A LIFE LEFT BEHIND: The hidden struggles of Iraq’s female climate refugees

By Khuloud al-Amiry in Baghdad
In the southern heartlands of Iraq, a quiet crisis is brewing, a crisis that for many means leaving behind everything they’ve ever known. It’s a crisis borne of drought, climate change and government policies. And it is the stories told by women forced to abandon their ancestral homes that provide particularly powerful examples of the devastation wrought by environmental change and a warming world.
Two years ago the family of Mohammed Abu Hussein left their village, Al Hassouna, in the central Iraqi province of Dhi Qar. In doing so, they abandoned 500,000 square meters of fertile land that once fed them and their community. Previously home to 76 families, their village now has only seven remaining households. Like so many others, the Abu Hussein family has fallen victim to environmental change in southern Iraq.
They now live in a cramped house on the outskirts of Nasiriyah, a city that is rapidly expanding because of families like the Abu Husseins. The house was once part of a wheat farm but urban sprawl is seeing arable land lost to urbanization.
For Um Hussein, a woman in her 60s, the family’s new life feels suffocating.
“I used to roam freely across our land, the open space stretched out in front of me,” she says, eyes welling with tears. “Now I’m stuck in this small house, my world reduced to a few meters.”
Isolation and stress are taking a toll on her health. After relocating, she was diagnosed with diabetes and high blood pressure.
The impact of displacement is often harder on women, particularly females in rural areas where they are often deeply connected to the land.
Many of these women were born and raised in the vast marshes and agricultural plains of southern Iraq. The women are often forced to leave behind not only their homes but their way of life. The connections to nature, the close-knit communities, and the sense of purpose in farming or reed cutting are suddenly gone, replaced with isolation and uncertainty. Many women who once worked the fields alongside their families now find themselves in crowded informal settlements, with little to do and even less support.
For Um Hussein, the loss of her home, her land and her freedom has been more than just a physical displacement, it has also been a spiritual and emotional blow.
“I used to walk miles without feeling any pain,” Um Hussein continues. “Now just walking a few steps is exhausting. This place has made me sick. I feel like I’m in prison, with no way out.”
Displacement in southern Iraq is not a new story. Over three decades ago, the Iraqi government under dictator Saddam Hussein decided to drain the marshes of southern Iraq as part of a campaign against the people who lived there and who opposed Hussein’s regime. The draining of the marshes led to the forced migration of thousands of people.
The scale of the contemporary displacement is equally worrying. According to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration, by March 2023, more than 12,200 families — that is over 73,000 individuals — had been displaced due to drought in southern Iraq. Dhi Qar was the hardest hit, followed closely by Maysan province.
By mid-March 2024, the number of displaced had surged to more than 23,000 families, according to Iraq’s Ministry of Environment. The crisis has seen families migrate to both rural and urban areas, with significant numbers heading to Baghdad and Karbala.
In both present and past displacement, many of the women who left behind a traditional way of life based on reed cutting found themselves in new areas where they faced mockery from locals who didn’t understand their traditions.
Today, Um Hussein and her daughters feel like they’re living through something similar. Despite two years in their new home, they still don’t feel like they belong.
“We can’t live here. We can’t get used to it,” says one of Um Hussein’s daughters says. “We just want to go back. If we could have water again, we could return to our land.”
Children in the displaced families can’t attend school because their residency status is constantly changing so they are unable to secure permanent registration. “Every year, we move again,” says one of the men in the community of displaced families. “The children never get to settle, never get to go to school for more than a few months at a time.”
But there’s no easy solution. “We don’t know how to grow anything except barley,” says Abu Hussein, the man of the family. Suggestions to help displaced families, like organizing donations to replant trees or to launch small agricultural projects with other crops or animals sound hollow to the family.
Families displaced from the marshlands often form tight-knit communities as they search for temporary shelter. They rent barren land for as little as US$320 a year and build homes from mud and reeds, holding on to the familiar despite hardship. For these families, displacement is a continuous cycle, one that has lasted for over 25 years.
“We’ve been moving from one place to another for decades,” says Um Ali, one of the women in this community. “We don’t have a solution. We only want one thing: water.”
Iraq’s Ministry of Environment has forecast even worse to come: Cities like Basra and Dhi Qar could be submerged in salt water by 2150, which would obviously displace entire populations, and these families, again.
Um Hussein believes that the government numbers are only the start of what is really going on. “The ones who are registered are only a small fraction of us,” she explains before asking what will happen to the family, should they be forced to relocate again.
“What will become of us?” Um Hussein asks. She is silent for a moment before whispering, “only God knows.”
This article is part of a series supported by the “Qarib” program, funded by the French Development Agency (AFD) and implemented by the French Agency for Media Development (CFI).