[Webinar] Environmental Displacement of the Indigenous Ahwari People in Iraq’s Wetlands
![[Webinar] Environmental Displacement of the Indigenous Ahwari People in Iraq’s Wetlands](http://api.beiruturbanlab.com/images/1800x10000xi/533~Outlook-5hexwxe3.jpg)
The Forced Displacement Program at AUB and the Beirut Urban Lab invite you to a webinar with Farah Alkhoury titled:
Environmental Displacement of the Indigenous Ahwari People in Iraq's Wetlands.
Date: Monday November 24, 2025; 6-7:15 PM
In conversation with: Sawsan Abdulrahim
This event is open to the public
Event Description
Long subjected to environmental injustice and state violence, the indigenous Ahwari people have been displaced from their lands in Southern Iraq and cut off from their ancestral ties to wetland ecology. This talk traces how ecological and infrastructural interventions in the Marshlands of Southern Iraq—through dams, canals, colonial agricultural projects, and oil extraction—have systematically dismantled the wetland’s hydrological continuity, rendering displacement not as a singular event but a protracted environmental process. Drawing on spatial analysis and testimonies conducted in collaboration with artist Ameneh Solati and the Ahwari communities, Farah Alkhoury’s presentation situates the Iraqi Marshlands and Ahwari people within broader questions of environmental displacement, climate politics, and the colonial afterlives of oil extraction.
Bios
Farah Alkhoury (She/Her) is an Iraqi architect and researcher based in New York. Engaging across various mediums, including exhibition design, research, teaching, and advocacy, her work examines environmental violence and political entanglements as consequential to architecture and spatial thinking. She is currently a fellow at Bard College working on a project titled “Occupied Ecologies: Architecture of Toxic Proliferation,” which attends to military toxicity that remains embedded in the soil, water, and air long after wars end. Farah is the recipient of the 2025 Graham Foundation Grant. She holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the American University of Sharjah and a master’s in advanced architectural design from Columbia University.
Sawsan Abdulrahim, PhD, MPH is Professor of Public Health and IDRC Chair in Forced Displacement at the American University of Beirut.