The Land

Iraq is about the size of California; its area is 171,000 square miles. Surrounded by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Kuwait, it is essentially a landlocked country, although large ships can sail up to Basra from the Persian Gulf. Iraq can be divided geographically into four zones: the Syrian Desert area in the west and southwest, the upland between the upper Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the mountainous areas in the north and northeast, and the river valleys of the center and southeast.

The Climate

In general, the climate of Iraq is much like the climate of Texas: hot and dry in the summers, and cool and a bit rainier in the winters. In most of the country, temperatures average in the 80s during the summer (although they can soar well into the 100s), and in the 40s and 50s during the winter; in the mountains they are correspondingly cooler.

Except for the mountainous areas, the rainfall in Iraq qualifies it as a desert. The usual definition of desert is an area that has an average of under 10 inches of rain a year, and Iraq's average rainfall is between four and six and a half inches a year. Ninety percent of this rain falls between November and April. In the mountainous areas, the rainfall is higher, between about 12.5 and 22.5 inches per year, enough water to support crops. The high areas may receive as much as 25 inches per year.

The impact of these rainfall patterns can be seen in the 1991 estimates of land use: only 12.5% of the land is under permanent cultivation, another 9.1% is meadows and pasturelands, an additional 4.3% is forested, and 74% is wasteland.

Water

Despite the lack of rain, there is water for irrigation, thanks to the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which have dominated the history and politics of the area. In fact, the name for the area up until the end of World War I was Mesopotamia, its ancient Greek name, which translates as "land between rivers."

Both the Tigris and the Euphrates have their headwaters in the highlands of eastern Turkey. The Euphrates flows into Iraq through Syria in the northwest, while the Tigris flows directly from Turkey in the northeast. They flow across the country to the southeast, joining north of Basra. There, they form the Shatt-al-‘Arab, which flows for 68 miles through southern Iraq and empties into the Persian Gulf, and which is deep enough (with engineering) to allow for the passage of ocean-going vessels.

The flow of the Euphrates is augmented by the rainfall in the desert areas to the west. This rainfall is carried east across the plains by wadis, which flow into small rivers which eventually flow into the Euphrates. (Wadi is the Arabic word for "arroyo" or "wash," i.e., a river bed that is dry except when flooded by seasonal rains.) These wadis are permanent fixtures in the landscape—one of them is 200 miles long and for centuries supported nomads and their livestock.

The Tigris, also, is augmented by smaller rivers flowing from the high Zagros Mountains in the northeastern part of the country: The Great Zab, the Little Zab, and the Dyuala carry melting snow down into the river valleys.

The land along and between the rivers is watered and fertilized and each year disrupted by spring flooding. This relatively constant water supply and resultant rich soil allowed for the earliest development of agriculture in the Western world, and the area has played an important part in history ever since. For 8,000 years, there have been continual attempts to control and channel the flooding of the rivers, as they can carry up to 40 times as much water during the spring flood season as during the low-level periods in the fall. Since the development of modern states, there has also been much international diplomacy and antagonism over the utilization of the water of the rivers as they flow through Turkey and Syria, and over the precise location of the boundary between Iraq and Iran along the Shatt-al-‘Arab.

In 1980, Iraq was the world's second largest oil exporter.

Oil

The rivers continue to dominate modern Iraqi agriculture, and farming is still the occupation of the majority of Iraqis. However, massive oil fields in the desert around Basra in the southeast, and those near Mosul and Kirkuk in the northeast, have provided the country with a much greater source of income than farming. A huge well was discovered in Kirkuk in 1927, and after much international negotiating and the building of several pipelines, by 1952 almost 20 million barrels of oil per year were being exported from Iraqi fields. In 1980, before the Iran–Iraq war, Iraq was the world's second largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia.

The Cultural Orientation Project--http://www.culturalorientation.net, for more information contact sanja@cal.org
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