Aerial view of Tarbela Dam تربیلا بند Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Pakistan Indus River

Tarbela Dam تربیلا بند‎ is an earth-filled dam along the Indus River in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Located in the Haripur mainly and in some area of Swabi of the province, the dam is about 30 km (20 mi) from the city of Swabi, 105 km (65 mi) northwest of Islamabad, and 125 km (80 mi) east of Peshawar. It is the largest earth-filled dam in the world, and also the largest dam by structural volume.

The dam was completed in 1976 and was designed to store water from the Indus River for irrigation, flood control, and the generation of hydroelectric power. The dam is 143 metres (470 ft) high above the riverbed. The dam's reservoir, Tarbela Lake, has a surface area of approximately 250 square kilometres (97 sq mi).

The Indus is a transboundary river of Asia and a trans-Himalayan river of South and East Asia. The 3,180 km (1,980 mi) river rises in Western Tibet, flows northwest through the Ladakh and Gilgit-Baltistan regions of Kashmir, bends sharply to the left after the Nanga Parbat massif, and flows south-by-southwest through Pakistan, before it empties into the Arabian Sea near the port city of Karachi.

The river has a total drainage area exceeding 1,165,000 km2 (450,000 sq mi). Its estimated annual flow is around 243 km3 (58 cu mi), twice that of the Nile and three times that of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers combined, making it one of the largest rivers in the world in terms of average annual flow. Its left-bank tributary in Ladakh is the Zanskar River, and its left-bank tributary in the plains is the Panjnad River which itself has five major tributaries, namely the Chenab, Jhelum, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej rivers. Its principal right-bank tributaries are the Shyok, Gilgit, Kabul, Kurram and Gomal rivers. Beginning in a mountain spring and fed with glaciers and rivers in the Himalayan, Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges, the river supports the ecosystems of temperate forests, plains and arid countryside.
The northern part of the Indus Valley, with its tributaries, forms the Punjab region of South Asia, while the lower course of the river ends in a large delta in the southern Sindh province of Pakistan.