Crucial Battle For World's Most Dangerous Dam
Updated: 5:36pm UK, Monday 18 August 2014
By Sam Kiley, Foreign Affairs Editor
Recapturing the Mosul Dam from Islamic State (IS) militants isn't just a military and political necessity - it's an engineering imperative.
It's got feet of clay. More accurately, gypsum and limestone.
It holds 12 billion cubic metres (425 billion cubic feet) of water.
If it broke it would unleash a liquid bulldozer 10 metres (65 feet) high that would engulf Mosul downstream on the Tigris before racing south and flooding Baghdad.
Some experts have said around 500,000 people could be killed if the dam were to fail.
Because it's been built on gypsum and limestone, which are water soluble, the dam's base gets regular injections of "grout" - a messy mix of concrete and earth.
Some 200 tonnes of the emergency engineering porridge has to be poured into the base every year but sinkholes are appearing.
Iraq's government had earmarked billions to repair the dam, which is also the source of electricity for about a million people and clean water for much of northern Iraq.
And while IS has pretentions to establishing a "caliphate" over much of Syria and Iraq, it is unlikely the ranks of its militants include advanced construction engineers capable of keeping the dam from collapsing.
In 2007, the US Army Corps of Engineers surveyed the structure and concluded the dam was "the most dangerous in the world".
Kurdish peshmerga fighters, with the support of airstrikes by US warplanes, are battling for control of the dam.
It's a ginger process.
The IS fighters are battle hardened. They are also demolitions experts and have unleashed a tide of bloody religious slaughter across a third of Iraq and Syria.
They have sown the countryside around the dam with improvised explosive devices and mines.
There are fears they might have also rigged the dam for destruction.
This may be an exaggerated concern. The IS is violent and extreme but there are no signs it is idiotic.
Its recent tactical successes have been carefully orchestrated as part of a wider strategy to create a caliphate not even al Qaeda managed to establish.
Sending a wall of water crashing down the Tigris valley and drowning mostly fellow Sunni Muslims would rob the caliphate of potential supporters and guarantee the survivors would turn against its brutal interpretation of Islam.
But this doesn't mean the dam may be damaged in fighting.
Nor that it would be able to survive intact if the IS manages to hang on, or in tit-for-tat-operations the dam's relentless need for reinforcement was fatally interrupted.
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