Kajaki Dam

The Kajaki Dam holds back the Helmand river where it leaves the mountains of central Afghanistan, about 160 kilometres north-west of Kandahar. It is about 100 metres high and 270 metres long, and the lake behind it winds back into the hills. It was built between 1951 and 1953 by the American firm Morrison-Knudsen as the centrepiece of the Helmand Valley Authority, a development scheme meant to irrigate the plains of Helmand and settle farmers on newly watered land.

The river it tames is one of the oldest names in the Iranian world. The Helmand is the Haetumant of the Avesta, the Zoroastrian scriptures, which praise it as a bright and glorious river, and the Greeks knew it as the Etymander. It rises in the Hindu Kush, flows south-west through Afghanistan and ends in the lakes and marshes of Sistan, on the border with Iran, where its waters have fed farming and settlement for thousands of years.

The dam's water still flows into a network of canals around Lashkar Gah, the town built in the 1950s as the scheme's headquarters. Hydroelectric turbines were added in the 1970s. During the war of the 2000s Kajaki became a focus of reconstruction efforts, and in 2008 a large military convoy carried a third turbine across Helmand to the dam. Today the reservoir, between bare brown ridges, is one of the largest bodies of open water in southern Afghanistan.