The Tigris river is said to have watered the biblical Garden of Eden and helped give birth to civilisation itself. But today it is dying. Human activity and climate change have choked its once mighty flow through Iraq. The country may be oil-rich but it is plagued by poverty after decades of war and by droughts and desertification.The Tigris, the lifeline connecting the storied cities of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, has been choked by dams, most of them upstream in Turkey, and falling rainfall. An AFP video journalist travelled along the river's 1,500-kilometre (900-mile) course through Iraq, from the rugged Kurdish north to the Gulf in the south, to document the ecological disaster that is forcing people to change their ancient way of life.
