Featured Photo Source: The photo above shows the different ethnic/religious groups. Photo is by Rafy from Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0. Source.
Today we head to the Middle East to look into one of the big factors of why it seems to be such an unstable region now a days, with it largely known for its wars and terrorism. It is to be noted that a lot of the Middle East is generally stable, and that there are many nice places within the region to go to, but the chance of war and violence in many places there exists, and much of it has played out and continues to play out still. So we are going to go on a little journey to make some sense of it, starting with Muhammad and a massively oversimplified explanation of the Sunni-Shia split.
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Muhammad, first marrying the 40-year-old widow Khadijah at age 25, would go on to have many other wives. Muhammad had only one child that survived into adulthood – a daughter called Fatimah. Much would be ordinary for Muhammad until he himself reached the age of 40.
Muhammad had a hobby of meditating on a mountain on an annual basis, where he would also pray. It was in 610 AD on one of these times that Muhammad claimed to be visited by the angel Gabriel for the first time, who recited messages to Muhammad directly from God.
As the years went on Muhammad continued to be visited by the angel Gabriel and he committed all that was said by the angel to memory. Muhammad would go on to recite these messages to people and gained followers, and these followers would go on to record his messages, and that would give birth to the Quran.
When Muhammad first begun preaching the messages in his hometown of Mecca in 613 AD, he faced rejection as those in the city at the time were largely polytheistic tribes who worshipped gods and goddesses related to nature. Muhammad’s word went against these worshippers beliefs, especially with him saying their was only one God and that idols to other Gods should be destroyed.
Muhammad and his followers faced violence from these worshippers, some of Muhammad’s followers were murdered as a result. Muhammad eventually learned of an assassination plot against him in 622 and he and his followers left Mecca and went to the nearby city of Medina, this journey is still known today where it is called the Hijra and celebrated by Muslims on the first day of the Muslim Year.
Muhammad and his followers did not give up and fought off attempts to eradicate and destroy their existence. They themselves also at times acted ruthless towards those who they saw as a threat against Islam or towards those who would not convert. Muhammad was not just a spiritual leader, but he would also become a great strategist of sorts in a sense of growing his influence and maintaining his leadership, even in the face of hostility.
The Meccans would eventually become desperate as they continued to lose prestige and support as Muhammad’s influence and following grew. Such desparation lead to the Meccans launching an attack on Medina in 625 and defeating the Muslims. But it was not the end, Muhammad did not give up in the face of defeat and instead raised a 10,000 man army, marched into Mecca and conquered it. Muhammad would die in 632 but by this point Islam, thanks to him, had gained an ever lasting foothold across the Arabian Peninsula.
But the death of Muhammad would also prove troublesome as it would lead to a schism amongst the Muslims. This was because there was no obvious succsessor of Muhammad, and worse still he had no living sons. And so two groupings emerged on what people thought should come next, one grouping believed that elite members of the Muslim community should choose the next Caliph and keep doing so each time they died, this group wanted Abu Bakr, a father of one of Muhammad’s wives, to become the next Caliph.
But another grouping rejected this as they believed that Muhammad had said only God can choose the next successor, and that meant keeping within Muhmmad’s family line as best as possible, and so they wanted Ali ibn Abi Talib to be the next Caliph, he was a cousin of Muhammad as he was the husband of Muhmmad’s daughter Fatimah. But this group would not get there way down to not being as popular.
Abu Bakr became the next Caliph and tensions grew between the two sides. Bakr served as Caliph until he died from illness and this time made sure to appoint someone as succssor, a friend of Muhammad, Umar. Umar as Caliph saw him defeat the Persians in battle and conquer them, but despite this victory he would still be assassinated by disgruntled Persians. Amongst all this… the tensions between the two sides continued.
