Shatt Al-Arab Corniche

At Basra the Tigris and the Euphrates, having crossed the whole of Mesopotamia, finally meet and flow on as a single broad river — the Shatt al-Arab — down to the Gulf. Along its western bank runs Basra's corniche, a promenade of cafés and date palms that is the city's favourite gathering place, especially in the cool of the evening.

Few rivers carry so much story. Just upstream, at al-Qurnah where the two rivers join, local tradition points to the site of the Garden of Eden and shows visitors a withered "Tree of Adam." Basra itself, a glittering port in the Abbasid golden age, is named in the Thousand and One Nights as a home port of Sinbad the Sailor, who set out from here toward his fabled voyages. The riverbank is watched over by a bronze statue of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, the Basra-born poet who helped invent modern Arabic free verse, unveiled in 1972.

The corniche has known darker days too. During the Iran–Iraq War, Saddam Hussein lined the bank with a long row of statues of fallen Iraqi commanders — widely said to number 99 — each pointing an accusing finger across the water toward Iran. They were removed after 2003. Today it is the poet and the palms, rather than the pointing soldiers, who keep watch over the slow brown water.