Basrah, also known as Basra, city in southeastern Iraq, capital of Al Basrah Governorate on the Shatt al Arab. The main seaport of Iraq, Al Basrah has an international airport and is connected by highways to Baghdad and the countries of Iran and Kuwait. It is the terminal point for oil pipelines, and petroleum refining is a major industry. Oceangoing oil tankers reach Al Basrah by means of the Roka Channel. Petroleum products, grains, and dates are the chief exports.

 The city was founded by the caliph Umar I in 635. It was called Basorah in the collection of Oriental folk tales known as the Arabian Nights. By the 8th century it had become an important trade and cultural center, but it declined with the fall of the Abbassid dynasty in 1258. Developed as a supply base by the British in World War I (1914-1918), Al Basrah became a major port once more.

Basrah's population is estimated around 900000.

The city location on map is:

Latitude: 30 degrees, 30 minutes north
Longitude: 47 degrees, 47 minutes east

The following is a description of Basra as recollected by Gavin Young from his book "IRAQ Land of Two Rivers."

The region of Basra, the city of Sinbad, is, some would say, the most beautiful part of Iraq, outshining both the 'Persian miniature' scenery of the central Euphrates and the cool, majestic north. I lived in Basra for three years and I always preferred it to Baghdad, while people who lived in the capital swore by it, and were reluctant to leave to go south. I know Iraqis today who are, literally, miserable when they are away from Baghdad; an intelligent Iraqi friend, for example, was quite unable to enjoy a week or two in Paris sunshine for thinking of his house in the Mansur quarter. Baghdadis are easily smitten by home-sickness.

But Basra is special, too. Except by the Tigris, Baghdad is not scenically romantic; it is dusty, too full of buses and concrete. But Basra retains a romantic aura. So does the whole area of the south from the Shatt al Arab up to Amara on the Tigris and Suq-esh-Shiukh on the Euphrates: it is lush, watered, full of trees and gardens and canoes gliding on the mirror-surfaces of calm lagoons. It is an area of countless birds and a variety of animals. You feel that lions, possibly dragons or the Great Roc of A Thousand and One Nights may appear. Its people, I judge, are the most beguiling of all Iraqis. The girls here are slightly darker than further north, and they have a more desert-Arab look: small, delicate noses, heart-shaped faces with prominent, sweeping cheekbones, full lips.

If there is a drawback to Basra it concerns the weather- in summer the temperature soars to 118 F, sometimes even higher. The summer humidity is intense, thanks to all that picturesque water. Air-conditioning hardly makes things more than barely tolerable for many foreigners (even Basrawis suffer), and that rules the city out as a place to visit from June to September. Another drawback- though perhaps only temporary- is that the suburbs of Basra to the west of the city are growing startlingly fast as the population explodes, and are therefore in urgent need of expert, careful town planning energetically applied: they are bloated, swelled up with an only partly digested influx of workers, technicians and administration men. Riverside Basra, lying languidly among trees along the Shatt al Arab, still has the power to enchant. But the region of southern Iraq to the south-west of Basra has now 'gone'- I mean it has now been taken over by industry, oil and the port of Umm Qasr. The desert outside Zubeir, once a good place for picnics, now resembles from the air a bowl of spaghetti- a tangle of roads carrying gigantic lorries from Kuwait or one port or another. Towards the airport at Shuaiba, near Zubeir and a hub of this tangle, things are no longer recognizable to anyone who knew Basra, say, ten years ago. The Basra of Sinbad the Sailor is- frenetically on the move. Too bad, one may say. But it is, after all, the port of one of the richest countries in the world.

An old Photo of Shatt Al Arab

The river-edge parts of Basra are what most Basrawis dream of from abroad. Ashar is the heart of the city; its covered bazaar and mosque mark the end of the creek that links it and the river to Old Basra. Upstream is Maqil, the garden suburb fanning out from the forest of cranes at the wharves of the Old Basra port and the railway station; and a little further you cross to the island that faces the Shatt al Arab Hotel, where Basra's airport was sited until the 1960s when it was moved to Shuaiba. Here are flowers and palms and that blessed water that is the glory of all Iraq, but particularly of the south. The students of Basra University are lucky that their new buildings are situated so ideally- on the point of the island with a view straight down (and up) the broad waterway that combines two of the world's greatest rivers, Tigris and Euphrates. The Shatt al Arab rolls placidly to the Gulf twenty five miles away. You get no feeling of the nearness of the sea; no salty tang penetrates up here. Through morning mists that swathe everything in pearl-gray, you watch the coffee-with-milk color of the Shatt al Arab passing through the miles and miles of date-forests on either bank; tall, nodding palms shaking their fronds in the river-breeze like mops of unruly hair.

The port is always over-full: ships of ten thousand or twelve thousand tons lie alongside the jetties opposite the handsome, domed Port Authority Building ashore at Maqil, a relic of the 1930s like the Shatt al Arab Hotel just up the road; both are fine examples of the 'British Raj' period architecture and decoration. But the port wharves cannot cope with the sea-traffic of modern Iraq, and lower down the river for several miles the steamers queue in mid-river, bows pointing upstream, equidistant from each other like ships in a naval review. You can take a boat (bellam in Iraqi) or a motor-launch and potter up and down the bustling river; or laze in one of the tea-houses that overhang the river on the comiche below the Ashar creek; or drink orange-soda and watch the ferry carrying people and trucks, bicycles and horses, handcarts and camels across the river. Dhows are moored along the bank of the comiche under the trees: big ocean-going Dhows, with thick masts raked forward, and high well-lacquered sterns that Sir Francis Drake would recognize; they regularly ply between the Gulf ports, or between Basra and Zanzibar and India. On shore there are a few of the magnificent old Turkish mansions once used by British shipping firms or banks, and now sadly awaiting demolition or else maintained as offices and museums.

I have said that the Shatt al Arab bustles. So it does. Down off Ashar's low, blue-tiled mosque motor-boats splutter back and forth in small pale blue clouds of exhaust fumes; passenger launches with crowded wooden roofs - they give the best view- pass and re-pass from one landing-stage to another; tugs drag long chains of iron barges to be loaded or emptied alongside the steamers in a flurry of clangs and clanks and reverberating shouts from foremen and stevedores. It is a lovely river; and it is alive.

Basra has been called the Venice of the East, but this is misleading and unfair. Of course Basra contains nothing architecturally comparable to Venice. It does, however, have a number of canals and they add real enchantment to the scene. At certain times of the year the shaded creek just below Ashar is full of singing and drumming as picnic or wedding parties of Iraqis spread carpets, produce hand-drums and dance. Bee-eaters, kingfishers and other birds flit through the date-gardens, the slanting sun produces a magical effect. A British artist, Donald Maxwell, who came here in the 1920s, and who had been unimpressed by Basra up till then, wrote ecstatically of 'palms and gardens on the right and buildings of the town on the left, and boats approaching, dream-like in the sunset glow . . . For once,'-he added, 'we have something that can surpass in beauty anything that Venice can show . . . Hundreds of palms seem to be growing out of a lake.'

Basra was founded with Kufa by order of the Caliph Omar as soon as the Sassanian capital at Ctesiphon fell to the Muslim armies. It was made into a military base, and a mosque was built there of mud and reeds. Of that and of the original palace nothing can be seen today. Basra looms into history once again with the raising there by Zubeir ibn al Awwam and Talha ibn Ubaidullah of a force to resist the claim of Ali, the Prophet Mohamed's cousin, to the Caliphate after the murders of Omar and Othman. A battle took place outside Basra to the west and it resulted in the deaths of both Zubeir and Talha. Zubeir was buried on the battle-site and that is why the small town that has grown up there is called Zubeir to this day.

