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Asharq Al-Awsat
Asharq Al-Awsat
Lifestyle
Asharq Al-Awsat

Iraq's Garden of Eden Now 'Like a Desert'

A veiled Iraqi woman rides in a boat as she goes out fishing early morning in marshland near Karbala, 110km south of Baghdad, in 2006. Photo: AFP

To feed and cool his buffaloes, Hashem Gassed must cross 10 kilometers (six miles) of sunburnt land in southern Iraq, where drought is devastating swathes of the mythical Mesopotamian Marshes.

The reputed home of the biblical Garden of Eden, Iraq's swamplands have been battered by three years of drought and low rainfall, as well as reduced water flows along rivers and tributaries originating in neighboring Turkey and Iran, AFP said.

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