The World Heritage site in southern Iraq survived Saddam Hussein’s campaign to drain the wetlands. Now they’re drying up, and biodiversity is collapsing.
— Read on www.wired.com/story/the-mesopotamian-marshes-are-disappearing-again/

“But ever since Iran, in 2009, completed construction of a 56-kilometer-long weir(!) along its border with Iraq, water no longer flows”

“often referred to as the cradle of civilization, as anthropologists believe that this is where humankind, some 12,000 years ago, started its wide-scale transition from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement. “