Battleground: 10 Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East
ISBN: 9780300277616Date read: 2025-08-18
How strongly I recommend it: 7/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Summary of what’s been going on in West Asia since the 2011 Arab Spring. Great example of one book keeping you more informed than a hundred hours of daily news, since the book can summarize what was important in hindsight, showing outcomes and connections with what influenced or was influenced.
my notes
Media and politicians fall back on simplified explanations for the Middle East’s geopolitics.
Off-the-shelf explanations are of little help to those trying to understand the real dynamics.
This book is aimed at readers who are interested in understanding that complexity and looking for a place to start.
It introduces the geopolitics of the Middle East by focusing on one key aspect: conflict.
Not suggesting that the Middle East should be defined only by its conflicts.
Conflicts show how a state or area’s local politics, informed by its history and the decisions of the ruling elite of the day, interact with outside forces, by an interaction between internal and external forces.
Chapters:
1 Syria: The Shattered Mosaic
2 Libya: Anarchy on the Mediterranean
3 Yemen: The Worst Humanitarian Crisis in the World
4 Palestine: The Vanishing Land
5 Iraq: The Broken Republic
6 Egypt: Fallen Giant
7 Lebanon: A Crumbling State
8 Kurdistan: The Struggle in the Mountains
9 The Gulf: Wealth and Insecurity
10 The Horn of Africa: A New Arena
Though the Middle East has certain unique features compared to other regions, notably its geographical location at a crossroads of three continents, its particular religious heritage, and its vast reserves of oil, reducing explanations for its fractures to these features is simplistic and inaccurate.3 It is far more helpful to explore how these characteristics have impacted the complex decisions being made, rather than using them lazily as a predetermined explanation.
The ‘Middle East’ was originally a colonial term, dreamt up by Britain to distinguish regions based on their distance from London: ‘the near east’, ‘the far east’, and the place in between, the ‘Middle’ East.
Many would still identify themselves more with alternative regional groupings such as the Islamic or Arab world, or more local areas such as the Levant (eastern Mediterranean), Mashriq (the Levant plus Iraq), Gulf, or Maghreb (North Africa).
There is a strong case for scrapping the term ‘Middle East’ altogether and replacing it with the less colonial ‘West Asia’.
The majority of the world’s Muslims live outside the Middle East.
This book is centred on the Middle East in the twenty-first century, particularly during the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Uprisings.
Seemingly once a decade, seismic events appear to rock the foundations of Middle Eastern geopolitics, whether it be 9/11 in 2001, the 1991 Gulf War, or the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
For all the upheaval, there is considerable continuity.
That said, the 2011 Arab Uprisings did change enough to justify the ‘new Middle East’ subtitle of this book.
The Middle East’s short-lived ‘Pax Americana’ was over, and a ‘post-American Middle East’ began to emerge.
After 2011, the number of players interfering was considerably more than in the past.
Conflicts attracted multiple external sponsors, with well over seven states intervening in the wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, with multiple outsiders vying for influence over the politics of Egypt, the Horn of Africa, Iraq, Kurdistan, and Lebanon, not just one or two dominant players as in the past.
In 1920 the victorious French and British stripped the Ottomans of their remaining Arab lands, creating instead a series of Western-style nation-states where once there were none: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan.
Artificial states with straight-line borders.
Syria had two thriving major trading cities, Damascus and Aleppo, but the ports they had previously relied on for trade were now in different countries.
UN Secretary-General António Gutteres called Yemen ‘the worst humanitarian crisis in the world’.
In 2020 three-quarters of the population of 27 million needed humanitarian assistance and just under a third did not know where their next meal was coming from.
North and South Yemen united in 1990.
Yemen was already the poorest country in the Middle East long before its civil war.
North Yemen was ruled by Arab nationalist military officers.
South Yemen’s socialist leaders, in contrast, sought to radically remake society.
They set up programmes to lessen the importance of tribalism and religion and to improve women’s rights, and developed one of the most progressive constitutions in the Arab world.
Yet the government’s poverty and relatively short lifespan meant that these changes had only limited reach.
Saleh gradually extended his power over all of united Yemen.
Saleh’s unwise decision at the UN to vote against authorising the US-led coalition to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein in 1990 prompted fury on the part of the US and the Gulf states. The former cut aid to Yemen while the latter expelled up to 800,000 Yemeni workers.
The Houthis, or Ansar Allah, were formed in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a radical offshoot of a political-religious Zaydi party and youth movement. They protested, among other things, the marginalisation of the Zaydi Shia, the Saleh regime’s corruption, and its closeness to the US.
The Zaydis form 30–35% of Yemen’s population and are mostly located in the far north, near the Saudi Arabian border.
Zaydis’ leaders are descendants of the prophet Mohammad, were the rulers of northern Yemen until the monarchy ended in 1962.
Saudi Arabia joined Saleh in fighting the Houthis in the late 2000s.
Saudi Arabia opposed the unification of the two Yemens in 1990, possibly fearing a united, more populous state to its south would be harder to control.
In the 2000s, when Saleh was seeking support from Saudi Arabia for his wars on the Houthis, he persuaded Riyadh that the Zaydi militia were receiving money and weapons from Iran - their arch-rivals.
With the Houthis’ march into first Sanaa and then Aden, Riyadh now worried that the whole of Yemen would be transformed into a pro-Iranian satellite.
