River · Iraq
Tigris
The Tigris is the longest river in Iraq and one of the two great rivers of Mesopotamia. It comes down from the mountains of Turkey and reaches the Persian Gulf through the Shatt al-Arab.
Picture credit: Dûrzan cîrano (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Hamza Al Mosuly (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is the Tigris?
The river starts here: Lake Hazar in the Taurus Mountains, Turkey.
It ends in the Shatt al-Arab, Persian Gulf.
Countries on the river: Iraq.
The story behind it
The Tigris rises at Lake Hazar in the Taurus Mountains of Turkey and then runs fast and muddy into the flat country of Iraq. Together with the Euphrates it made the land so fertile that some of the first cities in human history grew up here, including Nineveh and Baghdad, which still stands on its banks. Farmers have used its water for barley and date palms for thousands of years, lifting it with simple wheels and today with pumps. Downstream the two rivers meet and their water flows on as the Shatt al-Arab. Near the mouth lie the marshes where people live in houses made of reeds and travel by canoe, and where buffalo wade in the shallows. Dams upstream now hold back much of the flow, so the marshes have shrunk.
Questions children ask
How long is the Tigris?
The Tigris is about 1 850 kilometres long altogether. Roughly 1 418 of those kilometres lie inside Iraq, which makes it the country's longest river.
Which country does the Tigris flow through?
Here the Tigris is listed as the longest river of Iraq. Its upper part begins in Turkey, but the greatest stretch runs across Iraqi land.
Where does the Tigris flow into?
The Tigris joins the Euphrates, and together they flow as the Shatt al-Arab into the Persian Gulf. The last part of the journey is wide, slow and salty.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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