Iraq - The South Marsh Arabs (the Ma'dan) and the Shiite Dawa Party

This area between the Tigris and the Euphrates has been home to the Ma'dan for over 5,000 years. The people live on islands and travel using ancient dugout canoes. Many of their villages are actually man-made floating islands. There is also a group of about 10,000 insurgents who fight against the government of Iraq. Although the people allude to it as the Garden of Eden, it is a hot, humid place infested with mosquitoes, fleas and ticks. Winters are cold, with gales coming from the mountains of Kurdistan to the north or Iran to the east. Saddam has been bulldozing villages and using tanks, poison and air raids to show his displeasure. In Iraq, there are about 50,000 Shiites living in the areas once considered to be the Garden of Eden. Some are Sabeans who predate Islam. Saddam's government is Sunni, even though 55 percent of Iraqis are Shiites. The Shiites in the south are supported by Shiite Iran. The Dawa is a group founded by Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr who played host to Ayatollah Khomeini when he was on the run. Because of a deal struck by Saddam with the then Shah of Iran in 1978, Khomeini was physically tossed out of the holy city of Najaf, Iraq, and split for Paris. Chemical Ali personally strangled Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and had his two sisters hanged. The Dawa party was-surprise, surprise-banned and is now covertly headquartered in Basra.

For now, Saddam is busy building dams, draining the marshes and pouring poison into the rivers (he loves to play with chemicals, doesn't he?) in an effort to simply eliminate every living thing in the marshes. When he gets bored of poisoning the people, crops and animals, he has his army pound on them with artillery, strafe them with gunships and drop large bombs on them. If things are a little slow, he has his soldiers burn hundreds of acres of weeds just to give them something to do.

http://www.arab.net

http://www.inc.org.uk/marshes.html