The Tigris, rising in Lake Hazar (a small mountain lake southeast of Elazığ) and fed by a number of small tributaries, drains a wide area of eastern Turkey. After flowing beneath the massive basalt walls that surround Diyarbakır, it forms the border between Turkey and Syria below Cizre, and it receives the waters of the eastern Khābūr River at the border with Iraq a short distance beyond at Faysh Khābūr. Much of the river valley immediately above Mosul is now a reservoir, contributing to a large irrigation project in the Tall ʿAfar-Sinjār region.

On its left bank, near Mosul, the Tigris passes the ruins of two of the three capitals of ancient Assyria, Nineveh (Nīnawā) and Calah (modern Nimrūd). The ruins of the third capital, Ashur (modern Al-Sharqāṭ), overlook the river from the right bank farther downstream, between the left-bank junctions with the Great Zab and Little Zab rivers. During flood time, in March and April, the two Zabs double the volume of the Tigris, but their flow is controlled by the Bakhma and Dukān dams. The rapids of Al-Fatḥah Gorge impede navigation.

The Tigris reaches the alluvial plain near Sāmarrāʾ, the capital of a great empire during the ʿAbbāsid period (750–1258). A barrage and a regulated escape along that reach constitute the principal modern controls on the river; excess water can be let into the Lake Al-Tharthār depression to the west and from there into Lake Al-Ḥabbāniyyah across the Euphrates. A feed from Lake Al-Tharthār back into the Tigris also has been constructed. Below Sāmarrāʾ, the river receives the ʿUẓaym River.

In Baghdad and its environs, artificial embankments line the Tigris. Embankments also protect districts occasionally threatened by the Euphrates and the Diyālā River, which joins the Tigris just below the capital. A number of dams have restored the Diyālā to its historical role as a source of irrigation for the region east of Baghdad. At Al-Kūt, some 200 miles (320 km) downstream from Baghdad, there is a barrage, and the channel of the Gharrāf River branches off southward. The Gharrāf was, in ancient times, the main course of the Tigris and is today the source of considerable flow irrigation before it empties into the marshes and joins the Euphrates below Al-Nāṣiriyyah. The present-day major branch, Al-Aʿmā, feeds several channels that disperse their water over rice-growing areas and extensive marshes on either bank.

At Al-Qurnah, the principal channel joins the Euphrates, fed by the outflow of those same marshlands, to form the Shatt al-Arab. At Qarmat ʿAlī, a little above Baṣrah, the main stream receives more waters from the Euphrates that have filtered through Lake Al-Ḥammār. The Tigris and Euphrates, greatly reduced by irrigation, seepage, and evaporation, contribute only a small portion of al-Arab’s waters. Most of its flow derives instead from Iran’s longest river, the Kārūn, which enters at Khorramshahr. The Karkheh River is a minor left-bank tributary from Iran. The agricultural belt along the Shatt al-Arab, no more than 3 miles (5 km) wide on either side, is the richest area of date palm cultivation in the world. Irrigation occurs when high tide in the Persian Gulf forces the fresh water of the river to back up and overflow into creek beds.

Because the lower Shatt al-Arab forms a portion of the Iraq-Iran border, Iraq’s dependence on the river as its only access to the sea has been an issue of strategic importance to both countries. The vulnerability of the minor Iraqi port at Al-Fāw, at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab, was made clear by Iran’s capture of the city during the Iran-Iraq War. After that war, Iraq began cutting a channel to the gulf from Al-Zubayr, west of the main port of Baṣrah. It has been argued that the Persian Gulf War was brought on partly by Iraq’s desire to use the Kuwaiti islands of Būbiyān and Al-Warbah in the gulf as the off-loading points for that new channel.

Hydrology

The regime of the Tigris and Euphrates depends heavily on winter rains and spring snowmelt in the Taurus and Zagros mountains. The Euphrates traverses a considerably greater distance than the Tigris from its mountain basin to the point where it meets the Mesopotamian alluvial plain at Al-Ramādī in Iraq. On its long, gently sloping route through Syria and northern Iraq, the Euphrates loses much of its velocity and receives only two tributaries, the Balīkh and the (western) Khābūr, both of them spring-fed and entering from the left. The rate of evaporation on the river has increased to as much as 50 percent with the creation of large reservoirs and related irrigation areas behind a number of dams. The Tigris, in contrast, flows down the edge of a long, multichanneled catchment basin and is fed by four strong tributaries, the Great Zab, Little Zab, ʿUẓaym, and Diyālā rivers, all of which derive their water mainly from snowmelt in Turkish, Iranian, and Iraqi Kurdistan. The precipitous flow of its tributaries makes the Tigris more susceptible than the Euphrates to short-term flooding, and its short length brings its annual flood period a month earlier.

As it reaches the Mesopotamian alluvial plain above Sāmarrāʾ, the Tigris is a bigger, faster, more silt-laden, and more unpredictable river than the Euphrates at the corresponding point, Al-Fallūjah. That character is expressed in the Arabic name Dijlah, meaning “Arrow.” The mean annual discharge of the Tigris, before control by modern dams, was estimated at 43,800 cubic feet (1,240 cubic metres) per second, and the silt load at approximately one ton per second. Those estimates are roughly twice the values calculated for the Euphrates. In flood time the two rivers together carry as much as three million tons of eroded material from the highlands in a single day. Some 90 percent of the water and silt that pass Baghdad and Al-Ramādī, however, never reaches the gulf; the water either evaporates or is absorbed in the extensive irrigated areas and marshes, and the silt settles upstream from the Shatt al-Arab. The water and sediments in the Shatt al-Arab derive mainly from the left-bank tributaries, the Karkheh and Kārūn, which rise in Iran.