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Persian Gulf States Table of Contents

On August 2, 1990, Iraqi forces invaded and occupied Kuwait. On February 26, 1991, United States-led coalition forces restored Kuwaiti sovereignty. These paired events represented both the failure and the success of Kuwait's foreign policy.

The primary impetus for the invasion lay in the dynamics of internal Iraqi politics--economic and political concerns after the long, debilitating, and ultimately unsuccessful Iran-Iraq War. However, economic and political relations between Iraq and Kuwait provided the context for conflict.

Iraq's first financial disagreement with Kuwait related to oil policy. Iraq objected to Kuwait's production beyond OPEC quotas and the consequent contribution that overproduction made to lowering oil prices internationally. Iraq also claimed Kuwait was siphoning oil from the shared Ar Rumaylah oil field straddling the Iraq-Kuwait border. During the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq ceased production from its side of the field while Kuwait continued operations. Kuwait asserted it had taken oil only from its own side of the field; Iraq claimed it had poached. Another financial disagreement with Kuwait concerned the estimated US$13 billion that Kuwait had lent Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, a debt that Iraq wished Kuwait to forgive. These financial claims were set in a broader context. The Iraqi government experienced serious financial strains following the war with Iran; nearby Kuwait had apparently ample resources. To obtain these resources, Iraq put forward whatever financial claims it could.

In addition to economic issues, Iraq also disagreed with Kuwait over borders. This claim had two somewhat contradictory dimensions. Iraq first disputed the location of the border and then reaffirmed its claim to all of Kuwait. The latter claim rested on the argument that Iraq had once ruled Kuwait. This assertion to historical sovereignty over Kuwait was not solidly grounded: Kuwait had always been a self-governing political entity. Despite Ottoman Iraq's historic interest in Kuwait, it had never ruled the shaykhdom. When Kuwait was first established, the area was under the control of the Bani Khalid of Arabia, not the Ottomans. For a brief period in the late nineteenth century, Kuwait moved closer to the Ottomans, and for a short time Abd Allah as Salim held the Ottoman title of qaimaqam, or provincial governor; part of the Iraqi claim invoked this fact. After Britain and Kuwait signed the 1899 treaty, Ottoman forces, anxious to overthrow Mubarak, had no place in the shaykhdom. British forces came to Mubarak's support as needed in favor of Kuwaiti independence.

Kuwait's status was again a matter of international discussion in the period around World War I. In 1913 British and Ottoman representatives drew up the draft Anglo-Ottoman Convention in which Britain recognized Ottoman suzerainty over Kuwait but at the same time declared Kuwait an autonomous district of the Ottoman Empire. The convention conditioned recognition of Ottoman interests in Kuwait on the promise of Ottoman noninterference in the internal affairs of Kuwait. The Iraqi government's later assertion that this constituted British recognition of Iraqi jurisdiction in Kuwait was weak. The document specifically recognized Kuwait's historical political autonomy and disallowed Iraqi interference in Kuwait's domestic affairs. In any event, the document was never ratified, and at the beginning of World War I, Britain moved closer to Kuwait, not further away. At the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was dissolved. In the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, Turkey renounced claims to all former Ottoman provinces.

In the interwar years, the border question again arose. In 1922 the British convened a conference at Al Uqayr in Saudi Arabia that set Saudi Arabia's borders with Kuwait and Iraq but not Kuwait and Iraq's border with each other. However, in 1923 the British high commissioner in Iraq sent a memorandum to the political agent in Kuwait laying out the border between Kuwait and Iraq. When in 1932 Iraq applied to the League of Nations for membership as an independent state, it included information on the borders from the memorandum.

Iraq thus seemed to be moving toward acceptance of its border with Kuwait when the discovery of oil, the promise of more Kuwaiti oil revenues, and the related Majlis Movement occurred. As the Majlis Movement grew, Iraq began to support dissidents in Kuwait and simultaneously put forward claims to Kuwait. Iraq also explored the idea of building a port on Kuwait's coast to give Iraq an alternative to its port of Basra. Iraq began expressing interest in the islands of Bubiyan and Warbah as well. The Majlis Movement in Kuwait failed, however, and Iraq had to await another opportunity.

As long as Britain was there to support Kuwait, Iraq could do little more than assert a verbal claim. When Kuwait became independent in 1961, the Iraqi government tested Britain's resolve by bringing forces to Kuwait's border in support of its claims on the shaykhdom. British and Arab League forces, however, forestalled any Iraqi military action.

In 1963 a new government came to power in Iraq. Anxious to mend fences, this government formally recognized Kuwait and signed an agreement recognizing the borders between the two states as those set forth in Iraq's 1932 application to the League of Nations. Iraq then dropped its objection to Kuwait's membership in the UN and in the Arab League and established diplomatic relations, including the exchange of ambassadors, with Kuwait.

Nonetheless, tensions lingered. During the 1960s and 1970s, a series of border incidents took place, and there was continuing Iraqi pressure for Kuwait to relinquish, or at least offer longterm leases on, the islands of Warbah and Bubiyan. In the 1980s, relations between the two states appeared to improve as Iraq, desperate for Kuwaiti financial support in its war with Iran, was careful not to press its unpopular claims. Both sides claimed sincerity in their historical effort to negotiate the border issue. When the war ended, however, the border issue reappeared.

The dispute itself does not seem to have been a precipitating factor in the invasion. When Iraq entered Kuwait in August 1990, it claimed to do so in support of a Kuwaiti rebellion. When no pro-Iraqi rebellion (or even bloc) emerged, and Iraq found itself unable to set up a pliable Kuwaiti government, it was forced to resort to direct occupation. It was only at this point that the Iraqi claim to Kuwait resurfaced. On August 9, one week after the invasion, Iraq formally annexed Kuwait, adding the northern part of the country, including the Ar Rumaylah oil field and the islands of Warbah and Bubiyan, to Iraq's province of Basra and creating a separate province out of the rest of Kuwait.

After Kuwait's liberation, the UN established a five-member boundary commission to demarcate the Kuwait-Iraq boundary in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 687, which reaffirmed the inviolability of the Iraq-Kuwait border. In April 1992, the commission announced its findings, which demarcated the Kuwaiti border with Iraq about 570 meters to the north near the Iraqi town of Safwan and slightly north in the region of the contested Ar Rumaylah oil field. These modifications gave Kuwait six oil wells in the field and part of the Iraqi naval base of Umm Qasr. Kuwait accepted the commission's finding and announced it intended to build a security fence along its border with Iraq as an advance warning system. Iraq responded to the findings with an angry letter in May to the UN secretary general rejecting the commission's findings. Domestically, it continued to refer to Kuwait's territory as an integral part of Iraq. Physical demarcation of the land boundary was completed in November 1992.

The postwar period thus opened with many of the issues still unresolved that had played a role in precipitating the invasion and war. In Iraq the government of Saddam Husayn continued to assert its prewar claim to Kuwait, coloring Kuwait's postwar foreign policy. As long as Saddam Husayn remains at the helm in Iraq, Kuwait can feel no real security. Even were he to be replaced, much of the insecurity that haunts Kuwait and drives its foreign policy would remain. Kuwaitis see the war as one waged by the Iraqi people and remember previous Iraqi promises to respect Kuwait's sovereignty. Kuwait will continue to see Iraq as a serious threat, regardless of what transpires in Iraq's leadership.

Kuwait's postwar foreign policy is therefore based on two assumptions. The first is that security, notably with regard to Iraq, is its primary concern. The second is that security ultimately can be guaranteed only by the United States. It is clear that Kuwait alone, or even Kuwait with the support of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), established in May 1981, and other Arab members of the coalition--a formal plan, known as the Damascus Declaration, to include Egypt and Syria in gulf defense arrangements was moribund soon after its issuance--cannot provide for its own defense needs. In August 1991, Kuwait and the United States signed a US$81 million Foreign Military Sales agreement. In September 1991, Kuwait signed a formal ten-year defense agreement with the United States that permits the United States to pre-position weapons and conduct military exercises in Kuwait at Kuwaiti expense. However, the agreement does not provide for establishing a permanent United States base there. In 1992 Kuwaiti and United States forces carried out joint exercises under the defense agreement. Kuwait has backed up its formal security arrangements with a close political and economic relationship with the United States. It has given much of its postwar reconstruction business to United States firms, including civil reconstruction contracts that have been awarded through the United States Army Corps of Engineers and many contracts directly related to defense needs. The new pro-United States policy is not without its detractors. In the summer of 1992, the speaker of Kuwait's since-disbanded National Council asserted that the United States ambassador was interfering in internal Kuwaiti affairs. The Kuwaiti government and numerous Kuwaitis, however, condemned these remarks.

Kuwait maintains similarly close ties with other members of the coalition, signing defense agreements with Britain and in 1992 negotiating an agreement with France. It is seeking similar agreements with the remaining Security Council permanent members, Russia and China. It remains very close to Saudi Arabia. Relations with a regionally resurgent Iran remain ambivalent. Kuwait's relationship with Iran improved dramatically after the Iraqi invasion, which, in drawing attention to Iraq's expansionist ambitions, seemingly vindicated Iran's wartime position. An inevitable conflict remains, however, between Kuwait's postwar aim of maintaining a high and visible level of United States support and Iran's desire to limit United States presence in the gulf. In mid-1992 this tension was seen in a minor dispute over the fate of Kuwait Airways passenger aircraft flown by Iraq to Iran during the war. Kuwait demanded the swift return of the aircraft, whereas Iran demanded US$90 million for servicing them while they remained in Iran.

Kuwaiti policy toward states that had supported Iraq has been unforgiving. One of the hard lessons Kuwait's rulers learned from the Iran-Iraq War is that foreign aid does not buy popularity or enduring political support. Some of its largest aid was to Jordan, Sudan, and Yemen, countries that nonetheless failed to support the coalition. Kuwait cut those countries from its foreign aid program once sovereignty was restored. Kuwait was also a major donor to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO's wartime support of Iraq also resulted in severance of Kuwaiti monetary and political support. In June 1992, the National Council approved denying economic aid to Arab countries that supported Iraq's invasion. Although foreign aid will continue as a feature of Kuwait's foreign policy, Kuwait's limited postinvasion revenues and its experience during the occupation indicate that such aid would decrease.

Source: U.S. Library of Congress

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Persian Gulf States Table of Contents On August 2, 1990, Iraqi forces invaded and occupied Kuwait. On February 26, 1991, United States-led coalition forces restored Kuwaiti sovereignty. These paired events represented both the failure and the success of Kuwait's foreign policy.

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The best military videos like Persian Gulf War videos are at Military.com. Check out videos of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard in action!

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Connor Case

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"The Ottoman state rose to become a world empire, which lasted from the late 13th century to 1923. Like that of the Habsburgs, its eventual rival, the Ottoman Empire was dynastic; its territories and character owed little to national, ethnic or religious boundaries, and were determined by the military and administrative power of the dynasty at any particular time. The Ottomans attempted to bring as much territory as possible into the Islamic fold. The non-Muslims living in these areas were then absorbed into the Empire as protected subjects."

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"The Ottoman state rose to become a world empire, which lasted from the late 13th century to 1923. Like that of the Habsburgs, its eventual rival, the Ottoman Empire was dynastic; its territories and character owed little to national, ethnic or religious boundaries, and were determined by the military and administrative power of the dynasty at any particular time.

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Chris Williams Origin of Al Qaeda | Osama bin Laden

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Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan Documentary

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Documentary on the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan made by Regan Bell and Chris Williams

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One of the most horrific terms in history was used by Nazi Germany to designate human beings whose lives were unimportant, or those who should be killed outright: Lebensunwertes Leben, or "life unworthy of life". The phrase was applied to the mentally impaired and later to the "racially inferior," or "sexually deviant," as well as to "enemies of the state" both internal and external. From very early in the war, part of Nazi policy was to murder civilians en masse, especially targeting Jews. Later in the war, this policy grew into Hitler's "final solution", the complete extermination of the Jews. It began with Einsatzgruppen death squads in the East, which killed some 1,000,000 people in numerous massacres, and continued in concentration camps where prisoners were actively denied proper food and health care. It culminated in the construction of extermination camps -- government facilities whose entire purpose was the systematic murder and disposal of massive numbers of people. In 1945, as advancing Allied troops began discovering these camps, they found the results of these policies: hundreds of thousands of starving and sick prisoners locked in with thousands of dead bodies. They encountered evidence of gas chambers and high-volume crematoriums, as well as thousands of mass graves, documentation of awful medical experimentation, and much more. The Nazis killed more than 10 million people in this manner, including 6 million Jews. (This entry is Part 18 of a weekly 20-part retrospective of World War II)

Warning : All images in this entry are shown in full, not screened out for graphic content. There are many dead bodies. The photographs are graphic and stark. This is the reality of genocide, and of an important part of World War II and human history.

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One of the most horrific terms in history was used by Nazi Germany to designate human beings whose lives were unimportant, or those who should be killed outright: Lebensunwertes Leben, or "life unworthy of life". The phrase was applied to the mentally impaired and later to the "racially inferior," or "sexually deviant," as well as to "enemies of the state" both internal and external.

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We've been reworking our Holocaust Encyclopedia, and we would love for you to explore the new experience. Click the button at right to start using the new version. The version you are viewing now will remain online until June 30, 2018.

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What is happening in Middle East in 3500BCE

Farming has been established for thousands of years in the Middle East, and in the river valleys of ancient Mesopotamia the first true civilization in world history is appearing, that of the Sumerians.

The Sumerians live in large communities of many thousands of people - the earliest cities. Along with many other advances they are developing the techniques of writing, on which most future human progress will depend.

A second civilization is also beginning to emerge in the Middle East, that of Ancient Egypt, in the Nile Valley.
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What is happening in Middle East in 2500BCE

In the previous thousand years, the influence of Mesopotamian civilization has spread far and wide. This has been carried by the trade networks radiating outwards from the Sumerian cities. Towns and cities are now scattered over a large part of the Middle East, with outlying regions such as Asia Minor and Iran being drawn into the orbit of urban civilization.

The spread of trade routes is linked to a demand for tin and copper. The Sumerians alloy these two metals together to make bronze, which they use in weapons and armour.

The second great civilization of the ancient world is now well established. Situated in the Nile valley, Egypt has already produced some of the most famous structures in all history, the great Pyramids of Giza.
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What is happening in Middle East in 1500BCE

The past thousand years has seen the rise of fall of the first true empire in world history. This was the achievement of king Sargon of Akkad, in Mesopotamia, in the late 3rd millennium BC.

Since then the Middle East has seen many upheavals, particularly in Mesopotamia and surrounding regions. Indo-European speaking tribes have moved in from the northern fringes of the old civilizations and brought with them a new military technology, the chariot. Equipped with this battle-winning technology, they have subjugated local populations to create new states: the Hittite, Mitanni and Babylonian empires. These, together with the New Kingdom of Egypt, form the leading powers of the region.

These states are home to highly sophisticated - and already ancient - civilizations, with a complex commercial life, bureaucracies, and well-organised armies, all built around chariot formations. The struggles between them dominate the history of the Middle Eastern world in this period.
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What is happening in Middle East in 1000BCE

Over the past 500 years, great changes have wracked the Middle East. The old powers of the region - Egypt, the Hittites, Assyria and Babylon - have all been devastated by invaders from outside their borders: the "Sea Peoples" from Europe, the Aramaeans from the Syrian desert and the Kuldu (Chaldeans) and other groups from the southern desert.

The eclipse of these states has allowed new peoples, particularly the Phoenicians and Israelites, to come to the fore. Their achievements will have an enduring impact on world history.

Several major advances in civilization have taken place in region in recent centuries. Firstly, iron has come into widespread use, probably starting somewhere in Asia Minor. Secondly, the alphabet has been developed, again probably in Asia Minor but soon to be spread by Phoenician merchants around the Mediterranean and Middle East. A third occurrence of world significance is the appearance of the monotheism, carried into history by the Israelite tribes. Finally, the camel has been domesticated recently. This tough animal is helping new trade routes across the Arabian desert to come into use.
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What is happening in Middle East in 500BCE

The history of the Middle East over the past 500 years or so has been one of imperial powers following one another in succession: first the Assyrians, then the Babylonians and Medes, and now the Persian empire, the largest state in the history of the Ancient World.

