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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tim Marshall
Read between
November 16 - November 20, 2020
as in Iraq, it didn’t take much to pull the one people apart into many. When the French ruled the region they followed the British example of divide and rule.
The Assad clan, from which President Bashar al-Assad comes, is Alawite, a group that comprises approximately 12 per cent of the population. The family has ruled the country since Bashar’s father, Hafez, took power in a coup d’état in 1970. In 1982 Hafez crushed a Muslim Brotherhood Sunni uprising in Hama, killing perhaps 30,000 people over several days. The Brotherhood never forgave or forgot, and when the nationwide uprising began in 2011 there were scores to be settled.
Groups such as Al Qaeda and, more recently, Islamic State have garnered what support they have partially because of the humiliation caused by colonialism and then the failure of pan-Arab nationalism – and to an extent the Arab nation state.
Islamic State grew out of the ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq’ franchise group in the late 2000s, which nominally was directed by the remnants of the Al Qaeda leadership. By the time the Syrian Civil War was in full flow the group had split from Al Qaeda and renamed itself. At first it was known by the outside world as ISIL (‘Islamic State In the Levant’) but as the Arabic word for the Levant is Al Sham, gradually it became ISIS. In the summer of 2014 the group began calling itself Islamic State, having proclaimed such an entity in large parts of Iraq and Syria.
where Al Qaeda murdered people and captured headlines, IS murdered people and captured territory.
By the summer of 2015, many Arabs across the Middle East, including most of the regional media, were calling IS by another name, one which encapsulated how repulsive many ordinary people felt the organisation to be – Daesh. It is an acronym of sorts formed from the group’s previous name in Arabic, Dawlat al Islamiya Iraq Wa al Shams, but the reason people tend to use the name is because IS members hate the term. It sounds similar to the verb daes (one who is underhand and sows dissent); it rhymes with negative words such as fahish (a sinner); and best of all for those who despise the
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Syrian town of Kobane being overrun by Kurdish forces. The following year the major Iraqi city of Ramadi was retaken by the army and supporting militia. The outside world became more and more involved in Syria as the years passed. The Russians struck both Free Syrian Army and IS targets in Syria, following the alleged IS attack on one of its passenger airliners in Egypt. The French responded to the terror attacks on Paris in November 2015 with massive airstrikes on IS, and then asked the UK for assistance. The British Parliament voted to extend its air strikes in Iraq to include Syria.
The non-jihadist Iraqi Sunnis are in a difficult position. In the event of either a fragmented or a legally federalised Iraq they are stuck in the middle, surrounded by sand in an area that is known as the Sunni Triangle, with its points roughly located just east of Baghdad, west of Ramadi and north of Tikrit. Sunnis living here often have more in common with their related tribes in Syria than they do with the Kurds
There is not enough economic diversity within the triangle to sustain a Sunni entity. History bequeathed oil to ‘Iraq’, but the de facto division of the country means the oil is mostly in the Kurdish and Shia areas; and if there is no strong, unified Iraq, then the oil money flows back to where the oil is found.
In the event of a split the Shia are geographically best placed to take advantage. The region they dominate has oilfields, 35 miles of coastline, the Shatt al-Arab waterway, ports, access to the outside world and a religious, economic and military ally next door in the form of Iran.
The intelligence services in London believe that around 2015 there were more British Muslims fighting in the wider Middle East region for jihadist groups than were serving in the British Army. They had identified about 500 but believed there might be another 200–300. The radicalisation programme undertaken by the Islamists began several decades before the de-radicalisation
The British-trained Jordanian Army is thought to be one of the most robust in the Middle East, but it might struggle to cope if local Islamists and foreign fighters took to the streets in guerrilla warfare. If the Palestinian Jordanians declined to defend the country it is not unrealistic to believe that it would descend into the sort of chaos we now see in Syria.
The Ottomans had regarded the area west of the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Coast as a part of the region of Syria. They called it Filistina. After the First World War, under the British Mandate this became Palestine. The Jews had lived in what used to be called Israel for millennia, but the ravages of history had dispersed them across the globe. Israel remained for them the ‘promised land’ and Jerusalem in particular was sacred ground. However, by 1948 Arab Muslims and Christians had been a clear majority in the land for more than a thousand years.
The British looked favourably on the creation of a ‘Jewish homeland’ in Palestine and allowed Jews to move there and buy land from the Arabs. After the Second World War and the Holocaust, Jews tried to get to Palestine in even greater numbers.
