Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Indus River is 3,180 kilometers long according to the Himalayan Climate and Water Atlas. It rises at a spring called the Sênggê Kanbab in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, flows northwest through the Kashmir region, then south through Sindh province in Pakistan, and empties into the Arabian Sea near Karachi.
The word "India" derives from the Indus River. In ancient times "India" first referred only to the regions along the east bank of the Indus, but by 300 BC Greek writers including Herodotus and Megasthenes applied the term to the entire subcontinent.
The Indus River dolphin, Platanista indicus minor, is a subspecies of the South Asian river dolphin found only in the Indus River. According to the World Wildlife Fund it is one of the most threatened cetaceans, with only about 1,816 still existing, endangered by dams, canals, fishing gear, and industrial pollution.
The Indus Valley Civilisation was a major Bronze Age urban culture whose cities Harappa and Mohenjo-daro date to around 3300 BC. It extended from northeast Afghanistan across Pakistan into northwest India, and over 1,052 cities and settlements have been found, mainly near the Ghaggar-Hakra River.
The Indus is the most important supplier of water to the Punjab and Sindh plains and forms the backbone of agriculture and food production in Pakistan, which matters because rainfall is meager in the lower Indus valley. It supports crops such as cotton, sugarcane, and wheat, supplies potable water, and powers heavy industry.
The Indus Waters Treaty, signed in 1960, gave Pakistan nearly 177 million acre-feet of water, about 84 percent, and India nearly 33 million acre-feet, about 16 percent. India suspended the treaty on the 23rd of April 2025 following a terrorist attack near Pahalgam in Kashmir, and Pakistan warned that disrupting shared river flows could be considered an act of war.
The Indus depends heavily on glacial meltwater from the Himalayas, Karakoram, and Hindu Kush, and the Tibetan glaciers are retreating faster than anywhere else in the world. Officials including Qin Dahe and the World Bank's David Grey have warned that flows could fall by as much as 50 percent, threatening water supplies in Pakistan.