The conquest of this huge empire was the achievement of the Persian king Cyrus the Great, the first great ruler of the Achaemenid dynasty (hence another common name for the state he founded is the Achaemenid empire).

This succession of great empires - and the policy that the Assyrians and Babylonians pursued of re-settling conquered peoples in scattered groups throughout their territories - has resulted in the upheaval of populations on a vast scale. As a result, old languages have vanished and Aramaean has become the lingua-franca of the region. With its simple-to-learn alphabet, this has greatly stimulated international trade and inter-regional communications.

Middle Eastern civilization, by now three millennia old in its Mesopotamian heartland, has reached new heights.
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What is happening in Middle East in 200BCE

The past few centuries have seen the huge Persian empire conquered in a series of brilliant campaigns by the young Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia, between 333 and 323 BC. These campaigns involved armies largely recruited from amongst the city-states of Greece.

These cities have become the centre for the spread of Greek culture and language (which is replacing Aramaic as the lingua franca of the region). Greek cultural traditions mix with more ancient native elements to form a fascinating hybrid civilization which modern scholars label "Hellenistic". It is at this time that some of the most spectacular "Greek" artistic and intellectual achievements occur, in countries far away from the Greek homeland.
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What is happening in Middle East in 30BCE

Over the past two centuries the Middle East has been divided between two major powers, the Roman Empire to the west, which now controls Asia Minor, Syria and Judaea, and Egypt; and Parthia to the east, which rules Mesopotamia and Iran. This political division will characterize the history of the region for several centuries.

The social and cultural division is not so sharp, however. Greek civilization has left its mark on Mesopotamia and other parts of the Middle Eastern world, as a powerful ingredient in a mix containing more ancient cultures. Greek-style (or " Hellenistic") cities thrive under both the Romans and the Parthians, and in both empires art and architecture continue to be deeply effected by Greek influences. The Greek language remains the lingua franca throughout the region.
Next map: Middle East 200 CE
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At around this time, paper is first invented in China. It will make communication much easier than before.

What is happening in Middle East in 200CE

For the past two hundred years the Middle East continues to be divided between the Roman Empires and the Parthia Empire, with Asia Minor, Syria and Judaea, and Egypt under the firm rule of Rome, and Mesopotamia and Iran under the Parthians. The kingdom of Armenia acts as a buffer between the two, regularly fought over. The Roman empire normally has the better of the fighting, and has launched two major invasions which have penetrated deep into the heartland of the Parthian empire.

At this date Greek, or Hellenistic ("Greek-like") culture still predominates, at least in the cities across the region. In the Parthian part, however, there is starting to develop an Iranian revival in art and architecture, and probably also in literature and religion, with a revived Zoroastrianism. This is sponsored by the powerful Iranian nobility, which is increasingly hostile to the Roman power to the west.

One small part of the Middle East, Judaea, has seen the birth of one of the major religions of world history, Christianity. Later, however, two great Jewish rebellions against the Romans (66-73 and 132-135) there were crushed, and the Jewish people have been dispersed from their ancient homeland.
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The extraordinary city of Teotihuacan, in modern-day Mexico, is one of the largest in the world at this time.

What is happening in Middle East in 500CE

The Middle East has remained divided between two superpowers. The Roman Empire (now ruled from Constantinople and known to modern scholars as Byzantine Empire) rules the western parts of the region, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt. In the eastern parts of the region - Iran and Mesopotama - the Parthian Empire has been replaced by a new empire under the Persian Sasanian dynasty.

The Sasanian kings have proved more aggressive and formidable opponents of the Romans than their Parthian predecessors had. They have presided over an Iranian revival which has centred round the establishment of Zoroastrianism as the state religion. It has been during this period that a distinctively "Persian" civilization, which will later influence much Islamic art, architecture and literature, has evolved.

Zorosatrianism has not had it all its own way. In the 3rd century a new Iranian cult, called Manichaeism, briefly won many converts, at all levels of society. However, heavy persecution has since driven it underground. Also, Christianity has spread throughout the Middle East, under both the Romans and Persians; in the towns and cities of both empires it is probably the most popular faith.

Mesopotamia, with its intensive irrigation agriculture, has long been the breadbasket of the empires of the region, and the Sasanian government invests heavily in its irrigation systems. This, and along with it the entire productive economy of the region, reaches a level which it will not match until the 20th century. The expansion of Mesopotamian productivity increases the wealth of the whole empire.
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What is happening in Middle East in 750CE

The past two and a half centuries have seen the map of the Middle East change radically. In the 7 th century, a prophet, Muhammed, originally a merchant from an Arabian town called Mecca, started preaching a new religion, Islam. By his death he had converted most of the Arab tribes to the new faith. Thus united under the banner of Islam, and freed from their interminable quarrels, the Arabs swept outwards in a surge of conquests: Iraq and Iran, Syria and Palestine, Egypt and North Africa, Spain - all fell to them. By this date, Arab armies have penetrated as far as central Asia, western India and, briefly, into France.

The Persian empire vanished under the onslaught, and the Byzantine empire lost its most valuable provinces. In their place, the Arabs established a vast empire, called the "Caliphate" ("caliph" means "successor", in this case to the Prophet Muhammed).

Up until now the Caliphate has been ruled from Damascus, in Syria. This has been the capital of the Umayyad dynasty of caliphs. The overbearing rule of these caliphs has spawned a number Islamic break-way movements, seeking to install a purer form of rule. One of these is Shi'ism, which will remain an important force within Islam to the present day.

The days of the Umayyads are numbered. Already a great rebellion has broken out which will bring a new dynasty to power, the Abbasids. With the change of dynasty, the Caliphate's capital will very soon move to a new city, Baghdad, in Iraq.
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What is happening in Middle East in 979CE

Very soon after 750 Baghdad replaced Damascus as the capital of the Caliphate shifting the centre of gravity of the Muslim world eastward. Shortly after this, different provinces began to fall away from Baghdad's political control: Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, western India and much of Iran. By this date, the Caliphs have ceased to exercise much political power, even in Iraq. Nevertheless, the Caliphate continues to exist in the minds of Muslims: it is simply that the caliphs have increasingly taken on a more symbolic role as the focus of their religious loyalties.

The Muslim world is home to a flourishing, and highly sophisticated, cultural life. Technological and scientific developments have come in from China (for example paper) and India (the decimal system), which Arab scholars add to Greek thought (medicine and philosophy, amongst much else) plus major contributions of their own (including in optics, algebra and philosophy). These different strands mingle and synthesise to form a massive new body of knowledge, almost certainly the most advanced in the world at that time. This will in due course be passed westward to Europe, where it will form the basis for further advance.

The fragmentation of political power within the Islamic world allows the Byzantine Empire to continue to hold on to Asia Minor.
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What is happening in Middle East in 1215CE

The preceding two centuries have seen the rise and decline of Seljuq power in the Middle East.

Seljuq power soon broke up, however, giving way to regional states ruled by sultans of Turkish origin. The sultanate of Rum, in Asia Minor, was the most notable of these ("Rum" means "Rome", because this sultanate lay in former Byzantine, or Roman, territory).

Turkish sultans also came to power in Egypt, which had never been conquered by the Seljuqs. These were the Ayyubids, and they have succeeded in conquering up into Syria and far into the Arabian peninsula.

The Seljuq conquests, and the stricter conditions they placed on Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem, led to a succession of campaigns from Europe, which attempted to set up a number of Christian states in Syria. These "Crusades" met vigorous resistance, and have all but failed. The Europeans now control only a narrow strip of coast. They will soon lose even this.

In recent years, another Muslim Turkish group, the Khwarizm Shah, have taken control of Iran, and the Middle East will see new waves of invaders from central Asia during the next two centuries.
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What is happening in Middle East in 1453CE

The previous centuries have seen further invasions from central Asia. From the 1230s, much of the Middle East came under the rule of the Mongols. They conquered Iran and Iraq, and in 1258 captured Baghdad, killing the last of the Caliphs. They were only stopped by the Mamluq Turks, a group of slave-soldiers who had seized control of Egypt, Syria and western Arabia. They ousted the last Crusader toe-holds on the Syrian coast.

The Mongols introduced firearms to the region; the Mamluq armies adopted them and used them to greater effect than the Mongols had done.

The vast Mongol empire was divided amongst the descendants of Genghis Khan, and the Middle East fell to a branch which became known as the Il-khans. These converted to Islam. However, the usual decline set in, and a number of regional states emerged.

