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Al-ʿAmāra is a city and administrative unit in southern Iraq, north of the province of Basra on the river Tigris, in an area that has been inhabited since pre-Islamic times. The area is now inhabited by the tribes of the Maʿdan, who have developed their own material culture on the basis of the reed that grows in the marshes of the region. During the 1990s the Baʿth regime drained the marshes and, as a consequence, the typical reed culture of the Maʿdan was destroyed. The majority of the tribes living in the area belong to the Shīʿa. The city of al-ʿAmāra developed from a small village durin…