MBS therefore felt he had to get involved directly to sort out Yemen.
MBS believed the whole campaign would be over within six weeks, but it became a quagmire that some have labelled ‘Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam’.
Saudi intervention had the opposite effect to that desired regarding the Houthis and Iran: the invasion prompted the Houthis to deepen their ties with Tehran.
The war also damaged Saudi’s international image, as it seemed to be bombing Yemen recklessly, causing untold civilian casualties, while its navy blockaded ports and so worsened the humanitarian crisis.
Riyadh instead transformed a local civil war into a major international conflict, bringing in billions of dollars’ worth of firepower to rain down on the Yemeni people.
Thirty years after an optimistic unification, a formal or informal partition looks likely.
Yemen increasingly resembles the long-running disorder of Somalia.
In 2023, China brokered a regional détente between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
In 2020, UAE and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords, normalising ties with Israel, later joined by Morocco and Sudan, further breaking the taboo about Arab states making peace with Israel before the Palestinian issue was settled.
UAE was especially keen to access trade and defence relations with Israel, and later encouraged its allies in Sudan to sign up.
Morocco, which had long enjoyed not-so-secret ties to Israel due to the substantial Moroccan Jewish community, took the opportunity to bring its relationship into the open.
In 2020 there were over 630,000 Israeli settlers living in more than 150 settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
All of these are in contravention of international laws against building on occupied territory, though Israel insists it is not ‘occupied territory’ since there was no internationally agreed sovereign, neither Jordan nor the Palestinians, before Israel captured the lands.
A third of all settlers are in East Jerusalem.
As of 2021 there were 14 million Palestinians in the world, only 5.3 million of whom lived in the occupied territories.
After the 1948 Nakba, refugees fled.
4 million living as permanent refugees in neighbouring states and the 1.8 million Palestinian citizens of Israel.
During Israel’s war of independence, over 750,000 Palestinians fled but 150,000 stayed. They and their descendants now make up roughly 20% of Israel’s population.
Jordan has treated its Palestinians most favourably, hosting the largest number.
Jordan was the only Arab state to offer Palestinian refugees full citizenship.
The Lebanese government not only denied the refugees citizenship but also prevented most from working or living outside of their squalid concrete refugee camps
They are the most prominent group mentioned when the PA insists on refugees returning to Palestine.
Iraq is barely a hundred years old, but it was built on the site of some of the world’s oldest and most developed civilisations.
Not far from Baghdad can be found the ruins of ancient Babylon, home to the most advanced science and learning during the ‘Islamic Golden Age’ of the eighth and ninth centuries.
In 1258, the Mongols permanently destroyed the irrigation networks that had helped the region flourish for millennia.
Thereafter Baghdad and its environs became something of a backwater, absorbed into the Ottoman empire but of marginal economic, political, or cultural importance.
London fused together three Ottoman provinces: Basra in the south, Mosul in the north, and Baghdad in the centre, to forge a new country, ‘Iraq’, which it ruled on behalf of the League of Nations, theoretically preparing it for independence.
But Britain’s rule was self-interested and left a damaging legacy.
Most of the inhabitants were Muslim, but with sizeable Christian and Jewish communities, but the Muslim majority was not homogeneous.
Most were Arab, but the mountainous north was dominated by Kurds.
Most of the Muslims were Shia, but Sunnis were the ruling elites.
Saddam ordered an invasion of Iran.
The result was a stalemated conflict that dragged on for eight years, causing widespread death, destruction, and, ultimately, no territorial change.
Having nearly bankrupted Iraq’s economy with one war, Saddam sought to solve his financial woes by launching another: invading and annexing the wealthy Gulf state of Kuwait in 1990.
But this provoked international outrage, forcing Saddam’s retreat, but also destroying much of what was left of Iraq’s developed infrastructure.
Saddam responded with a campaign of oppression against civilians that culminated with the gassing of up to 5,000 Kurds in the 1988 Halabja massacre.
Washington and its allies created a no-fly zone over the northern mountains.
This prevented Saddam’s forces from entering the area, effectively cutting it off from the rest of Iraq for the next decade.
Western forces offered the south no such support, however, and Saddam crushed the uprising there, leaving many Shias feeling both a deep sense of betrayal by the West and by their Sunni countrymen who had stayed loyal to Saddam.
Anti-Western feeling was further fuelled by the sanctions that remained on Iraq for the decade after Desert Storm.
The UN had forbidden any state to trade with Iraq, so no food, medicine or vital supplies were allowed to enter, and Iraq could not sell its oil to raise funds.
More than the wars and Saddam’s brutal rule, the decade of sanctions accelerated Iraq’s decline and had a deep impact on the country’s national psyche.
Al-Qaeda’s slaughter of nearly 3,000 people on 11 September 2001, had nothing to do with Iraq, with whom the Afghanistan-based Jihadists had no direct ties.
US-led forces invaded from Kuwait in March 2003 and captured Baghdad within three weeks.
The end of Saddam’s dictatorship left a power vacuum.
In the northern mountains, Iraq’s Kurds had been governing themselves since 1991 under the protection of the Western no-fly zone and transitioned to the post-Saddam era relatively smoothly.
Elsewhere the situation was more chaotic.
The White House based many of its policies on the counsel of Iraqi exiles who had spent decades abroad and returned in 2003 to find the country unrecognisable.
Ministries and museums, with decades of records, property deeds, and vital administrative documents essential for running the country, were torched.
Thousands of competent administrators, doctors, and teachers fired overnight.
It is a sad irony that, despite US claims, prior to 2003 there was no recorded Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq.
Yet, after the invasion, branches did form to fight the occupation and attracted Jihadists from around the world.
Turkey, which borders Iraq to the north, became a significant partner to the newly autonomous Kurdish region, known as the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).
It greatly increased trade with the enclave, which boomed with energy wealth while the rest of Iraq stagnated.
Syria also interfered, cynically allowing Syrian and other Jihadists to pass through its territory to join Al-Qaeda’s insurgency.
Though Damascus loathed Jihadism, it wanted to bog down the US occupation to deter Washington from turning to Syria after Iraq.
Interestingly, Saudi Arabia did not get involved.
Though it opposed Saddam, who had threatened Saudi oilfields after invading Kuwait in 1990, it urged its ally Washington not to invade, correctly predicting that it would benefit its regional nemesis, Iran.
Since 1979, Iran’s approach to the world has generally oscillated between hard-line and moderate wings of the establishment.
The events of 9/11 occurred during an era when moderates held sway and Iran was trying to improve its ties with the West, prompting Tehran to help the US defeat Al-Qaeda and its defenders, the Taliban, in Afghanistan in late 2001.
It therefore proved quite a shock to be labelled an ‘enemy to world peace’ by George W. Bush.
The subsequent Iraq invasion triggered conservative hawks to become more ascendant in Iran.
Believing that influence in Baghdad was now vital to Iran’s interests, Iran poured energy and resources into Iraq’s post-war politics.
It built close ties with Iraqi politicians.
It cultivated the growth of Shia militias.
It built a deep cultural presence in Iraq, promoting its image and ideology to ordinary (Shia) Iraqis.
Iran genuinely did support long-neglected Shia religious sites, charities, and media, earning goodwill from many in the community.
UN sanctions squeezed the Iranian economy, crippling Iran’s finances further, to the point that frustrated voters elected moderates back into power in the form of President Hassan Rouhani in 2013.
Obama’s 2015 deal between Tehran and the Western international community ended sanctions in exchange for Iran suspending its nuclear programme.
In early June 2014, just over a thousand fighters from the Sunni Jihadist group Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (Greater Syria) captured Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.
Inside they found a vast cache of money, weapons, and equipment, including 2,300 Humvees left by the Iraqi army, which had disintegrated and fled.
A few days later its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, announced from Mosul’s Great Mosque that the territory he controlled, spanning eastern Syria and western Iraq were part of a new ‘Caliphate’, Islamic State, that sought to unite all Muslims under its rule.
The declaration prompted a wave of Syrian, Iraqi, and international Jihadist volunteers to join this ‘Caliphate’.
Meanwhile the weapons and money acquired enabled Islamic State to push deeper into Iraq and Syria, threatening both Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government.
Suddenly, this once marginal Al-Qaeda offshoot looked capable of sweeping through not only Iraq and Syria but the whole Middle East.
Only a few years earlier, Al-Qaeda in Iraq had been close to collapse, but now was rebranded as Islamic State in Iraq.
US and Iran campaigned against Islamic State separately, but with the same goal of destroying the so-called Caliphate.
The Iraqi military could recapture Mosul.
In 2016–17, it took nine months to dislodge the Jihadists and left the city devastated.
After they were eventually ejected, the historic Great Mosque from which Baghdadi had declared his Caliphate had been reduced to rubble.
By 2019, the last Islamic State stronghold had been captured.
In summer 2017, Kurdish leaders called an independence referendum, won by over 93% but dismissed by Baghdad as illegal.
This shattered any illusion of Kurdish–Arab cooperation and unity that might have been present during the fight with Islamic State.
Despite having the fifth-largest oil reserves in the world, Iraq has an electricity grid that provides only 5–8 hours of power a day.
Poor water management by the government (and Iraq’s neighbours) had prompted horrendous dust storms across Iraq that worsened health and contributed to the desertification of former agricultural areas.
This was all especially felt in Basra, where a combination of little water, limited electricity for air conditioning and 50-degree heat in the summer made it the epicentre of the protest movement.
Egypt, far from emulating its past successes, is barely struggling to survive - dependent on neighbours and allies for economic support.
Egypt is the most populous country in the Middle East.
Cairo, the largest city in the region, has 21 million inhabitants, more than double the size of London or New York.
95% of Egyptians live along the banks of the Nile and its delta, and the world’s longest river is the main reason Egypt exists.
A popular uprising overthrew the stagnant thirty-year dictatorship in 2011.
A wave of optimism, fear, instability, and political activity was ushered in.
Ultimately this ended in 2013, when the military deposed the elected Islamist government, establishing an autocracy even harsher than the one toppled two years earlier.
As elsewhere in the Middle East, the Ottomans’ decline in the nineteenth century brought European empires swooping in.
First came the French under Napoleon, who briefly conquered Egypt in 1798 but were defeated by the British, allowing the Ottomans to reconquer.
One of the Ottoman commanders, an Albanian called Muhammad Ali, emerged as the de facto ruler.
London granted Egypt nominal independence in 1922, though it retained control over key aspects of defence and the Suez Canal.
The hollowness of independence was exposed during the Second World War, when Britain once again dispatched its military to Egypt and then humiliated the king, Farouq, by surrounding his palace with tanks, demanding he appoint a new government of London’s choosing.
The Free Officers ultimately ended royal rule and British influence when they staged a bloodless coup in 1952.
A few days later they sent Farouq into exile and within two years had Britain agree to withdrawing its last troops.
The leading player among the Free Officers, soon to become president of the newly created republic, was Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser.
To many, Nasser remains a hero who stood up to the West and gave Egypt and the Arab world back its pride.
At home, Nasser smashed the old order.
His socialist policies saw land requisitioned from the elite and distributed among the peasantry, industry and other enterprises nationalised, women’s rights improved, and increased access to healthcare and education.
When Britain made a last-ditch attempt to claw back influence in Egypt by invading the Suez Canal with France and Israel in 1956, it was forced into a humiliating climbdown when its ally, the US, insisted London withdraw.
Nasser embraced Arab nationalism, positioning himself as the Middle East’s Bismarck, promising to unite the Arab world that had been artificially divided by European empires.
He was outweighed by later failures in the 1960s.
Bankrupt, Nasser had to abandon both Arab nationalism and non-alignment.
Nasser’s successor was another Free Officer, his vice president, Anwar Sadat.
Sadat launched a new war against Israel in 1973 that ended in stalemate but paved the way for a negotiated peace that saw Sinai returned and the Suez Canal re-opened.
It also enabled Egypt to switch sides in the Cold War, ditching the Soviet Union for the US,
Sadat’s assassination in 1981, when radical Islamists who felt betrayed by the peace treaty gunned him down during a military parade.
Sadat’s death ushered in what became the thirty-year reign of Hosni Mubarak.
He continued on the domestic and international path set by Sadat: peace with Israel, alignment with the West, and capitalist autocracy at home.
Yet though this proved stable in the medium term, it perpetuated a decline that had begun in the Nasser era, with Egypt becoming poorer, more unequal domestically, and increasingly diminished abroad.
All but one of Egypt’s presidents have been military men.
Egypt experienced no army intervention for nearly sixty years after 1952.
The flipside was that by granting the military so much wealth and status, it became fiercely protective of its privilege.
This ultimately led the army to overthrow Mubarak in 2011, sacrificing the president to retain its own privileges.
Senior officers lived in resort-style compounds in the suburbs of Cairo, separated from the rest of society.
Due to conscription, they had access to up to a million men under their command to provide cheap labour for various business enterprises.
These included army-run cement factories, farms, steel companies, water bottling plants, pasta plants, and of course defence industries.
These activities grew even more after 2011.
Egypt’s population boomed, leaping from 27 million in 1960 to 87 million in 2010, leaving widespread unemployment, under-employment, and frustration.
One of the main beneficiaries of this economic decline was the other major force in Egyptian politics: the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood were not heavily involved in the protests, but soon emerged as the main beneficiary of the new era.
An army man, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.
Sisi ushered in a new era of dictatorship and repression.
A thousand Morsi supporters were massacred by the military during a peaceful sit-in in Cairo.
Sisi amended the constitution to permit him to remain in power until 2030.
He empowered the army even more than his predecessors, granting it near-complete immunity and autonomy from the law, while giving officers an even bigger slice of the economy.
Egypt’s population was much younger, more rural, under-educated, lacking in a sizeable middle class, and overly dependent on the state for sustenance compared to other countries that have seen successful democratic revolutions.
Qatar and, to a lesser extent, Turkey supported the Brotherhood, while the UAE and Saudi Arabia backed Sisi’s coup.
For all its flaws, Egypt is far more stable than many of its Middle Eastern contemporaries, having avoided the civil wars of Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and the political chaos of Iraq and Lebanon.
Since 2011, Egypt’s weakness has been its economy.
The precarity of Egypt’s finances was exposed once again, first during the Covid pandemic and then the 2022 Ukraine war, from which Egypt imports much of its grain.
This prompted Cairo to gratefully accept a $22 billion aid package from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and a newly rehabilitated Qatar.
Once again Egypt’s weak finances had left it prey to outside leverage.
Over 60% of Egyptian men have sexually harassed women in public.
Lebanon: The Beirut blast was huge on 4 August 2020, the largest non-nuclear explosion in history.
218 people were killed, over 7,000 were injured.
Ammonium nitrate stored there by government officials without proper safety measures for over six years.
Lebanon enjoys one of the most liberal political climates in the Middle East, but it also suffers from a deeply corrupt sectarian ruling elite.
Lebanon’s great tragedy: It has the potential to be a beacon of freedom and prosperity, but has conflict and instability.
In the 1970s Lebanon erupted into a fifteen-year civil war between different religious and ideological factions.
Lebanese remained divided, as this was built into the design of the post-war political system.
Lebanon’s constitution recognises eighteen different religions among its 5 million or so inhabitants.
Council has to include representatives of all the region’s religious groups.
This singling out of religion as the key identity in politics was to cast a long shadow.
France opted to partition the northern Levant, creating two new states: Syria and Lebanon.
But the Lebanon it created was far larger than the tiny semi-autonomous enclave of Mount Lebanon.
Non-Maronite groups resented France separating them from family, friends, and co-religionists in Syria – barely 100 km from Beirut
France created a democratic constitution that made religion the primary political identity, distributing offices according to sect.
The powerful president was always a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni, the speaker of parliament a Shia, while Druze and Orthodox Christians were also to be represented in cabinet.
This formula was retained and formalised when Lebanon was granted independence in 1943.
As Beirut became a hotbed of intellectuals and militants in the 1950s and 1960s, many Sunnis, Druze, and Orthodox Christians argued that Lebanon should abandon its colonially imposed sectarian system and create a true democracy based on one person one vote.
Such voices were often aligned with the Arab nationalist movement growing across the Middle East at the time.
They wanted to reverse France’s partitions, reuniting with Syria and, possibly, the rest of the Arab world.
Sympathetic to the 110,000 Palestinians who had fled to Lebanon when Israel was created in the late 1940s.
In contrast, many Maronites, though not all, feared the Palestinians.
These tensions boiled over into civil war between 1975 and 1990.
The Shia Islamist government that came to power in Iran in 1979 declared Israel its enemy and sent militants to build a new Shia Islamist group in Lebanon: Hezbollah, soon Israel’s chief tormentor.
With Washington’s approval, the war finally came to an end in 1990, with Syria permitted to deploy its army across Lebanon.
The Taif Accord, as it became known, would shape Lebanon for the next thirty years.
The head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon was effectively a governor, using Syria’s military presence to keep leaders in line while taking a cut from most economic ventures.
Syria’s 29 years of military presence in Lebanon ended in 2005.
Syrian refugees: By 2014 over a million refugees had arrived, meaning a quarter of Lebanon’s population was now Syrian.
But the government was a reluctant host.
Wealthier refugees rented private accommodation while poorer arrivals lived in squalid informal tent cities.
Political leaders often scapegoated them for various woes, prompting sporadic attacks.
Lebanon lira rapidly devalued from the pegged rate of 1,500 lira to the dollar in 2019 to 35,000 lira by 2022.
Life savings were decimated.
Within a few years over 80% of the population were below the poverty line – a sharp drop for an historically middle-class country
Despite the scale of the crisis, the established elite proved nearly impossible to budge.
Western governments and NGOs also faced the paradox that if they wanted to help the Lebanese survive the crisis, they had to work with the corrupt leaders who had caused it.
Lebanon was created as a weak, sectarian state that has deeply entrenched generation after generation of elites who have little interest in changing that situation.
Indeed, they have fought and killed to preserve it.
Kurdistan:
The Kurds have a good claim to being the largest stateless nation in the world.
Estimates suggest there are at least 30 million Kurds living in the Middle East.
‘Kurdistan’, the mountainous area where Kurds form the majority population, is substantial, stretching from western Iran through northern Iraq, northern Syria and almost all of south-eastern Turkey.
Were all this territory ever to be amalgamated as a single independent Kurdistan, it would become the fifth-largest state in the Middle East.
Historically, the Kurds missed out when Britain and France carved up the Ottoman empire after the First World War.
While some Kurdish leaders lobbied for independence, instead the region was partitioned, with Kurds becoming a minority in four different states.
At this point Kurdish nationalism was far weaker.
However, this changed over the course of the 20th century as government discrimination and violence within all four states prompted Kurdish identity to harden, sparking several nationalist movements.
Similar nationalism elsewhere has often led to secession and independence, but no such liberation came for the Kurds.
Partly this was due to internal divisions.
Kurds have multiple fault lines among themselves.
They speak various different dialects.
While 75% are Sunni Muslims, there are other religious groups, and significant ideological differences, with some nationalists favouring leftist, secular solutions, while others prefer conservative, tribal politics.
Moreover, many who may be Kurdish by birth reject ideas of Kurdish nationalism altogether.
A specific Kurdish identity did not emerge until the nineteenth century.
The division of the Kurds into four states meant nationalist movements developed distinctly in different places, based on the challenges for the Kurds of each country.
Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq, all of whom firmly reject any kind of Kurdish independence as it would mean losing valuable territory, have all sponsored Kurdish groups in others’ states to further their own agendas.
In 1923, Ataturk was a staunch secularist and wanted the Turkish language rather than Islam to bind his new country together.
This meant trouble for the Kurdish speakers in the east.
A systematic effort was made by Ankara to supress Kurdish identity with the goal of turning the Kurds into Turks.
All references to Kurdistan were removed from official documents, Kurdish was banned from schools, and Kurdish place names were replaced by Turkish ones.
Thousands of villages were cleared, and their inhabitants deported west, where the plan was for them to be outnumbered by, and integrated with, Turks.
Thousands of Kurdish children, both boys and girls, were forcibly sent to boarding schools to be built into good Turks.
Saddam used killing squads, chemical weapons, aerial bombing, and mass deportation, against the Kurds, culminating in the infamous 1988 gas attack on Halabja.
In total a further 100,000 Kurds were killed.
When the Kurds rebelled again in 1991, after Saddam’s disastrous invasion of Kuwait, the international community were so fearful they’d be targeted by chemical weapons that they provided a protective no-fly zone.
The result was Iraqi Kurdistan’s first experience of real autonomy: an internationally protected region finally outside Baghdad’s control.
Iran’s demographics are complex.
Just over 50% of the population are ethnically Persian, with the remainder made up of sizeable Azeri, Kurdish, Baloch, Lurs, and other.
Kurds make up around 10%, but what distinguishes them from most Iranians is not their different ethnicity and language, but their religion.
Most are Sunni Muslims, compared to the 90–95% of Iranians who are Shia.
Syria was renamed the ‘Syrian Arab Republic’, suggesting little place for the 9% of the population who were Kurds.
In 1962, over 120,000 Kurds had their citizenship removed.
Erdoğan promised reforms and improvements to Kurdish cultural rights in 2005, saying publicly that Kurds should be able to call themselves Kurds.
Hi permitted the use of the Kurdish language in education, though only in private institutions for over-18s, and Turkey’s first Kurdish television channel was launched.
Why did Erdoğan’s strategy fail? He didn’t deliver on his promises.
The cultural measures introduced were half-hearted and piecemeal.
The television station, for example, was dull and unwatchable.
The Kurdish language was legalised, but key letters absent from Turkish remained prohibited, making something of a mockery of the legalisation.
Erdoğan’s foreign policy became increasingly harsh towards Kurds abroad, which turned off Kurds at home.
PKK’s youth wing declared autonomy in multiple Turkish Kurdish cities in late summer 2015.
This outraged Erdoğan and he deployed the military once more.
Over 600 people were killed in harsh urban fighting, and up to half a million displaced, but the Turkish military had retaken all the cities by spring 2016.
An attempted coup in June 2016 against Erdoğan by disgruntled military officers, bungled and quickly failed.
Erdoğan used the plot as a pretext to repress multiple domestic enemies.
Hundreds of thousands of state employees were dismissed, thousands of journalists were arrested, judges were dismissed, as were academics at universities.
The result was a complete purge from Turkey’s state institutions of anyone suspected of not backing Erdoğan.
Freedom without Independence?
The likelihood of an independent Kurdistan emerging looks as forlorn as ever.
It has thus far failed to come into being for three main reasons:
The Kurdish national movement started on the wrong foot
Once Kurdish nationalism emerged, its leaders and movements made a series of self-defeating errors.
Internal divisions have been greatly exacerbated by the machinations of different governments.
The importance of oil and gas to the world economy, and the desire of larger regional powers like Iran and Iraq to dominate those producing it, has made the Gulf a deeply insecure region.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman formed the GCC in 1981, partly to defend against Iraq and Iran.
When Britain eventually departed in 1971, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE arguably owed their separate existence to London’s long presence.
Qatar also formally follows Wahhabi Islam, but enforces it less rigidly.
It wasn’t a major fossil fuel exporter until the 1990s, when its huge natural gas reserves were tapped.
Bahrain has very modest oil reserves, meaning the ruling Al-Khalifa family have diversified the island’s economy to focus on finance.
This has been partly successful but has not allowed Bahrain anywhere near the international freedom of other Gulf states, leaving it often reliant on neighbouring Saudi Arabia.
The Al-Khalifas are Sunni Muslims, but most of their subjects are Shia.
Bahrain’s leaders fear the Shia could revolt against them, a sentiment shared by the Al-Sauds, whose Shia minority live in the most oil-rich parts of Saudi Arabia.
Kuwait has a functioning parliament, though the ruling Al-Sabah family is rarely criticised, and an historical merchant class that continued to be influential even after oil was discovered.
Kuwait often adopt neutral or mediating positions in the Gulf, eschewing the activism of Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha.
Oman likewise favours neutrality.
It enjoys closer ties with Iran than most Gulf states, partially the result of the two states’ much longer history of cooperation across the Gulf dating back centuries.
When Britain withdrew from the Gulf region in 1971, the US gradually took over its role as protector.
Two years later Saudi Arabia led an oil boycott against the US and other Western states to protest their support for Israel in the Yom Kippur/October war, almost quadrupling oil prices and pushing the US economy into recession.
While most US troops left after Saddam’s defeat, the White House concluded agreements with all six GCC states in the early 1990s to secure a permanent military presence. They retain these bases today.
This tied the GCC firmly to US primacy.
The 9/11 attacks had been precipitated by Al-Qaeda terrorists, mostly hailing from Gulf states – 15 of the 19 being from Saudi Arabia, and 2 from the UAE.
One of Al-Qaeda’s core concerns was the presence of non-Muslim US troops on the sacred Arabian Peninsula.
The conservative autocrats of the GCC were furious with the United States.
US President Barack Obama had facilitated the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, angering Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, which believed Washington should stand by its partners and, privately feared the White House might similarly desert them in the future.
Riyadh and Abu Dhabi share a deep opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Qatar largely welcomed the uprisings.
Al Jazeera, the Arabic news station established in Doha with Qatari backing, was instrumental in spreading the protests across the Arab world.
It had close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose spokesmen and allies were given regular airtime on Al Jazeera.
Doha was backing the opponents of its GCC allies, and pushing for different outcomes in the conflicts.
But in Yemen, Doha joined the Saudi–UAE-led coalition a few months after the initial intervention.
Despite its differences with allies elsewhere in the Middle East, Qatar signalled that on matters in the Gulf’s neighbourhood, GCC solidarity still held – for now.
The ‘Shale Revolution’ that massively increased the domestic oil supply of the US, as well as the growth of imports from Canada, mean the US now imports little oil from GCC states.
China’s interests in the Gulf were primarily economic.
The GCC is China’s eighth-largest source of imports and exports.
Saudi Arabia is China’s biggest trade partner, being a key market for Chinese construction firms as well as the single largest source of Beijing’s oil.
Riyadh values its ties with China so highly that it accepts Beijing’s extensive ties with its rival, Iran, also a key BRI partner.
China makes great use of Dubai’s role as the world’s third-largest re-export hub.
Over 4,000 Chinese companies are based in the UAE.
China is not necessarily a better friend than the United States, but it is a less complicated friend.
In 2015 a Chinese company signed a forty-three-year lease for the port of Gwadar in Pakistan – an early signatory to the BRI – 600 miles east of the Strait of Hormuz, opening the possibility that eventually the Chinese navy may have a base not far from the region.
China has a sizeable Muslim minority and utilises Saudi Arabia to help manage it.
The Hui Muslims of Ningxia province are tolerated, and Beijing uses its ties with Riyadh to underline this tolerance, such as securing pilgrimage spots to Mecca and Medina.
Qatar crisis rocked the Gulf from 2017 to 2021.
Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) was also heavily influenced by his counterpart in the UAE, Mohammed Bin Zayad (MBZ).
MBZ was fundamentally opposed to the Brotherhood and was convinced that Qatar’s continued sponsorship risked inspiring Emirati Islamists to challenge his rule at home.
In summer 2017, the blockade of Qatar began.
Saudi Arabia closed Qatar’s only land border and forbade Qatar Airways from using its airspace.
The four blockading governments ceased all economic activity with Qatar, Qatari citizens were expelled, while citizens of UAE and Bahrain were forbidden to express any support for Qatar on social media.
Tamim sought ways to overcome the boycott, reaching deals with Iran, Turkey, and East Asian states to provide essential goods by air and sea.
If the quartet had intended the blockade to weaken Qatar’s resolve, it failed.
Qatar used its vast wealth, via its $300 billion sovereign wealth fund, to pay inflated prices to keep food and goods flowing, and the besieged population rallied around the young emir, strengthening his position.
The blockade shattered the perceived stability of the GCC.
Kuwait and Oman, meanwhile, remained neutral and tried in vain to mediate.
Both were concerned that, should the quartet succeed in reducing Qatar’s independence, they might be next – especially Oman, which also enjoyed good ties with Iran.
Trump reportedly only started trying to end the boycott when he realised Qatar was paying Iran $100 million a year to use its airspace, giving Tehran an income at a time when the White House was trying to cripple its economy with sanctions.
Qatar made next to no concessions and the action was widely seen as a failure.
Tamim immediately travelled to Saudi Arabia for a GCC summit, where the leaders all embraced – the club apparently restored.
However, the episode had damaged GCC credibility.
In London alone, Doha owns such landmark assets as Harrods department store, the Shard skyscraper, the Savoy hotel, as well as 50% of Canary Wharf, 20% of Heathrow Airport and 14% of Sainsbury’s.
Investing in Western and Asian economies has been a deliberate tactic by all the GCC governments, especially the wealthiest trio of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar.
These investments have dual purposes.
On the one hand, they make economic sense, adding more assets to growing sovereign wealth funds – utilised expertly by Qatar to survive the blockade.
But they also serve geopolitical goals.
Making foreign economies reliant on Gulf largesse will make foreign governments more likely to support the incumbent regimes in the event of a domestic or international threat.
Gulf states have also invested widely in the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, purchasing extensive farmland to ensure ‘food security’: a guaranteed supply of food.
The Horn of Africa is one of the most beautiful and most violent regions in the world.
It boasts stunning landscapes and rich culture:
Ethiopia’s lush highlands and ancient churches
Somalia’s golden beaches and medieval ports
Eritrea’s rolling green hills and the forgotten Art Deco buildings of its capital, Asmara.
The Horn of Africa is dominated by an African superpower, Ethiopia, which has the continent’s largest army, second-largest population, and has itself interfered in its neighbours’ affairs for years, something that has been reciprocated.
The Horn of Africa today consists of four states: Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Djibouti, though a fifth territory, Somaliland, claims an independence from Somalia that is not recognised internationally.
Ethiopia has roughly 120 million of the 140 million inhabitants of the Horn region.
Landlocked, blocked from the sea by the three (or four) smaller countries.
Ethiopia is approximately two-thirds Christian.
Unlike all other states in Africa, Ethiopia was not colonised.
Ethiopian emperor Hailie Selassie persuaded the United Nations to integrate Eritrea into Ethiopia, frustrating the Eritreans.
Armed resistance to Ethiopian rule began in 1961, eventually exploding into a full-blown war of independence that lasted 30 years.
Selassie was deposed and, after considerable bloodletting, replaced by a Marxist military dictatorship, known as the Derg.
1991, the Eritrean war finally ended.
Fall of the Derg in Ethiopia:
The brutal Marxist regime was increasingly unpopular, not helped by disastrous economic policies that contributed to the infamous famine of 1984.
The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) marched almost unopposed into Addis Ababa and toppled the Derg.
This new government opted for federalism, giving considerable autonomy to Ethiopia’s various ethnic communities.
This opened the way for both economic development and a reconciliation with the West.
The Somali state collapsed in 1991.
Somaliland has remained de facto independent ever since.
In Mogadishu, the regime was toppled by another rival clan, forcing the dictator to flee.
But, unlike in either Ethiopia or Somaliland, these armed groups did not come with a political programme to establish a new government.
Instead they ransacked the capital, leaving it in a state of anarchy.
The power vacuum was filled by various local clan-based warlords.
International players then made the situation worse by offering aid to the various warring bosses, in the hope of re-establishing order.
