A new railway will at last link Iran and Iraq

For more than a century the geographical and political obstacles to a direct rail connection between Iraq and Iran have looked insurmountable. The Shatt al-Arab, the waterway formed by the convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, divides their southern border. The frontier also marks a cultural fault line, between the Arab and Persian worlds, which has been a source of conflict for millennia. Little wonder that when the great powers built railways to Iraq in the early 20th century they preferred to cut through the Taurus mountains in Turkey, cross the Nile in Egypt and traverse Syria’s deserts rather than brave any routes via Iran (see map).