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The term “Middle East” is a modern expression dating from World War II; it generally applies to the region that includes Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and Israel/Palestine. It is also often used to include parts of North Africa, especially Egypt, which has long been intimately involved in Middle Eastern affairs. (In the current work, Egypt and other North African nations are included in the Volume 2.) Before 1939, European geographers referred to the region as the “Near East,” while they applied “Far East” to China and Japan and “Middle East” to the Indian subcontinent. As defined in its modern sense, the Middle East comprises a roughly wedge-shaped land mass located between the continents of Europe (to the west and north), Asia (to the north and east), Africa (to the south and west), and the subcontinent of India (to the east). The region borders the Indian Ocean to the east, the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea to the north, and the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. It covers roughly 2,190,000 square miles (an area about two-thirds the size of the US), with a population of about 411 million.

The topography of the Middle East varies from high mountain ranges and river valleys to coastal regions. Much of the area consists of arid desert. Many rivers flow through the region, most notably the Nile in Egypt, which flows into the Mediterranean Sea, and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which flow through Syria and Iraq into the Persian Gulf on the Indian Ocean. The river valleys produce abundant agricultural products, but farming methods in many areas remain primitive to the point that many of the region’s farmers farm their land exactly as their ancestors did thousands of years ago.

The vast majority of the area’s people still derive their livelihood from agriculture. The main natural resource of the region of any great significance is oil, most of it found in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran. The abundance of this precious commodity in the Middle East gave the region great strategic significance during the Cold War and considerable international power at the end of the 2010s. Some countries had begun to move into a post-oil economy by emphasizing leisure, shopping, or air travel. The natural resource most coveted in the Middle East remains water, access to which threatens to become one of the greatest sources of conflict in the region in the twenty-first century.

Arabic, of which there are many regional dialects, remains the dominant language of most of the region. Most Iranians, however, speak Farsi (Persian), an Indo-European language. The official language of Israel is Hebrew, a Semitic language. Most Turks speak Turkish, a member of the Turkic language group.

Map of the Middle East between Africa, Europe, and Central Asia.

Most of the region’s inhabitants are adherents of the Sunni branch of the Islamic faith, but many practice various forms of Christianity. Most of the residents of Iran are Shiite Muslims. The Israelis mostly practice varieties of Judaism. Large minorities in various parts of the Middle East profess Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism. Members of other large minorities, such as the Kurds in Turkey, the Syrians, Iraqis, and Iranians, practice some combination of these faiths. Religion plays a much more significant role in the lives of Middle Easterners than it does in the lives of most contemporary Americans.

Time Line: Middle East

Early History

Many historians agree that the Middle East gave birth to modern Western civilization. Sometime between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago the inhabitants of modern Iraq invented agriculture, precipitating the agricultural revolution that so transformed civilization. Agriculture spread over the succeeding millennia, first to the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley (which roughly divides the region), then to the Nile Valley in Egypt, and then to most parts of the world.

Rather than living nomadic lives, the residents of the Middle East began to gather in permanent villages, which grew into the world’s first cities. As individuals accumulated wealth, they also had leisure time to spend on activities other than the daily search for food. Middle Easterners developed writing, art, literature, and architecture. Four of the world’s great religions originated in the Middle East: Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The modern conflicts among adherents of these religions date back to the earliest beginnings of Western civilization.

Numerous civilizations, some well known, some obscure, originated in the Middle East, which was a crossroads for trade and commerce from the beginnings of recorded history. The first civilization, called Sumerian by archaeologists, came into existence in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley about 6,000 years ago. In the Nile River Valley, Egypt arose more than 5,000 years ago and endured for nearly 3 millennia.

The Egyptians and Sumerians (and the successors of the Sumerians, the Old and New Babylonian Empires) bequeathed much to Western civilization, including monumental architecture, classics of literature, writing, and various superstitions. A few of the other contributors to Western culture from the Middle East include the Hittites (the discoverers of iron), the Phoenicians (who invented the world’s first true alphabet), the Lydians (who invented coined money), the Akkadians (who created the first empire in the world), and the Jews, (who created a religious tradition upon which the two other Abrahamic religions [Christianity and Islam] are based).

Alexander the Great conquered the entire region in 333-332 bce, bringing about a fusion of Middle Eastern culture with that of the Greeks. Alexander and his successors adopted many of the institutions they encountered in the Middle East and passed them on to the Romans when the latter conquered the region during the first and second centuries bce. After the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great in the fourth century bce, a succession of foreign conquerors dominated most of the region until after World War II.

