The Modern Middle East: A Century of Geopolitical Turmoil

The modern Middle East's geopolitical complexity stems from the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, influencing conflicts and power struggles to this day.

### The Legacy of Sykes-Picot: A Century of Conflict in the Middle East
* 🗺 The modern Middle East's complex geopolitical landscape can be traced back to the **1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement**, where British and French diplomats arbitrarily drew borders across the Ottoman Empire's territories.
* 🛢 The discovery of oil in the region further exacerbated conflicts, with resources often found in areas populated by **different ethnic and religious groups**.
* ⚔ The post-World War II era saw the rise of Arab nationalism, culminating in conflicts like the **Arab-Israeli Wars**, the **Iran-Iraq War**, and the **Lebanese Civil War**.
* 🇺🇸 The United States emerged as a **key player in the region** following the Gulf War, becoming the **primary security guarantor for the Persian Gulf and its oil supplies**.
* ☪ The Iranian Revolution in 1979 introduced a new brand of **Shia Islamism**, challenging the existing **Sunni Arab nationalist and secular movements**.
* 🏗 The creation of Israel in 1948 and subsequent conflicts with Arab states further fueled **regional tensions and conflicts**.
* 💰 Economic interests, particularly **control over oil resources**, have been a driving force behind many conflicts in the region.
* 🌐 The legacy of Sykes-Picot continues to shape the Middle East's political landscape, with ongoing conflicts and disputes rooted in the **arbitrary borders drawn a century ago**.

this video is made possible by nebula. Use the link down in the description below to support real life lore directly by signing up where you can watch 25 additional and exclusive full-length videos. In my ongoing nebula modern conflict series covering recent major Wars and crises, including this video's next part covering how Isis was able to rise to power in Iraq and Syria. Throughout all of our lifetimes, the Middle East is a region that has been nearly synonymous with Warfare, instability, and conflict. You've heard nearly every single year of your life about some kind of conflict going on in this place, regardless of when you were born, because conflicts have been raging here without a pause for nearly the entirety of the past Century. Just since the turn of the 21st century alone, there have been major wars fought across the territories of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Yemen. The nevariously attracted the military involvements of Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and powers from even beyond the Middle East like

the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Russia. These 21st-century conflicts in the Middle East alone have claimed the lives of millions of people and forced millions more into exile and refugee status, while costing trillions of dollars, making the Middle East arguably the most geopolitically turbulent region anywhere in the 21st-century world. But why is this part of the world the way that it is? Why do you always hear about wars and conflicts taking place here? And why will you probably continue hearing about wars and conflicts taking place here for the rest of your life? The answers to those questions are complex because the modern Middle East is the most geopolitically complicated chessboard in the world to really understand, with dozens of different actors and competing interests all variously working against each other at some times and then working together at others. But in order to understand the root cause of the modern Middle East's many problems, you only have to rewind the clock a little more than a hundred years ago to learn how the

Middle East borders we know today came into being, and why they have guaranteed more than a Century's worth of forever Wars and misery for the entire world ever since. For many centuries, the Turkish Ottoman Empire dominated practically the entirety of the Middle East and enforced its own rule of law across the land. Dozens of ethnicities, languages, and religions all compose the extremely diverse peoples of the Empire that at one point spanned from Hungary to Yemen. The Ottoman Empire had regions within it, but it had no tolerance for Nations and nationalism within the Empire of any kind was always ruthlessly repressed and crushed in the name of Greater Imperial stability and peace. But the Ottoman Empire eventually entered into a long period of gradual decline. By the 19th century, the rising British Empire was growing increasingly interested in the Middle East that the Ottomans had so thoroughly dominated for so long. The Middle East, you see, geographically stood in the way between the British home islands and the Crown's most important Colony India. In order to

better safeguard British ships traveling between India and the home islands. The British began gradually acquiring protectorates across the Middle East, beginning with the modern United Arab Emirates in 1820, and then gradually expanding from there to include Southern Yemen, Bahrain, and eventually Egypt itself in 1888, nearly 20 years after the Suez Canal had first been completed, which granted the British the quickest possible journey time between the home islands in India by way across the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. The Suez Canal, owned by British and French shareholders despite running through Egypt, was therefore one of Britain's most geopolitically valuable assets, and they intended to ensure their continuous access to it by forcing Egypt into the status of a protectorate. The British further established protectorates over Oman and Kuwait, and then in 1914, alarmed by the increasing British meddling in the Middle East and their internal affairs, the Ottoman Empire took the decision to join the First World War on the side of Imperial Germany. It was

