Lake Habbaniyah

South of the Euphrates near Habbaniyah lies a broad natural depression on the edge of the Iraqi desert. The low ground belongs to a landscape shaped by the river and its floods, between the cultivated banks of the Euphrates and the drier country farther south. Its basin is set apart from the river channel itself, a hollow in the flat land through which the Euphrates makes its way towards the plains of lower Mesopotamia.