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On the morning of August 7, , a team of fighters from the Islamic State, riding in pickup trucks and purloined American Humvees, swept out of the Iraqi village of Wana and headed for the Mosul Dam. Two months earlier, ISIS had captured Mosul, a city of nearly two million people, as part of a ruthless campaign to build a new caliphate in the Middle East. For an occupying force, the dam, twenty-five miles north of Mosul, was an appealing target: it regulates the flow of water to the city, and to millions of Iraqis who live along the Tigris. Getting closer, they saw a retaining wall that spans the Tigris, rising three hundred and seventy feet from the riverbed and extending nearly two miles from embankment to embankment. Behind it, a reservoir eight miles long holds eleven billion cubic metres of water. A group of Kurdish soldiers was stationed at the dam, and the ISIS fighters bombarded them from a distance and then moved in. When the battle was over, the area was nearly empty; most of the Iraqis who worked at the dam, a crew of nearly fifteen hundred, had fled. The fighters began to loot and destroy equipment. The next day, Vice-President Joe Biden telephoned Masoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdish region, and urged him to retake the dam as quickly as possible. American officials feared that ISIS might try to blow it up, engulfing Mosul and a string of cities all the way to Baghdad in a colossal wave. Ten days later, after an intense struggle, Kurdish forces pushed out the ISIS fighters and took control of the dam. But, in the months that followed, American officials inspected the dam and became concerned that it was on the brink of collapse. In fact, during the Gulf War, American jets bombed its generator, but the dam remained intact. To keep it stable, hundreds of employees have to work around the clock, pumping a cement mixture into the earth below. Without continuous maintenance, the rock beneath would wash away, causing the dam to sink and then break apart. The battle has sometimes been ferocious, with Iraqi soldiers facing suicide bombers, bombardments of chlorine gas, and legions of entrenched fighters. Although some Iraqi leaders predicted a quick success, it appears that the campaign to expel ISIS will be grinding and slow. And yet the biggest threat facing the people of northern Iraq may have nothing to do with who controls the streets. In February, the U. Embassy in Baghdad issued a warning of the consequences of a breach in the dam. For a statement written by diplomats, it is extraordinarily blunt. But Alwash told me that nearly everyone outside the Iraqi government who has examined the dam believes that time is running out: in the spring, snowmelt flows into the Tigris, putting immense pressure on the retaining wall. If the dam ruptured, it would likely cause a catastrophe of Biblical proportions, loosing a wave as high as a hundred feet that would roll down the Tigris, swallowing everything in its path for more than a hundred miles. Large parts of Mosul would be submerged in less than three hours. The rivers, which enter Iraq from the north and converge two hundred and fifty miles south of Baghdad, form an extraordinarily fertile valley in an otherwise dry part of the world. For centuries, populations flourished by tilling the rich alluvial soil left behind each spring by floodwaters receding from the plains between Baghdad and the Persian Gulf. But the rivers also wreaked havoc, delivering too much water or not enough, and the settlements on their banks lurched between periods of drought and flood. In the nineteen-fifties, governments in the region moved to assert greater control over the rivers with aggressive programs of dam construction. Dams regularize the flow of water, discourage floods, and, by storing water in reservoirs, minimize the impact of droughts. They also give whoever controls them power over the flow of water downstream, rendering other countries vulnerable. In , when both Syria and Turkey were completing dams on the Euphrates, and the reservoirs behind them began to fill, the river downstream dried up, forcing tens of thousands of Iraqi farmers to abandon their land. The same year, Turkey began surveying sites for another dam, just north of the border it shares with Iraq, on the Tigris River. The regime was awash in money; a previous government had nationalized the oil industry and renegotiated its relationships to the Western companies that had once controlled it. Saddam decided to build dams on both the Tigris and the Euphrates. Western specialists began making surveys to find the most favorable site, but few places had the right topography for a reservoir: low-lying land, preferably surrounded by mountains. The geology presented even greater problems. Water in dam reservoirs creates tremendous pressure, and only solid rock can stop it from leaking underneath the dam. The surveys revealed a multilayer foundation of anhydrite, marl, and limestone, all interspersed with gypsum—which dissolves in contact with water. Dams built on this kind of rock are subject to a phenomenon called karstification, in which the foundation becomes shot through with voids and vacuums. According to former Iraqi officials who worked on the project, successive teams of geologists reached the same conclusion: no matter where they looked, the prevalence of gypsum would make maintaining a dam difficult. The government settled on a site north of Mosul, which had the largest potential reservoir of any of the locations the geologists had scouted. In , Saddam ordered the construction to begin—urged on, according to another former senior Iraqi official, by the military situation. The official, who lives in Baghdad, spoke to me on condition of anonymity, fearing that he would lose his pension if he spoke out. A year before, Saddam had launched a huge invasion of Iran, hoping to seize its