shortly after that, when the British and the French decided that the Ottoman Empire would have to be completely destroyed by them, but it was initially unclear what exactly would take the place of the centuries-old rule of the Ottomans. In 1916, British and French diplomats named Mark Sykes and Francois George Pico negotiated a secret treaty regarding how their respective governments would divide and partition the lands of the Ottoman Empire between themselves after the war's conclusion and the ancient Empire's destruction. The agreement became simply known as the Seismico Agreement and basically went as follows: this Zone would fall under direct Colonial British rule; this Zone would in time become an independent Arab State under British influence; this Zone would fall under direct Colonial French rule; this Zone would in time become another independent Arab state but under French influence; this Zone would be given to the Russian Empire, while the region of Palestine in Jerusalem, with its immense religious significance, would be placed under some kind of, as of yet, unspecified International Administration.

these initial political lines that the British and French diplomats drew across the Middle East for the future of the region in 1916 paid little attention to the complex real borders of the Middle East various religious beliefs languages and ethnicities. But the lines were also not just arbitrarily drawn either well not based on ethnicity language or religion or really even geography. In many cases the lines were instead based upon the older Ottoman internal divisions that they had created which also had little to no regard for ethnic or religious boundaries and their vast ethnically linguistically and religiously diverse Empire where nationalism and separatism was never tolerated. The British Zone initially encompassed the Ottomans provinces of Baghdad and Basra and parts of Derezor and Damascus while the French Zone initially encompassed the Ottomans provinces of Masul Derazor Aleppo Adana Beirut and Lebanon while the international Palestine area was based on the province of Jerusalem itself that reported directly to the Ottoman Capital.

this was the map that Sykes and Pico drafted their own new lines atop of in 1916. Rather than any detailed ethnic, linguistic, or religious map of the region, resulting in massive consequences that reverberated down the decades. Ever since the initial terms of the 1916 Seismic Agreement were then even further complicated by several other British wartime promises, guarantees, and assumptions. In order to encourage an Arab revolt against their Turkish overlords, many British officials guaranteed that they would favor the creation of a large unified Arab State across the Arab lands following the end of the war. At nearly the same time, though in 1917, Britain also proclaimed the Balfour Declaration, which promised that the British government would favor the creation of a national home for the Jewish people in the land of Palestine. And then finally, there was the question of oil. Oil had been first discovered in the Middle East and a remote part of Iran in 1908 that the British subsequently dominated through their state-owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company.

which would later evolve into the British Petroleum or BP company that we know of today. But Iran's oil at the time wasn't considered enough. World War one was proving to everyone involved how critical oil was because coming as a strategic resource to fuel the new machines of war, from battleships to airplanes. And the United States was at that time by far the world's largest producer and supplier of oil. America therefore provided the British Empire with most of their oil needs. But America's president at the time was also Woodrow Wilson, a man who was staunchly opposed to the concept of Empires in the post-war world, including Britain's. So, believing America to be a potentially unreliable provider of oil to their empire in the future, the British government was at the time highly incentivized to acquire influence and control over as much of the Middle East nearby to Iran as possible, where they believed the potential future massive oil deposits would be later discovered and owned by them, providing Britain with a critical oil it would need to fight.

through whatever conflict would come to them next after World War One concluded, the Victorious allies met at Versailles in 1919 to set the terms the peace, and the borders of the Middle East were shifted once again. The Ottoman province of Missouri was transferred from the French zone of influence over to the British zone of influence, and as the Ottoman Empire was actively collapsing, the Allies pressed the infamous terms of the Treaty of Sevres upon the dying Empire in 1920. The terms of which made even the Treaty of Versailles that was pressed upon Germany seemed fairly generous. The terms of the previous seismic agreement between Vernon and France would remain intact. With the Russian Empire now gone, a huge independent state of Armenia was to be carved out of Northeastern Anatolia. Another independent state for the Kurdish people was to be further carved out of Southeastern Anatolia. Italy was to seize control over several of the Empire's Aegean Islands. Greece was to annex much of Eastern Thrace and a chunk

around the city of Izmir on the Anatolian Mainland, both the area around the strategically important Turkish Straits was to fall under an international regime outside of Turkey's remaining jurisdiction. The Turkish state that was to be left over was doomed to become nothing more than an insignificant rump State, and thus outraged by the treaty's terms, the emerging Turkish government almost immediately rebelled and continued fighting against the Allies for the next two years. After the Turkish forces made significant military gains on the battlefield, they forced the Allies to return back to the negotiating table again and concluded with the terms of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which replaced the terms of the previous Treaty of Sevres and were far more favorable to Turkey. Finally, the borders of the modern Middle East as we roughly know them as today were set in ink, but the terms of Lausanne in 1923 still left many questions and problems unresolved. There would be no independent state created for the Kurdish people after all.

