Middle East - Anthony Ham [40]
These two events – the Egypt–Israel peace treaty (and Sadat’s subsequent assassination by Islamists) and Iran’s Islamic Revolution – changed everything in the Middle East. Soon, the entire region would be in uproar and the effects are still being felt.
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Covering Islam, by Edward Said, is a classic, exploring how the Iranian Revolution and Palestinian terrorism changed forever the way we view the Middle East.
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BLOODY AFTERMATH
The Middle East’s reputation for brutal conflict and Islamic extremism owes much to the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was the worst of times in the Middle East, a seemingly relentless succession of bloodletting by all sides. The religious fervour that surrounded Khomeini’s Iran and the images of the masses chanting ‘Marg bar amrika!’ (‘Death to America!’) also marked the moment when militant Islam became a political force and announced to the world that the West was in its sights. While this development applied to only a small proportion of the region’s Muslims, the reputation has stuck.
The events that flowed from, or otherwise followed, the Iranian Revolution read like a snapshot of a region sliding out of control. In 1979, militants seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. They were ejected several weeks later only after bloody gun battles inside the mosque itself, leaving more than 250 people dead inside Islam’s holiest shrine. In November of that year, student militants in Tehran overran the US embassy, taking the staff hostage. They would be released only after 444 days in captivity. Away to the north, in 1980, Turkey’s government was overthrown in a military coup, capping weeks of violence between left- and right-wing extremists. The same year, Saddam Hussein, supported by the US, invaded Khuzestan in southwestern Iran, on the pretext that the oil-rich province was historically part of Iraq. The resulting war lasted until 1988 and claimed millions of lives as trench warfare and poison gas were used for the first time since WWI.
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Voices from the Front: Turkish Soldiers on the War with the Kurds, by Nadire Mater, offers sometimes harrowing first-hand accounts of the Kurdish insurgency during the 1990s.
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In June 1982, Israel marched into Lebanon, joining Syria, the PLO and a host of Lebanese militias in a vicious regional conflict from which no side emerged with clean hands. The PLO had long been using the anarchy at large in Lebanon to set up a state within a state, from where they launched hundreds of rocket attacks across the Israeli-Lebanese frontier. Led by Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel entered the war claiming self-defence. But these claims lost considerable credibility when, weeks after the PLO leadership had already left Beirut for Tunis, Israeli soldiers surrounded the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut and stood by as their Phalangist allies went on a killing rampage. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of civilians were killed. Israel withdrew from most of Lebanon in 1983, but continued to occupy what it called a self-declared security zone in southern Lebanon.
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A Modern History of the Kurds, by David McDowall, has been updated to 2004 (although the body of the work finishes in 1996), and it remains an excellent primer on the social and political history of the Kurds, focusing on Turkey and Iraq.
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WHO ARE THE KURDS?
The Kurds, the descendants of the Medes who ruled an empire over much of the Middle East in 600 BC from what is now northwestern Iran, are the Middle East’s largest minority group. Kurds (who are predominantly