Post Description

"Braving Iraq," which comes from the PBS series "Nature" which aired last Sunday on KCET, is a story mostly of people, water, reeds and birds (but also of frogs, water buffalo and bugs) in which the people, as they are wont to, play both villain and hero. The chief villain is Saddam Hussein, the late Iraqi dictator, who turned to desert 90% of one of the world's great wetlands, the 6,000-square-mile Mesopotamian Marshes. The representative hero is Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi native who left for the United States in 1978 and returned after the 2003 invasion to help get the water flowing again.

Sometimes identified as the "historical" Garden of Eden, the marshes were a system of reedy waterways twice the size of the Everglades, a permanent home or migratory layover for kingfishers, pelicans, flamingos, cormorants, stilts, teals and warblers. It was home also to the people known as the Marsh Arabs, who lived in ingenious harmony on the water and among the reeds, which provided them with fuel, feed and building material.

1080i / DD5.1