for example, a problem that has vexed the region for a century. Ever since today, the Kurds are one of the largest stateless people in the world, numbering some 40 million strong, with their own separate ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identity. But divided between the borders of what became Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, where in all four countries they are minority groups and have often been subject to persecution and discrimination. Kurdish nationalism and separatism, and the desire to create an independent Kurdish state out of these areas, has been a constant flashpoint of conflict in this region ever since the British also smushed together the former Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra into their mandate for Mesopotamia, which were later evolved into the state of Iraq. But the problem with that was that all three of those Ottoman provinces contained very different people with very different interests, identities, and beliefs. The people of Mosul were mostly ethnically Kurdish, the people of the Baghdad Province were primarily Sunni Muslim Arabs, while the people of the Basra Province were mostly

Shia Muslim Arabs even further. What became Kuwait had also been a formal part of the Basra Province under the Ottoman Administration until the British showed up and transformed it into a protectorate of theirs after World War One. The British legally separated Kuwait from the Basra Province and from Iraq, and they kept Kuwait as their own protectorate until the 1960s, which in the end would give the Iraqi State a decent historical claim to Kuwait that would eventually be acted upon by Saddam Hussein's invasion in 1990. Iraq became independent from the British mandate in 1932 and emerged as a deeply internally fragmented state with a historical claim on Kuwait. It was also almost completely landlocked with only a tiny sliver of a coastline on the Persian Gulf wedged in between Kuwait and Iran, and it further controlled neither of the headwaters for the two great rivers that it would rely so heavily upon for its civilization, the Tigris and Euphrates, both of which begin further to

the north within Turkey, the French mandates weren't created much better either. The Lebanon province of the Ottoman Empire was deliberately separated as an independent state by the French based on that province's slight religious majority of Christians at the time, but it had very significant minorities of Sunni and Shia Arabs and Druze Arabs as well. Meanwhile, the polyglot Ottoman provinces of Aleppo, Beirut, Damascus, and Darazor were all smushed together to form what became Syria, putting large numbers of Sunni Kurds, Sunni Arabs, Alawites, Arabs, and Christian Assyrians and Arabs all into the same country. And then in the 1930s, the Turkish government began pressuring the French to seed over the Syrian province of Alexandreta owing to that province's large Turkish community, fearing that if they did not yield to the Turkish demands, that Turkey may join in an alliance with Nazi Germany. The French relented and pushed out Alexandreta from the Syrian mandate as the independent state of Hatay in 1938. Then the following year in 1939, the

Independent Hatay State held a highly controversial referendum on annexation into Turkey that was passed, resulting in it entering Turkey as the Hatay Province. And ever since then, the government of what would later become Syria has continually claimed the Hatay Province as rightfully Syrian territory under Turkish occupation. And even further, the headwaters for the Euphrates River that runs all across Syria begins up in Turkey as well, meaning the Turkish-built dams on the Euphrates and the Tigris present direct challenges to both Syria's and Iraq's supplies of water, leading to further sources of potential conflict between Iraq and Syria on one side and Turkey on the other. Lebanon became independent from the French mandate in 1943, and Syria in 1946. And Syria immediately emerged with territorial disputes with Turkey over Hatay and territorial claims to the whole of Lebanon based on the French decision to artificially separate it based on religious demographics while being itself a deeply internally fragmented state along sectarian and ethnic lines just like Iraq and also Lebanon. Then all

of these political divisions created by the Allies map-making between 1916 and 1923 were even further exacerbated by the future discoveries of oil and gas across all of these brand new countries. Oil was only first discovered in Iraq in 1927, years after the borders had already been drawn and settled, marking the first major discovery of oil in the Arab world. Future initial discoveries of oil were made in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia a decade later, in 1938, and then much later in Syria and the United Arab Emirates in 1956 and 1958, respectively. But the locations of where the oil and gas reserves were to be discovered across all of these new countries, in nearly every single case, would ensure generations of nearly continuous conflict over them. Within Iraq, oil was discovered across the former Ottoman provinces of Basra and Mosul, home to the Shia Arab and Sunni Kurdish communities, but hardly any oil at all would be discovered in the central Baghdad province that was primarily home to the Sunni Arabs. Even further, an overwhelming

