SAMAWAH, Iraq —
Gazelles at an Iraqi
wildlife reserve are dropping dead from hunger, making them the latest victims
in a country where climate change is compounding hardships after years of war.
اضافة اعلان
In little over one month, the slender-horned gazelle
population at the Sawa reserve in southern Iraq has plunged from 148 to 87.
Rhim gazelles graze at the Sawa wildlife reserve in the desert of Samawa in Iraq’s southern province of Al-Muthanna on June 8, 2022.
Lack of funding along with a shortage of rain has
deprived them of food, as the country’s drought dries up lakes and leads to
declining crop yields.
President Barham Saleh has warned that tackling
climate change “must become a national priority for Iraq as it is an
existential threat to the future of our generations to come”.
The elegant animals, also known as rhim gazelles,
are recognizable by their gently curved horns and sand-colored coats. The
International Union for Conservation of Nature classes the animals as
endangered on its Red List.
Outside Iraq’s
reserves, they are mostly found in the deserts of Libya, Egypt, and Algeria but
are unlikely to number “more than a few hundred” there, according to the Red
List.
Turki Al-Jayashi, director of the Sawa reserve, said
gazelle numbers there plunged by around 40 percent in just one month to the end
of May.
“They no longer have a supply of food because we
have not received the necessary funds” which had come from the government,
Jayashi said.
Iraq’s finances are under pressure after decades of
war in a poverty-stricken country needing agricultural and other infrastructure
upgrades.
It is grappling with corruption, a financial crisis,
and political deadlock which has left Iraq without a new government months
after October elections.
At three other Iraqi reserves further north, the
number of rhim gazelles has fallen by 25 percent in the past three years to 224
animals, according to an agriculture ministry official who asked to remain
anonymous.
Turki Al-Jayashi, director of the Sawa wildlife reserve, gives an interview there in the desert of Samawa in Iraq’s southern province of Al-Muthanna on June 8, 2022.
He blamed the drop at the reserves in Al-Madain near
Baghdad, and in Diyala and Kirkuk on a “lack of public financing”.
At the Sawa reserve, established in 2007 near the
southern city of Samawah, the animals pant under the scorching sun.
The brown and barren earth is dry beyond recovery,
and meager shrubs that offer slight nourishment are dry and tough.
Some gazelles, including youngsters still without
horns, nibble hay spread out on the flat ground.
Others take shelter under a metal roof, drinking
water from a trough.
Summer hasn’t even begun but temperatures have
already hit 50 degrees Celsius in parts of the country.
The effects of drought have been compounded by
dramatic falls in the level of some rivers due to dams upstream and on
tributaries in Turkey and Iran.
Desertification affects 39 percent of Iraqi land,
the country’s president has warned.
“Water scarcity negatively affects all our regions.
It will lead to reduced fertility of our agricultural lands because of
salination,” Saleh said.
He has sent over $68,000 in an effort to help save
the Sawa reserve’s rhim gazelles, Jayashi said.
But the money came too late for some.
Five more have just died, their carcasses lying together on
the brown earth.
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