Like his father, Iraqi buffalo herder Watheq Abbas grazes his animals in Iraq's southern wetlands, but with persistent drought shrinking marshland where they feed and decimating the herd, his millennia-old way of life is threatened.

"There's no more water, the marshes are dead," said 27-year-old Abbas, who has led his buffaloes to pasture in the marshland for the past 15 years.

"In the past, the drought would last one or two years, the water would return and the marshes would come back to life. Now we've gone without water for five years," the buffalo herder told AFP.

This year has been one of the driest since 1933, authorities have said, with summer temperatures topping 50C across Iraq, which is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

The UNESCO-listed swamplands in the country's south -- where tradition has it that the biblical Garden of Eden was located -- have sustained civilisations dating back to ancient Mesopotamia.

But the unrelenting dry spell has reduced the mythical waterways to a barren land of cracked earth, stripped of the slender reeds that once dominated the landscape.

Abbas and tens of thousands of Iraqis like him who rely on the........

© Al Monitor