In the 1340s the region was struck by the Black Death. In the late 14th century another conqueror from central Asia, Timur, became master of most of the Middle East, with the major exception of Egypt and Syria, still under the Mamluqs.

Since Timur's death his empire has shrank back to Iran, and Iraq has fallen to another group from central Asia, the Black Sheep Turks.

Meanwhile, Asia Minor has now come under the Ottoman empire. In this year, 1453, the Ottomans capture the great Byzantine capital of Constantinople.
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What is happening in Middle East in 1648CE

Over the past two centuries, most of the Middle East has come under the rule of two major powers. The Ottoman empire sent its armies east from Asia Minor to conquer Syria in 1516, Egypt in 1517, western Arabia (the Hejaz and Yemen) in the following years, and Iraq in 1534. The Ottomans have brought much needed peace and stability to these countries, and a measure of economic progress. To the east has arisen the other major Middle Eastern power, Safavid Iran. Under the Safavids, Iran has experienced a period of great cultural achievement, particularly in architecture.
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What is happening in Middle East in 1789CE

Luckily for the Ottomans, Iran has experienced even greater weakness. The Safavid dynasty has fallen from power, and successor regimes have become increasingly unstable. Through all this, the leadership of the Shi'ite branch of Islam has been strengthening its hold on the country.

In Arabia, today's Gulf emirates are being established, and the first Saudi kingdom has appeared.

By this date, Western economic interests are being felt in the region. These will only get stronger.
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What is happening in Middle East in 1837CE

In the last years of the 18th century and the early years of 19th, the decline in the Ottoman empire power became all too apparent. Egypt and Syria came under a break-away regime, and Iraq was governed as a virtually independent state. Now, however, there are signs of a revival. Iraq first, and now, Syria, are being brought back under the firm control of the Ottomans. Egypt, however, has been lost to the Ottomans. It is treated by Western powers as an independent state.

Iran continues to experience weakness and instability.

The small Arab emirates on the Gulf coast are beginning to feel the power of the British navy. In Arabia, the first Saudi kingdom was crushed, and a second one has now appeared.
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What is happening in Middle East in 1871CE

The past decades have seen the lands of the Ottoman empire experience renewed centralized rule, with the provincial elites in Syria and Iraq being brought firmly back under the authority of the sultan's government. Egypt is by now an independent kingdom.
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What is happening in Middle East in 1914CE

In recent decades, the Suez canal's immense importance in linking European nations with their empires in East Africa, India, SE Asia and the Pacific has placed the Middle East right at the heart of their concerns. The British, being the leading global power, are at the forefront in establishing their interests in the region. Egypt has now drifted under their political control, as have several small emirates on the Arabian coast. British commercial interests predominate in Iraq and Iran - which is also a target for Russian influence. French commercial influence is strong in Syria.

In the face of these pressures, the Ottoman empire has continued to tighten its control over Anatolia, Syria and Iraq, and is also intent on modernizing its dominions' economies. The Ottoman government seeks to balance British and French influence by developing closer ties with Germany.

In the Arabian peninsula, a third Saudi kingdom has appeared, and this time it will endure. Two further developments which will have a dramatic impact on the coming decades in the region are the arrival of Jews in increasing numbers in Palestine, from the 1880s onwards, and the discovery of oil in Arabia, in 1901.
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What is happening in Middle East in 1960CE

The decades since 1914 have been ones of great change for the Middle East.

The Ottoman empire sided with Germany and Austria in World War 1 (1914-8), and afterwards was broken up amongst the nations of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. All except Turkey and Saudi Arabia were at first under British or French control. Iraq became independent in 1933.

After World War 2, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan became independent. In 1948 the British left Palestine, under fire from both Arabs and Jews. The Jews declared the independent state of Israel. Bitter fighting between Jews and Arabs followed, but Israel continued in being.

The politics of most Middle Eastern states has been autocratic, and frequently unstable. They have also been deeply affected by the Cold War, with some (Syria, Egypt) veering towards the pro-Soviet camp and others (the monarchies of the Arabian peninsula, Turkey, Iraq and Iran) towards the West. Israel, on the whole pro-West, has retained a western-style parliamentary system.

The oil industry is transforming many Middle Eastern countries, especially in the Gulf region, giving them hitherto undreamed of wealth.
Next map: Middle East 2005

What is happening in Middle East in 2005CE

For the Middle East, the last few decades have been troubled ones, dominated by two issues - oil, and Arab-Israeli hostility. Such are their geopolitical importance to the rest of the world that the region has attracted constant global attention, and frequent intervention.

The first of these, oil, has brought economic progress and dazzling modernity to several countries, especially in the Arabian peninsula. The second has directly involved the surrounding countries of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, and, indirectly, all the countries of the region. It has brought two full-scale Arab-Israeli wars (the Six Days War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973), plus several bloody disturbances on - and within - Israel's borders. After the 1973 war the oil producing countries grouped together in an organization called OPEC and imposed an embargo on the sale of oil to those countries in the west which had supported Israel.

Virtually every major episode in the region's recent history has been touched to a greater or lesser extent by these two issues. The rise and fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq (which involved two wars against the US and one or more of her allies, the Gulf War in 1991 and the Iraq War in 2003) and the Islamic Revolution in Iran, have had their impact multiplied by them. The Arab-Israeli question has made it much harder for Muslim leaders to adopt pro-Western policies, and has given anti-Western terrorist organizations widespread support. Oil wealth has helped finance terrorism, and has impeded the spread of democracy in the region: apart from Israel, Turkey is the only country to have developed a proper parliamentary-style system of government.

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Farming has been established for thousands of years in the Middle East, and in the river valleys of ancient Mesopotamia the first true civilization in world history is appearing, that of the Sumerians. The Sumerians live in large communities of many thousands of people - the earliest cities.

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Ottoman Empire, empire created by Turkish tribes that grew to be one of the most powerful states in the world in the 15th and 16th centuries. Its dynasty was founded by a prince (bey), Osman, after the Mongols defeated the Seljuqs at the end of the 13th century.

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On May 14, 1948, in Tel Aviv, Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaims the State of Israel, establishing the first Jewish state in 2,000 years. Ben-Gurion became Israel's first premier.

In the distance, the rumble of guns could be heard from fighting that broke out between Jews and Arabs immediately following the British army withdrawal earlier that day. Egypt launched an air assault against Israel that evening. Despite a blackout in Tel Aviv-and the expected Arab invasion-Jews celebrated the birth of their new nation, especially after word was received that the United States had recognized the Jewish state. At midnight, the State of Israel officially came into being upon termination of the British mandate in Palestine.

Modern Israel has its origins in the Zionism movement, established in the late 19th century by Jews in the Russian Empire who called for the establishment of a territorial Jewish state after enduring persecution. In 1896, Jewish-Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl published an influential political pamphlet called The Jewish State, which argued that the establishment of a Jewish state was the only way of protecting Jews from anti-Semitism. Herzl became the leader of Zionism, convening the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897. Ottoman-controlled Palestine, the original home of the Jews, was chosen as the most desirable location for a Jewish state, and Herzl unsuccessfully petitioned the Ottoman government for a charter.

After the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, growing numbers of Eastern European and Russian Jews began to immigrate to Palestine, joining the few thousand Jews who had arrived earlier. The Jewish settlers insisted on the use of Hebrew as their spoken language. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, Britain took over Palestine. In 1917, Britain issued the " Balfour Declaration," which declared its intent to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Although protested by the Arab states, the Balfour Declaration was included in the British mandate over Palestine, which was authorized by the League of Nations in 1922. Because of Arab opposition to the establishment of any Jewish state in Palestine, British rule continued throughout the 1920s and '30s.

Beginning in 1929, Arabs and Jews openly fought in Palestine, and Britain attempted to limit Jewish immigration as a means of appeasing the Arabs. As a result of the Holocaust in Europe, many Jews illegally entered Palestine during World War II. Jewish groups employed terrorism against British forces in Palestine, which they thought had betrayed the Zionist cause. At the end of World War II, in 1945, the United States took up the Zionist cause. Britain, unable to find a practical solution, referred the problem to the United Nations, which in November 1947 voted to partition Palestine.

