Sanctuary Under Siege

By EDWARD BARNES/TEHRAN

Each morning the Iraqi artillery begin to find their targets. Deep in the standing reeds where the gunners cannot easily find them, black-robed women tend their children and few remaining buffalo in tiny makeshift clearings, while men, armed with old AK-47 assault rifles, crouch in hidden blinds along the waterways, waiting for Iraqi patrols. Only at nightfall, when the government troops return to their bases, can the men creep back to their families to sleep.

Saddam Hussein's writ does not extend over the 6,800 sq. mi. of marsh that covers southern Iraq. There Shi'ite army deserters and Marsh Arabs who rose in rebellion after Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War carry on their fight against Saddam. But they fear that their struggle may be doomed now that Baghdad has undertaken the systematic despoliation of the age-old Shi'ite sanctuary in the marshes. Over the past 20 months, according to captured documents and engineering plans now trickling out of Iraq, the government has nearly completed work on a huge project of four major canals and dozens of dams and embankments that will sap the water from the reeds and open the isolated rebel - strongholds to Iraqi tanks, possibly as early as this summer. "We no longer think of victory," says a Shi'ite leader based in neighboring Iran. "Our rifles are no match for his tanks. If Saddam falls, it will have to be to someone else. We continue to fight simply because not to do so would mean certain death."

Draining the swamps is only part of Saddam's campaign to subdue the south. Iraqi military units have effectively encircled the area, enforcing a near total economic blockade and cutting off escape routes into Iran. Government artillery regularly bombards the marshes, and mines have been strewn across the landscape. Army forays into the villages bring terror to the 200,000 local Marsh Arabs. A captured Iraqi document details the elements of the siege: "the withdrawal of all foodstuffs, a ban on the sale of fish, prohibiting means of transportation to and from these areas." The document also calls for mass arrest, assassination, poisoning and burning of houses.

The 10,000 ill-equipped and ill-trained Shi'ite fighters have survived largely because of the protection offered by the terrain, with its floating reed islands and 20-ft. tall forests of papyrus and rushes. But once the swamps are dry, the rebels fear not only enemy tanks but also fires, which would push them into the arms of troops surrounding the perimeter. In February three blazes set by Iraqi barrages scorched several hundred square miles of marshland and destroyed dozens of villages.

Government officials insist the Saddam River project, a 350-mile canal linking Baghdad with the Shatt al-Arab waterway south of Basra, is intended only to add 1.5 million acres to Iraq's arable land. Arif al-Delaimi, chief engineer on the project, says the southern portion of the canal was completed in the 1980s and the marshes have been drying up ever since. Instead of driving the inhabitants out, he says, the government has been resettling them around artificial lakes. But Andrew Whitley, executive director of Middle East Watch says, "The land under the water is of little agricultural value. The project only makes sense as a political enterprise."

The northern sections of the swamp are already dry. Most of the rice farming population has left. In the central marshes, the Shi'ite stronghold, the water level has dropped as much as 18 ft. Inhabitants now have to dig wells to find drinking water; in one attempt, villagers struck oil instead.

Shi'ite rebels in Tehran say the fish, buffalo and rice that were the staples of life are gone. They claim the Iraqi army is using poison to kill marsh wildlife, and they show videotapes of hundreds of fish floating belly up on the brackish waters. Emma Nicholson, a British M.P. who has made three trips to the marshes, says the inhabitants can no longer sustain themselves. In the past eight months, more than 350 villages have been destroyed by shell and rocket fire. "The only way to live in the marshes today is to remain alone and move every day," said a recent escapee.

Rebel leaders say that because of the encirclement, it is virtually impossible to get supplies into the swamps or evacuate the wounded. Access has been limited to small boats that attempt to steal past Iraqi army positions at night. According to a report prepared for the European Community, the government blockade has brought widespread starvation to the marshes and caused commodity prices to rise by "300 times in the past six months." The blockade is so effective, says the report, that there is not even a black market.

While rebels claim they have been successful in attacking the canal's system of levees, dikes and sluice gates, others within the Shi'ite community say the system is too vast and too easily repaired to be destroyed by the rebels' sporadic attacks. One guerrilla leader admitted that a recent raiding party had detonated more than 1,000 lbs. of TNT in one of the bigger earthworks with little effect. "It just made a small hole that released some water," he said, "but it was repaired in two days using a diesel shovel."

The marsh fighters have given up hope that the Western allies will mount a large-scale rescue. "When we saw the allied jets ignore the guns that were killing us and hit only the missiles that threatened their planes last year, we knew we had been abandoned," said a rebel leader in Tehran.