But then there was a moment of fleeting hope that the two sides could unite as the elites appointed Ali ibn Abi Talib as the next Caliph, someone that the second grouping had wanted originally. But after 5-years Ali would be assassinated, his eldest son Hassan took over as the next Caliph but he would be forced out by a rebel force led by Muawiyah and he became the sixth Caliph, greatly angering the second grouping and causing a split that would henceforth never heal.
The second grouping did not just see the leaders as an elected Caliph but also as an imam chosen by divine whim, and to them the first imam was Ali ibn Abi Talib with the first three Caliphs being illigitimate. To the second grouping Hassan was then the second imam, as he was the son of Ali ibn Abi Talib, so you can only imagine how angry they were over a rebel kicking Hassan out of a post that they believed he held by divine right, and so following his overthrow the second group put their support behind Husayn as their third imam, as he was the youngest son of Ali ibn Abi Talib.
Things would only get nastier from here on out. To the second groupings anger Husayn would be beheaded by Yazid, who the first grouping saw as the seventh Caliph (coming after Muawiyah). The second grouping then saw the son of Husayn as their 4th imam. This is the Sunni-Shia split, with the Sunnis supporting the elected Caliph and the Shias supporting the divienly chosen imam. Both sides believe that Muhammad is the final prophet, and both groups follow the five pillars of Islam, and both use the Quran as the holy book although the Shias do not accept the Quran in its entirety believing certain parts were recounted by those who were not an imam and therefore such passages were not truly from God.
Now I shall focus on Iraq, a nation that in its creation proved quite controversial, considering its deep divides.
The area of Iraq is considered one of the Cradles of Civilization with the existence of a fertile strip of land between the Tigris and Euphrates known as Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia itself has bee credited for many things, such as independent emergence of writing, the invention of the wheel, early sailboats, as well as calendars, maps, and schools. They are even credited with the origin of the 60-minute hour and 60-second minute.
Mesopotamia is also famous as Alexander the Great chose this land for his capital city, selecting Babylon for its treasures and strategic location between Europe and Asia. A millenium after this the head of the Abbasid Dynasty built Baghdad on that same land to be the capital of the Muslim world. Baghdad reigned for half a millenium as a world hub of learning and commerce and was the world’s largest city for a time, Bahgdad would later be destroyed by the Mongols, ending its golden era.
The area has a great and long history, but the creation of the modern-day State of Iraq was troublesome. The beginning of the 20th Century saw the area under rule of the Ottoman Empire, of which it had been under for four centuries. The different ethnic and religious groups within the empire were mostly left to keep to themselves, although there had been revolts, particularly from Arabs. The Ottomans were also not innocent from committing genocide, especially during World War I.
World War 1 would come along and cause great change, with the Ottomans siding with Imperial Germany against the Allies. Of course that was the losing side and this war would be the final straw of the already ailing Ottoman Empire, which even before the war had been a shadow of its former self, with large parts of it already having either became independent or been taken by powerful colonial empires such as France and Britain.
With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following WW1 the victors were left to divide up the remainder of the territory in the Middle East, specifically a British and Frenchman, Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot respectively, played the largest role in carving up the fallen empire, creating new nations and deciding who gets influence where.
So you may be wondering, did these two fine gentlemen decide to take the natural ethnic and religious splits into account while carving up the territory, like a pair of responsible adults should? Nope. Instead they was like “let’s just draw a line in the sand from the e in Acre to the last k of Kirkuk” – a line in the sand. What they came up with was a jumble of areas for either direct French control, French influence, some small international zones, an area of direct British control, and an area of British influence. No ethnic and religious divisions taken into account at all – surely nothing will come of this, and also taken little account to natural geographic boundaries. It is clear that the imperial powers wanted to keep things as simple as possible, but what looks simple on paper, can actually be a whole entire mess in reality.
