There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

Father says thousands of years later, Yazidi settlements were similarly wiped off the map when Saddam ordered that they be destroyed to make way for the Mosul Dam. All at once the villagers were left homeless. In their own motherland, they became refugees. Saddam also built reservoirs and dikes to divert water from the marshlands—which used to be so green and fertile that many believed them to be the original Garden of Eden. But the tyrant wanted to teach the Marsh Arabs a lesson, and, in doing so, send a message to all dissidents. “You know, Marsh Arabs used to grow rice and cane reeds—and scented cucumbers. Ah, that smell! But when the dictator decimated the marshlands, the water became undrinkable, full of salt. The buffalos were poisoned. The plants died. Twenty thousand square kilometers of bountiful soil, imagine, crumbled into wasteland. People starved to death.” Father says that, in the chaos following the American invasion, all the chemicals and rubble from fuel and weapons contaminated the Tigris. And the Mosul Dam, which Saddam in all his hubris had once named after himself, has now been declared the most perilous dam in the world, built on poor foundations of soluble rock that are dissolving by the day. At some point in the future it could collapse, and, if that happens, in only a matter of hours it will inundate Mosul and the surrounding area, engulfing houses and fields as well as thousands of years of history. He says that one ancient city in particular is i...