In July 1958, in the same month as the anti-monarchic revolution, Iraqi and Greek researchers presented the government with their socio-economic and planning-architectural study on the ‘Special Problem of Buffalo-Owning Sarifa Dwellers’ in the eastern periphery of Baghdad. The study examined a different kind of urban landscape, rather, an urban ‘wetland’ that was co-created by migrant families engaged in buffalo-breeding from southeastern Iraq, including the marshes. Contemporary discourse on Iraq’s wetland ecosystems has thus far been dominated by a focus on the marshes of southeastern Iraq. This paper, however, wants to broaden the historical notion of what constituted a ‘wetland’ in Iraq. It examines the ‘wetland’ ecosystems of Mayzara, a neighborhood located beyond the eastern Nazim Pasha flood dyke and railway embankment. The capital’s inhabitants greatly benefited from their dairy production, specifically dairy-based products like the popular breakfast food qeymar. On average, the monthly income of buffalo-owning migrant families was five times the amount that a non-buffalo owning family earned. The Iraqi river buffalo was a highly desirable commodity whose sale could both enable a family to migrate to the city or whose breeding could render them wealthy in the capital. Yet, the study argued that in order for these families to become “productive social units,” their housing situation should be categorized and solved as either part of the rural or urban territories of Iraq. Yet their distinct settlements, marked by large open courtyards, earth architecture, reed mat shelters and nearby wading pools for buffaloes did not fit into the flattened categories of rural and urban. Instead, migrant families used flood plains, water channels, and excavated ditches to reproduce the environmental features of the wetlands they left behind to support their buffalo-centered livelihoods in the capital. Buffaloes and Chevrolets, along with reed mats and concrete, thus equally defined Baghdad’s environment. Similar to how the Iraqi state viewed southeastern marshlands as a problem of development, the capital’s authorities and state officials perceived buffalo-breeding families, the Iraqi river buffaloes, and their urban ‘wetlands’ as a problem that required drastic environmental intervention and transformation. This paper narrates how Iraqi, British, and Greek experts conceptualized this problem and eventually drained this landscape.

“The Iraqi government, not the Shaikh of Kuwait, is our government; we are the owners of the soil and have been born and bred on it.” In the early 1930s, this was a common refrain among the farmers who had risen up against one of the largest landowners in southern Iraq, repelling private tax assessors and marketing the crops themselves. Although Shaykh Ahmad al-Jaber took it as an affront to his independent sovereign power, he and the ruling Sabah family of Kuwait were reluctant to resort to outright coercion to quash these “communistic” challenges to their proprietary rights. Instead, they would spend the next years enmeshed in Iraqi courts, invoking Iraqi laws, and insisting on the efficacy of Iraqi territorial sovereignty—only to gradually lose many of their properties around Basra. In studying the disputes over the Sabah properties around Basra, my paper explores themes of nationality and territoriality as they unfolded in struggles over the material wealth of agricultural land. It links these disputes in Ottoman and Mandate-era commitments by the British to fiscal privileges for the Sabah family, and in the social crises and economic confusion of the Great Depression. The latter had already helped spur a wider political project in interwar Iraq to capture greater shares of the value of regional commodity circuits like the Basrawi date trade within the country’s borders. The paper then recounts how the peasant uprisings on the Sabah estates incidentally reinforced such projects. Many of the tenants were originally Nejdi, but by the 1930s they were invoking Iraqi nationality in their challenges to the Sabah enforcers and lawyers; appeals to district and provincial authorities; and self-advocacy in national periodicals. The paper also considers the materiality of the Sabah properties themselves. These estates were primarily marshlands in which the surface area fluctuated annually due to ecological conditions in the northern Gulf littoral, and as such had complicated attempts by Ottoman, British, and Hashemite state authorities to assign them stable cash values. Cultivators on the Saba properties had acquired certain rights of tenure precisely because they had labored to reclaim the estates from the marshlands of the Shatt al-Arab estuary. The paper thus asks how, by fixing the land concretely in place for the purpose of commercial agriculture, cultivators provoked abstract claims to property and nationality—and in turn served to render these notions real and concrete in the new political geography of Iraq.