United Nations in 1948, which voted to partition the region into two countries. The Jews agreed, the Arabs said ‘No’. The outcome was war,
Jordan occupied the West Bank region, including East Jerusalem. Egypt occupied Gaza, considering it to be an extension of its territory. Neither was minded to give the people living there citizenship or statehood as Palestinians, nor was there any significant movement by the inhabitants calling for the creation of a Palestinian state. Syria, meanwhile, considered the whole area to be part of greater Syria and the people living there as Syrians.
Israel regards Jerusalem as its eternal, indivisible capital. The Jewish religion says the rock upon which Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac is there,
For the Palestinians Jerusalem has a religious resonance which runs deep throughout the Muslim world: the city is regarded as the third most holy place in Islam because the Prophet Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven from that same rock, which is on the site of what is now the ‘Furthest Mosque’ (Al Aqsa).
Gaza is by far the worse off of the two current Palestinian ‘entities’. It is only 25 miles long and 7.5 miles wide. Crammed into this space are 1.8 million people. It is in effect a ‘city state’, albeit a horribly impoverished one. Due to the conflict with Israel its citizens are penned in on three sides by a security barrier created by Israel and Egypt, and by the sea to their west.
If and when Hezbollah in Lebanon uses its larger and longer-range rockets to reach deep into Israel on a significant scale, the response will be massive. Another serious potential threat comes from Lebanon’s bigger neighbour Syria. Historically, Damascus wants and needs direct access to the coast. It has always regarded Lebanon as part of Syria (as indeed it was) and remains bitter about its troops having been forced to leave in 2005.
But the Heights were seized by Israel during the Six-Day War in 1967, and it would take an enormous onslaught by a Syrian army to break through to the coastal plain leading to the major Israeli population centres.
Iran is a non-Arabic, majority Farsi-speaking giant. It is bigger than France, Germany and the UK combined, but while the populations of those countries amount to 215 million people, Iran has only 81 million. With limited habitable space, most live in the mountains; the great deserts and salt plains of the interior of Iran are no place for human habitation. Just driving through them can subdue the human spirit, and living in them is a struggle few undertake.
the major Iranian oilfields are, the others being in the north and centre. Together they are thought to comprise the world’s fourth-largest reserves. Despite this Iran remains relatively poor due to mismanagement, corruption, mountainous topography that hinders transport connections and economic sanctions
The Elburz range also begins in the north, but along the border with Armenia. It runs the whole length of the Caspian Sea’s south shore and on to the border with Turkmenistan before descending as it reaches Afghanistan. This is the mountain range you can see from the capital, Tehran, towering above the city to its north. It provides spectacular views, and also a better-kept secret than the Iranian nuclear project: the skiing conditions are excellent for several months each year.
Iran is defended by this geography, with mountains on three sides, swampland and water on the fourth. The Mongols were the last force to make any progress through the territory in 1219–21 and since then attackers have ground themselves into dust trying to make headway across the mountains. By the time of the Second Gulf War in 2003 even the USA, the greatest fighting force the world has seen, thought better than to take a right turn once it had entered Iraq from the south,
The mountainous terrain of Iran means that it is difficult to create an interconnected economy, and that it has many minority groups each with keenly defined characteristics.
A nuclear-armed Iran would be the regional superpower par excellence, and to counter this danger the Saudis would probably try to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan (with whom they have close ties).
Iranian fears have now faded, and Iran is left in the dominant position with a direct line to its allies in Shia-dominated Iraq.
It has made ground in Iraq since the US invasion delivered a Shia-majority government. This has alarmed Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and helped fuel the Middle East’s version of the Cold War with the Saudi–Iranian relationship at its core. Saudi Arabia may be bigger than Iran, it may be many times richer than Iran due to its well-developed oil and gas industries, but its population is much smaller (33 million Saudis as opposed to 81 million Iranians) and militarily it is not confident about its ability to take on its Persian neighbour if this cold war ever turns hot and their forces confront
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What may also be a factor, albeit unspoken within the EU, is that Turkey is a majority Muslim country (98 per cent). The EU is neither a secular nor a Christian organisation, but there has been a difficult debate about ‘values’. For each argument for Turkey’s EU membership there is an argument against, and in the past decade the prospects for Turkey joining have diminished. This has led the country to reflect on what other choices there may be.
Mustafa Kemal and he was the only Turkish general to emerge from the First World War with an enhanced reputation. After the victorious powers carved up Turkey he rose to become president on a platform of resisting the terms imposed by the Allies, but at the same time modernising Turkey and making it part of Europe. Western legal codes and the Gregorian calendar were introduced and Islamic public institutions banned. The wearing of the fez was forbidden, the Latin alphabet replaced Arabic script, and he even granted the vote to women (two years ahead of Spain and fifteen years ahead of France).
