That's especially important since there are so many Pashtuns just across the border in Pakistan, where the Taliban have major bases of operation.
But there are rebel groups besides the Taliban, not all of which are Pashtun. Generally, though, the north of the country is stabler and less violent than the south or east. The Afghanistan War is extremely complicated, but this map does a remarkable job of capturing the most important components: 1 the Taliban areas, in orange overlay; 2 the areas controlled by the US and allies, in depressingly tiny spots of green; 3 the major Western military bases, marked with blue dots; 4 the areas of opium production, which are a big source of Taliban funding, in brown circles, with larger circles meaning more opium; 5 the supply lines through Pakistan, in red, which Pakistan has occasionally shut down and come under frequent Taliban attack; 6 the supply line through Russia, which requires Russian approval.
If this map does not depress you about the prospects of the Afghan War, not much will. The Arabian peninsula has a very, very long history, and the Saudi family has controlled much of it since the s.
But to understand how the peninsula got to be what it is today, go back about a years to The Saudis at that point controlled very little, having lost their territory in a series of wars. The peninsula was divided into lots of little kingdoms and emirates. The Ottoman Empire controlled most of them, with the British Empire controlling the southernmost third or so of the peninsula — that line across the middle shows how it was divided. After World War I collapsed the Ottoman Empire, the Saudis expanded to all of the purple area marked here, as the British had promised for helping to fight the Ottomans.
This deal is dramatized in the film Lawrence of Arabia. By the early s, the British effectively controlled almost all of the peninsula, which was divided into many dependencies, protectorates, and mandates. But the Saudis persisted. The Middle East produces about a third of the world's oil and a tenth of its natural gas.
It has a third of all natural gas reserves, but they're tougher to transport. Much of that is exported. That makes the entire world economy pretty reliant on the continued flow of that gas and oil, which just happens to go through a region that has seen an awful lot of conflict in the last few decades. This map shows where the reserves are and how they're transported overland; much of it also goes by sea through the Persian Gulf, a body of water that is also home to some of the largest reserves in the region and the world.
The energy resources are heavily clustered in three neighboring countries that have historically hated one another: Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. The tension between those three is something that the United States, as a huge energy importer, has been deeply interested in for years: it sided against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war of the s, against Iraq when it invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia in the s, again against Iraq with the invasion, and now is supporting Saudi Arabia in its rapidly worsening proxy war against Iran.
The global economy depends on this narrow waterway between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula. Ever since President Jimmy Carter issued the "Carter Doctrine," which declared that the US would use military force to defend its access to Persian Gulf oil, the little Strait of Hormuz at the Gulf's exit has been some of the most heavily militarized water on earth.
The US installed a large naval force, first to protect oil exports from the brutal Iran-Iraq War of the s, then to protect them from Saddam Hussein in the s Gulf Wars, and now to protect them again from Iran, which has gestured toward shutting down oil should war break out against Israel or the US. As long as the world runs on fossil fuels and there is tension in the Middle East, there will be military forces in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Suez Canal changed everything. When Egypt opened it in , after ten years of work, the mile, man-made waterway brought Europe and Asia dramatically and permanently closer. The canal's significance to the global order was so immediately obvious that, shortly after the British conquered Egypt in the s, the major world powers signed a treaty, which is still in force, declaring that the canal would forever be open to trade and warships of every nation, no matter what.
Today, about eight percent of all global trade and three percent of global energy supply goes through the canal. There are few grimmer symbols for the devastation of the Iraq War than what it did to Baghdad's once-diverse neighborhoods. The map on the left shows the city's religious make-up in Mixed neighborhoods, then the norm, are in yellow. The map on right shows what it looked like by , after two awful years of Sunni-Shia killing: bombings shown with red dots , death squads, and militias.
Coerced evictions and thousands of deaths effectively cleansed neighborhoods, to be mostly Shia blue or mostly Sunni red. Since late , the sectarian civil war has ramped back up, in Baghdad and nationwide.
The ethnic group known as Kurds, who have long lived as a disadvantaged minority in several Middle Eastern countries, have been fighting for a nation of their own for a long time. This map shows where they live in green overlay, and the national borders that they have proposed on three separate occasions, all of them failed. The Kurds have fought many armed rebellions, including ongoing campaigns in Syria and Turkey, and suffered many abuses, from attempted genocides to official bans on their language and culture.
