Lake Razzaza, also known as Lake Milh, emerges as a pure stretch of blue beside the desert road running from the shrine city of Karbala towards Iraq’s border with Saudi Arabia, but the lapping edges of its tranquil waters now wash up dead fish.
Among the brightly-painted boats resting on the shoreline, fisherman Bashir Kamel, 38, walks barefoot carrying crates of his still-flapping morning catch. He pours the fish into a polystyrene box lined with the ice blocks that will keep them fresh until they reach a marketplace in Karbala.
“It looks like there are a lot of fish, but there are very few now because the lake is shrinking,” he tells Middle East Eye. “Every year it gets smaller.”
Kamel estimates that the lake, lying 40km west of Karbala, has shrunk as much as 40 percent from when he first started fishing here as a boy, helping his father.
“The lake used to be fed by small tributaries from the Euphrates but these tributaries were cut and since 2003 no water has come to the lake, so the water has become saltier and the freshwater fish we catch can’t survive in this salty water,” he said.
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