90 percent of all of Iran's oil reserves would simply be discovered within the Iranian province of Kazakhstan. Which encompasses an exposed flat plane on the western side of the Zagros Mountains that otherwise largely forms the rest of Iran's westernmost borders. And even further kugistan was primarily inhabited by Shia Arabs rather than the Shia Persians who made up the majority of the rest of the country. Kuwait eats those small in size also had enormous oil reserves nearly equal to the entirety of a rock's oil reserves. And of course Iraq contained the historical claim to Kuwait a card that could be theoretically deployed at any time to double the Iraqi State's oil resources. In Saudi Arabia home to the largest share of the Persian Gulf soil the oil would be almost entirely discovered in just a small area of the Eastern side of the country near to the Waters of the gulf itself within lands that were home to Saudi Arabia's Shia Muslim minority while hardly any at all would be discovered in the Sunni majority areas. And then in Syria the oil

was found almost entirely in the east, in the northeast of the country, in the lands of the Sunni Kurds, in the Sunni Arabs, while hardly any at all was discovered in the Alawite Shia Arab lands of the West. All in all, the oil found across the Middle East, scattered across the complicated mosaic of competing ethnic, religious, and political identities, would prove to make up nearly half of the entire world's known supply of oil, meaning that outside powers like the British, the Soviets, and eventually the Americans were all going to be permanently interested in influencing the region's events, atop all of the dozens of local ethnic, religious, and political interests and actors seeking to influence events as well. And then the British did something else in the Middle East as well. They created a Jewish state of their other mandate on the other side of the Middle East, in Palestine. In the wake of the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany in Europe, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees had been fleeing for their lives to the British mandate for Palestine, encouraged by the

British government's own promises for a Jewish homeland made in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and in the process changing the mandate's demographics, which had previously been almost entirely populated by Arabs. As Britain prepared to release the Mandate for Palestine as an independent state following the end of World War II, the newly created United Nations released a plan for the partition of mandatory Palestine in 1847 between a newly created Jewish State and a Palestinian Arab State, and an international Administration placed in control over the holy city of Jerusalem. The plan was accepted by most of the Jewish groups but nearly universally rejected by most of the Arab groups on the basis that the proposal was too unfair and tilted too much towards the Jewish side despite the Palestinian era population at the time in mandatory Palestine being more than twice as many as the Jewish population was. The 1947 U.N partition Plan called for giving the Jewish State 62% of the mandate's land while only 38% of the land would be allocated to the Arab

State fighting between the Arabs and the Jews in mandatory Palestine escalated, and as the British withdrew in 1948, the state of Israel declared its independence, thus starting the continuous Arab-Israeli conflict that has remained ever since. Not one Arab country in the world would recognize Israel's existence as legitimate at first, and a coalition of mostly recently created or independent Arab states went to war with Israel in 1948 in support of the Palestinian Arab cause. Israel ended up emerging victorious in that war and ended it in control over all the lands that the U.N. had assigned to the Jewish state in the 1947 partition plan, in addition to 60 percent of the UN-proposed Arab states' land and the Western half of Jerusalem, while Jordan occupied and then annexed the Palestinian-assigned West Bank and international East Jerusalem, while Egypt occupied the Palestinian-assigned Gaza Strip and transformed it into a protectorate. No independent Palestinian Arab state would end up emerging, and an estimated 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were exiled or became refugees, displaced from

their homes, with many of them fleeing into neighboring Lebanon. In an event that they referred to as the nakba, or the catastrophe, which would gradually alter that country's demographics to being more Muslim-dominated, leading to future internal demographic conflict in that country, like the long Lebanese Civil War that would last between 1975 and 1990. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of additional Jews would migrate towards Israel from the shattered communities left behind by the Nazis in Europe, further tilting Israel's demographics more in favor of Jews. The defeat of the Arabs against Israel in 1948 gave way to the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, a secular Arab nationalist who dreamed of unifying all of the Arab lands in the Middle East beneath a single Arab superstate that would utilize most of the Middle East's oil as their super weapon, a super weapon that he hoped would lead to the defeat of Israel and its primary backer, the United States. Nasser came to power in Egypt in 1954, and he would only be the

first of many post-World War II Middle Eastern leaders who had set about to change the map of the region sent into place by Sykes in Pico. He railed against not only Israel and the United States but against the era monarchies like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as well whom he saw is corrupted and who were actively developing closer relations to the United States over their vast oil resources. In 1956, Nassar took the fateful decision of nationalizing the Suez Canal and destroying the ownership structure over it that had been dominated by the foreign British and French shareholders for nearly a century. The British, French, and Israelis all retaliated with war in an invasion of Egypt to try and regain colonial control over the canal, but this time both the United States and the Soviet Union alike rebuked the colonial invaders, and Egypt emerged victorious, catapulting Nassar and his flavor of secular Arab nationalism to the status of much of the Arab world's new champion. In 1958, a coup by military officers in Syria pledging

