ABU SUBAT, Iraq, March 1 - The family of marsh Arabs that had lived in this smashed house was named Tweresh, said Hamid Muhamed Hashim, walking carefully in his cracked leather sandals over the fallen bricks.
A dike that Saddam Hussein's government finished nine years ago had drained this marsh, once part of an incomparable ecosystem spread across 7,000 square miles of southern Iraq that Mr. Hussein systematically destroyed.
After sealing this dike, the government gave families 24 hours to leave and never come back, Mr. Hashim said. The ruined houses were left sitting on dusty little hills in a barren and bone-dry desert. He was 15 then.
But when Mr. Hussein's government fell in April 2003, villagers went to the dike and gouged holes in it using shovels, their bare hands and at least one piece of heavy equipment, a floating backhoe. Since then, something miraculous has occurred: reeds and cattails have sprouted up again; fish, snails and shrimp have returned to the waters; egrets and storks perch on the jagged remains of the walls, coolly surveying the territory as if they had never left.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/08/science/earth/08mars.html
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