Al-Hawizeh women struggling amid marsh eradication: a case study of Al-Bu Khassaf women in Maysan, Southern Iraq

This paper examines the socio-ecological collapse of the Al-Hawizeh Marsh, southern Iraq’s last surviving wetland, through a gendered lens centred on the women of Al-Bu Khassaf village in Maysan. Drawing on field research, interviews and local testimonies, it documents how deliberate drainage, oil extraction and militarised spatial governance have dismantled the ecological and cultural foundations of marsh life. The study situates women at the core of this collapse as the principal custodians of ‘marsh knowledge’: an inherited corpus of ecological, economic, and cultural practices now on the brink of extinction. It traces the shift from a participatory production model, where women’s labour sustained the collective economy, to a condition of severe livelihood erosion, dependency and impoverishment. These dynamics, we argue, reflect a deliberate reconfiguration of the marsh as an extractive and securitised frontier rather than a living heritage landscape. Beyond documenting loss, the study calls for urgent multi-level interventions: enforceable transboundary water governance, a moratorium on hydrocarbon expansion, demilitarisation and the institutional recognition of women’s agency and intangible heritage. The women of Al-Bu Khassaf are thus both witnesses and resisters within Iraq’s broader landscape of environmental and developmental failure.