Iraqi fishermen caught in net of water frontiers

AL-FAW, Iraq: On the banks of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, Iraqi fishermen live in constant fear of arrest by Iranian and Kuwaiti forces for mistakenly straying across frontiers with former enemy countries.

About 15-km from where the mighty Tigris and the Euphrates rivers merge and flow out to the Gulf lies the fishing port of Al-Faw. The port town has been on the front line of two wars that have shaped Iraq’s modern history -- in the 1980s against Iran and then after Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait.