Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place, #1)

by Tim Marshall

The rigs out in the Atlantic are owned mostly by American companies, but more than half of the output ends up in China. This makes Angola (dependent on the ebb and flow of sales) second only to Saudi Arabia as the biggest supplier of crude oil to the Middle Kingdom.

American oil companies and big multinationals are still far more heavily involved in Africa, but China is quickly catching up. For example, in Liberia it is seeking iron ore, in the DRC and Zambia it’s mining copper and, also in the DRC, cobalt.

Kenyan port of Mombasa and is now embarking on much larger projects just as Kenya’s oil assets are beginning to become commercially viable.

Over the southern border, Tanzania is trying a rival bid to become East Africa’s leader and has concluded billions of dollars’ worth of deals with the Chinese on infrastructure projects.

joint agreement with China and an Omani construction company to overhaul and extend the port of Bagamoyo, as the main port in Dar es Salaam is severely congested. It is planned that Bagamoyo will be able to handle 20 million cargo containers a year, which will make it the biggest port in Africa.

China’s presence also stretches into Niger, with their National Petroleum Corporation investing in the small oil field in the Ténéré fields in the center of the country. And Chinese investment in Angola over the past decade exceeds $8 billion and is growing every year. The China Railway Engineering Corporation (CREC) has already spent almost $2 billion modernizing the Benguela railroad line, which links the DRC to the Angolan port of Lobito on the Atlantic coast eight hundred miles away. In this way travel the cobalt, copper, and manganese with which Katanga Province in the DRC is cursed and blessed.

What Beijing wants in Angola is what it wants everywhere: the materials with which to make its products, and political stability to ensure the flow of those materials and products. So

China is Sudan’s biggest trading partner, which goes some way to explaining why China consistently protects Sudan at the UN Security Council and continued to back its President Omar al-Bashir even when there was an arrest warrant out for him issued by the International Criminal Court.

Lecturing the African leaders is going out of fashion due to the harsh realities of global economic competition and the threat of Islamism.

South Africa is China’s largest trading partner in Africa. The two countries have a long political and economic history and are well placed to work together. Hundreds of Chinese companies, both state-owned and private, now operate in Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town, and Port Elizabeth.

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 Greater Middle East extends across one thousand miles, west to east, from the Mediterranean Sea to the mountains of Iran. From north to south, if we start at the Black Sea and end on the shores of the Arabian Sea off Oman, it is two thousand miles long. The region includes vast deserts, oases, snow-covered mountains, long rivers,

It also contains the fertile region known as Mesopotamia, the “land between the rivers” (Euphrates and Tigris). However, the most dominant feature is the vast Arabian Desert and scrubland in its center, which touches parts of Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, and most of Saudi Arabia, including the Rub al Khali or “Empty Quarter.” This is the largest continuous sand desert in the world, incorporating an area the size of France. It is due to this feature that not only the majority of the inhabitants of the region live on its periphery, but also that, until European colonization, most of the people within it did not think in terms of nation states and legally fixed borders.

The term Sykes-Picot has become shorthand for the various decisions made in the first third of the twentieth century, which betrayed promises given to tribal leaders and which partially explains the unrest and extremism of today.

The most important division within Islam is almost as old as the religion itself: the split between Sunni and Shia Muslims dates back to 632 CE, when the prophet Muhammad died, leading to a dispute over his succession.

comprising perhaps 85 percent of the total,

Sunna, or “people of tradition.” Upon the death of the prophet, those who would become Sunni argued that his successor should be chosen using Arab tribal traditions. They regard themselves as Orthodox Muslims.

Shia derives from shiat Ali, literally “the party of Ali,” and refers to the son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad. Ali and his sons, Hassan and Hussein, were all assassinated and thus denied what the Shia feel was their birthright—to lead the Islamic community.

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, favored by many Sunnis from Qatar and Saudi Arabia;

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. The Ismaili school disputes the lineage of the seventh imam, while the Zaidi school disputes that of the fifth imam. There are also several offshoots from mainstream Shia Islam, with the Alawites and Druze being considered so far away from traditional Islamic thought that many other Muslims, especially among the Sunni, do not even recognize them as being part of the religion.

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.

Turks saw a rugged, mountainous area dominated by Kurds, then, as the mountains fell away into the flatlands leading toward Baghdad and west to what is now Syria, they saw a place where the majority of people were Sunni Arabs.

Shatt al-Arab waterway, the marshlands, and the city of Basra, they saw more Arabs...

They ruled this space accordingly, dividing it into three administrative regions: M...

Assyria, Babylonia, and Sumer.

However, the Kurds were geographically defined and, crucially, numerous enough to be able to react when the reality of dictatorship became too much.

When in 1990 Saddam Hussein overreached into Kuwait, the Kurds went on to seize their chance to make history and turn Kurdistan into the reality they had been promised after the First World War in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), but never granted. At the tail end of the Gulf War conflict, the Kurds rose up, the Allied forces declared a “safe zone” into which Iraqi forces were not allowed, and a de facto Kurdistan began to take shape.

Iraqi Kurdistan has long been divided between two rival families. Syria’s Kurds are trying to create a statelet they call Rojava. They see it as part of a future, greater Kurdistan, but in the event of its creation, questions would arise as to who would have how much power, and where. If Kurdistan does become an internationally recognized state, then the shape of Iraq will change. That assumes there will be an Iraq. There may not be.

The Hashemite Kingdom, as Jordan is also known, is another place that was carved out of the desert by the British, who in 1918 had one large piece of territory to administer and several problems to solve.

The Saudi leader eventually landed on a name for his territory, calling it after himself, hence we know the area as Saudi Arabia—the rough equivalent would be calling the UK “Windsorland.”

Transjordan, which was shorthand for “the other side of the Jordan River.” A dusty little town called Amman became the capital of Transjordan, and when the British went home in 1948 the country’s name changed to Jordan. But the Hashemites were not from the Amman area: they were originally part of the powerful Qureshi tribe from the Mecca region, and the original inhabitants were mostly Bedouin. The majority of the population is now Palestinian: when the Israelis occupied the West Bank in 1967, many Palestinians fled to Jordan, which was the only Arab state to grant them citizenship. We now have a situation where the majority of Jordan’s 6.5 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.

The French had long allied themselves with the region’s Arab Christians and by way of thanks made up a country for them in a place in which they appeared in the 1920s to be the dominant population. As there was no other obvious name for this country the French named it after the nearby mountains, and thus Lebanon was born. This geographical fancy held until the late 1950s. By then the birthrate among Lebanon’s Shia and Sunni Muslims was growing faster than that of the Christians, while the Muslim population had been swollen by Palestinians fleeing the 1948 Arab–Israeli War in neighboring Israel/Palestine. There has been only one official census in Lebanon (in 1932), because demographics is such a sensitive issue and the political system is partially based on population sizes.

Some parts of the capital, Beirut, are exclusively Shia Muslim, as is most of the south of the country. This is where the Shia Hezbollah group (backed by Shia-dominated Iran) is dominant. Another Shia stronghold is the Bekaa Valley, which Hezbollah has used as a staging post for its forages into Syria to support government forces there. Other towns are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. For example, Tripoli, in the north, is thought to be 80 percent Sunni, but it also has a sizable Alawite minority, and given the Sunni-Alawite tensions next door in Syria, this has led to sporadic bouts of fighting.

Hezbollah militia, probably the most efficient fighting force in the country. The Lebanese army exists on paper, but in the event of another civil war, such as that of 1975–90, it would fall apart, as soldiers in most units would simply go back to their hometowns and join the local militias.

When the French ruled the region they followed the British example of divide and rule. At that time, the Alawites were known as Nusayris. Many Sunnis do not count them as Muslims, and such was the hostility toward them that they rebranded themselves as Alawites, as in “followers of Ali” to reinforce their Islamic credentials. They were a backward hill people, at the bottom of the social strata in Syrian society.

French took them and put them into the police force and military, from where, over the years, they established themselves as a major power in the land.

The Assad clan, from which President Bashar al-Assad comes, is Alawite, which comprises approximately 12 percent 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 thirty thousand people over several days. The Brotherhood never forgave or forgot, and when the nationwide uprising began in 2011 there were scores to be settled. In some respects the ensuing civil war was simply Hama, part two.

is doubtful that whoever eventually “wins” would look kindly upon a Kurdish statelet within what are nominally the borders of Syria. Not only would the Syrian Sunni majority oppose losing territory, but the Turks would be horrified at having a Syrian Kurdish state on its borders. There would inevitably be moves to join it up to some of the Kurdish-dominated regions inside Turkey itself.

Groups such as al-Qaeda and, more recently, the 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. Arab leaders have failed to deliver prosperity or freedom, and the siren call of Islamism, which promises to solve all problems, has proved attractive to many in a region marked by a toxic mix of piety, unemployment, and repression. The Islamists hark back to a golden age when Islam ruled an empire and was at the cutting edge of technology, art, medicine, and government. They have helped bring to the surface the ancient suspicions of “the other” throughout the Middle East.

the group had split from al-Qaeda and renamed itself. At first it was known by the outside world as ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and 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 the Islamic State, having proclaimed such an entity in large parts of Iraq and Syria.

Its main attraction, though, was its success in creating a caliphate; where al-Qaeda murdered people and captured headlines, the IS murdered people and captured territory.

It is an acronym of sorts for the Arabic Dawlat al-Islamiya f’al-Iraq wa al-Shams, but the reason people came up with the name is because the Islamic State members hate the term. It sounds similar to the word daes—one who is underhanded and sows dissent. More important, it rhymes with negative words such as fahish—“sinner”—and best of all, for those who despise the organization’s particular brand of Islam, is that it rhymes with and sounds a bit like jahesh—“stupid ass.” This is worse than being called a donkey, because in Arab culture one of the few things more stupid than a donkey is an ass.

By the spring of 2016 Libya was clearly another front in a long battle.

But it also means the United States needs to keep good relations with whichever country it receives permission from to house the regional drone HQ. This is a reminder of the conceptual map of US power required to fully understand geopolitics today. For example, the signal sent from Nevada may need to travel through an underwater cable to Germany and then be sent up to a satellite belonging to a third country that sells bandwidth to the Pentagon.

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. The Kurdish lands cannot be brought under their control, the cities south of Baghdad such as Najaf and Karbala are overwhelmingly Shia, and the ports of Basra and Umm Qasr are far away from the Sunni territory. This dilemma leaves the Sunnis fighting for an equal share in a country they once ruled, sometimes toying with the idea of separation, but knowing that their future would probably be self-rule over not very much.

The authorities are fearful of a jihadist group in Iraq or Syria reaching the now fragile borders in strength and crossing into Jordan. 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. This is the last thing the Hashemite rulers want—and it’s the last thing the Israelis want as well.

The Ottomans had regarded the area west of the Jordan River 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. For millennia the Jews had lived in what used to be called Israel, 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.

To this day Egypt, Syria, and Jordan are suspicious of Palestinian independence, and if Israel vanished and were replaced by Palestine, all three might make claims to parts of the territory.

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 200 million people, Iran has only 78 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.

two huge mountain ranges in Iran: the Zagros and the Elburz. The Zagros runs from the north, nine hundred miles down along Iran’s borders with Turkey and Iraq, ending almost at the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf.