The Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) was the longest two-state, conventional war of the twentieth century. It engulfed both countries for most of the 1980s and its effects have lasted until today. During wartime, both governments produced massive amounts of state-sponsored literature that reinforced two official narratives of the war. Since the war ended, however, there has been a proliferation of writing about the conflict from a variety of perspectives that has considered a more comprehensive understanding of the war’s consequences and its victims. Most of the literature that has emerged as a challenge to the state narratives of “Saddam’s Qadisiyya” and the “Sacred Defense” have focused on the terrible human consequences of the war: physical and mental trauma narratives of soldiers and civilians, stories of widows, orphans, and refugees. Yet, the war also left behind myriad consequences on non-human victims and destroyed parts of the natural environment in the border regions between Iran and Iraq, and specifically the ecologically diverse border zone in Iran’s southwest and the Iraqi south. Extant studies by environmental and social scientists have focused on air and water pollution from weapons and spilt oil and the effects of leftover mines. Prose fiction, however, offers another perspective. This paper brings together two novels published in 2017, Haras (Pruning the Palm) by Iranian writer Nasim Mar’ashi, and al-Sabiliyyat (trans. The Old Woman and the River) by the late Kuwaiti writer Isma’il Fahd Isma’il, to show how writers of fiction have used the devastating effects of war on the peoples, animals and physical environment of the marshlands in the two countries to create alternative narratives of this long war. Moreover, this paper highlights how two prominent novelists working in Persian and Arabic, two literatures rarely brought together in comparative contents, have found common thematic grounds around the need to address environmental degradation in contemporary fiction. In so doing, it draws from recent critical work in animal studies and the ecocriticism (namely by Rob Nixon, Anat Pick, and the more recent work of Charis Olszok) to explore notions of victimhood, mourning, and loss across contemporary Arabic and Persian literatures.