The Jews were to possess more than half of Palestine, although they made up less than half of Palestine's population. The Palestinian Arabs, aided by volunteers from other countries, fought the Zionist forces, but by May 14, 1948, the Jews had secured full control of their U.N.-allocated share of Palestine and also some Arab territory. On May 14, Britain withdrew with the expiration of its mandate, and the State of Israel was proclaimed. The next day, forces from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded.

The Israelis, though less well equipped, managed to fight off the Arabs and then seize key territory, such as Galilee, the Palestinian coast, and a strip of territory connecting the coastal region to the western section of Jerusalem. In 1949, U.N.-brokered cease-fires left the State of Israel in permanent control of this conquered territory. The departure of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from Israel during the war left the country with a substantial Jewish majority.

During the third Arab-Israeli conflict-the Six-Day War of 1967-Israel again greatly increased its borders, capturing from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria the Old City of Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. In 1979, Israel and Egypt signed a historic peace agreement in which Israel returned the Sinai in exchange for Egyptian recognition and peace. Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) signed a major peace accord in 1993, which envisioned the gradual implementation of Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process moved slowly, however, and throughout the 21st century, major fighting between Israelis and Palestinians has resumed in Israel and the occupied territories.

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State of Israel proclaimed | May 14, 1948 | HISTORY

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On May 14, 1948, in Tel Aviv, Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaims the State of Israel, establishing the first Jewish state in 2,000 years. Ben-Gurion became Israel's first premier. In the distance, the rumble of guns could be heard from fighting that broke out between Jews and Arabs immediately following the British army withdrawal [...]

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Contents

1. Before the Holocaust: Historical Anti-Semitism & Hitler's Rise to Power

2. Nazi Revolution in Germany, 1933-1939

3. Beginning of War, 1939-1940

4. Towards the "Final Solution," 1940-1941

5. Holocaust Death Camps, 1941-1945

6. Nazi Rule Comes to an End, as Holocaust Continues to Claim Lives, 1945

7. Aftermath & Lasting Impact of the Holocaust

8. Photo Galleries

The word "Holocaust," from the Greek words "holos" (whole) and "kaustos" (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar. Since 1945, the word has taken on a new and horrible meaning: the ideological and systematic state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews (as well as millions of others, including Romani people, the intellectually disabled, dissidents and homosexuals) by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945.

To the anti-Semitic Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Jews were an inferior race, an alien threat to German racial purity and community. After years of Nazi rule in Germany, during which Jews were consistently persecuted, Hitler's "final solution"-now known as the Holocaust-came to fruition under the cover of World War II, with mass killing centers constructed in the concentration camps of occupied Poland. Approximately six million Jews and some 5 million others, targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaust. More than one million of those who perished were children.

Before the Holocaust: Historical Anti-Semitism & Hitler's Rise to Power

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler. Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust-even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine. The Enlightenment, during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious toleration, and in the 19th century Napoleon and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

Did you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes.

The roots of Hitler's particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I. Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country's defeat in 1918. Soon after the war ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers' Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract "Mein Kampf"(My Struggle), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in "the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany."

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the "pure" German race, which he called "Aryan," and with the need for "Lebensraum," or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler took advantage of the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party's status and rise from obscurity to power. On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After President Paul von Hindenburg's death in 1934, Hitler anointed himself as "Fuhrer," becoming Germany's supreme ruler.
WATCH: Third Reich: The Rise on HISTORY Vault
Nazi Revolution in Germany, 1933-1939

The twin goals of racial purity and spatial expansion were the core of Hitler's worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy. At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.

Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler, head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS), and later chief of the German police. By July 1933, German concentration camps (Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in "protective custody." Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000, or only 1 percent of the total German population. During the next six years, Nazis undertook an "Aryanization" of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds).

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht, or the "night of broken glass" in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish shops were smashed; some 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested. From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

Beginning of War, 1939-1940

In September 1939, the German army occupied the western half of Poland. German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles. Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program. After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.

Towards the "Final Solution," 1940-1941

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler's empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to the Polish ghettoes. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppenwould murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler's top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung ( final solution) to "the Jewish question." Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz, near Krakow. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.
READ MORE: Horrors of Auschwitz: The Numbers Behind WWII's Deadliest Concentration Camp
Holocaust Death Camps, 1941-1945

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young. The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz-Birkenau. From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Fed up with the deportations, disease and constant hunger, the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19-May 16, 1943 ended in the death of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter. This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease. And in 1943, eugenicist Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins, injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname "the Angel of Death."

Nazi Rule Comes to an End, as Holocaust Continues to Claim Lives, 1945

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power. In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on "International Jewry and its helpers" and urged the German leaders and people to follow "the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples"-the Jews. The following day, Hitler committed suicide. Germany's formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy's front line. These so-called "death marches" continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people. In his classic book "Survival in Auschwitz," the Italian Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops arrived at the camp in January 1945: "We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat."
READ MORE: The Horrifying Discovery of Dachau Concentration Camp-And Its Liberation by US Troops
Aftermath & Lasting Impact of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust-known in Hebrew as Shoah, or catastrophe-were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their families and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe.

In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust's bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years. Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging the German people's responsibility for the crimes committed in their name.

Photo Galleries

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Before the Holocaust: Historical Anti-Semitism & Hitler's Rise to Power Nazi Revolution in Germany, 1933-1939 Beginning of War, 1939-1940 Towards the "Final Solution," 1940-1941 Holocaust Death Camps, 1941-1945 Nazi Rule Comes to an End, as Holocaust Continues to Claim Lives, 1945 Aftermath & Lasting Impact of the Holocaust Photo Galleries The word "Holocaust," from the Greek words "holos" (whole) and "kaustos" (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar.

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Break Up of the Ottoman Empire - ParkerPedia

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Your encyclopedia for 7th Grade Social Studies.

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The Ottoman Empire (; Ottoman Turkish: دولت عليه عثمانیه‎, Devlet-i ʿAlīye-i ʿOsmānīye, literally The Exalted Ottoman State; Modern Turkish: Osmanlı İmparatorluğu or Osmanlı Devleti ), also historically known in Western Europe as the Turkish Empire or simply Turkey, was a state that controlled much of Southeast Europe, Western Asia and North Africa between the 14th and early 20th centuries.

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Afghanistan War, international conflict in Afghanistan beginning in 2001 that was triggered by the September 11 attacks and consisted of three phases. The first phase-toppling the Taliban (the ultraconservative political and religious faction that ruled Afghanistan and provided sanctuary for al-Qaeda, perpetrators of the September 11 attacks)-was brief, lasting just two months. The second phase, from 2002 until 2008, was marked by a U.S. strategy of defeating the Taliban militarily and rebuilding core institutions of the Afghan state. The third phase, a turn to classic counterinsurgency doctrine, began in 2008 and accelerated with U.S. Pres. Barack Obama's 2009 decision to temporarily increase the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan. The larger force was used to implement a strategy of protecting the population from Taliban attacks and supporting efforts to reintegrate insurgents into Afghan society. The strategy came coupled with a timetable for the withdrawal of the foreign forces from Afghanistan; beginning in 2011, security responsibilities would be gradually handed over to the Afghan military and police. The new approach largely failed to achieve its aims. Insurgent attacks and civilian casualties remained stubbornly high, while many of the Afghan military and police units taking over security duties appeared to be ill-prepared to hold off the Taliban. By the time the U.S. and NATO combat mission formally ended in December 2014, the 13-year Afghanistan War had become the longest war ever fought by the United States. American military casualties included some 2,400 service members killed and some 20,700 others wounded.

Prelude to the September 11 attacks

The joint U.S. and British invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 was preceded by over two decades of war in Afghanistan ( see Afghan War). On December 24, 1979, Soviet tanks rumbled across the Amu Darya River and into Afghanistan, ostensibly to restore stability following a coup that brought to power a pair of Marxist-Leninist political groups-the People's (Khalq) Party and the Banner (Parcham) Party. But the Soviet presence touched off a nationwide rebellion by fighters-known as the mujahideen-who drew upon Islam as a uniting source of inspiration. These fighters won extensive covert backing from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States and were joined in their fight by foreign volunteers (who soon formed a network, known as al-Qaeda, to coordinate their efforts). The guerrilla war against the Soviet forces led to their departure in 1989. In the Soviets' absence, the mujahideen ousted Afghanistan's Soviet-backed government and established a transitional government.

The mujahideen were politically fragmented, however, and in 1994 armed conflict escalated. The Taliban emerged and in 1996 seized Kabul. It instituted a severe interpretation of Islamic law that, for example, forbade female education and prescribed the severing of hands, or even execution, as punishment for petty crimes. That same year, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was welcomed to Afghanistan (having been expelled from Sudan) and established his organization's headquarters there. With al-Qaeda's help, the Taliban won control of over 90 percent of Afghan territory by the summer of 2001. On September 9 of that year, al-Qaeda hit men carried out the assassination of famed mujahideen leader Ahmad Shah Masoud, who at the time was leading the Northern Alliance (a loose coalition of mujahideen militias that maintained control of a small section of northern Afghanistan) as it battled the Taliban and who had unsuccessfully sought greater U.S. backing for his efforts.

The September 11 attacks and the U.S.-British invasion

The hijacking and crashing of four U.S. jetliners on September 11, 2001, brought instant attention to Afghanistan. The plot had been hatched by al-Qaeda, and some of the 19 hijackers had trained in Afghanistan. In the aftermath of the attacks, the administration of U.S. Pres. George W. Bush coalesced around a strategy of first ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan and dismantling al-Qaeda, though others contemplated actions in Iraq, including long-standing plans for toppling Pres. Saddam Hussein. Bush demanded that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar "deliver to [the] United States authorities all the leaders of al-Qaeda who hide in your land," and when Omar refused, U.S. officials began implementing a plan for war.

The campaign in Afghanistan started covertly on September 26, with a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) team known as Jawbreaker arriving in the country and, working with anti-Taliban allies, initiating a strategy for overthrowing the regime. U.S. officials hoped that by partnering with the Afghans they could avoid deploying a large force to Afghanistan. Pentagon officials were especially concerned that the United States not be drawn into a protracted occupation of Afghanistan, as had occurred with the Soviets more than two decades prior. The United States relied primarily on the Northern Alliance, which had just lost Massoud but had regrouped under other commanders, including Tajik leader Mohammed Fahim and Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek. The Americans also teamed with anti-Taliban Pashtuns in southern Afghanistan, including a little-known tribal leader named Hamid Karzai.

The CIA team was soon joined by U.S. and British special forces contingents, and together they provided arms, equipment, and advice to the Afghans. They also helped coordinate targeting for the air campaign, which began on October 7, 2001, with U.S. and British war planes pounding Taliban targets, thus marking the public start of Operation Enduring Freedom. In late October, Northern Alliance forces began to overtake a series of towns formerly held by the Taliban. The forces worked with U.S. assistance, but they defied U.S. wishes when, on November 13, they marched into Kabul as the Taliban retreated without a fight.

Kandahar, the largest city in southern Afghanistan and the Taliban's spiritual home, fell on December 6, marking the end of Taliban power. It had been besieged by a force led by Karzai that moved in from the north and one commanded by Gul Agha Sherzai that advanced from the south; both operated with heavy assistance from the United States. As the Taliban leadership retreated into Afghanistan's rural areas and across the border to Pakistan, anti-Taliban figures convened at a United Nations (UN)-sponsored conference in Bonn, Germany. With behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the United States, Karzai was selected to lead the country on an interim basis.

An intensive manhunt for Omar, bin Laden, and al-Qaeda deputy chief Ayman al-Zawahiri was undertaken. Prior to the killing of bin Laden by U.S. forces in 2011 ( see below), the Americans were believed to have come closest to bin Laden in the December 2001 battle of Tora Bora (bin Laden's mountain stronghold). But bin Laden was thought to have managed to have slipped into Pakistan with the help of Afghan and Pakistani forces that were supposedly helping the Americans. Critics later questioned why the U.S. military had allowed Afghan forces to lead the assault on the cave complex at Tora Bora rather than doing it themselves. (Indeed, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry made this criticism repeatedly during the 2004 general election campaign.) Al-Qaeda subsequently reestablished its base of operations in the tribal areas that form Pakistan's northwest border with Afghanistan. Omar and his top Taliban lieutenants settled in and around the Pakistani city of Quetta, in the remote southwestern province of Balochistān. One of the final major battles of the first phase of the war came in March 2002 with Operation Anaconda in the eastern province of Paktia, which involved U.S. and Afghan forces fighting some 800 al-Qaeda and Taliban militants. The operation also marked the entrance of other countries' troops into the war: special operations forces from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, and Norway participated.

Iraq takes centre stage

With the ouster of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the international focus shifted to reconstruction and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan. In April 2002 Bush announced a " Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan in a speech at the Virginia Military Institute, promising substantial financial assistance. But from the start, development efforts in Afghanistan were inadequately funded, as attention had turned among U.S. officials to the looming confrontation in Iraq. Between 2001 and 2009, just over $38 billion in humanitarian and reconstruction assistance to Afghanistan was appropriated by the U.S. Congress. More than half the money went to training and equipping Afghan security forces, and the remainder represented a fraction of the amount that experts said would be required to develop a country that had consistently ranked near the bottom of global human development indices. The aid program was also bedeviled by waste and by confusion over whether civilian or military authorities had responsibility for leading education, health, agriculture, and other development projects.

Despite military commitments from dozens of U.S. allies, the United States initially argued against allowing the other foreign forces-operating as the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)-to deploy beyond the Kabul area. That choice was directed by the Pentagon, which insisted on a "light footprint" out of concern that Afghanistan would become a drag on U.S. resources as attention shifted to Iraq ( see Iraq War). When ISAF did begin to venture beyond Kabul, its efforts were hampered by the "caveats" of its component countries-restrictions that kept all but a handful of the militaries from actively engaging in the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The force, overseen by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the organization's first mission outside Europe, was also hamstrung by a lack of troops as international commitments to Afghanistan flagged.

The United States consistently represented the largest foreign force in Afghanistan, and it bore the heaviest losses. By spring 2010 more than 1,000 U.S. troops had been killed in Afghanistan, while the British troops suffered some 300 deaths and the Canadians some 150. Both Britain and Canada stationed their troops in Afghanistan's south, where fighting had been most intense. More than 20 other countries also lost troops during the war, though many-such as Germany and Italy-chose to focus their forces in the north and the west, where the insurgency was less potent. As the fighting dragged on and casualties escalated, the war lost popularity in many Western countries, creating domestic political pressure to keep troops out of harm's way or to pull them out altogether.

Initially, the war appeared to have been won with relative ease. On May 1, 2003, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced an end to "major combat" in Afghanistan. On the same day, aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, President Bush announced that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended." At that time, there were 8,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The first democratic Afghan elections since the fall of the Taliban were held on October 9, 2004, with approximately 80 percent of registered voters turning out to give Karzai a full five-year term as president. Parliamentary elections were staged a year later, with dozens of women claiming seats set aside for them to ensure gender diversity. The 2004 constitution provided Afghanistan with a powerful central government and weak regional and local authorities-a structure that was in opposition to the country's long-standing traditions.

Despite vast powers under the constitution, Karzai was widely regarded as a weak leader who grew increasingly isolated as the war progressed. He survived several assassination attempts-including a September 2004 rocket attack that nearly struck a helicopter he was riding in-and security concerns kept him largely confined to the presidential palace in Kabul. Karzai's government was beset by corruption, and efforts to build a national army and a police force were troubled from the start by inadequate international support and ethnic differences between Afghans.

Beginning in 2005, violence climbed as the Taliban reasserted its presence with new tactics modeled on those being used by insurgents in Iraq. Whereas early in the war the Taliban had focused on battling U.S. and NATO forces in open combat-a strategy that largely failed to inflict significant damage-their adoption of the use of suicide bombings and buried bombs, known as IEDs ( improvised explosive devices), began to cause heavy casualties. Between January 2005 and August 2006, Afghanistan endured 64 suicide attacks-a tactic that had been virtually unknown in the country's history before then. At first the attacks caused relatively few casualties, but as training and the availability of high-powered explosives increased, the death toll began to climb: in one particularly vicious attack in November 2007, at least 70 people-many of them children-were killed as a parliamentary delegation visited the northern town of Baghlan. Less than a year later, a bombing at the Indian embassy in Kabul killed more than 50; the Afghan government accused elements of Pakistan's intelligence service of complicity in the attack, a charge Pakistan denied.

