It was the river that watered the biblical Garden of Eden and helped give birth to civilisation itself. But today the Tigris is dying. Human activity and climate change have choked its once mightly flow through Iraq, where -- with its twin the Euphrates -- it made Mesopotamia a cradle of civilisation thousands of years ago. Iraq may be oil-rich but the country is plagued by poverty after decades of war and by droughts and desertification. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES ARRANGED IN SEQUENCES