Two weeks after being abducted by armed men, Jassim al-Assadi is free again. This famous environmental activist in Iraq, very involved in the preservation of famous marshes in the south of the country, was kidnapped on February 1 by unknown assailants who had stopped his car on a highway near Baghdad. He has now regained his freedom, his family confirmed on Thursday.

"Jassim al-Assadi has been freed from the yoke of his captors," said his brother Nazem. "Thank you to those who supported us in this ordeal [...] thank you to the Prime Minister for his support [...] and his concern to guarantee his safety, thank you to the police," he added. However, Nazem al-Assadi declined to comment immediately on the circumstances of his brother's release, whose motive for the abduction remains unknown for now.

Marshes suffering from drought

Born in 1957 in the marsh region, Jassim al-Assadi is the hydraulic engineer who heads the environmental association "Nature Iraq" and regularly intervenes in the Iraqi and foreign media to raise awareness among Iraqis about the marshes, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and threatened in recent years by drought and water shortages.

Since 2006, he has been involved in various initiatives to restore these marshes in southern Iraq, which were almost completely drained in the 1990s under Saddam Hussein. Threatened by drought in one of the countries most exposed to climate change according to the UN, the marshes suffer from reduced rainfall, scorching summer temperatures that accelerate the phenomenon of evaporation, and especially the reduced flow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, due to dams built upstream in neighboring countries, Turkey and Iran.



While Iraq has regained a semblance of normality and relative security stability after decades of conflict, assassinations and kidnappings of militants or officials remain common, in a country still shaken by tribal conflicts and where civil society deplores the existence of armed factions and a proliferation of weapons very easy to obtain.

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  • World
  • Iraq
  • Activist
  • Ecology
  • Abduction