The Taliban's resurgence corresponded with a rise in anti-American and anti-Western sentiment among Afghans. Those feelings were nurtured by the sluggish pace of reconstruction, allegations of prisoner abuse at U.S. detention facilities, widespread corruption in the Afghan government, and civilian casualties caused by U.S. and NATO bombings. In May 2006 a U.S. military vehicle crashed and killed several Afghans, an event that sparked violent anti-American riots in Kabul-the worst since the war began. Later that year NATO took command of the war across the country; American officials said that the United States would play a lesser role and that the face of the war would become increasingly international. This shift reflected the greater need for U.S. troops and resources in Iraq, where sectarian warfare was reaching alarming levels. By contrast, the war in Afghanistan was still regarded in Washington as a relative success.

For commanders on the ground in Afghanistan, however, it was apparent that the Taliban intended to escalate its campaign, launching more frequent attacks and intensifying its fund-raising from wealthy individuals and groups in the Persian Gulf. Another source of money was Afghanistan's resurgent opium industry. International pressure had forced the Taliban to curb poppy cultivation during their final year in power, but after their removal in 2001 the opium industry made a comeback, with revenues in some areas of the country benefiting the insurgency. Western-backed campaigns to eliminate poppy cultivation or to encourage farmers to grow other crops had little discernible impact; Afghanistan soon became the supplier of over 90 percent of the world's opium.

The United States, meanwhile, had had only limited success in killing or capturing Taliban commanders. In early 2007, Mullah Obaidullah Akhund-the Taliban's number three leader-was captured in Pakistan, and months later Mullah Dadullah-the Taliban's top military commander-was killed in fighting with U.S. forces. But those were the exceptions. Top insurgent leaders remained at large, many of them in the tribal regions of Pakistan that adjoin Afghanistan. This reality prompted the United States to begin targeting insurgent leaders who lived in Pakistan with missiles fired from remotely piloted drones. The CIA program of targeted killings was publicly denied by U.S. officials but was widely acknowledged in private. Pakistani officials in turn denounced the strikes in public but privately approved of them as long as civilian casualties were limited. The United States repeatedly threatened to expand its drone strikes beyond Pakistan's tribal areas and into regions such as Balochistān if Pakistan did not demonstrate greater cooperation in battling the Taliban, a group it had long fostered.

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Afghanistan War | History, Combatants, Facts, & Timeline

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Afghanistan War, international conflict beginning in 2001 that was triggered by the September 11 attacks. U.S. forces quickly toppled the Taliban (the faction that ruled Afghanistan and provided sanctuary for al-Qaeda) in the first months of the war, only to face years of insurgency led by a reconstituted Taliban.

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Livvi Philpot

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A map marked with crude chinagraph-pencil in the second decade of the 20th Century shows the ambition - and folly - of the 100-year old British-French plan that helped create the modern-day Middle East.

Straight lines make uncomplicated borders. Most probably that was the reason why most of the lines that Mark Sykes, representing the British government, and Francois Georges-Picot, from the French government, agreed upon in 1916 were straight ones.

Sykes and Picot were quintessential "empire men". Both were aristocrats, seasoned in colonial administration, and crucially believers in the notion that the people of the region would be better off under the European empires.

Both men also had intimate knowledge of the Middle East.

The key tenets of the agreement they had negotiated in relative haste amidst the turmoil of the World War One continue to influence the region to this day. But while Sykes-Picot's straight lines had proved significantly helpful to Britain and France in the first half of the twentieth century, their impact on the region's peoples was quite different.

The map that the two men drew divided the land that had been under Ottoman rule since the early 16th Century into new countries - and relegated these political entities to two spheres of influence:

Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine under British influence

Syria and Lebanon under French influence

The two men were not mandated to redraw the borders of the Arab countries in North Africa, but the division of influence existed there as well, with Egypt under British rule, and France controlling the Maghreb.

A secret deal

But there were three problems with the geo-political order that emerged from the Sykes-Picot agreement.

First, it was secret without any Arabic knowledge, and it negated the main promise that Britain had made to the Arabs in the 1910s - that if they rebelled against the Ottomans, the fall of that empire would bring them independence.

When that independence did not materialise after World War One, and as these colonial powers, in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, continued to exert immense influence over the Arab world, the thrust of Arab politics - in North Africa and in the eastern Mediterranean - gradually but decisively shifted from building liberal constitutional governance systems (as Egypt, Syria, and Iraq had witnessed in the early decades of the 20th Century) to assertive nationalism whose main objective was getting rid of the colonialists and the ruling systems that worked with them.

This was a key factor behind the rise of the militarist regimes that had come to dominate many Arab countries from the 1950s until the 2011 Arab uprisings.

Tribal lines

The second problem lay in the tendency to draw straight lines.

The newly created borders did not correspond to the actual sectarian, tribal, or ethnic distinctions on the ground

Sykes-Picot intended to divide the Levant on a sectarian basis:

Lebanon was envisioned as a haven for Christians (especially Maronites) and Druze

Palestine with a sizable Jewish community

the Bekaa valley, on the border between the two countries, effectively left to Shia Muslims

Syria with the region's largest sectarian demographic, Sunni Muslims

Geography helped.

For the period from the end of the Crusades up until the arrival of the European powers in the 19th Century, and despite the region's vibrant trading culture, the different sects effectively lived separately from each other.

But the thinking behind Sykes-Picot did not translate into practice. That meant the newly created borders did not correspond to the actual sectarian, tribal, or ethnic distinctions on the ground.

What was the Sykes-Picot agreement?

The Sykes-Picot agreement is a secret understanding concluded in May 1916, during World War One, between Great Britain and France, with the assent of Russia, for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire

The agreement led to the division of Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine into various French and British-administered areas. The agreement took its name from its negotiators, Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and Georges Picot of France.

Aiming to change the outcome of WWI
These differences were buried, first under the Arabs' struggle to eject the European powers, and later by the sweeping wave of Arab nationalism.

Brutality

In the period from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, and especially during the heydays of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser (from the Suez Crisis in 1956 to the end of the 1960s) Arab nationalism gave immense momentum to the idea that a united Arab world would dilute the socio-demographic differences between its populations.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Arab world's strong men - for example, Hafez Assad and Saddam Hussein in the Levant and Col Muammar Gaddafi in North Africa - suppressed the differences, often using immense brutality.

But the tensions and aspirations that these differences gave rise to neither disappeared nor were diluted. When cracks started to appear in these countries - first by the gradual disappearance of these strong men, later by several Arab republics gradually becoming hereditary fiefdoms controlled by small groups of economic interests, and most recently after the 2011 uprisings - the old frictions, frustrations, and hopes that had been concealed for decades, came to the fore.

Identity struggle

The third problem was that the state system that was created after the World War One has exacerbated the Arabs' failure to address the crucial dilemma they have faced over the past century and half - the identity struggle between, on one hand nationalism and secularism, and on the other, Islamism (and in some cases Christianism).

The founders of the Arab liberal age - from the late 19th Century to the 1940s - created state institutions (for example a secular constitution in Tunisia in 1861 and the beginnings of a liberal democracy in Egypt in the inter-war period), and put forward a narrative that many social groups (especially in the middle classes) supported - but failed to weave the piousness, conservatism, and religious frame of reference of their societies into the ambitious social modernisation they had led.

And despite major advancements in industrialisation, the dramatic inequity between the upper middle classes and the vast majority of the populations continued. The strong men of Arab nationalism championed - with immense popular support - a different (socialist, and at times militarist) narrative, but at the expense of civil and political freedoms.

And for the past four decades, the Arab world has lacked any national project or serious attempt at confronting the contradictions in its social fabric.

The new generation

That state structure was poised for explosion, and the changing demographics proved to be the trigger. Over the past four decades, the Arab world has doubled its population, to over 330 million people, two-thirds of them are under 35 years old.

This is a generation that has inherited acute socio-economic and political problems that it did not contribute to, and yet has been living its consequences - from education quality, job availability, economic prospects, to the perception of the future.

At core, the wave of Arab uprisings that commenced in 2011 is this generation's attempt at changing the consequences of the state order that began in the aftermath of World War One.
The writer is the author of Egypt on the Brink.
This currently unfolding transformation entails the promise of a new generation searching for a better future, and the peril of a wave of chaos that could engulf the region for several years.

