Meaghan Wilson Anastasios

The map that broke the Middle East and the 1,400-year rivalry behind today’s crisis

Wondering what’s going on with Iran?

You wouldn’t be alone.

Every time the Middle East explodes into the headlines, people ask the same question: What. The. Actual. Fuck?

If you want to understand the Middle East, start with a map.

Notice the borders.

When borders are straight lines, it’s a safe bet they weren’t negotiated by the people who live there. They were drawn by someone powerful sitting somewhere else, ruler in hand, deciding the fate of millions.

The war in Iran dominating global headlines right now has been more than a thousand years in the making. The fault lines currently exposing the Middle East’s underbelly reach back centuries. They’re based on religious strife, imperial borders, and local and imported rivalries that never truly disappeared.

I’m going to walk you through some of them. So, settle in and make yourself a cuppa.

What would I know? Fair question.

For a start, I’m a historian with a PhD. Yes, really. Not that this is my area of expertise. Middle Eastern politics is one of my “pet” subjects (for want of a better word) and has been since I was in my early teens. That, and the rise of Nazi Germany. Yes, I was a peculiar child.

Want proof? Here are some books I borrowed from the school library when I was 13 and never returned…

Mea culpa, Miss Richmond. But that was in the 1980s, and Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” hadn’t been borrowed since 1962. Figured it wouldn’t be missed.

I’ve often wondered why those two subjects took my fancy. The best answer I can come up with is that even then, without being conscious of it, I could sense they were the two key events that were shaping my world.

I stand by that.

My fascination with the Middle East (and Indiana Jones, because… yes… Harrison Ford) led me to study archaeology at university. I then spent many seasons working in the region.

Since my shift into writing and working in the film and TV industry, I’ve created and written documentary series that focus on the history and culture of the Middle East.

Jack of all trades…that’s me.

So, this is not even close to an exhaustive account. If you’re an expert in the field, you’ll have quibbles about things I’ve left out.

Sure, I could do a granular thing that would stretch to the length of a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica (remember them?). But that’s why I abandoned my academic career… yes, once upon a time, I was a lecturer at the University of Melbourne. I deeply admire the people I used to work with who dedicate their lives to acquiring expertise in a specific field and advancing knowledge in that area.

That’s not me. The thing that floats my boat is condensing bigger concepts into digestible portions to share with people who are interested in expanding their knowledge. It’s not about “dumbing” things down. It’s simply taking a complicated subject and making it accessible.

To strain a metaphor, you can enjoy having a hit of tennis without acquiring the skills and expertise of a seeded player at Wimbledon. I’m here to help you learn how to hold the racquet and hit the ball over the net.

Let’s start by having a look at a map of the Middle East.

First problem?

The name. “Middle East.”

The term was coined by the British in the late 19^th century. Why “Middle”? That’s because when you stand in Britain and Western Europe and look east, the region is located in the “Middle” relative to the “Near” East, as the Balkans (and sometimes) Turkey were known, and the “Far” East of China and beyond.

So, yes. Right away, those of us educated in a Eurocentric education system are coming at it from a jaundiced perspective.

Everything about the region was modelled on the Western idea of what we saw as an all-encompassing “Arab” culture.

For the West, “Arab” was shorthand for “Muslim.”

Western European thinking didn’t accommodate the myriad people living in what is a vast and diverse region.

Yes, those people were—generally, but not always—united by the Muslim faith. But that’s not allowing for the large numbers of minority groups, including Alawites, Druze, Zoroastrians, Samaritans, Copts, Assyrians, and, of course, Jews. And it’s certainly not acknowledging the two very distinct branches of Islam: Sunni, and Shiite.

Now, let’s look back at that map.

The myriad problems of the Middle East can be neatly summarised with just two words:

Straight.

Lines.

Look at those borders.

When you see a border and it’s a straight line, it’s a recipe for disaster. Because you know it’s been imposed upon the people living there.

Not negotiated. Imposed.

Nationhood and cultural identity naturally evolve around geographic features. Mountain ranges. Rivers. Lakes. Coastlines.