oilfields and possibly to overthrow its government. But the Iranians pushed back, and the war became a bloody stalemate, with fighting concentrated along the border, near the southern city of Basra. As the Iraqi soldiers dug in, they were vulnerable to the fluctuations of the Tigris. In and again in , floods had swept through the south of Iraq, separating Basra from the rest of the country. The decision to build the dam started a decades-long argument over who is responsible for the looming disaster. Nasrat Adamo, a former senior official at the Iraqi Ministry of Irrigation, told me that a consortium of Swiss firms hired to oversee the process assured government officials that the gypsum problem could be managed. But other people who were involved in building the dam argued that the Iraqis should have been more cautious: the Swiss explained clearly that the site was problematic, and geologists working in the area had raised concerns for decades. Iraqi officials were terrified of disappointing Saddam. The dam was built in three years, largely by workers from China. Today, a stone memorial on top of the dam commemorates nineteen Chinese nationals who died during its construction; the memorial, inscribed in English and Chinese but not in Arabic, does not give the cause of their deaths. Alwash, the Iraqi-American hydrological engineer, told me that, in Iraq, when laborers fell into wet cement during large infrastructure projects, it was common for the work to carry on. In , the reservoir filled up, and the structure—named the Saddam Dam—began holding back the Tigris. Shortly after the dam went into use, Nadhir al-Ansari, a consulting engineer, made an inspection for the Ministry of Water Resources. Sinkholes were forming around the dam, and pools of water had begun bubbling up on the banks downstream. But it was too late. The dam was already finished. By , just six years later, the new dam was forty per cent complete. Then Saddam sent his Army into Kuwait, sparking the Gulf War, and he ordered all the earthmoving equipment stripped from the Badush site and sent to the front lines. When the United States and its allies arrived to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait, they bombed all the equipment. The U. Work on Badush never resumed. When the Americans invaded in , they discovered a country shattered by sanctions. Power plants flickered, irrigation canals were clogged, bridges and roads were crumbling; much of the infrastructure, it seemed, had been improvised. Army Corps of Engineers began several assessments of the Mosul Dam. Iraqi officials were publicly skeptical, but, under pressure from the Americans, they agreed to lower the maximum depth of the reservoir by about thirty feet, to take pressure off the dam wall. In , the Iraqi government chose an Italian engineering company, Trevi S. A senior American official who has spent years working in Iraq confided that the deal may have stalled after Trevi refused an Iraqi demand for a kickback. Even Janabi, who American officials say is fully aware of the problems at the dam, dodged the issue when I asked about it this summer. In private, some Iraqis pose conspiracy theories. Naemi has spent his career at the Mosul Dam; he was a young engineering graduate when it opened, and he remembers the day Saddam paid a visit, shortly after the Iran-Iraq War ended. This dam is not going to collapse. Everything is going to be fine. Naemi told me that some American officials had come to him earlier this year to warn that the dam was going to break, and confronted him with satellite photos that showed water from the reservoir seeping through the sides of the dam. In response, U. It took me more than a hundred phone calls, e-mails, and visits before a single American official was granted permission to speak to me on the record; even then, three other State Department officials listened in on the conversation. A walk around the Mosul Dam gives you a sense of its scale and its problems. Four massive towers, part of the hydroelectric system, mark the western end. Along the edges of the dam, little springs spurt from the ground. Here and there are gauges and cameras, part of a system that collects real-time information—water pressure, temperature, chemistry—that the U. Army Corps of Engineers monitors around the clock. At the bottom of the wall, where the Tigris gushes out, are two control gates, which allow water to be drained from the reservoir quickly, in case heavy rainfall or snowmelt builds up pressure on the dam wall. When I visited, in September, one of the gates was broken: stuck shut. The controllers have resorted to the working gate at least four times since ISIS was driven away from the dam. The interior is cool and wet and dark. It feels like a mine shaft, deep under the earth. You can sense the water from the reservoir pressing against the walls. Inside the gallery, the engineers are engaged in what amounts to an endless struggle against nature. Using antiquated pumps as large as truck engines, they drive enormous quantities of liquid cement into the earth. Since the dam opened, in , engineers working in the gallery have pumped close to a hundred thousand tons of grout—an average of ten tons a day—into the voids below. Up close, the work is wet, improvisatory, and deeply inexact. Gauges line the walls of the gallery, programmed to detect changes in pressure; water seeps through cracks in the floor. Ordinarily, the pressure is much higher on the upstream side—because the water is pressing against the dam wall. If the pressure readings on the two sides of the gallery begin to converge, water is probably passing underneath. Like his boss, Jabouri has worked at the dam since he was a young engineering graduate. At his feet, all along the gallery floor, were holes that serve as guides for the industrial drills the engineers use to probe the voids. The void they were hunting for was deep below—perhaps three hundred