Akeed Abdullah stands next to his boat in a dried marsh in Hor al-Hammar, Iraq, on March 27. A severe drought is causing hardship for Marsh Arabs, who pursue a life of fishing and foraging that has not changed substantially for thousands of years. Hadi Mizban / AP

HOR AL-HAMMAR, Iraq – A severe drought is threatening Iraq’s southern marshes — the traditional site of the biblical Garden of Eden — just as the region was recovering from Saddam Hussein’s draining of its lakes and swamps to punish a political rebellion. Marshes that were coming back to life a few years ago with U.N. help are again little more than vast expanses of cracked earth. The area’s thousands of inhabitants, known as Marsh Arabs, are victims of the debilitating drought that has ravaged much of Iraq and neighboring countries the last two years. "I have no work. Our livestock have died, our children have left school because we don’t have money to buy them clothes," said fisherman Yasir Razaq. He spoke in front of his wooden boat, which sat on a dried-up lake bed in the Hor al-Hammar marsh near Nasiriyah, 200 miles south of Baghdad. …

Iraq drought hits marshes in ‘Garden of Eden’