Human beings gather in valleys and fields. We construct fortresses on mountaintops, ports in deep harbours, towns beside sources of freshwater. We share common languages… beliefs… cuisines… sporting traditions… songs… architecture… dance… stories. Those things develop over thousands of years. They bind us together and make us strong. It’s how communities evolve.

But it’s not all rainbows and unicorn farts.

It also leads us to share the same common enemies. The people over the mountains who want to steal our cattle. The tribe upstream that dammed the river and took our water. The bloke who wants to build on that sweet spot on the hill with a great view over the bay.

That leads to us developing the same prejudices. The same fears. So, we gather with people who think the same way we do and exclude those who don’t. Often, to our detriment.

It’s not always pretty, but it’s been the way of the world since our ancestors swung down from the treetops and decided to take off across the African savannah and see what was going on out in the wider world a hundred thousand years or so ago.

Because we’re a fundamentally weak species, other than our opposable thumbs and outsized brains, the tight bonds that hold us together have been the secret to our success.

Unfortunately, the flipside of that is our fear of the “other” that comes with it, and the competitive spirit that makes us lose our shit with tiresome regularity.

Back to the borders.

Those lines did not evolve naturally. They come from a ruler and a pen, drawn by men sitting at a conference table deciding the fate of millions of people.

And we’re dealing with that decision today. Because it completely ignored the truth on the ground.

We in the West are extremely good at casting non-Westerners in the role of the “other.” A group of people kind of look like each other and live vaguely in the same area, so they’ll pretty much be the same, right?

As we say here in Australia… yeah, nah. That’s not the way it works. Nobody making a call about where, exactly, to draw lines on that map thought for a minute about the cultural boundaries they were chopping through when they carved up the Middle East.

But, I digress. As I often do.

Where did those lines come from?

In a way, it started in 1453 when Mehmet II (Mehmet the Conqueror) marched into Constantinople and put an end to the Byzantine rule in that part of the world. The empire he headed up would one day find itself perched on top of the world’s largest oil reserves.

The locals knew the oil was there. As early as 4000BC, natural surface bitumen in Mesopotamia—modern-day Iraq—was used to waterproof boats and as mortar for construction. But they had no idea what it would ultimately be used for.

When German engineer Karl Benz (yes, that Benz) invented the first motor car in 1885, and Henry Ford worked out how to mass produce them in 1908, demand for oil went through the roof.

Meanwhile, the Germans knew where the world was headed, and had been working the room. In Turkey, they backed the Young Turks (the political party, not the Rod Stewart song) who took power in 1908. The Germans offered them the capital and expertise to build a railway linking Berlin and the Mesopotamian capital of Baghdad. In return, they were given the right to drill for oil 20 kilometres either side of the track.

The Germans were quick off the mark and began converting their coal-powered naval ships to oil-fired engines—increasing their speed, range and manoeuvrability.

The British were behind the eight-ball.

The Empire upon which the sun would never set, as the saying went, had many things, but it was a little lacking in oil.

Enter Winston Churchill, back then the First Lord of the Admiralty. In 1913, just a year before war was declared, he told Parliament that the acquisition of oil should be a priority. His solution? Seize control of the Ottoman oil deposits.

(As an aside, for the Australians and New Zealanders following along, that’s the one of the main reasons we ended up at Gallipoli. Churchill’s desire to tap into Ottoman oil.)

With war looming, the Ottoman Empire tried to forge a peace deal with the British. It was rejected, because of course it was. Why make an alliance when you’ve got heart set on a bit of pillaging?

The “Sick Man of Europe.”

At its greatest extent, the Ottoman Empire spread from its heartland in Turkey and covered most of southeastern Europe, including Greece, the Balkans, Romania and Hungary, the entire Red Sea coastline of the Arabian Peninsula, and much of the African Red Sea coast as well through its control of Egypt.

That meant it had oversight of the crucial Suez Canal, which joined the Mediterranean and Red Sea. Without it, Europe’s only sea-route to Asia and Australia was the long, and perilous, journey via Africa’s west coast and the Cape of Good Hope.

