Paging people like Tamerlane here!!
An associate here mentioned that a friend of hers took refuge in a house owned by a couple of Iraqi sisters during (I think) the first Gulf War, somewhere in Southern Iraq towards Kuwait.
These sisters had always claimed they were Christian, but in their house it was quite “weird” and there was “lots of water” and “algae” and stuff. Do bear in mind this is third hand, so very very vague.
It turned out they weren’t Christian, but claimed this to protect themselves (this is not uncommon in the Middle East, as Christianity is respected and therefore protected by Islam, whereas many other faiths are not). Instead they followed some strange, rare ancient religion that involved “water worship”.
The first candidate that springs to mind is Zoroastrianism, as there are persecuted members of that faith in that region, and I found a cite mentioning that they hold water sacred. However Zoroastrians tend to hold fire as the number one sacred thing, and fire is not mentioned in this anecdote, only water worship.
Another persecuted group in that area are the [url=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandaeanism”]Mandeans[/a], who do a lot of baptism and use pure water in their rituals.
Anyone have a clue what else it might be?