feet down from where we were standing. After several minutes of drilling, a few feet at a time, the bit pushed into the void, letting loose a geyser that sprayed the gallery walls and doused the crew. The men, wrestling the pipe, connected it to the pump. Jabouri flicked a switch, and, with the high-pitched whine of a motorcycle engine, the machine reversed the pressure and the grout began to flow, displacing the water in the void. When I visited, only four grouting machines, instead of the usual eleven, were in use. A given void might be as big as a closet, or a car, or a house. It could be a single spacious cavity, requiring mounds of grout, or it could be an octopus-like tangle, with winding sub-caverns, or a hairline fracture. Generally, smaller cavities require thinner grout, so Jabouri started with a milky solution and increased its thickness as the void took more. Finally, after several hours, he stopped; his intuition, aided by the pressure gauges, told him that the cavity was full. The grouting came to a standstill—but the passage of water underneath the dam did not. Iraqi and American officials are reluctant to discuss how long the grouting was suspended. Jabouri, the deputy director, told me that work had ceased entirely for about four months. After the peshmerga captured the dam two years ago, Kurdish officials intended to shut down the turbines, but American officials told them that this would add more water to the reservoir, making the dam more likely to burst. So isis continued to profit from the dam. Using satellite photos and data from gauges around the dam, they tried to assess its condition. According to a U. To illustrate, American engineers have devised a triangular chart. The process begins, at the apex, with solutioning, advances through cavity formation and piping, and ends with core collapse and, finally, dam breach—like a Florida sinkhole opening up, unannounced, beneath a shopping center. In twelve hours, the dam is gone. In , an Iraqi graduate student commissioned a bathymetric survey of the reservoir floor, which is more than a hundred and sixty feet underwater. The survey showed a surface pockmarked with sinkholes, some of them sixty-five feet wide. In January, a team of American scientists reported that a thirty-metre-wide block on the western side of the dam had tilted, with one end sinking into the earth a tenth of an inch. The State Department has refused to make the report public. It was the fourth time the dam had moved since November, To engineers, uneven movement of a dam means that the ground underneath may be falling away; the uneven pressure could ultimately cause a breach. But most dams stop settling within a few months after they are built. Outside experts, including Ansari, told me that for the dam to move that much was highly irregular. The underlying soil is readjusting itself because of the voids. A second report, also kept from the public, was equally alarming. Like the first, it concluded that sections of the dam were moving unevenly, that water was passing through the foundation rapidly, and that water downstream contained high concentrations of dissolved gypsum—evidence of large voids. A chart compared the relative chances of collapse of a number of dams worldwide, and the likely death toll. A small number of dams were grouped toward the middle of the chart, indicating a moderate level of risk; the Mosul Dam stood by itself, nearly off the chart. In the nineteen-seventies, the U. As in Mosul, experts expressed concerns but decided that aggressive grouting would allow the dam to function normally. The Teton Dam opened in the fall of ; the following June, cracks appeared in the main wall, and water from the reservoir began to leak through. Within hours, the cracks spread, the dam disintegrated, and a wall of water poured forth. The wave swept aside everything in its path, including two towns, at least eleven people, and thousands of cattle. The water knocked loose a large clutch of felled trees from a nearby forest, which washed downstream and crashed into a gasoline storage tank. The leaking gas burst into flames, and the fire, as it spread, destroyed several hundred homes that had been spared by the flood. The wave would almost certainly catch most of the people trying to outrun it. Residents of Mosul, scrambling on foot and by car through a citywide traffic jam, would need to travel at least three and a half miles to survive. In less than an hour, those who remained would be under as much as sixty feet of water. With Mosul and other nearby villages occupied by ISIS , an orderly evacuation would be unlikely; the prospect of large numbers of people fleeing cities under ISIS control would pose its own security challenges. An inland tidal wave could displace the 1. South of Samarra, residents would likely have to get farther away to avoid flooding, since the land begins to flatten out, making the floodplain wider. Shallow floods, the State Department said, could not be ignored. Within four days, the wave would reach Baghdad, depositing as much as sixteen feet of water in many areas of the city, probably including the airport and the Green Zone, the site of government buildings and most of the embassies. The Iraqi government—embattled, paralyzed, ineffectual—seems highly unlikely to carry out meaningful evacuations or large-scale relief efforts in the event of a breach. Adamo, the former official, scoffed at the idea that the government could save anyone. Thus far, two have been installed. Still, as people flee, the sick, disabled, and elderly would likely be left behind. With the Baghdad International Airport flooded, meaningful relief from outside the country might be days away. By the time the flood wave rolled past Baghdad and exhausted itself, as many as one and a half million people could be dead. But, some experts told me, the aftermath would prove even more harrowing. How do you give them electricity? Where