Instead, Somalia became dependent on foreign aid and factions would fight for access to external funds.
Peace between Eritrea and Ethiopia proved fleeting.
Though the new government in Addis Ababa had approved Eritrean independence as one of its first acts, a new war broke out in 1998.
Disputes over a relatively minor piece of territory provoked horrendous fighting for two years, costing over 100,000 lives – more than died in Eritrea’s thirty-year independence struggle.
While Eritrea turned in on itself, Ethiopia continued to thrive despite the frozen conflict.
Addis Ababa was quick to sign up as a partner in the ‘war on terror’, granting it access to yet more high-end military equipment denied to its neighbours.
Israel helped the famous operation to evacuate 10,000 Ethiopian Jews during the 1984 famine and resettle them in Israel.
In the 2000s, Israel took a renewed interest in the region, increasing its naval and covert presence, this time to counter Iranian activity in the Red Sea.
As elsewhere, the entry of one Middle Eastern power into the region created something of a domino effect, drawing others in to counter their rivals.
Of all the Middle Eastern governments newly engaged in the Horn, the UAE was arguably the most prominent.
Mohammed Bin Zayed (MBZ):
On the death of his half-brother in 2022, MBZ became ruler of Abu Dhabi and president of the UAE.
He consolidated his rule by placing key allies, notably his full brothers, into prominent government positions.
Dubai required a $20 billion bailout from Abu Dhabi after the financial crash of 2008/9, in exchange for which MBZ demanded greater control over security and foreign policy.
MBZ had developed a deep opposition to Islamism in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, seeing little difference between its relatively moderate ideology and the more extreme Jihadism of Al-Qaeda or Islamic State.
While personally religious, MBZ believed religion should stay out of politics.
Abu Dhabi made economic openness and international trade central to its efforts, and a concerted effort to be more visible in international affairs, aided by a dedicated and skilled team of diplomats.
Ethiopia maintains thousands of troops in Somalia’s south-western provinces, officially part of the African Union force supporting the government.
In 2016 Addis Ababa controversially lobbied the UAE to develop Somaliland’s Berbera port.
The agreement, which granted the Dubai-based company DP World a thirty-year concession to develop the port and a 51% stake, also gave 30% to Somaliland and 19% to Ethiopia.
The deal furthered Somaliland’s informal secession by granting it powerful external protectors.
This was compounded by the $400 million construction of a road linking Berbera to the Ethiopian border, funded by the UAE and UK, granting Addis Ababa access to another port, and boosting Somaliland’s ability to survive without Mogadishu.
Since 1991, Ethiopia had enjoyed a degree of political stability.
42-year-old Abiy Ahmed was elected:
Abiy promised domestic reform on assuming office, and immediately released thousands of political prisoners.
He also promised peace with Eritrea, opening the way to UAE mediation.
Abiy responded by dissolving the 28-year-old coalition in 2019, and forming a new one, ‘the Prosperity Party’, that excluded the TPLF.
This aided peace with Eritrea as much of the animosity was between the TPLF and the ruling party of Eritrea.
Abu Dhabi injected $3 billion into Ethiopia’s economy in June 2018, and soon an agreement was reached between the two sides.
Abiy’s warming to Eritrea and the Gulf mediators indicated a more open approach to foreign affairs.
He dropped his predecessors’ hostility to Somalia.
But Ethiopia was too big and powerful to be swayed by Middle Eastern rivalries and strengthened its ties with Abu Dhabi and Riyadh’s rivals Turkey, Qatar, and Iran as well.
Ethiopia: Such was Abiy’s growing clout that he was awarded the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for his reconciliation with Asmara.
However, acclaim for Abiy was soon tempered by the outbreak of the Tigray war in 2020.
TPLF launched an insurrection against federal forces based in Tigray, prompting a massive counter-attack by Addis Ababa.
A major conflict followed, killing up to 600,000 within two years.
War crimes were committed on both sides.
Abiy’s new partners in Eritrea joined the fight, attacking Tigray from the north.
Abiy ultimately triumphed and the TPLF, facing a siege that triggered famine across Tigray, sued for peace.
An African Union-brokered ceasefire was agreed in November 2022, which saw the TPLF agree to disarm and restore federal control to Tigray.
However, the war had highlighted future problems, as other Ethiopian regions also protested Addis Abba’s centralisation.
Ethiopia gave little ground on its controversial Grand Ethiopia Renaissance Dam, which threatened to reduce the Nile water running into Sudan and Egypt.
Eritrea enforces national service for all Eritrean adults from school until the age of 40 for women and 50 for men.
Some serve in the military, but many end up in labour battalions working on public infrastructure projects or for companies owned by party bosses.
Flight from this modern slavery has made Eritrea one of the highest producers of refugees per capita in the world.
Djibouti has historically been something of an exception in the Horn, mostly avoiding the violence and instability that troubled its neighbours.
Much of this was down to outside protection.
It remained under French control until 1977.
Ethiopia has also been a staunch defender, relying heavily on Djibouti’s port.
China was permitted to open a base in 2017.
Beijing had been using Djibouti port since 2008: Beijing’s first overseas naval base.
Was part of a wider Chinese expansion in the region, with Djibouti playing a key role in its Belt and Road
New infrastructure projects saw Djibouti’s public debt nearly double between 2016 and 2018, leaving it heavily indebted to Beijing.