Alexander the Great's admiral, Nearchos, had made a harbor (of which nothing survives) near Basra, but it was only in the sixteenth century that the port really seems to have flourished- perhaps because it was only then that Basra began to impinge on European consciousness. The Portuguese controlled the Gulf by the end of the fifteenth century, until challenged by the Turkish Navy after about 1520 as the Ottoman power crept eastwards; yet up to 1500, Iraq was not much in the minds of other Europeans. The Renaissance in Europe was followed by the exciting discovery of the New World by Columbus which concentrated people's attention rather as the moon-landings did in the second half of the twentieth century. Babylon, Nineveh, Baghdad seemed dead legends and few travelers cared to exert themselves to see what modern Mesopotamia was like. Then came a dramatic change. Diaz and da Gama sailed to the Indies. The East was 'opened up'. Soon, land-travelers followed the sailors. Officers, merchants, simple adventurers returned to write books of journeys through exotic lands that seized the imagination of their readers and became best-sellers. Land-travel may have been arduous, but sea-travel was a hardship too, and not so interesting. As a result, the overland route began to be much used. From India to the Mediterranean it followed two principal courses. One-the long one- took you across Persia, over the Kurdish mountains, to Aleppo and Beirut. By the other you sailed to Basra, stayed a few days to organize things and then traveled up the western bank of the Euphrates via Samawa, Lamlum, Hiska (Diwaniya) and Hilla, to Baghdad and Aleppo. (It was not until 1650 that the eastern route up the Tigris was preferred- it was found to be easier for shipping. ) Travel was by camel caravan- you needed the safety of numbers- and, with luck, you reached Aleppo in seventy days.

In 1583, Ralph Fitch, a merchant of London, noted Basra's mud wails, a port 'decayed but not idle', and remarked that the town was 'a place often thousand houses and of many reed huts'. It was then 'a town of great trade of spices and drugs.. . Also there is a great store of wheat, rice and dates growing thereabouts, wherewith they serve Babylon and all the country.'

Another traveler, John Eldred, wrote:

'The town of Balsara [in those days the spelling of the city's name varied wildly] is a mile and a half in circuit: all buildings, castle and walls are made of brick dried in the Sun. The Turks hath here five hundred Janissaries, beside other soldiers continually in garrison. To this port of Balsara come divers ships laden with all sorts of Indian merchandise, as spices, drugs, Indica, and Calicut' cloth. These ships are usually from forty to three score tones, having their planks sowed together with cord made of the bark of the Date trees . . . They go to a place called Bahrain.. . there they fish for pearls four months in the year, to wit, in June, July, August and September.'

By 1500, Basra had been decreed a wiliya (Governorate) by the Turkish Sultan in Istanbul; it came under the Pasha of Baghdad. The Turkish Pashas of Baghdad thus entered into a protracted time of extreme irritation, for the Basra region was a buzzing hive of rebellion and conflict. The tribes of the Marshes, that seep down to within thirty miles due north of Basra, could not be prevented from making sorties from their soggy fastness in the great reed-beds of the swamps. Pashas mounted expedition after expedition from Baghdad; but whatever their initial success, the final result was the same-the canny Marsh Arabs paddled .their canoes back into the impenetrable reed maze, more or less chastised, to lick their wounds and prepare for the next attack on Turkish outposts, or the shipping on the two rivers, or even for all-out offensives against the city of Basra. The Marshmen were irrepressible. Heads were cut off, sentences of exile and imprisonment imposed on their rebellious Sheikhs, Janissaries with matchlocks and cannon-trains bombarded tribesmen whenever they caught them in the open; all to no avail. And apart from the outrageous behavior of the tribes, 'battles between Turks and invading Persians in and around the city were a permanent feature of life. Only in the seventeenth century was there an interlude of peace and prosperity that gave hope of a new dawn for the south. Ali Pasha, in 1624, repulsed a Persian attack with the aid of Portuguese ships-of-war and, in the period of peace that followed, established a court in Basra that people compared to the glories of Harun al Rashid's Baghdad. Briefly, Basra became a Mecca for poets, scientists and artists. But Ali Pasha's son soon wrecked all that by imposing a buffalo tax on the neighboring tribes, something no poverty-stricken Marshman- whose buffalo herd is his wealth- could accept. So the old instability returned to the region. Even so, for a time, travelers were able to report that 'There is so much liberty and so good order in the City, that you may walk all night long in the Streets without molestation.'

A Frenchman, J. B. Tavernier, saw a thriving trade in 1670 despite the instability:

'The Hollanders bring spices thither every year. The English carry pepper and some few cloves; but the Portuguese have no trade at all thither. In short there are merchants of all countries from Constantinople, Smyrna, Aleppo, Damascus, Cairo and other parts of Turkey, to buy such merchandises as come from the Indies, with which they lade the young camels which they buy in that place: for thither the Arabians bring them to put them to sale . . . The prince of Balsara is so good a Husband, that he lays up three millions of livres in the year, his chiefest revenue is in four things, Money, Horses, Camels and Date-trees; but in the last consists his chiefest wealth.'