personal loyalty to Nassar took over the country and joined it with Egypt in the short-lived United Arab Republic, which only fell apart just three years later in 1961 when another group of Syrian officers launched another coup and restored Syria again as an independent nation. Civil War in North Yemen exploded the following year in '62 between the monarchist government there and Nasser-style Arab nationalist Republican Rebels, leading to the modern Middle East's first proxy conflict. The monarchist Middle Eastern states like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and Imperial Iran all balked at the prospect of a revolution in Yemen toppling the monarchy there and then spreading to their own monarchies, and so they all intervened militarily on behalf of the Yemeni monarchist regime, while Nassar, wanting to spread the cause of Arab nationalism and unity, massively supported the Nationalist Rebels by sending tens of thousands of Egyptian troops and copious volumes of weapons. The war ended up turning into Egypt's version of the Vietnam War, consuming enormous amounts of manpower and

resources, and developing into a stalemate, greatly weakening the Egyptian armed forces. In the process, by 1967, Nasser was again threatening war with Israel over on another front but encouraged by Egyptian defeats in Yemen. The Israelis decided to strike first. Surprise Israeli strikes against Egyptian forces caught them completely off guard, leading to rapid Israeli military gains against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in what would become known as The Six-Day War. Israel ended the war by occupying the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip in the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, placing Israeli forces on the entire eastern bank of the Suez Canal itself, which caused Egypt to shut the canal down to all maritime traffic for the next eight years. Jewish Israeli settlers would then begin to move in and colonize all of the recently occupied territories, leading to further conflicts between the Israeli State and the Arab and Islamic worlds. Crushed and humiliated by the defeat, Nasser was forced to withdraw from the

war in Yemen and died shortly afterwards from a heart attack at just 52 years old in 1970. It was also around that time that the British Empire decided that they could no longer financially maintain their commitments to Security in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. And critically all of the oil there. In 1970, the British protectorates of Bahrain, Qatar, the modern United Arab Emirates, and the Gulf were all finally granted their independence. And without the British there any longer, the United States began taking an increased interest in the region instead, wishing to maintain the status quo and Regional stability in the Gulf in order to safeguard the world's supply of oil. In contrast to the frequent Wars that were being fought over on the other side of the Middle East, the United States began encouraging their Ally at the time, Imperial Iran, to step forward as the new guarantor of the Region's security and to block the expansion of the Soviets from entering into the Gulf. Massive amounts of American weapon sales were

made to arm Imperial Iran for this exact purpose. A policy that would quickly backfire very badly. But on the other side of the Middle East, Nasser's Arab nationalist successor in Egypt, Anwar Sadat, and the recently risen to power Arab nationalists in Syria, Hafez al-Assad, decided to join forces again and attack Israel in order to reclaim the occupied Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. Israel once again emerged victorious in that war, but fearful that they would not always be so capable of winning surrounded by enemies. The 1973 Yom Kippur War paved the way for peace between Egypt and Israel six years later in 1979 following the Camp David Accords negotiated by The Carter Administration in the United States, in which Israel agreed to dismantle all of their settlements in the Sinai Peninsula and return it back to Egypt in exchange for Egypt recognizing the legitimacy of Israel's statehood, which made Egypt the first country in the entire Arab world to ever do so after more than 30 years.

of Israel's existence. Peace between Israel and Egypt had at last been achieved, but the peace was denounced by every other Arab state in the world, including most of all by Syria, which by that time was under the nearly totalitarian regime of Hafez al-Assad and his brand of extremely militant secular Arab nationalism, or Baathism. Egypt was expelled from the Arab League for a decade over the peace agreement. Sadat himself was assassinated by Egyptian Islamist militants who believed that he was a traitor, and Syria began championing itself as the new primary backer of the Palestinian Arab cause. As more and more Palestinian refugees fled into neighboring Lebanon, that country's extremely diverse demographics began tilting ever more in favor of the Muslims, to the point where the Christians eventually became less than half of the overall population. The Lebanese Christians had generally dominated the government and generally sided with Israel in the Western world, while the Lebanese Sunni and Shia Muslims generally sided with the Arab