The Romans conquered all the coastal regions of the Middle East and Egypt and held them for more than 400 years. For a brief time the Romans also conquered the Tigris-Euphrates Valley all the way to the Persian Gulf before being thrown back by the Parthians (a rejuvenated Persian Empire). The Romans spread the civilization developed in the Middle East to all parts of their empire, including modern Western Europe.

After the Roman Empire collapsed about 450 ce, the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire dominated much of the region until the rise of Islam in the seventh century. The Islamic empire endured until both it and the remnants of the Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottoman Turks during the fifteenth century. The Ottoman Empire managed to control most of the Middle East until World War I, which began the transformation of the Middle East into its modern form. However, that transformation began in the latter part of the nineteenth century with the emergence of Zionism.

Rise of Zionism and Arab Nationalism

After a violent Jewish uprising against Roman rule from 66–73 ce, the Romans dispersed the Jewish population of Palestine to all parts of their empire, which the Jews call the diaspora. The small Jewish communities were thus established in all parts of the Roman world clung to their religious beliefs and customs and did not assimilate into the populations among which they found themselves. Over the centuries the peoples of the areas in which the Jews lived formed a virulent animosity toward them, which is known as anti-Semitism.

In part anti-Semitism derived from religion. The peoples of the regions to which the Jews were dispersed, which are mostly in modern Europe, became overwhelmingly Christian in religious persuasion. Many Christians blamed the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and hated them. Many Jews were moneylenders and middlemen in economic transactions, which accounted for some of the anti-Jewish feeling. The Jews were moneylenders in part because some countries prohibited other occupations for Jews and some Christians were banned from loaning money at interest. Much anti-Semitism came from fear of strangers—xenophobia—and ethnocentrism on the part of the Christian population. Anti-Semitic sentiments led to frequent outbreaks of violence, sometimes called pogroms, against the Jewish communities of Europe.

Alfred Dreyfus in his room on Devil’s Island in 1898, stereograph sold by F. Hamel, Altona-Hamburg. (Collection of Fritz Lachmund)

A sensational manifestation of anti-Semitism in France during the 1890s was the Dreyfus Affair. Alfred Dreyfus was a French Jewish army officer who was accused and convicted of high treason. The ensuing efforts of Dreyfus’s brother to prove his innocence provoked outbursts of anti-Semitism throughout France and split French society down the middle. One person covering the affair for an Austrian newspaper was Theodor Herzl, who despaired of any peaceful resolution to what European newspapers referred to as “The Jewish Question.” Consequently Herzl formed the Zionist movement.

Zionists believed that Jews would never be treated fairly by non-Jewish governments or be accepted into gentile society. They therefore formulated a plan to create a Jewish state in Palestine as a homeland for all Jews everywhere and as a voice for Jews living in other parts of the world. The Zionists managed to interest a few wealthy Jews in their project, who financed a few Jewish settlements in Palestine before World War I, but only a few. Palestine was still part of the Ottoman Empire, which looked with disfavor on the influx of substantial numbers of Jews into its domains.

During World War I the Ottoman Empire allied with Germany and Austria against Great Britain, France, and Russia. In 1917, in order to secure a substantial loan from a large Jewish banking house with which to continue the war, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration. This declaration guaranteed British help for the Zionists in establishing a homeland for Jews in Palestine once the war ended.

At the same time, a British officer named T. E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, along with the British Empire, managed to rouse parts of the Arab population of the Ottoman Empire against the Ottomans by promising them independence once the war ended in the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, thus encouraging modern Arab nationalism or pan-Arabism. These two mutually incompatible promises by the British government were the seeds of many of the contemporary problems in the Middle East.

Interwar Era

After the war ended, the League of Nations (an organization founded after World War I to settle international disputes) dissolved the Ottoman Empire and awarded parts of its former territories to the victorious British and French governments as mandates. The British received Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine, which they were to administer for ten years while they prepared the people in those regions for self-government. The French received mandates over Lebanon and Syria under the same conditions.

Adhering to the Balfour Declaration, the British High Commissioner of Palestine began allowing large numbers of Jews to emigrate to the region in 1919. Almost immediately outbreaks of violence occurred between the Jewish settlers and the native Palestinians. This violence escalated during the 1920s and 1930s with the formation of paramilitary groups on both sides.