Their one major victory in the last century has been in Iraq: as a result of the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, Iraqi Kurds have autonomous self-rule in Iraq's north.
This is an old idea that gets new attention every few years, when violence between Sunnis and Shias reignites: should the arbitrary borders imposed by European powers be replaced with new borders along the region's ever-fractious religious divide? The idea is unworkable in reality and would probably just create new problems.
But, in a sense, this is already what the region looks like. The Iraqi government controls the country's Shia-majority east, but Sunni Islamist extremists have seized much of western Iraq and eastern Syria. The Shia-dominated Syrian government, meanwhile, mostly only controls the country's Shia- and Christian-heavy west. The Kurds, meanwhile, are legally autonomous in Iraq and functionally so in Syria.
This map, then, is not so much just idle speculation anymore; it's something that Iraqis and Syrians are creating themselves.
Noble as the cause was, the destruction of Moammar Qaddafi's dictatorship by a spontaneous uprising and a Western intervention has just wreaked havoc in Africa's northern half. This map attempts to show all that came after Qaddafi's fall; that it is so overwhelmingly complex is precisely the point. The place to center your gaze is the patterned orange overlay across Libya, Algeria, Mali, and Niger: this shows where the Tuaregs, a semi-nomadic ethnic minority group, lives.
Qaddafi used Libya's oil wealth to train, arm, and fund large numbers of Tuaregs to fight the armed uprising in When he fell, the Tuaregs took the guns back out with them to Algeria and Mali, where they took control of territory. In Mali, they led a full-fledged rebellion that, for a time, seized the country's northern half.
Al-Qaeda moved into the vacuum they left, conquering entire towns in Mali and seizing fossil fuel facilities in Algeria. Criminal enterprises have flourished in this semi-arid belt of land known as the Sahel. So have vast migration routes, of Africans looking to find work and a better life in Europe. At the same time, armed conflict is getting worse in Nigeria and Sudan, both major oil producers. Qaddafi's fall was far from the sole cause of all of this, but it brought just the right combination of disorder, guns, and militias to make everything a lot worse.
Top map: Gregor Aisch ; bottom map: Eric Fischer. These maps are two ways of looking at a similar thing: the digitalization of the Middle East. The map on top is actually a population map: the dots represent clusters of people, but the dots are colored to show how many IP addresses there are, which basically means how many internet connections. The blue areas have lots of people but few connections: these are the poorer areas, such as Yemen, Pakistan, and Syria.
White and red show where there are lots of connections: rich countries like Israel and the United Arab Emirates, but also parts of Egypt and Iran and Turkey, the populations of which are increasingly wired, to tremendous political consequence.
The map on the bottom shows tweets: lots of dots mean lots of tweets from that area. They're colored by language. Notice where these two maps are different: Iran has lots of internet connections but almost no tweets; like Facebook, Twitter has been banned since the anti-government protests. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, lights right up: its modestly sized population is remarkably wired.
The significance of that became clear, for example, with the and social media-led campaigns by Saudi women to drive en masse, in protest of the country's ban on female drivers. The consequences of internet access and lack of access will surely continue to be important, and perhaps hard to predict, for the region.
The last of these empires was the Ottoman Empire, which first appeared in the 14 th century. The Ottoman Turks would go on to conquer nearly the entire Near East. But eventually the Ottoman Empire would fall into decline, pushed out of their territories mainly by European powers.
These artificial borders have become a source of conflict in the region that has lasted to this day. Decolonization began in the period between the two world wars.
By the s, the Europeans had left all their colonies in the Near East. The latter part of the 20 th century and the first two decades of the new millennium in the Near East would largely be defined by numerous conflicts, including all-out wars. Other ongoing conflicts in the Near East include hostilities between the two main Muslim sects, the Sunnis and the Shiites, and violence involving armed Islamic fundamentalist groups, such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
There have, however, been positive developments in the region as well. The oil wealth of the Arabia Peninsula, for example, has enabled most of the countries therein to achieve economic prosperity.
There have also been positive moves towards peace in the region, including peace agreements between Israel and some of its formerly hostile Arab neighbors. Nevertheless, the region still faces many threats and challenges.
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NES majors gain a broad and deep understanding of the region through courses that cover multiple time periods, regions of the Near East, and disciplinary methods. Students majoring in NES will gain competence in a Near Eastern language and a solid grounding in the histories, societies, politics, languages, literatures, and religions of the pre-modern and modern Near East.
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