"Clancy, Tom - Op-Center 04 - Acts of War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clancy Tom)

1,150 miles southeast through Iraq, where it meets
the Euphrates at Basra. The equally mighty
Euphrates is formed by the confluence of the Kara and
Murad Rivers in Eastern Turkey. It flows
mostly southward and then southeast for almost 1,700
miles, surging through great canyons and jagged
gorges along its upper course, and a vast flood
plain in Syria and Iraq. Where they meet, the
Tigris and the Euphrates form the river channel
Shatt al Arab, which flows southeast into the
Persian Gulf and is part of the border between Iraq
and Iran. The two countries have long fought over
navigation rights to the 120 mile waterway.
The Tigris and Euphrates in the east and the great
Nile River in the west once defined the Fertile
Crescent, the cradle of a number of early
civilizations stretching back as far as
B.c.
The Cradle of Civilization, Ibrahim thought.
His homeland. One third of his great nation, now
lifeless and rotting.
Over the centuries, warships came down the
Euphrates and tribes were forced to move west. The
water-wheels and irrigation canals in the east were
neglected as the western part of the country grew--the
line of great cities stretching from Aleppo in the
north down through Hama, Homs, and eternal
Damascus. The Euphrates was abandoned, and then
it was murdered. Its once-bright waters were turned
brown with industrial and human waste, most of it from
Turkey, and not even the melting mountain snows or
heavy rains could cleanse it. In the 1980's,
Turkey began a massive reclamation project
by constructing a series of dams along the upper
course of the Euphrates. This effort helped.
to clean the river and keep Turkey fertile. But it
caused the north of Syria and especially
al-Gezira to fall further into drought and starvation.
And Syria did nothing to prevent it, Ibrahim
thought bitterly. There was Israel to fight in the
southwest and Iraq to watch in the southeast.
The Syrian government did not want its entire
northern border, over four hundred miles,
jeopardized by tension with the Turks.
More recently, however, there had been other
voices.
They had grown increasingly loud in 1996, after
repeated, vicious attacks against the Kurds.
Thousands of Kurds died in clashes with the Turks in
the Hakkari Province near the border with Iraq.