and Muslim World, instead eventually culminating in the explosion of a complex and multi-sited Civil War beginning in 1975 that would last for 15 years until 1990. The office Syria would invade Lebanon in 1976 and then spent years attempting to integrate and annex the country directly into Syria based on the separation that the French had done with her map making after syson Pico. Israel would also invade Lebanon in their attempts to fight against Palestinian forces there and secure the safety of their northern border leading to direct Israeli and Syrian fighting in the country as well. The Israeli occupation in Lebanon would only end in 2000 while the Syrian occupation only ended in 2005. In retaliation for their worsening relationship with Syria, Israel unilaterally declared to annex the occupied territories of East Jerusalem in 1980 and the Syrian Golan Heights in 1981, setting in on the path of a permanent territorial dispute with Syria that lasts into the present day as each side ever since has claimed that the

Golan Heights is a core part of their integral territories, and at nearly the same time as these events were ongoing, a revolution exploded in Iran in 1979. That toppled the autocratic U.S.-aligned monarchy of the Shah and replaced him with a new revolutionary Theocratic regime dominated by the Iranian Shiite Muslim clergy and their leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The new revolutionary Iran completely changed the way the Middle East worked because they emerged as the first truly Islamist government in the region. The new Iranian regime's Shia Islamist ideology believes and continues to believe in the concept of a grand Islamic civilization consisting of all the Islamic peoples and territories all across the world, and that all of these Islamic territories should be united under the rule of the Islamic clergy and their supreme leader. The new revolutionary Iran was also open about their desire to export and spread their Islamic revolution first to the Shia Muslim majority lands across the Middle East and Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, and then

from there to the rest of the Islamic world, all of the monarchies in the Islamic world, like the Arab monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, were to be toppled during this revolutionary process. While Israel, in the Iranian mind a western occupier of rightfully Islamic lands, would have to be completely destroyed. These foreign policy goals would ultimately make Iran a bitter and irreconcilable enemy of both the Israelis and also the Saudis and every other Arab monarchy across the region. In addition to the United States, all of whom wish to contain the Islamic revolution within Iran and prevent it from spreading any further. It also initially made Iran a terrifying Enemy Within Iraq, what power had just recently been seized by the office secular Arab nationalist Saddam Hussein. Just as the revolution in Iran was erupting, Saddam and his ruling click of Ba'athists in Iraq came from the Sunni Arab minority of the country, from the former Ottoman province of Baghdad, and he deeply feared revolutionary Iran's exportation of the Shia Revolution into the Basra area of

Iraq, where the majority of the population were also Shia, and where the majority of Iraq's oil reserves were also located, thus determined to kill the Iranian Revolution in its cradle before it could spread. Saddam invoked the call of Arab nationalism when he decided to send the Iraqi Army invading into Iran in 1980, with a stated goal of conquering the majority province of Kazakhstan on the flat plain west of the Zagros mountains, and adding its massive oil resources to his own already large existing Iraqi oil arsenal, and setting himself down the path as the next great aspirant to the mantle of the Arab hero who would rail against the map of the Middle East created by Sykes and Picot. But instead, the Iran-Iraq war would turn into an eight-year-long apocalypse that would claim the lives of half a million people and injure around a million more, desperate to keep Iraq afloat as a buffer state between themselves and the fiercely anti-monarchist and expansionist revolutionary Iran who had

just toppled their own monarchy. The Kuwaitis and the Saudis each lent tens of billions of dollars to Saddam in order to keep him in the fight for longer. The origin of the long-standing Saudi-Iranian Cold War. But for Saudi Arabia, the fear went much deeper. You see, across the 17th and 18th centuries, Bahrain, an island in the Persian Gulf right off of the Saudi Mainland, had been ruled by various dynasties coming from Persia and Iran. The British had transformed Bahrain into a protectorate of theirs only in 1861, and after it was granted independence a century later in 1971, the Imperial state of Iran claimed the island as rightfully belonging to them. And after the 1979 Islamic revolution, the new Theocratic revolutionary Iran continued the claim that Bahrain was a lost Iranian Province and that it should be returned to them. Further amplified by the fact that the vast majority of Bahrain citizens were and are Shia Muslims but ruled by a Sunni Muslim monarchy friendly to the

fellow Sunni monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, who wait in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain is these days directly connected to Saudi Arabia by an 18-mile Long Bridge. The island is only located about 60 kilometers away from Saudi Arabia's largest single oil field, gavar, only about 50 kilometers away from the headquarters of Saudi Aramco, the state Oil Company, and only about 80 kilometers away from Rostanura, which is the Saudi's largest oil export terminal. Bahrain is placed directly off the coast of the Shia Muslim majority area of Eastern Saudi Arabia, where nearly the entirety of Saudi Arabia's oil reserves and infrastructure are located, meaning that were the Iranians to successfully export the revolution into Shia-majority Bahrain and topple the Sunni monarchy there, the next target would be the next-door Shia-majority areas of Eastern Saudi Arabia, which could place the entire Saudi monarchy and state into jeopardy. Thus, to prevent that from ever happening, the Saudis decided to bankroll Saddam to keep the Iranian Revolution.

