For the past few years, whenever I thought of Iraq I could only think about war. Last night, however, I watched a one hour BBC program called Miracle in the Marshes of Iraq that changed the way I view Iraq probably for the rest of my life. Southern Iraq was once lush with thousands of square miles of marshes where animals, both human and non-human, coincided. (These marshes were even called ‘the original Garden of Eden’.) According to the film, Saddam Hussein ordered that they be dried up in the 1990s. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government, people have been working hard to bring back the marshes. Azzam Alwash, the engineer featured in the show who is doing his best to bring back the water, even mentioned that he’d like for the marshes of Iraq to become a tourist hot-spot one day in the future. Filmaker David Johnson was dedicated to film the rebirth of the marshes as well as rare birds. It was really interested and eye-opening to learn something different about Iraq for once as well as watch as the marshes started to thrive once more. If you’re in the UK, you can watch Miracle in the Marshes of Iraq either here or here.

(Images all clickable straight to source: BirdLife.org, InternationalRivers.org, WorldReligionsProject.Wikispaces.com)