So now what we have is ethnic and religious groups being split apart into new nations, and the combining of groups who are not exactly to see eye to eye with each other, due to the religious and ethnic differences between them, which spells bad news for the sharing of resources. There is little national pride for a nation that has been so hastily created with little thought of the peoples within it. What happens is one of the groups takes over and oppresses the other, which then leads to things like rebellions, coups, and sectarian violence – AKA instability. If you were wondering why the Middle East seems to be such a warzone now a days, this is one of the main factors, although not the only one, but it is a big one.
This is also not the only time colonial decisions on land division have caused continuing bloody issues into the modern day – we can also look at places in Africa and South Asia for similar issues created by the genuises of Europe.
Anyway, the new divisions in the Middle East would eventually evolve into the creation of modern-day Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Kuwait. Some of these new borders were a bit better than the monstrocity that Sykes and Picot came up with, but in places like Iraq it was still a complete mess, a mixture of Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish peoples. Iraq was a powder keg waiting to go off, at first this powder keg was subdued due to the iron-fisted rule of dictators backed up by a strong military, it wasn’t perfect, in fact it was very brutal, but the nation was being kept together if anything else. But such things can only last so long, especially if those Western powers come knocking again. Surely not though, right? The West is surely finished with the Middle East now?
I think that even if the Western powers did not show up on Iraq’s doorstep that Iraq would eventually have blown anyway, if you look at Yugoslavia as an example, this nation was kept together under Tito despite its vast ethnic differences, but once he died, well, it blew up violently. But that still does not excuse the Western powers for becoming militarily invested in Iraq, due to various reasons I am not going to touch on now. And ultimately Iraq’s actual creation was still the bumbling mistake of the West anyway, this powder keg need not have been created in the first place.
It is of note that Iraq did go through a series of leaders without devolving into a big boom, and before that the British existed to prevent the boom from happening. The boom was stopped by at first the presence of colonial forces and then the existence of militarily-backed dictators – of which its line continued until the Iraq War where the big boom finally happened.
Saddam Hussein would eventually climb to power and become the toughest of the line of militarily-backed dictators, he was the zenith of that line and served as someone best at preventing that big boom – although he certainly was not blameless himself for causing issues in the Middle East, as you shall see. There is no doubt that Hussein was a very evil man, but it was one of those situations of either a stable state under rule of such a figure as him, or complete anarchy and war that destabilizes not only the nation but also the region.
Hussein was a brutal dictator, killing those in government he believed were disloyal to him, he allowed torture to exist as a punishment, and also legalized honour killing. Hussein’s family was also not much better than him, but the worst of all was Uday, a literal psychopath and rapist, who killed people for the most ridiculous things, and basically just abused his priviledge and power to get whatever he wanted – which was mostly girls, who would then suffer a terrible fate. Uday was actually so obnoxiously evil that even Saddam Hussein was freaked out enough to exclude him from succeeding as the next leader of Iraq, with Hussein instead making the younger brother Qusay as the successor. Uday was certainly a Joffrey figure.
But let’s get back on to Saddam Hussein, so I can continue to explain why he was also very evil as well. The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, which overthrew the Western-backed Shah and installed a hardline Shia-dominated political system frightened Hussein as he was worried a similar thing would take place in Iraq, considering Iraq was a Shia majority country but was led by a Sunni dominated regime (setting off that powder keg), he was frightened by it so much so that he decided to launch an invasion into Iran, known as the Iran-Iraq War, Hussein had hoped for a swift victory but instead it turned into a deadly stalemate, killing 100s of thousands.
In starting this war Hussein had inadvertently ruptured the powder keg he had hoped to contain by starting the war in the first place, during all the chaos the Kurds decided they had had enough of being under Iraqi rule and so attempted to create their own autonomous country, of which they received some limited support from Iran. In response Hussein crushed this attempt by launching a genocide against the Kurds in the north, including via the usage of chemical weapons, anywhere from 50-180k Kurds were murdered.
It was an evil act by Hussein which had no excuse. Speaking of the Kurds we should take a look into them. The Kurds are perhaps the most currently persucuted group in the Middle East, considering they are a completely different ethnic group to the Arabs (and the Persians and Turks) and speak Kurdish as a first language, although many also speak Arabic as a second language, they are the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East.
