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.
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By the summer of 2015 many Arabs across the Middle East, including most of the regional media, were calling the Islamic State by another name, one which encapsulated how repulsive many ordinary people felt the organization to be—DAESH.
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.
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In the battle for Tikrit the US Air Force found itself in the odd position of flying reconnaissance missions and limited air strikes, which assisted Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders who had been brought in to oversee the Iraqi assault on the town.
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The US pilots, who flew the majority of the missions, suffered from not having American Special Forces forward air controllers calling in the coordinates for the strikes. As targets were frequently in the urban areas, the “rules of engagement” meant many planes returned to their bases without firing their weapons.
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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.
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In the event of a split, the Shia are geographically best placed to take advantage. The region they dominate has oil fields; thirty-five 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.
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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. However, by 1948 Arab Muslims and Christians had been a clear majority in the land for more than a thousand years.
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The British looked favorably 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 the 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.
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 Syrians. 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. In this century, however, there is a fierce sense of nationhood among the Palestinians, and any Arab dictatorship seeking to take a chunk out of a Palestinian state of whatever shape or size would be met with massive opposition. The Palestinians are very aware that most of the Arab countries, to which some of them fled in the twentieth century, refuse to give them citizenship; they insist that the status of their children and grandchildren remains “refugee,” and work to ensure that they do not integrate into the country.
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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 that 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 “Farthest 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 solution can be easily achieved.
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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.
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There are 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. In the southern half of the range there is a plain to the west where the Shatt al-Arab divides Iran and Iraq. This is also where the major Iranian oil fields are, the others being in the north and center. Together they are thought to comprise the world’s third-largest reserves. Despite this, Iran remains relatively poor due to mismanagement, corruption, mountainous topography that hinders transport connections, and economic sanctions that have, in part, prevented certain sections of industry from modernizing.
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.
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In fact, the US military had a catchphrase at the time: “We do deserts, not mountains.”
In 1980, when the Iran-Iraq War broke out, the Iraqis used six divisions to cross the Shatt al-Arab in an attempt to annex the Iranian province of Khuzestan. They never even made it off the swamp-ridden plains, let alone entered the foothills of the Zagros. The war dragged on for eight years, taking at least a million lives.
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 percent of the country speaks Farsi, the language of the dominant Persian majority. As a result of this diversity, Iran has traditionally centralized 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.
Iran also has a nuclear industry that many countries, particularly Israel, believe is being used to prepare for the construction of nuclear weapons, increasing tensions in the region. The Israelis feel threatened by the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons. It is not just Iran’s potential to rival their own arsenal and wipe out Israel with just one bomb: if Iran were to get the bomb, then the Arab countries would probably panic and attempt to get their own as well. The Saudis, for example, fear that the ayatollahs want to dominate the region, bring all the Shia Arabs under their guidance, and even have designs on controlling the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. 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). Egypt and Turkey might follow suit.
This means that the threat of an Israeli air strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is a constant presence, but there are many restraining factors. One is that, in a straight line, it is one thousand miles from Israel to Iran. The Israeli air force would need to cross two sovereign borders, those of Jordan and Iraq; the latter would certainly tell Iran that the attack was coming. Another is that any other route requires refueling capabilities that may be beyond Israel, and that (if flying the northern route) also overfly sovereign territory. 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 percent of the world’s oil needs. At its narrowest point, the Strait, which is regarded as the most strategic in the world, is only twenty-one miles across. The industrialized world fears the effect of Hormuz being closed possibly for months on end, with ensuing spiraling prices. This is one reason why so many countries pressure Israel not to act.
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In the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE the Persian Empire stretched all the way from Egypt to India. Modern-day Iran has no such imperial designs, but it does seek to expand its influence, and the obvious direction is across the flatlands to its west—the Arab world and its Shia minorities. 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, and it may be many times richer than Iran due to its well-developed oil and gas industries, but its population is much smaller (28 million Saudis as opposed to 78 million Iranians) and militarily it is not confident about its ability to take on its Persian neighbor 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 themselves as the champions of their respective versions of Islam. When Iraq was under the heel of Saddam, a powerful buffer separated Saudi Arabia and Iran; with that buffer gone, the two countries now glare at each other across the Gulf.
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This was the background to the shocking events of early 2016 when Saudi Arabia (a majority Sunni country) executed forty-seven prisoners in a single day, among them the country’s most senior Shia sheikh—Nimr al-Nimr. This was a calculated move by the ruling Sunni royal family to show the world, including America, that nuclear deal or no nuclear deal—the Saudis were going to face down Iran. Demonstrations broke out across the Shia Muslim world, the Saudi embassy in Tehran was duly ransacked and set on fire, diplomatic relations were broken between the two countries, and the scene was set for the continuation of the bitter Sunni/ Shia civil war.
Northwest of Iran is a country that is both European and Asian. Turkey lies on the borders of the Arab lands but is not Arabic, and although most of its landmass is part of the wider Middle East region, it tries to distance itself from the conflicts taking place there.
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Its population is 75 million, and European countries fear that given the disparity in living standards, EU membership would result in a mass influx of labor. What may also be a factor, albeit unspoken within the EU, is that Turkey is a majority Muslim country (98 percent). The EU is neither a secular nor a Christian organization, but there has been a difficult debate about “values.”
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 modernizing 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). 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 who didn’t found themselves on the wrong end of a coup d’état by a military determined to complete Atatürk’s legacy.
By the late 1980s, however, the continued rejection by Europe and the stubborn refusal of many ordinary Turks to become less religious resulted in a generation of politicians who began to think the unthinkable—that perhaps Turkey needed a plan B. President Turgut Özal, a religious man, came to office in 1989 and began the change. He encouraged Turks to again see Turkey as the great land bridge between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and a country that could again be a great power in all three regions. The current president, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, has similar ambitions, perhaps even greater ones, but has faced similar hurdles in achieving them. These are in part geographical.
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In NATO terms, Turkey is a key country because it controls the entrance to and exit from the Black Sea through the narrow gap of the Bosporus Strait. If it closes the strait, which is less than a mile across at its narrowest point, the Russian Black Sea Fleet cannot break out into the Mediterranean and then the Atlantic. Even getting through the Bosporus takes you only into the Sea of Marmara; you still have to navigate through the Dardanelles Strait to get to the Aegean Sea en route to the Mediterranean.
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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 a few knocks 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. President Erdo?an’s remarks on Jews, race, and gender equality, taken with the creeping Islamization of Turkey, have set alarm bells ringing. However, compared with the majority of Arab states, Turkey is far more developed and recognizable as a democracy. Erdo?a 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.
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The Arab Spring is a misnomer, invented by the media; it clouds our understanding of what is happening. Too many reporters rushed to interview the young liberals who were standing in city squares with placards written in English, and mistook them for the voice of the people and the direction of history. Some journalists had done the same during the Green Revolution, describing the young students of north Tehran as the “Youth of Iran,” thus ignoring the other young Iranians who were joining the reactionary Basij militia and Revolutionary Guard.
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The second phase of the Arab uprising is well into its stride. This is the complex internal struggle within societies where religious beliefs, social mores, tribal links, and guns are currently far more powerful forces than “Western” ideals of equality, freedom of expression, and universal suffrage. The Arab countries are beset by prejudices, indeed hatreds, of which average Westerners know so little that they tend not to believe them even if they are laid out in print before their eyes.
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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 theater 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.
