Heat: 50 degrees, no shade, ground burned hard as clay

By sunrise, the remaining channels of Iraq’s Mesopotamian Marshes are already giving way to dead, sun-baked land. Narrow boats move through the reeds until the vegetation thins, revealing flames above the oil fields. The water eventually ends at ground hardened like clay in a kiln.

The marshes, in southern Iraq, were once described as the Garden of Eden and the cradle of civilization. They were also among the world’s largest wetland areas, roughly the size of the German state of Saxony. But in the account, the surviving waterways lead into an increasingly barren landscape.

The author meets farmer Falah Zrair, who lives on the boundary between marsh and desert. His hut, assembled from wood and plastic sheeting, stands on a dusty rise about two meters high. It was once a tiny island. His children wake and feed the water buffalo as the morning begins.

The early hours remain bearable, but the temperature climbs with every passing minute. Summer days reach 50 degrees Celsius or more. People the author encountered tell him, “We are only waiting for our death.” The account presents the heat as a burden that affected him more deeply than violence and destruction during his work as a war reporter, while asking why political and public responses to the climate crisis remain inadequate.

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We are only waiting for our death.