Engineer & Environmentalist

Azzam Alwash is an Iraqi geotechnical engineer and environmentalist. He was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2013, for his efforts on restoring salt marshes in southern Iraq that had been destroyed during the Saddam Hussein regime. 

Azzam left Iraq in 1978 at the age of 20 because he refused to join the ruling Ba’ath Party. Halfway through an engineering degree, he moved to Los Angeles, California, and continued his studies. Following the 2003 invasion, Azzam returned to Iraq and set up Nature Iraq, a non-profit focused on restoring the salt marshes of southern Iraq.

Once known as “The Garden of Eden,” the wetlands had now turned to dust bowls. As a young boy in Iraq, Azzam spent many days out in the marshes with his father, who was head of the irrigation department during the early 1960s. He remembered looking over the side of the boat into clear water, watching large fish dart away, and spending precious time with his father.

When the Hussein regime fell, Azzam knew the time had come for him to go back to restore the beloved marshes of his childhood. In 2003, he made the difficult choice to give up a comfortable life in California and move back to war-torn Iraq, with the hopes that one day his own daughters might be able to see the place he had loved as a child.

The Mesopotamian marshes are starting to flourish once again as a result of Azzam’s advocacy. Almost half of the original area is now flooded again. Thanks in large part to Azzam’s work, the Iraqi government voted to establish the marshes as the country’s first national park in July 2013.