Duke University's Curtis J. Richardson, a wetlands expert, was part of the first scientific team to visit the Iraqi Mesopotamian marshes after Saddam Hussein's fall in 2003. Lying between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the marshes - once nearly twice the size of the Everglades - were the main stopover on the Siberia-Africa bird migration route, and a crucial filter that cleansed the rivers as they flowed into the Persian Gulf.
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