Europe and the West are paying a high price for their damage limitation policies in the Middle East. The fundamental challenges of successive waves of migration into Europe from the Middle East and the threats posed by ISIS will continue to dog European countries and the West for another generation.

As Justin Marozzi, an eminent author and lecturer who has spent the past 30 years travelling in and writing about the Middle East said, quoting from a letter-writer in the Daily Mail:

“Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle East? Let me explain. [The West] supports the Iraqi government in the fight against Islamic State. We don’t like IS, but IS is supported by Saudi Arabia whom we do like. We don’t like President Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but not IS, which is also fighting against him.

“We don’t like Iran, but the Iranian government supports the Iraqi government against IS. So, some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting our other enemies, whom we don’t want to lose, but we don’t want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win.

“If the people we want to defeat are defeated, they might be replaced by people we like even less. And all this was started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out – do you understand now?”

I was so taken by this bewildering, and amusing, description of what is happening in the Arab world that I felt compelled to learn more about a region that is so fundamentally important to us in Malta economically, politically and in security terms.

I therefore propose over the next few weeks to write five articles covering the Sunni/Shia divide; ISIS and the so-called caliphate; the ISIS propaganda machine; and meeting the security challenge of Islamic State. This article sets the scene by giving the historical and geopolitical context in which today’s turmoil in the Middle East has come about.

I do not pretend that this will be an in-depth analysis. Each article will inevitably skate over some very complex history and politics. But I hope it will be enough to make some sense at least of the wonderful Marozzi quote and the turbulence around us.

For simplicity’s sake, it is convenient to start the story of today’s Middle East during the First World War 100 years ago. The maelstrom in the Middle East has its roots in the world created by the Great War.

When Germany gained a new ally in the Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1914, the outcome of the conflict was to prove as disastrous for the Ottomans as for the Germans. A multi-national Muslim empire that had once threatened Vienna was broken up.

The Arab provinces were parcelled up by France and Britain into colonial mandates. The foundations of the future Jewish state were laid. And the caliphate (I shall explain this more fully in a subsequent article), which had been established in the earliest days of Islam, was abolished.

If Germany’s humiliation at Versailles in 1918 set the stage for Nazi retaliation in the World War II, the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire created the festering sore that is the Middle East today.

The legitimacy of Middle Eastern frontiers has been called into question since they were first drawn up. Most famously, as a result of the secret Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which carved up the Middle East with such insouciance: “I should like to draw a line from the “e” in Acre to the last “k” in Kirkuk.”

ISIS is wrecking the post-colonial states of the Middle East and adding a fresh layer of instability to an already unstable region

The French got control and influence in Syria, Lebanon and southern Turkey, while the British took over Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine and the Gulf States. Arab nationalists in the 1940s and 1950s openly called for the overthrow of boundaries widely condemned as imperialist legacies.

When we survey the extraordinary state of the Middle East today, we can see clearly the difficult legacies wrought by colonialism. Palestine, the Jewish state of Israel, the stateless Kurds, Syria and Lebanon, the formation of Iraq as one nation from three separate Ottoman provinces with largely Kurdish, Sunni and Shia populations. All this Great Power machination completely negated the promises to the Arabs made in the course of the First World War.

Nearly a century and several wars later, the worst exponents of that Arab resentment – the jihadists of so-called Islamic State – have proclaimed the re-creation of the caliphate. The sword of Islam has been seized by disgruntled Muslims against their own rulers and against perceived foreign foes.

Coming up to date, the so-called Arab Spring and the ensuing chaos have dealt the region a body blow. Libya is a broken state and lies in chaos, giving jihadists a foothold on our doorstep. Syria is consumed by civil war and on the point of collapse. Iraq is battling ISIS. Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, is struggling against terrorism.

In the wake of the Arab Spring, Egypt has replaced an unsavoury but democratically elected government with a military regime and the Sinai peninsula is becoming a war zone. Turkey, a key NATO ally, has declared a controversial war on terrorism against both Islamic State and the Kurdish PKK, causing instability within its own borders. Lebanon and Jordan are suffering severely from the spillover effects of the Syrian conflict.

The West continues to allow Israeli injustice against the Palestinians a free hand. As Edward Said, the late Palestinian-American intellectual, reasonably put it: “You cannot continue to victimise someone else just because you yourself were a victim once – there has to be a limit.”

As to the two giants in the region, Saudi Arabia, dominated by the majority Sunni branch of Islam, is convinced that Iran, ruled by the minority Shia, is bent on regional hegemony using armed proxies such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Saudi Arabia has used its petrodollar wealth to build a global nexus for thepropagation of Wahhabism, an ultra-conservative branch of Sunni Islam.

Hatred of the Shia is matched only by rampant anti-Semitism.

Terrorism can be traced to Saudi funding of extremist schools, or madrassas, around the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Sunni-Shia rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran is helping to fuel conflict in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

The nuclear deal that the West has reached with Iran has opened the prospect of a seismic political shift in the region with allies turning against one another and former enemies embracing.

The crux is that a big motivation for the United States’ rapid change in policy towards Iran is the rise of Islamic State. ISIS is wrecking the post-colonial states of the Middle East and adding a fresh layer of instability to an already unstable region.

It is easy to understand why the West finds itself at sea in the midst of the chaos of the Middle East. It has been bruised by conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and it is consequently confused to know what to do next in the face of the threat from ISIS.

Next week, the Sunni/Shia schism.

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