The Jews and the Palestinians directed violence toward the British administration as well as toward each other, with the Jews feeling the British were moving too slowly in admitting new settlers and the Palestinians protesting the admission of any Jews at all. The Zionists negotiated a deal with Nazi Germany during the 1930s allowing German Jews to emigrate to Palestine, but both the British and Palestinians were reluctant to admit them. Nevertheless, many German Jews came into Palestine illegally with the aid of various Zionist organizations.

In the meantime, other regions of the Middle East gained at least a measure of independence and self-government. Persia, renamed Iran in 1935, had been an independent state since the sixteenth century. Turkey and Egypt both emerged from World War I as sovereign nations.

In 1927, the League of Nations formally recognized the kingdom of Jordan. Ibn Saud became king of an independent Saudi Arabia in 1932. In the same year the Iraqi monarchy became nominally independent. The Syrians and the Lebanese signed a treaty of independence and friendship with the French in 1936 (although it was never ratified by the French). Although the European nations still dominated the Middle East during the interwar era, the region was becoming increasingly independent.

World War II and Its Results

World War II revolutionized political relationships in the Middle East. The Zionists found themselves in the position of being forced to support Britain against the anti-Semitic Nazi Germans during the war, despite their opposition to British emigration policies. Egypt became a battleground in the war, but Turkey managed to remain neutral.

Most of the Arab governments favored the Germans in the war but were unable to act on their sentiments because of British domination. The war so weakened the French government that it was forever unable to impose its former influence in Syria and Lebanon. The war also weakened the British government to the point that the ten years following the war witnessed the dissolution of most of the former British Empire.

The war also resulted in the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews and another collective six million communists, political activists, gays, lesbians, Roma peoples, and the handicapped at the hands of the Nazis. After the war, millions of European Jewish refugees longed to go somewhere else. Many of them opted for the Americas, but the Zionists encouraged many to go to Israel. The treatment of the Jews by the Nazis aroused much sympathy for them in the international community. Many Jews entered Palestine illegally, despite the British restrictions on emigration, provoking the native Palestinians to new rounds of violence against the Jews, who retaliated.

The British finally declared the situation in Palestine to be insoluble, and on May 14, 1948, the British high commissioner left the region. The United Nations created a two-state solution of Israel and Palestine. On the same day, the Zionists proclaimed the formation of a Jewish state they called Israel, citing biblical justification in that God gave the Israelites the land in covenant.

Middle East and the Cold War

The governments of the United States and the Soviet Union immediately recognized the new nation, but the neighboring Arab states of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt sent their armed forces into Palestine to “restore order.” War ensued, which lasted on and off until July 1949, when a United Nations (UN) mediator arranged an armistice. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled their homeland and became refugees in neighboring Arab states, particularly Lebanon and Jordan.

The refugees lived for many years thereafter in poverty-stricken camps. A fragile peace marred by frequent outbreaks of violence on both sides endured until 1956. During the intervening years a special relationship began to develop between the United States and Israel, while the Soviet Union increasingly supported the Arab states in their disputes with Israel. This dichotomy was part of the widening Cold War developing between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The special relationship between the United States and Israel derived in large part from the wealth and political influence of the American Jewish community. American Jews, anxious that the Jewish state in Israel should survive and prosper, made large donations to the political campaigns of candidates for the US Congress. These candidates, once elected to the House of Representatives or the Senate, voted for billions of dollars in US aid to Israel and brought heavy pressure on the US State Department to support Israel diplomatically.

The State Department consequently adopted a very pro-Israel stance in its foreign policy, which angered the governments and peoples of the other Middle Eastern states and led to American support for the policies of Israel even in the face of world condemnation of Israeli actions. Another cause of unqualified US support for Israel was the ever-widening Cold War with the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union gave massive financial and military support to the Arab states of the Middle East, especially to Syria and Egypt. In 1956, the British, French, and Israelis attacked Egypt and took the vital Suez Canal, which links the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea, and thus the Indian Ocean.

The Soviets secretly informed the US government that continued occupation of the area by the allies would result in war. President Dwight D. Eisenhower clandestinely forced the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Sinai Peninsula and the Suez district.

Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser then set out to forge Arab unity. For a time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he managed to forge a union between Egypt and Syria, but the union eventually collapsed due to regional rivalries. Nasser tried to pursue “Arab Socialism” in his domestic policies but ultimately failed. In the meantime, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) secretly aided a repressive and staunchly anticommunist regime in Iran to suppress its opponents. This aid caused severe repercussions for the United States during the 1970s.

Formation of the PLO and the Six-Day War

During the 1960s, terrorism escalated in the Middle East with Arab attacks inside Israel and Israeli retaliatory bombing raids on the Arab states. In 1964, all the Palestinian groups inside and outside Israel who were determined to create an independent Arab state in Palestine and destroy what they called the “Zionist Political Entity” (the state of Israel) came together in an umbrella organization called the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under the leadership of Yasir Arafat. The PLO began to coordinate guerrilla attacks against Israel.

In an effort to gain a strategic advantage in this undeclared war and to deny the Arab states bases from which to launch attacks, the Israelis launched a surprise attack against their Arab neighbors in 1967. In what became known as the Six-Day War, the Israelis seized the Golan Heights on its border with Syria, the Sinai Peninsula on its border with Egypt, and the West Bank in six days of fighting. They also virtually destroyed the armed forces of Syria and Egypt.

During the war, the Israelis deliberately attacked the American communications ship Liberty in international waters in the eastern Mediterranean and killed more than 200 US sailors in order to prevent the US government from learning exactly what was occurring in the war. Despite this unprovoked attack, the US delegation to the United Nations used its veto powers in the Security Council to prevent U.N. sanctions or military action against Israel. The General Assembly of the United Nations overwhelmingly voted condemnation of Israeli actions in the Six-Day War.

From the Yom Kippur War to Camp David

For the next seven years the PLO and other Arab organizations continued their guerrilla warfare against Israel, resulting in increasingly violent retaliation by the Israelis. Both sides committed many atrocities against the civilian populations of the other side. Finally, in 1973 the war (which had never really ended) broke out anew. On Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan attacked the Israeli military and destroyed most of its tanks and aircraft.

President Richard Nixon and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger took equipment from the US armed forces around the world and resupplied the Israeli armed forces, which allowed the Israelis to beat off the Arab attacks and win what became known as the Yom Kippur War. Angered by US actions, the Arab states declared an oil embargo against the United States, which had come to be dependent on Arab oil.

The embargo resulted in long lines at filling stations throughout the United States and engendered widespread resentment against Israel. Nevertheless, the seemingly unqualified US support for Israel continued, as did the guerrilla war waged by the Arab states and Israeli retaliation in the form of the bombing of Arab cities and refugee camps.

During the administration of US President Jimmy Carter from 1976 to 1980, US diplomats arranged peace talks between the Israelis and the Egyptians. The US Department of State hoped these talks would lead to a general peace settlement in the Middle East. The focus of the discussions centered around the concept of “peace for land.” The Israelis would return the territory they occupied during the Six-Day War in return for Egyptian recognition of the legitimacy of the Jewish state and a peace treaty between the two nations. The U.N. also passed two resolutions calling for the same result.

At the presidential retreat of Camp David, the leaders of Egypt and Israel concluded an agreement, with promises of massive US aid for economic development in both countries. The peoples of the world hoped that a lasting peace settlement in the Middle East was at hand.

Iranian Revolution and Iran-Iraq War

The peace accords between Egypt and Israel had barely concluded when the world’s attention shifted to another area of the Middle East. In 1978, revolution broke out in Iran, led by the exiled Islamic religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The revolutionaries overthrew the repressive monarchy of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in early 1979 and established a republic dominated by Shiite Muslim holy men. The new government identified the United States as the “Great Satan” and adopted a decidedly anti-American foreign policy.

The revolutionaries stormed the US embassy in the capital city of Tehran later in the year in retaliation for the US government’s decision to let the exiled monarch of Iran come to the United States for medical treatment. For more than 400 days the revolutionaries held the embassy personnel hostage. The spectacle of an essentially Third World nation successfully defying the world’s greatest superpower did much to weaken US prestige around the world and contributed to Jimmy Carter’s defeat in the 1980 presidential election.

Relations between the United States and Iran remained tense even into the twenty-first century. The Iranian government adopted a staunchly anti-Israeli foreign policy and sponsored several guerrilla organizations that launched attacks inside Israel. During the 1970s and 1980s, the guerrilla attacks extended to American targets, because the Arab states perceived the United States to be unquestioningly on the side of Israel in the conflict.