do they go? The two remain obsessed with the dam, haunted by decisions made more than thirty years ago. They confer on the phone daily and get together to discuss the situation; they sometimes reach out to engineers who work at the dam. Neither he nor Ansari is optimistic that the Iraqi government will be able to solve the problem in time. Perhaps the simplest solution is to scrap the dam entirely and make a deal to lease Turkish dams north of the border. But the political instability in the region makes such an accord practically impossible. Another option is to re-start construction of the half-completed dam at Badush, but the smaller reservoir would likely require tens of thousands of acres of land to be removed from cultivation. This would cost an estimated three billion dollars. The Iraqi government—nearly paralyzed by internal conflicts—seems unlikely to impose a solution anytime soon. Early in , under American prodding, the Iraqis reopened negotiations with Trevi S. In September, a team of engineers, hired at a cost of three hundred million dollars, arrived at the dam to perform a crash repair job. Their main task is to install updated equipment, designed to fill the voids beneath the dam more precisely, and to repair the broken control gate. Under the contract, the Italians will do the grouting for a year, and then leave the equipment with their Iraqi counterparts. In some cases, he said, it may take days to fill a single void. Last year, Alwash, the Iraqi-American civil engineer, was told by an official of the European Union that the dam is most susceptible to failure in the spring, when the snow melts and the Tigris is at its highest. The officials who first argued for the construction of the Mosul Dam, back in the eighties, were motivated by similar concerns about snowmelt—and they were proved right. In , there was a huge melt, which would almost certainly have flooded the southern marshes if the dam had not contained the worst of it. Last spring, the Iraqi government prepared by lowering the maximum water level in the reservoir, to ease severe pressure on the dam wall. This year, such a precaution could dramatically lessen the number of people at risk—to about three hundred and sixty-four thousand. The Trevi engineers, scrambling to keep the dam functioning, are operating in a militarized environment. The following month, Kurdish forces fired a missile at a team of ISIS commandos who were approaching with a load of explosives. For local residents, the threat of imminent violence has outweighed the threat from the dam. In Wanke, a small farming community about three miles downstream of the dam, ISIS positions are visible from the riverbank. For years, he told me, Wanke was a mixed Arab-Kurdish community. But when ISIS fighters swept in, during the summer of , many of his Arabic neighbors stepped forward to help the invaders. They started ordering us around. I knew their children. I went to their weddings. They betrayed everything in life. Nazir and his family escaped to a nearby village, where they lived with relatives for a year and a half before ISIS was expelled from Wanke. When the family moved back, Nazir found that his Arab neighbors had fled with the retreating invaders. Nazir knows that, if the dam fails, Wanke could be under sixty feet of water in a matter of minutes. But, he told me, neither he nor anyone else in the village thinks much about it. People in his part of the world are accustomed to having their lives upended. Save this story Save this story. Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon. Link copied. The closed gates at the mouth of the spillway, the final safety valve at the Mosul Dam. Photograph by Victor J. Blue for The New Yorker. Farhad Shekhamen, a peshmerga fighter, stands before the Mosul Dam as members of his unit go for a swim. Peshmerga forces pushed out ISIS from the dam two and a half years ago. Riyadh al-Naemi, the director of the Mosul Dam, at his headquarters. To keep the ground beneath the dam stable, workers in the gallery pump a cement mixture into the earth. Without continuous maintenance, soluble rock in the foundation would wash away, causing the dam to sink and then break apart. A boy takes an inner tube to go fishing on the Tigris River near Wanke, a farming village three miles downstream of the dam. If the dam fails, Wanke could be under sixty feet of water in minutes. Previously under the control of the Islamic State, Wanke was liberated by peshmerga fighters, but ISIS positions are still visible from the riverbank. More: ISIS. A Reporter at Large. The Front Lines. By Luke Mogelson. The Fight of Their Lives. By Dexter Filkins. Notes from All Over. A new law threatens the livelihoods of those who scavenge scrap metal on the street. The Weekend Essay. In and around Kyiv, war has become part of daily life, even as the public grows weary of its costs. By Keith Gessen. War Comes to Beirut. The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has erupted, displacing more than a million people. Many in Lebanon fear a Gaza-like campaign of violence. By Rania Abouzeid. The Financial Page. A new book by two New York Times investigative reporters comprehensively debunks the notion that Trump is a good businessman. By John Cassidy. Briefly Noted. The Lede. Treating political violence as a contagion could help safeguard the future of American democracy. By Michael Luo. Outrage and Paranoia After Hurricane Helene. These are significant things in North Carolina, where Trump and Harris are within a point of each other. By Jessica Pishko. The Pain of Travelling While Palestinian. This year, I learned the difference between a traveller and a refugee. By Mosab Abu Toha. Don Luigi Ciotti leads an anti-Mafia organization, and for decades he has run a secret operation that liberates women from the criminal underworld. The Sporting Scene. By Louisa Thomas.

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