U.S. Denounces Baghdad for Violating Rights of Shiites

WASHINGTON —  The State Department denounced the Iraqi government Friday for continued human rights violations in its efforts to drive Shiite Muslims from their ancestral home in the country’s southeastern marshlands.

“We have verified extensive draining and burning of the marshes, the burning of villages, and ongoing artillery attacks on civilian centers,” the department said in a statement. “The Iraqi government’s tactics are designed to eradicate a culture which has been present in the marshes for thousands of years, and eliminate a fragile ecosystem in the region.”

The statement came amid new reports of atrocities from recent visitors to the region, which is part of a protected zone patrolled by U.S., French and British fighters.

Yousif Khoei, the grandson of late Iraqi Shiite spiritual leader Ayatollah Abul Qassim Khoei, spent last Friday, Saturday and Sunday observing the border region just west of the Iranian town of Susangerd.

In an interview from London on Thursday, Yousif Khoei described an encampment of 5,000 Shiite refugees who had fled across the border into Iran. Frightened, hungry and weary from 130-degree heat, many of the fugitives had been injured by the intermittent artillery attacks of the Iraqi army, Khoei said, and most were women and children.

“We saw a little girl, 2 years old, whose thigh was badly damaged by shrapnel,” Khoei said. “Another boy . . . had lost an arm to a bombing and a woman . . . lost a leg.”

He and a British television cameraman also saw Iraqi bombs explode in the distance Saturday afternoon.

The 5,000-square-mile marshland region near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is of strategic importance to Iraq, the State Department official said. Much of the nation’s oil wealth is concentrated there and the region was hotly contested during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war that began in 1980.

Believed by some to be the location of the biblical Garden of Eden, the marshes became a haven for deserting Iraqi soldiers and government dissidents during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Those who fled into the marshes joined the approximately 200,000 “marsh Arabs” who lived there in reed huts, fishing and raising water buffalo.

The area, unusual in the arid Middle East, once abounded in fish, birds and other wildlife. But hoping to regain control of a region that has consistently resisted his authority, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has scorched portions of the marshes, and has successfully dried out vast areas in the center by building dams that reroute the inflowing waterways. Such measures enable the Iraqi army to penetrate the region more easily.

While the Iraqi government claims the marshes are being drained as part of a long-planned effort to reclaim the land for agricultural purposes, State Department officials dismissed that explanation.