"العراق والخليج الفارسي" [ظ‎‎٣‎٠] (٨٦٢/٦٥)

30 GEOLOGY AND DESCRIPTION OF THE LAND
and invested by the Iraqi forces in April 1941 under the usurper
Rashid Ali, until relieved in May by a mechanized column from
Palestine by way of Rutba (p. 305).
Between Ramadi and Falluja the first of the modern controlled
distributaries leaves the left bank of the Euphrates (fig. 6). This
is the Saqlawiya canal, a watercourse of great antiquity, possibly a
prehistoric course of the river, certainly a navigable channel in Sas-
sanian times, re-excavated and realined as the Nahr Isa in the early
Abbasid period when it entered the Tigris through the suburb south
of the old ‘round city’ of Baghdad. The whole channel was navigable
at least as late as 1838, but because of the wide inundations that it
caused in the region west of Baghdad, the head was closed about
1870 by Midhat Pasha (p. 265). Midhat’s dam was close to Saqlawiya,
then a small village on a loop of the river which has since dried up,
and there is no record that it was ever breached; but after some years
the Euphrates burst its banks higher up and scoured a new channel
to the old bed of the canal. This was dammed by a later governor,
Sirri Pasha, but less effectively, and his dam, the Saddat as Sirriya,
has failed on several occasions, notably in 1910 and 1923. It was
also deliberately breached by the Turks after their retreat from
Baghdad in March 1917 in an attempt to delay pursuit. Both then
and in 1923 the flood waters swept across to the Aqarquf depression
(fig. 13) and threatened Baghdad. After this last occasion a new
dam was built farther down the channel and has since withstood all
flood pressures. Meanwhile a new cut has been made between the
two former channels, and the canal is controlled to irrigate at least
50,000 acres of very fertile land (p. 437).
The mound of the early Arab city of Anbar (p. 242) is close to the
old head of the Nahr Isa, a few miles distant from Falluja. Rapiqu,
an early Babylonian city on the Euphrates, was approximately in the
same position. Though the Euphrates approaches closer to the
Tigris a few miles lower down, the best road westwards from Baghdad
has always passed over the hard strip of country through Khan Nuqta
south of the Saqlawiya canal; Falluja, Anbar, or Rapiqu must always
have been important as crossing-places for the road to Syria.
The Euphrates below Ramadi
The delta regime of the Euphrates is extremely complicated. As
already mentioned (p. 19), the flood waters have for many thousands
of years poured into Lower Mesopotamia to be checked by the bar
formed by the advancing delta of the Karun. From earliest historical