The Kurds got the dirtiest end of the stick after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and subsequent drawing of new borders, they are a group without any one nation to themselves, but are instead dispersed through parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. This means in a number of country’s they have fought for their own autonomy and independence, in which in return they have faced much brutality, one particularly place where this can be seen is in Turkey, where there is an ongoing low-level conflict. The Kurds have also fielded militia in the Syrian Civil War and wars in Iraq. Many of them wish for the ultimate goal of a fully independent united Kurdistan in the Middle East.
The Kurds in Iraq have since 1992 realized an semi-state of autonomy (known as Iraqi Kurdistan with Erbil as its capital city) with its own government, armed forces, and have borders which remain highly disputed to this day between the Kurdish regional government and Iraqi government. This semi-autonomous region is still under rule of Iraq with the Kurds taking part in the Iraqi government, it is a loose and fragile balance, but is at least a step forwards for the Kurds in some fashion. So although it is a compromise of sorts it is far from ideal, especially with Iraq itself still a nation of deep divides, and many Kurds hunger for a fully independent Kurdistan.
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But let’s head back to Hussein now. You would think after the disaster that was the Iran-Iraq War perhaps Saddam Hussein would not be foolish enough to start another war – well think again. Next in his sights was Kuwait, which he invaded and occupied in hopes of getting his hands on the country’s oil reserves, it seems that Hussein really wanted a win at this point and also was a bid to improve Iraq’s economy, especially after the failed Iran-Iraq War. Saddam did successfully take Kuwait but it would not last as by doing this he attracted the attention of the West, and thus came the Gulf War, where Saddam was pushed out of Kuwait via a US-led coalition.
And so once again Saddam tasted defeat, and once again he had reptured the powder keg, as uprisings were launched by Shias and Kurds amidst the chaos, and once again Saddam met this with more genocide, crushing the rebellions and taping over the rupture on the powder keg, and stability returned. But this stability would not last, as this keg was going to explode.
The year is 2003 and I would like to introduce you to the controversial Iraq War. The war had been launched via a US-led coalition under the Bush administration who hoped for a swift victory, it came under the guise that Saddam Hussein was harbouring weapons of mass destruction (nuclear weapons), something that still has not been proven till this day. Although the US knew by doing this they would set off the powder keg that was Iraq, they did not realize how big the boom was going to be.
There was no swift victory, the war although eventually won by the US (in that they met their main goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein), the war was still longer and bloodier than had been anticipated, and even today the US still maintains a limited armed presence within the country, loosely propping up the multi-party democratic government it helped to install. The deep ethnic and religious divisions now came exploding forth with a fury the US did not fully anticipate.
It should be noted that at first many Iraqis welcomed the US invasion as liberators, overthrowing the brutal Saddam Hussein and putting an end to a repressive regime, and I think we can all agree that this is indeed a very good thing, but the poorly handled aftermath that followed, the big vacuum, the big boom, has led many to now question if it was worth it. At the very least the US should have been far more prepared to handle the aftermath than they were, perhaps then maybe things would have went better. Sunni and Shia extremist attacks on one another, usually via suicide bombings, became a common occurrence and remain a common occurrence since Hussein’s downfall, an endless and vicious tit for tat. An ultra-conversative ideology has also taken much stronger roots.
Although things were going South the existence of the US occupation helped to slow this down somewhat, but they could not stay there in large numbers forever and in 2011 they begun to withdraw, and with that what was left of the powder keg was left to fully decay, with no one to maintain it any longer. Iraq had a prime minister and government but it was not exactly strong, they had a new constitution but had not been given the right guidance or time to get used to it, and although they did have an army, this armed force was a shadow of that which was under Hussein, with most being newly-trained recruits. Iraq was left by the US in a very unstable position.
The Shia majority now took power, many itching for revenge against the minority Sunni who had ruled over them for most of the country’s history. Now, when a country is very unstable the last thing you want to do is create more instability by isolating a group of people. But, Nouri al-Maliki clearly did not care for this common sense wisdom and fresh on the power train, used this power to begin persucuting the Sunnis via discrimmination, arresting of Sunni leaders, and targeting Sunnis with torture and violence. And then guess what, instability follows when Sunnis begin to retaliate, a split in the government forms, and Sunnis in the military begin to dislike the new leadership. Many Sunnis find themselves pushed into supporting a violent response. Things… are not looking good. This cycle perpetuates a growing amount of extremism on both sides – tit for tat.
But this sudden change in leadership of Iraq also had much broader implications for the Middle East and beyond. Consider this – the majority of the Muslim world is made up of Sunnis by far, with the only Shia majority countries being Iran, Iraq, Bahrain and Azerbaijan, while in Lebanon it is near enough tied, but the Shia’s have more power thanks to Hezbollah’s influence. Iran, Azerbaijan and Lebanon are led by a Shia dominated government and so is Syria despite it having a Sunni majority. Now suddenly, you have Iraq flipping to a Shia dominated government.
This now means a band running across the Middle East from Iran to the Mediterrenean are ran by Shia-led governments, something that would benefit Iran and something that greatly scares Saudi Arabia. And so… you now have this destabilization causing tensions on the wider regional stage.
For some time Shia-dominated Iran and Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia have been facing off in what many view as the Middle East’s own Cold War, with wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere serving as proxies for the Saudis and Iranians to fight indirectly for influence, often using/funding militias and other groups.
So you can understand why Iraq flipping to a Shia government is viewed as a very bad thing for their goals and aspirations in the Middle East, and a potentially good thing for Iran. And so, tensions grow as the Saudis attempt to keep Iraq aligned with them, while Iran attempts to bring Iraq in line with them – a tug o’ war, serving to destabilizie Iraq even further.
We saw this with Bahrain during the Arab Spring, Bahrain is a Shia-majority country but it is led by a Sunni dominated monarchy and government. During the Arab Spring the country experienced an uprising that threatened to topple the Sunni Monarchy and government. The Saudis, fearing a Bahrain more closely aligned with Iran if its monarchy and government were to fall, agreed to intervene (through the Gulf Cooperation Council alongside the UAE) on the side of the Sunni Monarchy and Government by deplolying its military in Bahrain and helping to supress the uprising. In this they succeeded in keeping Bahrain under Sunni control and therefore under their thumb, and away from Iran. Bahrain is strategically very important considering its position in the Persian Gulf and the fact it is literally right off of Saudi Arabia’s coast, it is little wonder why they intervened. There are even road bridges that connect the island with Saudi Arabia.
But anyway, back to the previous topic. So, we have all of this instability now, which is made worse when the Arab Spring takes place and causes the Syrian Civil War, of which its effects are still ongoing to this day. You now have Syria and Iraq as two unstable countries, with both Saudi and Iranian influence on one or the other side making things even more unstable and chaotic. The West are reluctant to intervene now due to history, and the fact that all of this can at least largely be blamed on their meddling in the first place, so without them getting properly involved the gaping wound is not being patched up and held together by anyone. The grounds are now ripe for dark things to take root, namely terrorist groups that begin getting out of control, one such as ISIS for example.
Groups like ISIS can rise and take advantage due to the instability, the general anarchy, weak and not entirely loyal state armed forces, growing extremism with both Sunnis and Shias as the tit for tat grows and grows, with no one to check it.
ISIS is a Sunni terrorist group of which its origins stretch back to at least 1999. It was founded by Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi gave his allegience to Al-Qaeda in 2004, a group at that time far more known, especially due to 9/11 and the resulting War on Terror, which in itself was a whole other fiasco of instability and poor handling of the aftermath which saw its grand finale in Afghanistan only last year. After Zarqawi swore allegience his group became Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The group achieved little at this point and was largely pushed out of relevance by US forces. Not much else significant happened until Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became the 3rd leader of ISIS in 2010, following the assassination of the previous leader. Baghdadi had been a US war prisoner in 2004 and when he took power over ISIS he meant business. He made moves to greatly strengthen ISIS, including by bringing in former military personnel that had served under Saddam Hussein which brought key experience, and with the Syrian Civil War beginning in 2011 there was a great opportunity for the group to get involved as rebels and gain experience in battle.
ISIS drove up a brutal reputation on the battlefield and quickly gained the eyes of other groups fighting in the war who begun distancing themselves from ISIS’s brutality. The relationship between ISIS and Al-Qaeda plus its affiliates also broke down during the war and they became opposed to each other, this breakdown showed that ISIS was now a loose cannon, not under control of any other group. The breakdown largely came about due to ISIS’s aggressive expansion, reluctance to work with other groups in an effective manner, and the view that they were fighting for their own goals rather than solely against the ruling Syrian regime. Despite ISIS largely alienating itself, its war machine was in full swing and its staggering progress continued.
ISIS would then burst to worldwide attention as it poured over the Iraqi border from Syria and begun conquering territory there as well, and with the unstable position that Iraq was still in, its armed forces and government failed to get a hold on the rapidly developing situation.
The thing with Iraq’s armed forces is that they were still not as experienced as the army that had been under Hussein and also the fact that many Sunnis within the armed forces did not exactly want to fight other Sunnis and also did not have much reason to defend a Shia-government who had been persucuting them, and so in the face of these factors the armed forces mostly retreated in the face of ISIS’s advance. This rapid retreat allowed ISIS to get their hands on advanced US-made weapons and vehicles left behind by the Iraqi Army (something of which we have seen repeat in Afghanistan with the Taliban in the face of the rapid retreat and collapse of Afghanistan’s armed forces).
It seems this costly mistake keeps being made – a new armed force is slapped together by the US, given some training, weapons, and vehicles, and then just hope it works, a further highlight of a sloppily planned aftermath following completion of an initial main goal.
ISIS stormed in and begun mass executions against any authority figures they got their hands on, and then against anyone who showed an inkling of resistance or dissent against them. It was brutal. And then the height came when they managed to take over Mosul, which is the second largest city in Iraq. People were stunned at this lightning takeover and the seeming out of nowhere that this group had come from. But when you look through this you still find lines that draw all the way back to Sykes-Picot. Even Baghdadi mentioned what he called the Sykes-Picot conspiracy and that it is something he aimed to erase, and that his advance would not stop until that was done.
And so there the world stood, with a giant mess upon it, all because of so many mishandlings that had taken place in the Middle East. Of course the way that the Ottoman Empire had been divided up is not entirely the reason that all of these things happened, but it is one of the large reasons that such tensions existed for this culmination to take place, and why still there is so much division, terrorism, and war in the Middle East of which will probably continue on for a long time yet, especially as the influence battle between Saudi Arabia and Iran continues.
ISIS was eventually subdued as its aspirations led it to begin poking the bears that were the Western powers and it now is a former shadow of itself, although still lurks weakly in the background, giving us a continuing reminder that such a thing could happen again as instability and the strong possibility of instability continues on, whether it is ISIS again or most likely a new group, perhaps one that splinters off of ISIS. It is hard to say when the looming instability will end. But the divide between Shias and Sunnis, and other ethnic groups, will likely go on for a long time. One thing that would be beneficial for the Middle East is for Iran and Saudi Arabia to come together and stop their endless power playing, but this is far easier said then done.
I hope this has given at least some kind of understanding as to why the Middle East is the way it is today. The important thing now is focusing on finding a way towards peace, and ways to heal divides. As has been shown time and time again, conflicts here have achieved very little and only served to make things worse. There is no easy solution.
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