Marsh Arabs

The Marsh Arabs (Arabic: عرب الأهوار ʻArab al-Ahwār "Arabs of the Marshlands"), also referred to as Ahwaris, the Maʻdān (Arabic: معدان "dweller in the plains") or Shroog (Mesopotamian Arabic: شروگ "those from the east")—the latter two often considered derogatory in the present day—are indigenous inhabitants of the Mesopotamian marshlands in the modern-day south Iraq, as well as in the Hawizeh Marshes straddling the Iran–Iraq border.

Comprising members of many different tribes and tribal confederations, such as the Āl Bū Muḥammad, Ferayghāt, Shaghanbah, Ahwaris had developed a culture centered on the marshes' natural resources. Many of the marshes' inhabitants were forcibly displaced during the Ahwari Genocide when the wetlands were drained during and after the 1991 uprisings in Iraq. The draining of the marshes caused a significant decline in bioproductivity; following the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, water flow to the marshes was restored and the ecosystem has begun to recover.

The origins of the Ahwari people are still a matter of some dispute. British colonial ethnographers found it difficult to classify some of Ahwaris' social customs and speculated that they might have originated in Indus Valley (Pakistan). They may have descended from Zuṭṭ, who moved to the region of lower Iraq in the 8th and 9th centuries and followed similar customs and traditions.

Some scholars such as Ali al-Wardi have claimed they are descended from the Nabataeans of Iraq, the Aramaic-speaking people who inhabited Lower Mesopotamia in the Middle Ages, and some of their clans even follow their ancestry to Islamized Mandaeans.

Other scholars have proposed historical and genetic links between the Marsh Arabs and the ancient Sumerians due to shared agricultural practices, methods of house-building and location. There is, however, no written record of the marsh tribes until the ninth century and the Sumerians lost their distinct ethnic identity by around 1800 BCE, some 2700 years before. Links to Sumerian genetics can likely be traced back to the Arabization and assimilation of indigenous Mesopotamians.

Others, however, have noted that much of the culture of Ahwaris is shared with the desert bedouin who came to the area after the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate.

The marshes had for some time been considered a refuge for elements persecuted by the government of Saddam Hussein, as in past centuries they had been a refuge for escaped slaves and serfs, such as during the Zanj Rebellion. By the mid-1980s, a low-level insurgency against Ba'athist drainage and resettlement projects had developed in the area, led by Sheik Abdul Kerim Mahud al-Muhammadawi of the Al bu Muhammad under the nom de guerre Abu Hatim.

During the 1970s, the expansion of irrigation projects had begun to disrupt the flow of water to the marshes. However, after the First Gulf War (1991), the Iraqi government aggressively revived a program to divert the flow of the Tigris River and the Euphrates River away from the marshes in retribution for a failed Shia uprising. This was done primarily to eliminate the food sources of the Marsh Arabs and to prevent any remaining militiamen from taking refuge in the marshes, the Badr Brigades and other militias having used them as cover. The plan, which was accompanied by a series of propaganda articles by the Iraqi regime directed against the Ma'dan, systematically converted the wetlands into a desert, forcing the residents out of their settlements in the region. Villages in the marshes were attacked and burnt down and there were reports of the water being deliberately poisoned.