contained within just Iran, and they have worked tirelessly ever since to do whatever they can to bottle Iran up after the Iran-Iraq war concluded in a stalemate without any changes made to the borders in 1988. Saddam requested that Kuwait forgive the 65 billion dollars worth of loans that they had given him to fight against Iran, and after they refused, Saddam went on to utilize Iraq's theoretical historical claim to Kuwait and invaded that country next just two years later in 1990, annexing it and adding all of its own oil reserves into a rock proper. The Iraqi conquest of Kuwait suddenly doubled the amount of oil reserves that Saddam controlled and placed him personally in control of nearly a fifth of all the known oil reserves in the world. Then the Iraqi Army began lining up on the Kuwaiti border with Saudi Arabia next, a stone's throw away from the massive oil fields in Saudi Arabia. It appeared quite obvious that Saddam was planning on using the Iraqi Army to invade Saudi Arabia next and conquer

their oil fields as well, which would have further boosted his control over the world's supply of oil to nearly 45% of it, which would have made Saddam Hussein the master of global oil and given him the fuel he needed to continue on with his ultimate ambition of unifying the Arab world beneath his authority and finally overturning the map drawn up by Sykes and Pico. Not willing to allow any of that to happen, however, the United States gathered together a massive military coalition of 32 nations and militarily intervened against him during the Gulf War of 1990-91, which rapidly ejected the Iraqi military from Kuwait and liberated the nation. Once again, the map of Sykes and Pico was once again restored. Afterwards, the United States began fully stepping into the role as the new primary security guarantor of the Persian Gulf and its oil supplies in order to make sure that the source of half of the world's oil would remain stable and accessible. The United States' Fifth Fleet was reactivated and headquartered in Bahrain, providing the U.S. with a big

incentive alongside of the Saudis to keep the island out of the hands of revolutionary Iranian influence. While the United States Air Force set up a massive new Air Base at ALU Dade in Qatar. Shortly after that, Jordan became the second Arab state in the world to make peace with Israel when they recognized the Jewish state in 1994. But the increasing setbacks for secular Arab nationalism in the Middle East and the growing presence and legitimacy of the United States and Israel in the region gave rise to a new brand of Sunni Islamism in the Arab world that rivaled both the marshia Islamism in Iran and the secular Arab nationalist movements like Ba'athism in Iraq and Syria and the previous Nasserism in Egypt. This set the stage for new organizations like Al Qaeda to emerge who wanted to ignite a worldwide Islamist Revolution to unite the entire Muslim World beneath a new Islamic State that would fully encompass all of the Muslim lands and finally do away with the borders and terms of Sykes.

and Pico once and for all. This newest challenge to the map of the Middle East set by Sykes and Pico would eventually evolve even further into the form of Isis, an even more radical Sunni Islamist organization with roots in Al Qaeda. That for a time in 2014 and 2015 exploded onto the world stage with a series of conquests across the border between Iraq and Syria, a border that had been set by Sykes and Co a century before their time in 1916, and a border which they were adamant they were going to finally be the ones to destroy, just like many others before them, and probably like many more in the future. But unfortunately, due to the inherently violent, controversial, and recent nature of discussing how an organization as infamous as Isis managed to catapult itself into such a position of power in the Middle East, the next part of this video would almost certainly cause the rest of the video to become demonetized and age-restricted, which ultimately would mean the YouTube's algorithm would

have never promoted any of this video to you, and you would probably never have seen any of it, but thankfully I was still able to produce the next part of this video anyway because of the power of Nebula. Where you can go and watch the next 40-minute part of this video covering exactly how Isis managed to rise to power in Iraq and Syria and become the latest force in the Middle East seeking to overturn the results of the Sykes-Picot agreement. And this is also just one of more than two dozen exclusive full-length real-life lore videos that you can only find on Nebula in My overall modern conflict series. There the canal only be found over there because of all of their darker more controversial subject material. There were other episodes in the series covering how other recent major conflicts in the Middle East began and went that this video didn't quite make it up to like the modern civil wars in Yemen in Syria were deeper dives into the United States Iran conflict. The wars fought by Saddam Hussein in 2003.

