Contribution short abstract:

This paper explores the processes of respiration and reparation at the official "zones of combat dust" over the dried beds of Mesopotamian Marshlands in the aftermath of wars and sanctions.

Contribution long abstract:

The immense haze of dust that raises with the wind from the dried beds of Mesopotamian marshlands has drastically changed air and life across Iran and Iraq southern borders in the past decade. This paper explores life in the bad air through an ethnographic engagement with multi-species encounters and affective resonances that shape around green future making at the official zones of combat dust operations in Iran. I show how the oil-rich marshlands have become a laboratory of war-devastated and sanction-ridden reparational experimentations where engineers, scientists, environmental activists, farmers, and traders cooperate and compete to control the air. Drawing on the processes of respiration and photosynthesis, this paper highlights the contours of greening from plantation to rehabilitation and revival as they elude particular habitual knowledge and sensory practices of the marshlands. While understanding the life of Marsh Arabs is long entangled in the nostalgic ebbs of "Mesopotamian culture" in the anthropological debates, I draw on war ecology and hazardous atmosphere to revisit the terms of nativity, indigenousness and breathing hierarchies. Social life here grows in the ruptures and wreckage of structurally violent worlds, where militarized biospheres yield planetary ecological effects.