interior ministry’s federal security affairs agency said in a social media post that environmental police had “conducted a field inspection … to monitor potential environmental violations resulting from the activities of oil companies in the Hor al-Huwaiza area”.

It continued: “The field visit revealed that the pond had completely dried up, with no ongoing drilling, extraction, or disposal of oil waste at the site. However, there were excavations … being carried out by local companies contracted with the Chinese company Geo-Jade for exploration purposes and the future installation of oil rigs.”

Jassem Falahi, an environment ministry official, has previously told AFP that the protected status of the marshes did not bar development projects.

However, he added in May: “Investment is subject to specific conditions and standards that must not disturb the core area … or affect the site and its biodiversity.” A spokesperson for TotalEnergies said that while it had a 22.8% stake in Halfaya oilfield, it was not an operator, and that questions about the field should be directed to PetroChina.

Unesco stressed its “significant concern over the continued vulnerability of the natural components of the property to oil and gas developments”.

Deprived of livelihoods, many marsh residents have fled. In Mustafa’s village, hundreds of homes stand abandoned. Fresh protests flared three months ago, with crowds gathering near Halfaya to denounce new drilling permits.

“This isn’t just about today’s drilling rights,” Mustafa said. “We’re fighting so the next generation can know the wetlands our ancestors protected for thousands of years.”

The unrest coincides with Iraq’s push to expand oil output, even as water shortages worsen. With another scorching summer under way, the head of Basra’s Human Rights Commission has called for a state of emergency, warning of a looming disaster from scarcity, pollution and rising toxicity.

What remains in Hawizeh is a quiet war – over land, water, and memory.

“The government and the companies have turned us into a cake to be divided,” Mustafa says. “They treat these waters like a business opportunity. For us, it’s life.”

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At Natural World Fund, we are passionate about restoring habitats in the UK to halt the decline in our wildlife.