United States invasion of Iraq, along with many, many others, with new episodes over there releasing every single month. And what's even more, you also get access to all of the other amazing exclusive content that can be found on Nebula. Because the best part about this site is that it's jointly co-owned by all of its creators, built by me and hundreds of other YouTubers and podcasters. And because it's a subscription-based service, we all get to work on way bigger and higher budget productions over there than we could ever do on YouTube. That's why there's tons of other exclusive content you'll find equally fascinating from all of these other creators over there as well. And if you sign up for Nebula using my link, you'll also get free access to all of Nebula classes where creators host classes on how to be, well, a creator. There's classes by Sam from Wendover Productions on persuasive communications, or by Devin from Legal Eagle on copyright laws, or by Patrick on how to make a movie, and dozens

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Why the Middle East’s Borders Guarantee Forever Wars

RealLifeLore

The Geopolitical Turbulence of the Modern Middle East

The Middle East has been plagued by continuous warfare and instability for over a century, involving multiple countries and costing millions of lives.

The root of the region's problems can be traced back to the decline of the Turkish Ottoman Empire and the subsequent intervention and partitioning by major powers like Britain and France.

The secret Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916, which divided the Ottoman lands between the British and French, set the stage for the complex geopolitical struggles and conflicts that continue to define the Middle East today.

The Impact of Political Lines on the Middle East

The 1916 British and French diplomatic lines in the Middle East ignored the region's complex borders and were based on Ottoman divisions, leading to long-term consequences.

The agreements, influenced by wartime promises and the pursuit of oil, shifted Middle Eastern borders and led to the Treaty of Sevres in 1920.

The terms of the treaty were later replaced by the more favorable 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which still left many issues unresolved, including the creation of an independent Kurdish state.

The Complex History of the Kurdish People and the Modern Middle East

The Kurds, a large stateless group with a distinct identity, have faced persecution and discrimination as minority groups in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

The arbitrary borders drawn by the British and French have created internal fragmentation and conflicts within Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, exacerbated by territorial disputes and the later discovery of oil reserves.

The distribution of oil across the region has further fueled continuous conflict, particularly in Iraq, shaping the complex history of the modern Middle East.

Oil Discovery in the Middle East & the Creation of Israel

Iran's, Kuwait's, Iraq's, Saudi Arabia's, and Syria's oil reserves significantly impacted the region's geopolitics, drawing interest from global powers.

The British's establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, the UN's partition plan, and the Arab-Israeli conflict led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs and the rise of Israel.

The outcome of the 1948 war resulted in the demographic shift of Palestinian Arabs and the influx of Jewish refugees, setting the stage for future conflicts.

Gamal Abdel Nassar's Impact on the Middle East

Gamal Abdel Nassar rose to power in Egypt, nationalized the Suez Canal, and became a champion of secular Arab nationalism, leading to a victory in the Suez Crisis.

He then got involved in the civil war in North Yemen, which significantly weakened the Egyptian armed forces.

Nassar's aggressive stance against Israel ultimately led to the Six-Day War and a humiliating defeat for Egypt, but his legacy shaped much of the Middle East's modern history.

The peace agreement between Israel and Egypt was condemned by other Arab states, leading to Egypt's expulsion from the Arab League.

The Lebanese Civil War was fueled by the shifting demographics and the involvement of Israel and Syria in an attempt to fight Palestinian forces.

The revolution in Iran led to a new regime that aimed to spread its Islamic revolution, making it a bitter enemy of Israel and the Arab monarchies, while also provoking the Iran-Iraq war as Saddam Hussein feared the spread of Shia revolution.

The Gulf War and Its Impact on the Middle East

Saudi Arabia and Kuwait financially supported Saddam Hussein to counter Iranian influence, leading to the Gulf War.

The war, triggered by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, resulted in a US-led coalition expelling Iraqi forces and reaffirming the existing map of the region.

The conflict also marked the rise of US involvement in the Persian Gulf and set the stage for the emergence of Sunni Islamism, including groups like Al Qaeda.

The Rise of Isis and the Sykes-Picot Agreement

Isis emerged as a radical Sunni Islamist organization, aiming to overturn the Sykes-Picot border between Iraq and Syria.

The group's rapid rise to power in 2014 and 2015 caused controversy and demonetization on YouTube.

Nebula, a subscription-based platform, allowed the continuation of the video series on Isis and other modern conflicts in the Middle East.