In 1980, war broke out between the new regime in Iran and the more secular state of Iraq. The Iraqi government feared that the religious fundamentalism inherent in the Iranian revolution might spread to its own country. The war lasted for eight years and was fought with great bitterness and loss of life on both sides.

Israeli Invasion of Lebanon

In 1982 members of the Israeli government decided to at least diminish the guerrilla attacks on Israel by launching an invasion of Lebanon. The PLO had its headquarters in Lebanon, and Palestinian refugee camps in that country were hotbeds of guerrilla activity. The Israelis found willing allies in Lebanon in the form of the country’s Christian minority, who rose up against the Muslim majority when the Israeli armed forces invaded.

The Israeli invasion sparked a civil war in Lebanon that left a once-prosperous nation in ruins. The murder of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in refugee camps by a Christian militia under Israeli supervision resulted in world condemnation of Israeli actions, but once again the US delegation to the United Nations vetoed the sanctions and military actions against Israel proposed by the General Assembly in the Security Council.

The Israelis managed to drive the PLO and Yasir Arafat out of Lebanon. The PLO leadership went to Libya in North Africa, another Arab state with strong sympathy for the Palestinians and an antipathy for Israel. Despite American efforts to revive the peace talks and extend the Camp David Accords, progress was discouragingly slow. Guerrilla attacks against US and Israeli targets continued, as did retaliatory attacks by Israel against perceived guerrilla targets.

End of the Cold War and the Persian Gulf War

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s, unequivocal US diplomatic support for Israel came to an end. US diplomats began to bring pressure to bear on the Israelis to make concessions to the Palestinians and other Middle Eastern states to achieve a lasting peace in the region. In 1991, war again interrupted the peace process. The Persian Gulf War resulted from Iraq’s invasion of the tiny, oil-rich nation of Kuwait.

Encouraged by mixed signals from US diplomats, Iraqi armed forces under Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait, a region Saddam considered to be legally part of Iraq. US trading partners in Europe and Asia received much of their oil from Kuwait. Consequently, US President George Bush secured a United Nations condemnation of Iraqi actions and a Security Council resolution calling for the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait by force of arms. A military force made up overwhelmingly of American troops landed in Saudi Arabia, while American aircraft bombed Iraqi military targets and cities.

During the brief conflict the Iraqis launched guided missile attacks on Saudi Arabia and Israel. The American-led U.N. forces quickly overwhelmed the Iraqis and drove them out of Kuwait, forcing Hussein to capitulate. US military forces remained stationed in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait at the end of the twentieth century to guard against renewed Iraqi attempts to incorporate Kuwait into Iraq.

After the war, US diplomats renewed their pressure on the government of Israel to reach a general settlement with the Palestinians and the other nations of the Middle East. In 1994, the Israelis agreed in principle to the formation of an independent Palestinian state. Again under US pressure, they agreed to negotiate with the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and allowed Arafat to return to Palestine. Formerly, the Israelis had refused to talk to the PLO and dismissed it as a terrorist organization.

The negotiations for full autonomy for the Palestinians dragged on into the 2000s, frequently interrupted by outbreaks of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. The chief stumbling blocks in the negotiations seemed to be the exact territorial boundaries between Israel and Palestine and the disposition of the city of Jerusalem, holy to both the Jews and the Muslims. Both sides wanted Jerusalem to become their capital city. By the second decade of the twentieth-first century no solution to these problems seemed to be in sight.

Middle East at the Millennium and After

The general situation in the Middle East in the late 1990s was that some signs of peace, or at least the desire for peace, were evident as major sources of conflict diminished and/or the competing parties wearied of the struggle. The governments continued, to a greater or lesser degree, to pursue a policy of economic development. Modernization in the form of increasing demands by women for equal rights, the secularization of society, industrialization, emphasis on human rights, demands for political democracy, and the breakdown of traditional mores seemed to be moving the region inexorably toward the model of societies in Western Europe and the United States.

All of this changed early in the twenty-first century. On September 11, 2001 (also known as 9-11), the terrorist group al-Qaeda launched an attack directly against the United States. Four airplanes were hijacked. Two were crashed into the World Trade Center (“The Twin Towers”) in New York City, one was crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after the passengers overpowered the hijackers. Nearly 3,000 people died and another 6,000 were injured. Both of the World Trade Center towers collapsed, killing more than 400 first responders. The collective response was outrage.

