Brazilian petroleum company Braspetro discovered the Majnoon oilfield in 1975, drilling into a shallow Upper Cretaceous formation and finding it to be part of the Great Rumaila Triangle, one of the richest petroleum zones on Earth. Development moved fast. Before Iraq's war with Iran halted everything in 1980, the field was already being mapped for large-scale extraction. At its peak before the Gulf War, roughly a sixth of Iraq's total oil production passed through Majnoon, an enormous flow of crude coursing through pipelines laid across engineered sand paths in the marshes. The field's strategic value made it both prize and target in every conflict that followed.

In February 1984, Iranian forces launched Operation Kheibar, an amphibious assault through the Hawizeh Marshes aimed at capturing the oil-rich islands. Soldiers crossed the wetlands in motorboats and landed by helicopter onto the mudflats. They seized Majnoon, but the cost was staggering. Iraq responded with artillery, air strikes, and chemical weapons. Mustard gas attacks on the island killed or wounded approximately 2,500 Iranian soldiers. The broader Battle of the Marshes cost Iran an estimated 50,000 casualties. The fighting left the landscape scarred and the infrastructure in ruins. Iran held parts of the area through the war, and both sides looted and sabotaged oil facilities. The human toll of that chemical warfare, soldiers dying in agony on a marsh island most of the world had never heard of, remains one of the Iran-Iraq War's grimmest chapters.

Production at Majnoon recovered after the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, but the reprieve was short. United Nations sanctions following Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait strangled output. The 2003 Iraq War brought further disruption, and by the mid-2000s production had dropped to roughly 46,000 barrels per day, a fraction of the field's potential. In December 2009, the Iraqi government awarded a license to a joint venture of Royal Dutch Shell and Malaysia's Petronas, splitting ownership with Shell holding 45 percent, Petronas 30 percent, and Iraq's Missan Oil Company retaining 25 percent. The contract promised to triple production at a fee of $1.39 per barrel. But the economics proved difficult. Shell exited the project by 2018, handing operations to Iraq's Basra Oil Company.

Majnoon sits in the Hawizeh Marshes, a wetland ecosystem straddling the Iran-Iraq border that has sustained human communities for over 5,000 years. The Marsh Arabs who live in this region navigate by mashoof, slim canoe-like boats that glide through reed beds and open water. Oil development threatens this ancient way of life. Drilling operations and associated infrastructure have drained portions of the marshland, damaging the ecosystem that these communities depend upon. Majnoon Island exists at the intersection of deep time and modern extraction, a place where 5,000 years of marsh culture collide with the machinery of the global petroleum industry. The mud beneath this landscape holds both the oldest continuously inhabited wetland ecosystem in the world and one of its largest untapped oil reserves.