Today the older parts of Ashar are still attractive. The covered bazaars have character and are worth wandering through. They are quite extensive; the shops are well-stocked; they smell of spice and herbs and coffee; there is an old-world atmosphere there. They have not changed much, thank heavens, since I worked there in a crumbling office in the 1950s. Along the creek outside the bazaar, coffee-houses look across at the more modern jumble of new Basra, street-sellers peddle anything from torch batteries and tomatoes to dancing toys and onion sandwiches. For tourists there are Arab head-dresses, local silver, bracelets, coffee-pots, camel-saddles. The coffee-houses are clean and bright and customers sit along the wooden benches covered with raffia mats; each one has a television set donated by the government. An English traveler, the Hon. George Keppel, passing through Basra on his way home from India in the early 1800s, described a scene not unlike what you can see today:

'Throughout the bazaar, we observed numerous coffee-houses; they are spacious, unfurnished apartments, with benches of masonry round the walls, raised about three feet from the ground. On these are placed mats; at the bar are ranged numerous coffee-pots, and pipes of different descriptions. It is customary for every one to bring his own tobacco. These houses are principally filled by Janissaries, who were puffing clouds from their pipes in true Turkish taciturnity.'

You don't need to provide your own tobacco these days. And the men you see puffing clouds of smoke are not Janissaries but the merchants, taxi-drivers, tradesmen and workers of Basra. It is interesting to pass the time watching the different sorts of people who come to these coffee-houses or the crowds sauntering back and forth before their entrances.

Apart from the townsmen you see farmers from the rich Mesopotamian hinterland, weather-beaten men in black and brown cloaks; Marsh Arabs, similarly dressed but their hands and feet are bigger and hornier from constant contact with canoe-paddles, the decks of boats and slashing, stabbing reed-stubble; men from the direction of Kuwait in red and white check head-cloths, clicking beads, eyes half-buried in skin wrinkled from squinting into the sun. In hot weather, sit in the doorway to catch what breeze you can.

The modernization of the Basra area- the extension of the port facilities at Fao and Umm Qasr, the resulting proliferation of highways and housing-has left little of beauty in the older part of Basra itself. But near the courthouse you can still see a congregation of palsied old houses that give a good idea of the nineteenth-century grace of this ancient city.

On both sides of the creek rows of great houses stand staring at each other from high, pointed windows and latticed shenashils, the overhanging wooden structures in which the people of the house can sit and spy on passers-by below. (Theshenashils supported by wooden beams are nineteenth-century; those with iron rail supports were built after the arrival of the British in 1915 .) The houses are of yellow brick. Their windows are often protected from the appalling Basra heat by long, broad shutters held open by adjustable iron struts, a special feature of Basra architecture. Some shenashils are painted green or blue, some are dust-colored. Here there were street after street of rich men's houses. Now, with broken beams and cracked glass windows, many of them have a hopeless look like decrepit old men warming their failing bones in the sun. Yet they could be saved, like the Basra Museum which stands among them in a good garden with a wooden balcony on two facing sides of a courtyard, and large decorated beams: an old house, well restored.

In the street, under a cat's cradle of telephone wires, you smell fresh baking, and see boys jogging along with trays piled with flat Arab bread balanced on their heads. Children are playing hop-scotch in the street; through an open door an old man is being shaved with a cut-throat razor. Wooden front-doors are studded with iron, and decorated with knockers of brass shaped into the small hands of Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Mohamed, that bring blessings. You have glimpses, through doorways, of crab-apple trees and palms. An old man in glasses and a white head-cloth squats basking in a pool of sunlight near an old wall. Girls in bright dresses play with infants under carved lintels. There is an air of decrepitude and pathos. Here time passes, as Arabs say, like shadows on the sand.

These photos belong to an Austrian person by name of Gerhard H. whom worked in Iraq (Basrah) during the 80s, he was kind to let me publish the photos on this site. Thank you Gerhard.

The west bank of Shat Al Arab River in Basrah city

One of the many narrow water chanels in Basrah.

Date Palms in Basrah Governorate

View of Basrah City