George W. Bush, US president at the time, pushed for an invasion of Afghanistan, as the Taliban Islamic fundamentalist movement there had supported al-Qaeda. In an odd twist, the United States had put the Taliban into power somewhat by establishing them as a main threat to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The Americans led an international coalition in the invasion of Afghanistan, an action supported by many other countries and generally held to be authorized as a form of self-defense by the United States. Among the nations supplying forces in the initial assault was the United Kingdom. Forces of what was called the Northern Alliance had been fighting the Taliban-controlled government of Afghanistan since 1996. That alliance included forces from Russia, India, Turkey, and, in an interesting situation, Iran.

The invasion and bombing lasted only two months, from October to December 2001, and was very successful at first. The Taliban fell and the U.N. helped to establish an International Security Assistance Force, whose goal was to train a new Afghan army. The United States contributed more than half the forces, but a large number of nations also lent anywhere from less than a hundred to thousands of troops, the general average being around 1,000. The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) also increased its mission and attempted to train Afghan troops. The troop training varied in effectiveness, and many times Taliban fighters would disguise themselves as Afghan troops in order to attack ISAF and other forces. At other times people loyal to the Taliban would join the Afghan army and then attack from within. At different points in the war the Americans and/or others would deploy increased numbers of troops and seem to achieve success, only to see the Taliban surge and force the invasion forces to pull out of captured areas. By the 2010s, another large-scale Islamist fundamentalist movement, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, headquartered in those two countries, had joined the war on the Taliban side. In spite of several peace deals and eighteen years of fighting, success in 2019 seemed far away and the stability of the Afghan state, such as it is, remained tentative.

In response to 9-11, George W. Bush announced a US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The main reasons given as justifications were that Iraq had been stockpiling weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that Iraq had backed al-Qaeda in the lead-up to the 9-11 attacks. The first rationale was doubted by many expert observers at the time, and the second had very little if any evidence to support it. Iraq had used WMDs, particularly chemical weapons, in its 1980-1988 war with Iran and against its own people. However, international inspectors assigned to monitor the situation after the 1991 Gulf War had not found any evidence of recent WMD development in Iraq. Additionally, experts doubted the existence of any link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Even agencies of the US intelligence community (the CIA, NSA, etc.) argued that there was no such link and that al-Qaeda was not active in Iraq. Moreover, there was no logical reason for a power-hungry dictator like Saddam to back an outside Islamist terrorist group that likely would have preferred to see Saddam overthrown. Nevertheless, the American and British governments strongly backed an invasion, despite public opposition that grew greatly after the invasion.

Oil and gas pipelines in the Middle-East. (Energy Information Administration)

The invasion itself lasted less than three months. The Iraqi government was quickly toppled, with Saddam fleeing and going into hiding. After that initial success, the United States occupied the country and started to try to build a coalition government and train a new Iraqi army. The old pre-invasion Iraqi army, which was formally disbanded, was never disarmed, however; elements of it eventually arose against coalition forces. Also, humanitarian aid was slow and the country fell into chaos and anarchy. Violence broke out among Sunni, Shi’a, and Kurd factions. The United States, by hook and crook, eventually forced the creation of an Iraqi coalition government and withdrew its forces. Nevertheless, fighting broke out several more times as a civil war developed and spread into the 2010s. Between 2014 and 2017, fighting raged between Iraqi government forces and those of ISIS, which sought to establish a caliphate in the region. ISIS was put down by a US-led effort in 2017. As of 2019, a tense standoff existed in some areas Iraq between Kurdish forces, who wanted to establish full control over the northern, Kurdish part of the country, and government forces, which sought to retain the nation’s borders.

Meanwhile, as ISIS began to emerge in the early-2010s, Syria erupted into civil war (2011- ): anti-government forces there sought the removal of the Alawite leader Bashir al-Assad, who responded with vicious attacks against civilian populations. Syria became home to one of the worst humanitarian crises in modern history, producing millions of refugees and ravaging the country.

Another, smaller yet similarly devastating civil war broke out in Yemen in 2015. In that case the fighting was between two factions, one in control of the government and the other known as the Houthi armed movement. Saudi Arabia entered the conflict on the side of the Yemeni government, and as of 2019, the conflict continued.

For Further Study