President Turgut Özal, a religious man, came to office in 1989 and began the change. He encouraged Turks again to see Turkey as the great land bridge between Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and a country which could again be a great power in all three regions.
Russia backing President Assad and Turkey working hard to help overthrow the Assad regime and replace it with a Sunni Muslim-led government.
The Americans, alarmed at the new cold war between Turkey and Israel, two of its allies, are working to bring them together again. The USA wants a better relationship between them so as to strengthen NATO’s position in the eastern Mediterranean.
Until a few years ago Turkey was held up as an example of how a Middle Eastern country, other than Israel, could embrace democracy. That example has taken some huge blows recently with the ongoing Kurdish problem, the difficulties facing some of the tiny Christian communities and the tacit support for Islamist groups in their fight against the Syrian government. The failed coup of 2016 opened the way for the Erdog˘an government to crack down on all opposition. More than 50,000 people were subsequently arrested and about 150,000 fired from their jobs. In 2018, Erdog˘an won an election that
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When Hosni Mubarak was ousted as President of Egypt it was indeed people power that toppled him, but what the outside world failed to see was that the military had been waiting for years for an opportunity to be rid of him and his son Gamal, and that the theatre of the street provided the cover they needed.
After Mubarak’s fall, when the radical Muslim Brotherhood preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi returned from exile in Qatar, at least a million people came out to greet him, but few in the Western media called this the ‘voice of the people’. The liberals never had a chance. Nor do they now. This is not because the people of the region are radical; it is because if you are hungry and frightened, and you are offered either bread and security or the concept of democracy, the choice is not difficult.
India, despite obsessing about Pakistan, defines itself in many ways, including that of being an emerging world power with a growing economy and an expanding middle class. From this vantage point it looks across at Pakistan and sees how it outperforms it on almost all economic and democratic indicators.
The two are tied together within the geography of the Indian subcontinent, which creates a natural frame. The Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea are respectively to the south-east, south, and south-west, the Hindu Kush to the north-west, and the Himalayas to the north.
The interior of the frame contains what are modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan. The latter two are impoverished landlocked nations dominated by their giant neighbours, China and India.
Bangladesh’s problem is not that it lacks access to the sea, but that the sea has too much access to Bangladesh: flooding from the waters of the Bay of Bengal constantly afflicts the low-lying territory. Its other geographical problem is that it is almost entirely surrounded by India, because the 2,545-mile long frontier, agreed in 1974, wrapped India around Bangladesh, leaving it only a short border with Myanmar as an alternative land route to the outside world.
Even now New Delhi does not truly control India and, as we shall see, to an even greater extent Islamabad does not control Pakistan. The Muslims had the greatest success in uniting the subcontinent under one leadership, but even Islam never overcame the linguistic, religious and cultural differences.
The British came, and went, and when they went the centre could not hold, and things fell apart. In truth, there was no real centre: the region has always been divided by the ancient disparities of the languages of the Punjab and Gujarat, the mountains and the deserts, and Islam and Hinduism.
On 3 June 1947 the announcement was made in the House of Commons: the British would withdraw – India was to be partitioned into the two independent dominions of India and Pakistan. Seventy-three days later, on 15 August, they were all but gone.
Hindus, Sikhs and others turned on each other in panic and fear. The British government washed its hands and refused pleas from the new Indian and Pakistani leaders for the few troops still in the country to help maintain order. Estimates of the death toll vary, but at least a million people died and 15 million were displaced.
What did Pakistan get out of this? Much less than India. It inherited India’s most troublesome border, the North West Frontier with Afghanistan,
in 1971 East Pakistan rebelled against the dominance of West Pakistan, India intervened and, after much bloodshed, East Pakistan seceded, becoming Bangladesh.
India, despite its size, cultural diversity, and secessionist movements, has built a solid secular democracy with a unified sense of Indian identity. Pakistan is an Islamic state with a history of dictatorship
The name Pakistan gives us clues about these divisions; pak means ‘pure’ and stan means ‘land’ in Urdu, so it is the land of the pure, but it is also an acronym. The P is for Punjab, A is for Afghania (the Pashtun area by the Afghan border), K for Kashmir, S for Sindh and T stands for ‘tan’, as in Baluchistan.
The official language is Urdu, which is the mother tongue of the Muslims of India who fled in 1947, most of who settled in the Punjab. This does not endear the language to the rest of the country. The Sindh region has long chafed at what it feels to be Punjabi dominance and many Sindhis think they are treated as second-class citizens.
