Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

by Tim Marshall

South Africa’s economy is ranked second-biggest on the continent behind Nigeria. It is certainly the powerhouse in the south in terms of its economy (three times the size of Angola’s), military and population (56 million). South Africa is more developed than many African nations, thanks to its location at the very southern tip of the continent with access to two oceans, its natural wealth of gold, silver and coal and a climate and land that allow for large-scale food production.

The Africa of the past was given no choice – its geography shaped it – and then the Europeans engineered most of today’s borders. Now, with its booming populations and developing mega-cities, it has no choice but to embrace the modern globalised world to which it is so connected. In this, despite all the problems we have seen, it is making huge strides.

The Europeans used ink to draw lines on maps: they were lines that did not exist in reality and created some of the most artificial borders the world has seen. An attempt is now being made to redraw them in blood.

For example, there are various branches of Sunni Islam that follow particular great scholars from the past, including the strict Hanbali tradition, named after the ninth-century Iraqi scholar Ahmad ibn Hanbal, favoured by many Sunnis from Qatar and Saudi Arabia; this in turn has influenced the ultra-puritanical Salafi thought, which predominates among jihadists. Shia Islam has three main divisions, the best known of which is probably the Twelvers, who adhere to the teaching of the Twelve Imams, but even that contains divisions.

Iraq is a prime example of the ensuing

conflicts and chaos. The more religious among the Shia never accepted that a Sunni-led government should have control over their holy cities such as Najaf and Karbala, where their martyrs Ali and Hussein are said to be buried. These communal feelings go back centuries; a few decades of being called ‘Iraqis’ was never going to dilute such emotions.

However, the Kurds were geographically defined and, crucially, numerous enough to be able to react when the reality of dictatorship became too much. Iraq’s five million Kurds are concentrated

in the north and north-eastern provinces of Irbil, Sulaymaniyah and Dahuk and their surrounding areas. It is a giant crescent of mostly hills and mountains, which meant the Kurds retained their distinct identity despite repeated cultural and military attacks against them, such as the al-Anfal campaign of 1988, which included aerial gas attacks against villages. During the eight-stage campaign, Saddam’s forces took no prisoners and killed all males aged between fifteen and fifty that they came across. Up to 100,000 Kurds were murdered and 90 per cent of their villages wiped off the map.

Although not a recognised state, there is an identifiable ‘Kurdistan’ region. Crossing

borders as it does, this is an area of potential trouble should the Kurdish regions attempt to establish an independent country.

There is another problem: unity among the Kurds. Iraqi Kurdistan has long been divided between two rival families and all the different Kurdish regions have their divisions. Syria’s Kurds are still trying to create a statelet they call Rojava but President Assad’s military victories since 2017 have put that in doubt. Nevertheless, Syria’s Kurds still see Rojava as part of a future greater Kurdistan, but having been used as ‘boots on the ground’ by the Western powers to beat Islamic State in Syria, they are once more being abandoned. Yet again they will repeat their old adage: ‘The Kurds have no friends but the mountains’.

We now have a situation where the majority of Jordan’s 9.7 million citizens are Palestinian, many of whom do not regard themselves as loyal subjects of the current Hashemite ruler, King Abdullah. Added to this problem are the one million Iraqi and Syrian refugees the country has also taken in who are putting a huge strain on its extremely limited resources.

Syria is another multi-faith, multi-confessional, multi-tribal state which fell apart at the first time of asking. Typical of the region, the country is majority Sunni Muslim – about 70 per cent – but has substantial minorities of other faiths. Until 2011 many communities lived side by side in the towns, cities and countryside, but there were still distinct areas in which a particular group dominated. As in Iraq, locals would always tell you, ‘We are one people, there are no divisions between us.’ However, as in Iraq, your name, place of birth or place of habitation usually meant your background could be easily identified, and, as in Iraq, it didn’t take much to pull the one people apart into many.

Fundamentally, everyone was aware of the tension of having leaders from a small minority of the population ruling the majority. 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 the near future most of Syria looks as if it is destined to be ruled by the Assad regime, as long as Iran and Russia continue to back it. However, as of the summer of 2019 the Kurds and Turkey still hold territory, and various jihad groups form pockets of resistance. The deep divisions in Syrian society revealed by the war have not healed, and without a redistribution of power and wealth by the Assad regime, there will always be elements waiting for another chance to overthrow it.

Syria has become, like Lebanon, a place used by outside powers to further their own aims. Russia, Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah support the Syrian government forces. The Arab countries support the opposition, but different states support different opposition groups: the Saudis and Qataris, for example, are both vying for influence, but each backs a different proxy to achieve it.

It quickly became the ‘go to’ jihadist group, drawing thousands of foreign Muslims to the cause, partially due to its pious romanticism and partially for its brutality. Its main attraction, though, was its success in creating a caliphate; 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 organisation’s particular brand of Islam, is that it rhymes with and sounds a bit like jahesh, meaning ‘stupid ass’. In Arabic culture, this is quite a serious insult, one which simultaneously demeans the subject and reduces its power to instil fear.