Used in counterinsurgency, base-making, and rapid landscape transformation, t-walls are a military technology with transnational reach. These blast-proof concrete segments, integral to wartime segregation in Europe, were later introduced to the Middle East to generate "ideal" landscapes for pacifying insurgency in Palestine, Iraq, and Kurdistan. T-walls, introduced to the Iraqi landscape in 2003 as a core technology in the War on Terror. As a material artifact of divide and conquer policies, t-walls have accompanied intensified modalities of spatialized policing, garrisoned safety enclaves, siege warfare, and deadly restrictions on mobility in Iraq. This paper is based upon ethnographic interviews and travel with internally displaced Anbari farmers in 2014 and 2015, whose encounters with t-walls are illustrative of much broader displacement from their land and crops. Sandwiched between multiple entities scrambling for geopolitical control in Anbar, families crossed a regional border into the semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan for refuge. However, Anbari men sometimes traveled back and forth illegally to maintain farms or fight in militias. As they travel across newly made internal borders between Iraqi Kurdistan where they seek refuge from military violence, and Anbar province, where their crops and land need tending, their interface with t-walls and checkpoints shapes their ability to maintain intimacy with their farmland. T-walls are often theorized as a barrier technology that segregates spaces and produces or concretizes borders. This paper argues that, rather that mark the edge, such concrete artifacts mark the middle of occupied territories, pulling symbolic, material, and political attention to loci of militarism and the environments it produces. T-walls are, therefore, ecological figures that symbolize much broader impacts of displacement and environmental estrangement in the long wake of the War on Terror.

In March 1905, the ‘Amara seniye lands commission accused Ghadban al-Bunyan, shaykh of the Bani Lam, of trying to illicitly acquire the Chahala tax farm by means of a “borrowed name” contract. Claims – by both officials and shaykhs – that others were using “borrowed names” to illegally bid on tax farm contracts proliferated in late Ottoman ‘Amara, often alongside accusations of “banditry.” This paper will explore how a suite of illicit behaviors centered on banditry and borrowed names came to define the edge of the Ottoman community in ‘Amara, and will argue that these behaviors were increasingly spatialized through association with the practice of border-crossing, ultimately confining Ottoman identity both discursively and spatially. In a context of fierce competition over scarce tax farms in the rice lands on the Tigris, officials used accusations of borrowed-name contracts primarily to explain the difficulty of locating tax farmers who were both “neutral” and “local,” characteristics at the intersection of multiple reform projects. Shaykhs, though, buttressed their bids for tax farms by contrasting accusations of banditry and borrowed names with claims to officially-recognized goods like “subjecthood” and “honesty.” Linking these to an assertion of the right to “not fall into obscurity” through access to “refuge and homeland,” shaykhs claimed simultaneous local and Ottoman identities, arguing that (former) bandits could be Ottoman on the same terms as anyone else. However, through the competition over tax farms, groups living in the trans-border marshes on the frontier with Iran often used the border as a tool in their negotiations with Ottoman authorities. Border-crossing was part of a toolkit that allowed shaykhs to jockey for position within the Ottoman system. But both it and the marshes became increasingly associated with banditry and borrowed names, as tribes who were temporarily resident in Iran were forced to rely on these strategies to access land – but also as shaykhs whipped up fears that rivals would allow thousands of armed Qajar subjects across the border to cause violence and unrest. So, the use of the border as a political resource led to an increasingly spatialized understanding of banditry, and of Ottoman identity, ultimately making it more and more difficult for shaykhs to cross back. Squeezed both discursively and spatially, they found themselves increasingly counted out of the Ottoman political community and denied access to land, as their vision of the possibility of overlapping Ottoman and tribal belonging receded.