The fist-size fish are the only species left in Iraq's Lake Razzaza, a sprawling reservoir west of the Shiite holy city of Karbala that until the early 1990s teemed with birds and fish and attracted tourists on weekends.

"Back then you could work for a year and buy an apartment," says Nafia Aliawi, a fisherman in an ankle-length black robe who has been trawling Lake Razzaza on small wooden motor boats for the past 25 years.

"Now look, I can't even dress my children," he says, resting his hands on the shoulders of two small sons in torn shirts who work alongside him on the desolate shore of the glassy lake, grey under a dreary autumn sky.

The lake was created in 1969 when a Spanish contractor built a drainage canal to divert the annual floodwaters of the Euphrates river into the desert to prevent flooding across southern Iraq.

During the next two decades the lake hosted the same menagerie of river carp found in the Euphrates, including those species most prized for masguf, a traditional Iraqi method of searing fish over open fires.

It also attracted migratory birds, including great flocks of pink flamingos, pearly white Slender-billed Gulls, and the Marbled Duck, an endangered species.

But the lake began to shrink when Saddam Hussein's regime completed a massive system of embankments designed to drain Iraq's southern marshes after the 1991 Shiite uprising that followed the Gulf War over Kuwait.

"I am a hydraulic engineer, so I can only say that they cut off the water," says Mahdi al-Latif, the provincial official in charge of water resources.

-- It said get out in three days or we slit your throat --

"But without a doubt Karbala was the Iraqi city that resisted the most. It resisted for 13 days, it did not give up. Many buildings were destroyed, and there were many massacres in the city" during the uprising.

Since then the lake has been rapidly dwindling and growing more salty due to the evaporation during Iraq's searing summer months. The birds have mostly left, and the only fish that remain are the tiny, sharp-toothed Shanak.

In what Latif calls a "conspiracy against the lake," the little fish drove the larger and more sought-after varieties out by eating their young.

On a normal day each fisherman can net around 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of Shanak, worth around five dollars (four euros). The work is hard, the salt burns their skin, and the salty water rots their wooden boats.

"This is hard work, but this is what we do. We can handle the heat, the cold, the salt, as long as we can make a living," says Hamid Abbas, 46, a fisherman with a close-cropped beard and a black and white headdress.

The fisherman have traditionally migrated throughout Lake Razazza, the smaller Lake Habaniya that overflows into it, and Lake Tharthar in the north, pitching tents on the desert shores.

But Razazza's northern shoreline and the other two lakes lie in Sunni areas, and in 2006 fishermen from different tribes and sects that had shared the placid waters for decades were ensnared by the sectarian violence that swept through Iraq after the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine.

Nafia's brother Bassem was camping on the shore of Lake Tharthar shortly after the bombing when a group of Sunni fishermen handed him a letter.

"It was a letter from Zarqawi himself, it had his official seal," Bassem says, referring to the dreaded Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in a US air strike later that year.

"It said get out in three days or we will slit your throat."

The fishermen have not returned to the north since then and say they are still too scared to fish in Sunni areas.

But within a few years the lake that divides them will most likely have vanished, replaced by the salt flats that already form a desolate ring hundreds of metres (yards) wide between the grey water and the gently rolling desert.

-- It will die a natural death --

---------------------------------

Shortly after Saddam drained the marshes and diverted water from Lake Razzaza, Turkey constructed the massive Ataturk dam on the headwaters of the Euphrates river, essentially halting the floods that had once fed the lake.

The dam was the first milestone in Turkey's massive Southeastern Anatolia Project, which aims to construct 22 dams on the Tigris and the Euphrates and has drawn fire from Iraq and Syria, which also rely on the rivers.

Lake Razzaza has already lost around a third of its depth, according to Latif, and he and other experts believe that if more water is not found it will likely vanish in the next three to four years.

"Flood control became an oxymoron in Iraq as of 1997. That was the year of the last major flood of the Euphrates," says Azzam Alwash, a veteran environmental engineer and the head of the conservation group Nature Iraq.

"Unless there is a political decision to keep Lake Razzaza alive it will die a natural death," he said.

But any solution would require convincing Turkey to release more water into the Euphrates, and the lake is an understandably distant priority for Iraq, which is struggling to rebuild after decades of war and sanctions.

And because Razzaza has no outlet for water to flow out, even if the floods resumed it would eventually become as salty as seawater, and at that point even the sturdy Shanak will die out.

"It was intended from its inception to be a flood control basin. It was not intended to be a lake where people fish," Alwash says.

In the meantime the fishermen on Lake Razzaza work day and night plucking the small and practically worthless Shanak from their nets.

"I have ambitions," Hussein Ali, a 30-year-old says as he tosses glimmering fish into a basket swarming with flies. "I'd like to have a normal job in the city. But the only jobs are in the security forces."

Hassan Abid, 20, working across from him, deftly pries the jaws of a fish open with his fingers so he can pull it off the net.

"I've done this work since I was nine years old," he says. "I don't know how to do anything else."

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