The Ottomans also controlled Africa’s Mediterranean coastline, almost to the Straits of Gibraltar. Their reach was so extensive that as recently as 350 years ago, Ottoman troops were knocking at Vienna’s doors.

But by the first decade of the 20^th century, the Ottoman Empire was in trouble. Its territory had shrunk to a third of what it had been at its peak.

The “Sick Man of Europe,” as it was called, was forced to side with Germany.

It was a bad move.

When war broke out, the British were so cocky about their prospects, they negotiated a secret agreement with France that sliced the Ottoman Empire up into pieces.

The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement gave the Syrian coast and Lebanon to France. Britain took central and southern Mesopotamia, and its vast oil reserves. And Palestine would have an international administration.

The rest of the territory—the rest of Syria, northern Iraq, and Jordan—would be placed under compliant Arab chiefs, with France supervising the north, and the British keeping an eye on the south.

If you want a cinematic interpretation of what happened after the war, you could do worse than to revisit “Lawrence of Arabia.”

That’s where all the lines came from.

Back to the map, and you’ll notice that Iran still has lovely, wiggly, natural borders. It escaped the big carve-up.

That’s largely thanks to a conflict that dates back 1,400 years and is the ancient mess that underpins the ghastly mess the world is dealing with today.

It started when Prophet Mohammed died in 632AD. He left no male heir.

So, a bitter rift split his followers.

The Shia, known as the Shiat Ali, or “followers of Ali,” believed that the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, was part of a divine order, and that Mohammed’s heirs should come from his bloodline.

Most of Mohammed’s followers chose Mohammed’s close friend and father-in-law, Abu Bakr, as the Prophet’s successor. They were known as followers of the sunna, or “way,” hence, “Sunni.” The Sunni are opposed to political succession based on Mohammed’s bloodline.

“Let there be no compulsion in religion.” (the Quran, Surah Al-Baqarah 2:256)

Less than a hundred years after Mohammed’s death, the Islamic faith had spread from its roots in the Middle East, to Central Asia in the east, and Spain in the west.

Sunnis called most of the shots across the Islamic world for the first nine hundred years of its existence and enthusiastically took to the persecution and execution of their Shia rivals.

But that changed in 1501 when the Safavid dynasty emerged in Persia and made Shia Islam the state religion.

For the Shia, it was a big thing. It gave them a base to push back against their Sunni rivals in the Ottoman Empire.

What followed was two centuries of fierce fighting between the Sunni Caliphate in Constantinople—modern-day Istanbul—and Shia Persia. That’s an important thing to remember – because back then, the Ottoman Empire in Turkey, not the Arabian Peninsula, was the seat of Sunni power.

When a treaty between the Sunni Ottomans and the Shia Safavids of Iran was signed in 1639, it gave the Ottomans control over Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), and Persia kept its territory to the east of the rugged Zagros Mountains and the Shatt al-Arab river in the south.

So, when the Ottoman Empire fell, Persia didn’t fall under European control.

Hence, no straight lines.

To get their claws into Iran, the British, French and Americans, had to go in the back door, propping up a pro-Western monarchy, the Pahlavi Dynasty, which reigned from 1925 until the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

The Islamic Revolution ousted the Pahlavi Shah, and with it the West’s influence in Iran. With the Shah gone, Shia cleric Ayatollah Khomeini was given carte blanche to set up his Shia Islamic government.

Iran’s constitution vowed to assist “the dispossessed” around the world—which gave Khomeini licence to back militant groups in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bahrain, and Pakistan.

While the Ayatollah Khomeini transformed Iran into a Shia powerhouse, across the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia saw it as an existential threat. It was a reboot of the ancient rivalry between Sunni and Shia Islam.

Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is ruled by followers of Wahhabism, a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam that emerged in the 18th century. The al-Saud family, who became the country’s rulers around the same time, rose to prominence alongside the discovery of oil in the region in 1937.

Today, the accumulated wealth of the al-Saud family is estimated to be worth trillions of US dollars.

Critics — including several European security reports — have argued that Wahhabi ideology has played a significant role in the spread of some modern extremist movements.

And the thing Wahhabists despise more than almost anything? Shias.

So close…

So much so, that in late 2023, Saudi Arabia was ready to make peace with its sworn enemy, Israel, to undermine Shia power in the region.

In 2020, Israel had signed the Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. It was the first formal normalisation of Arab-Israeli relations in thirty years.

The Saudis were set to join the fold.

But what happened then?

The 7 October 2023 attacks in Israel.

Hamas and Iran knew what Israel would do to Gaza in response. As bombs rained down on Palestinian heads, the prospect of Israel and the Sunni powers of the Gulf States making peace over biscuits and cups of tea was down the proverbial toilet.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend,

Today, Shias are a majority in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain, with big numbers in Lebanon. Sunni Islam dominates in more than forty countries from Morocco to Indonesia. They represent 85 per cent of the world’s Muslim population.

Their hatred of each other extends to militant groups that butt heads in conflicts across the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa.

The 1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq? Saudi Arabia (with US support) backed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the brutal fight against Shia Iran.

Russia’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan? Saudi Arabia sponsored militants fighting the Russians, but as a side quest, attacking Iran-backed Shia movements in the region. One of those militants was a Saudi mujahideen named Osama bin Laden… who also received backing from the CIA.

Then there’s Iraq. After the American invasion, Sunni fundamentalists flooded the country, and began murdering Shia civilians in the hopes it would spark a civil war that would force the Shia Iraqi majority to capitulate to Sunni extremist violence.

According to the Council for Foreign Relations, over the past decade, Sunni extremism has been “rising, aided by private funding networks in the Gulf, particularly in Kuwait, with much of the violence directed at other Muslims rather than Western targets. Shia militant groups are also gaining strength, in part to confront the threat of Sunni extremism.”

Let’s not forget the Syrian civil war.

Tens of thousands of Syrian Sunnis joined forces to fight the al-Assad regime that had been propped up by Iran and Russia for decades.

Why Russia?

Because Russia’s only way into the Mediterranean and, beyond that, the Atlantic Ocean, is via Turkey’s Bosphorus. Their only other way? Via Syria’s main Mediterranean port, Latakia, and its adjacent military base. Mediterranean access means Atlantic access, and a route to the east coast of the US. Russia wasn’t going to let that go in a hurry.

Along with Russia, the Lebanon-based Shia militant group, Hezbollah, sided with Bashir al-Assad while Iran pumped billions of dollars in aid and loans into training and equipping foreign militants to fight the Sunni insurgency.

On the other side, Sunni al-Qaeda in Iraq moved in and became Islamic State. Their brutality was so extreme, that al-Qaeda expelled them from the fold in 2014.

It was a slaughterhouse. More than half a million Syrians are estimated to have died, and half the country’s population was displaced.

So, how things stand today?

Iran is being hammered on all sides.

In Syria, the Sunni founder of the militant Al-Nusra Front and former member of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has reinvented himself and been appointed president. Bashir al-Assad has fled to—you guessed it—Russia. And Al-Sharaa has torched Syria’s relationship with Iran.

Gaza, the stronghold of Iran’s proxy in Palestine, Hamas, is flattened.

Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shia militia that became the strongest political party in Lebanon, is under attack from Israel.

The Iranian-backed Houthis, who toppled Yemen’s government and were fighting US-backed Saudi forces had started lobbing drones at Israel and international shipping routes in the Red Sea. Today, they’re on the back foot.

In December last year, Israel became the first nation to recognise the breakaway African state, Somalialand. The United States has already established informal diplomatic engagement with the self-proclaimed nation. Why? Because it’s the perfect place to lob potshots at the Houthis.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States have been in a race to see who can pour the most gold into the outstretched Trumpian palm.

The quid pro quo?

America is spending at least US$1 billion a day waging war on the Saudi’s sworn enemies.

And Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was described by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as “the new Hitler,” is dead.

In summary, yes, it’s about the oil.

But forget history, and you’re missing the big picture.

Because this is a story that has been playing out for centuries. This is just the latest chapter.

It’s also not the last word on it.

Got something to add? Please throw your thoughts into the mix in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.

Because knowledge is power. And we could all do with a little more of that at the moment.