The violence experienced by the Iraqi people in recent decades has had detrimental effects on the natural environment as well. Environmental damage to Iraq’s south has frequently been taken as emblematic of the damage wrought on the country as a whole, from Basra’s palm trees incinerated during the Iran-Iraq War to the draining of the marshes in the 1990s by the Baathist regime. In this paper, I examine how two recent works of fiction have addressed the ongoing environmental catastrophe of the Basra region, as well as the complex relationships between the human and natural worlds. The 2017 novel al-Sab?liyy?t by the Basra-born Kuwaiti novelist Ism???l Fahd Ism???l has as its protagonist an older Iraqi woman, whose village along the Sha?? al-?Arab is evacuated in the early days of the Iran-Iraq War. Returning to the military zone, she makes an accommodation with the troops stationed there and single-handedly revives plant and animal life while restoring dammed streams. Her interactions with humans—whether the military or her own family members—are tense and frustrating, and her only true companions are non-human: her loyal donkey and the apparition of her late husband. Drawing on the insights of ecocriticism, I argue that al-Sab?liyy?t replaces a problematic and destructive anthropocentrism in favor of a more expansive biocentrism. The Basran author ?iy?? Jubail? evokes similar themes in certain stories from his 2018 flash fiction collection, L? ?aw???n Haw?? f? l-Ba?ra, although his stories, which frequently veer into magical realism, offer a darker view of both humanity and the natural world. In one story, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War returns to his ruined farm in the Faw peninsula and, in draining the salt water and sowing seeds, revives—to his horror—the corpses of dead soldiers lying under his soil. In other stories, a young man, waiting in vain by the Sha?? al-?Arab for his beloved, turns into a tree, and Walt Whitman’s beard grows to encompass an entire public park in Basra. In Jubail?’s brief narratives, the conventionally defined borders between humans and the environment become blurred and at times, menacing. Both works of fiction present a reassertion of natural world in response to war and violence visited upon Iraq.