Nevertheless the Israeli/Palestinian joint tragedy continues, and such is the obsession with this tiny piece of land that it may again come to be considered by some to be the most pressing conflict in the world.

In the twentieth century, with the introduction of the Mandate for Palestine, the Jewish movement to join their minority co-religionists grew and, propelled by the pogroms in Eastern Europe, more and more Jews began to settle there. 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. Tensions between Jews and non-Jews reached boiling point, and an exhausted Britain handed over the problem to the United Nations in 1948, which voted to partition the region into two countries. The Jews agreed, the Arabs said ‘No’. The outcome was war, which created the first wave of Palestinian refugees fleeing the area and Jewish refugees coming in from across the Middle East.

During the Six-Day War of 1967 the Israelis won control of all of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. In 2005 they left Gaza, but hundreds of thousands of settlers remain

in the West Bank. Israel regards Jerusalem as its eternal, indivisible capital. The Jewish religion says the rock upon which Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac is there, and that it stands directly above the Holy of Holies, King Solomon’s Temple. 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). Militarily the city is of only moderate strategic geographical importance – it has no real industry to speak of, no river and no airport – but it is of overwhelming significance in cultural and religious terms: the ideological need for the place is of more importance than its location.

Control of, and access to, Jerusalem is not an issue upon which a compromise solutio...

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. They can only build to within

a certain distance of the border with Israel because the Israelis are trying to limit the ability of rocket fire from Gaza to reach deep into Israel. The last decade has seen an asymmetric arms race gain pace, with militants in Gaza seeking rockets that can fire further, and Israel developing its anti-missile defence system.

Under current conditions Israel faces threats to its security and to the lives of its citizens by terrorist attacks and rocket fire from its immediate neighbours, but not a threat to its very existence.

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 which have, in part, prevented certain sections of industry from modernising.

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, knowing that even with its superior firepower Iran was not a country to invade. In fact, the US military had a catchphrase at the time: ‘We do deserts, not mountains.’

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. Khuzestan, for example, is ethnically majority Arab, and elsewhere there are Kurds, Azeri, Turkmen and Georgians, among others. At most 60 per cent of the country speaks Farsi, the language of the dominant Persian majority. As a result of this diversity, Iran has traditionally centralised power and used force and a fearsome intelligence network to maintain internal stability. Tehran knows that no one is about to invade Iran, but also that hostile powers can use its minorities to try and stir dissent and thus endanger its Islamic revolution.

A final reason is that Iran holds what might be a trump card – the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf through which passes each day, depending on sales, about 20 per cent of the world’s oil needs. At its narrowest point the Strait, which is regarded as the most strategic in the world, is only 21 miles across. The industrialised world fears the effect of Hormuz

being closed possibly for months on end, with ensuing spiralling prices. This is one reason why so many countries pressure Israel not to act.

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 each other directly. Each side has ambitions to be the dominant power in the region, and each regards itself as the champion of its respective version of Islam.

With Iran accused of backing the Houthi rebels, and Saudi Arabia supporting the Yemen government, the battle for influence in the Middle East continues between the two countries, hence Saudi Arabia’s dislike of the Iran nuclear deal. Western media reporting concentrated on the Israeli reaction to the deal, but the Arab media across the entire region was wholly against it, with some newspapers comparing it to the Munich Agreement of 1938. One leading Saudi columnist called for the kingdom to begin building a bomb to be ready for when Iran does the same.

Most geographers regard the small area of Turkey which is west of the Bosporus as being in Europe, and the rest of the country, south and south-east of the Bosporus, as being in the Middle East (in its widest sense). That is one reason why Turkey has never been accepted into the EU. Other factors are its record on human rights, especially when it comes to the Kurds, and its economy. Its population is 79 million and European countries fear that, given the disparity in living standards, EU membership would result in a mass influx of labour.

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. ...

In the 1920s, for one man at least, there was no choice. His name was 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 Gre...

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). In 1934, when Turks embraced legally binding surnames, Kemal was given the name ‘Atatürk’ – ‘Father of the Turks’. He died in 1938 but subsequent Turkish leaders continued working to bring Turkey into the West European fold, and those that didn’t fo...

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 Erdoğan government to crack down on all opposition. More than 50,000 people were subsequently arrested and about 150,000 fired from their jobs.

However, compared with the majority of Arab states Turkey is far more developed and recognisable as a democracy. Erdoğan may be undoing some of Atatürk’s work, but the grandchildren of the Father of the Turks live more freely than anyone in the Arab Middle East.

Iraq is a case in point: a democracy in name only, far from liberal, and a place where people are routinely murdered for being homosexual.

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. It was only when the Muslim Brotherhood called

its supporters out that there was enough cover. There were only three institutions in Egypt: Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, the military and the Brotherhood. The latter two destroyed the former, the Brotherhood then won an election, began turning Egypt into an Islamist state, and paid the price by itself being overthrown by the real power in the land – the military.

In impoverished societies with few accountable institutions, power rests with gangs disguised as ‘militia’ and ‘political parties’. While they fight for power, sometimes cheered on by naive Western sympathisers, many innocent people die. It looks as if it will be that way in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and possibly other countries for years to come.