As Saddam Hussein drained Iraq’s famed marshes to punish the rebellious tribesmen who lived in them, Amjad Mohamed packed his few possessions, grabbed his fishing rod, and fled south to Basra with his extended family.

For 12 years, they lived in one of the poor, neglected neighborhoods on the outskirts of Iraq’s second largest city. He worked as a laborer in the oil fields and tried his hand at catching fish in nearby streams.

All the while, though, Mohamed dreamed of returning home, and when the U.S.-led invasion started in 2003, he was among the first to hack at the dikes Saddam’s regime had built to block the rivers from replenishing the wetlands. Eagerly embracing his ancestral village days after the arrival of American troops, he bought one of the narrow, tar-covered boats favored by generations of fishermen and took to the water once more.

But after a few recent lean years as a fisherman and several run-ins with tribal elders, he decided to call it quits and head back to the city for good.

“The water’s just bad. It’s so salty, it’s not like it was before,” he said, as he sat on the stoop of his cousin’s electrical-goods store alongside one of Basra’s rubbish-clogged canals. “I prefer not to be in the marshes than to see them like that.”’

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