dam on the Euphrates River in southeastern Turkey, the centrepiece of the Southeastern Anatolia Project. The Ataturk Dam is the largest in a series of 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric stations built on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in the 1980s and '90s in order to provide irrigation water and hydroelectricity to arid southeastern Turkey. Completed in 1990, the Ataturk Dam is one of the world's largest earth-and-rock fill dams, with an embankment 604 feet (184 m) high and 5,971 feet (1,820 m) long. Water impounded by the dam is fed to power-generating units at Şanlıurfa that have a capacity of 2,400 megawatts. From there the water is gravity-fed to vast irrigation networks in the Harran Plain and elsewhere in the vicinity.