Villagers celebrate a Bakhtiari nomad wedding in the mountain village of Abid near the town of Masjid-e-Soleiman in southwestern Iran, Thursday, Nov. 29, 2007. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
Villagers celebrate a Bakhtiari nomad wedding in the mountain village of Abid near the town of Masjid-e-Soleiman in southwestern Iran, Thursday, Nov. 29, 2007. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
DASHT-E-BOZORG, Iran (AP) _ As chill wind blows in, the Bakhtiari nomads pack up at the end of summer and start a long journey — women and kids on horseback, men on foot, belongings in tow — for the warmer regions here in southwestern Iran.
In April, when the desert heat begins to fire up, they will make the reverse trip to the cool, mountainous regions more than 100 miles to the north, crossing flood-swollen rivers and mountain passes to better grazing lands for their goats and sheep.
"This has been our way of life as long as history can remember. We've got used to this lifestyle," Hasan Qoli Soleimani said in his home — a large black tent made of tough goat hides.
Every winter, Soleimani and his family settle in Dasht-e-Bozorg, a region outside Shoushtar, a city in oil-rich Khuzestan province.
Iran has one of the largest nomadic populations in the world, an estimated 1.5 million in a country of some 70 million, according to the government's agency for nomad affairs.
But experts say it's a way of life that is slowly disappearing.
"Nomadic life is on the brink of extinction. If this trend continues, there will be no more nomads living in Iran in the next 20 years," researcher Ali Qoli Mahmoudi Bakhtiari said.
"Few grazing lands and water resources are left for them. Nomadic life will soon be legend," said Bakhtiari, a retired professor of linguistics and Persian literature.
Numbers for the decline are hard to come by. The government's figures show the population down 200,000 from a century ago. But Bakhtiari says that doesn't show the real rate of the fall, which
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