The Making of the Arab World, presented by Tarek Osman, can be found on the BBC Radio 4 website

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The map that caused a century of trouble

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A map marked with crude chinagraph-pencil in the second decade of the 20th Century shows the ambition - and folly - of the 100-year old British-French plan that helped create the modern-day Middle East. Straight lines make uncomplicated borders.

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https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/mobile/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005175https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/mobile/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005175

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Zionism

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also called:

Gulf War

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Persian Gulf War, (1990-91), international conflict that was triggered by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, ordered the invasion and occupation of Kuwait with the apparent aim of acquiring that nation's large oil reserves, canceling a large debt Iraq owed Kuwait, and expanding Iraqi power in the region. It was the first major international crisis of the post- Cold War era, and the U.S.-led response would set important precedents for the use of military force over subsequent decades.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait

Tensions in the Persian Gulf began to build during the summer of 1990, with Iraq adopting an increasingly belligerent tone toward both Kuwait and members of its ruling Ṣabāḥ dynasty. On July 17 Saddam launched a televised verbal attack on Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates for exceeding the oil export quotas that had been set for them by OPEC. A day later Kuwait was accused of stealing oil from the Al-Rumaylah oil field, which straddles the border between Iraq and Kuwait. As criticism mounted, talks between the two countries in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, broke down on August 1. Hours later, early on August 2, Iraqi armoured divisions invaded Kuwait despite personal assurances from Saddam to Egyptian Pres. Hosni Mubarak that Iraq would avoid using force to press its claims against Kuwait.

Active resistance to the invasion lasted about 14 hours, during which time an estimated 4,200 Kuwaitis were killed in combat. Although remnants of Kuwait's 20,000-man army maintained a spirited defense over the next 36 hours, the Iraqi takeover of Kuwait city was completed with little difficulty. The fiercest opposition came at Dasman Palace, the royal residence of emir Sheikh Jābir al-Aḥmad al-Jābir al-Ṣabāḥ, which only yielded to the Iraqis after hours of bitter hand-to-hand fighting in which the emir's younger brother, Sheikh Fahad, was killed. At 11:11 am on August 3 Kuwait Radio fell silent with these words: "Arabs, brothers, beloved brothers, Muslims. Hurry to our aid." Sheikh Jābir, his cabinet, and senior members of the Ṣabāḥ family fled to Saudi Arabia to establish a government-in-exile. Crown prince Saʿd al-ʿAbd Allāh al-Sālim al-Ṣabāḥ quickly emerged as the dominant personality within this group, and finance minister Sheikh Ali al-Khalifah al-Ṣabāḥ took control of most of Kuwait's overseas assets, which amounted to some $100 billion. As many as 350,000 Kuwaiti refugees also fled south into Saudi Arabia.

On August 4 Iraqi occupation forces appointed Col. Alaa Hussain Ali as head of state of Kuwait; he was backed by a nine-member cabinet of "revolutionaries" who, Iraq said, were responsible for ousting remnants of the previous regime. On August 8 the Iraqis installed the Provisional Free Government of Kuwait, a body that was established to give credence to Iraq's dubious claim that the invasion was conducted at the request of Kuwaitis opposed to the Ṣabāḥ dynasty. On August 10 foreign diplomats were given a two-week deadline to close their embassies in Kuwait and move to Baghdad. On August 28 Saddam declared that Kuwait was now the 19th province of Iraq. Place-names were "Iraqized," and the southern Iraqi province of Al-Baṣrah was extended to include the Kuwait side of the Al-Rumaylah oil field as well as the islands of Būbiyān and Al-Warbah at the head of the Shaṭṭ Al-ʿArab waterway.

During the occupation of Kuwait, Iraqi troops began a systematic campaign of pillage, rape, torture, murder, and theft of Kuwait's economic assets. The Iraqi occupation government announced the death penalty for looters but condoned the removal to Baghdad of medical equipment from hospitals, the assets of the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, treasures of Islamic art from the Kuwait National Museum, and $1.6 billion in gold and cash from the Central Bank of Kuwait. Amnesty International reported that Iraqi soldiers had carried out hundreds of extrajudicial killings and taken several thousand Kuwaiti civilians prisoner. One widely circulated story about Iraqi soldiers removing newborn infants from hospital incubators was eventually debunked as a fabrication, but the truth did not emerge until long after the conflict had been settled.

The international response to the invasion of Kuwait

The diplomatic response to the invasion was swift. On August 6 the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 661, which imposed a ban on all trade with Iraq and called on UN member countries to protect the assets of the legitimate government of Kuwait. A day later the first U.S. troops were sent to Saudi Arabia, while Mubarak invited Arab leaders to Cairo for an emergency summit. On August 10, 12 of the 21 Arab League countries passed a resolution condemning Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and endorsing the UN resolution. Among those Arab states sympathetic to Iraq were Jordan, Yemen, Sudan, Tunisia, and Algeria as well as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The key supporters of Kuwait, apart from Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states, were Egypt and Syria, whose leaders had improved mutual relations in the months preceding the invasion. Saddam countered the Arab League resolution on August 12 by declaring that "all occupation problems, and those portrayed as occupation problems in the Middle East, can be resolved simultaneously and on the same principles and bases as should be set out by the UN Security Council." Saddam also used the crisis as an unlikely opportunity to conclude peace with Iran. On August 15 he announced that Iraq was ready to accept Iranian terms for the settlement of the Iran-Iraq War: the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from occupied Iranian territory, resolution of the Shaṭṭ Al-ʿArab waterway dispute, and a prisoner-of-war exchange. The Soviet Union, at first guarded in its response to the invasion, on September 3 expressed its support for the U.S. military presence in the Gulf.

More than 600,000 expatriates, including some 7,000 Western nationals, remained in Kuwait after the invasion, having been barred from leaving the country by Iraqi occupation authorities. The Iraqi regime began rounding up hundreds of Westerners and holding some of them at strategic military and industrial sites as "human shields" in the event of attack. On August 28, the same day that Iraq declared that it had annexed Kuwait, Saddam said that women and children would be allowed to leave. The plight of the remaining hostages resulted in a procession of Western politicians and celebrities to Baghdad. Among those appealing for the release of the hostages were former British prime minister Edward Heath, Labour politician Tony Benn, American heavyweight boxing champ Muhammad Ali, and British singer-songwriter Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens). In a sudden and dramatic move, on December 6 Saddam announced that all remaining hostages would be released. Although this put the Iraqi government in compliance with Security Council Resolution 674-which demanded that "Iraqi authorities and occupying forces immediately cease and desist from taking third State nationals hostage"-there remained the matter of Iraq's continued occupation of Kuwait and the potential threat to Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer and exporter.

Operation Desert Shield

Saddam's conquest of Kuwait had been achieved in short order, and he seemed poised to continue his military push into Saudi Arabia. Conquering Saudi Arabia would give Saddam control of more than 40 percent of the world's oil reserves as well as two of the holiest sites in the Islamic world, Mecca and Medina. With Iraqi troops on the Saudi border, King Fahd, in an unprecedented move, invited Western and Arab forces to deploy in the kingdom in support of the Saudi defense forces. The U.S. immediately dispatched elements of its Rapid Deployment Force. This included the "ready brigade" of the 82nd Airborne Division, the U.S. Marine Corps First Expeditionary Force, and two squadrons of U.S. Air Force F-15s. Two U.S. Navy carrier battle groups were also deployed to the Persian Gulf. The U.S. ground contingent was a relatively lightly equipped "trip wire" force; even if Saudi Arabian and other Arab armies had rushed to the area, it is unlikely that the hastily assembled defenders could have repelled a concerted Iraqi attack. Nevertheless, this initial U.S. deployment deterred Saddam from attacking Saudi Arabia and initiating a war with the U.S. and its allies.

On paper, the Iraqi military looked formidable. Its army was the fifth largest in the world, with some 950,000 personnel, 5,500 main battle tanks, 10,000 additional armoured vehicles, and nearly 4,000 artillery pieces. The Iraqi air force consisted of some 40,000 personnel and 689 combat aircraft. Both the army and air force had extensive combat experience from the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), including the large-scale use of chemical weapons. Iraq was believed to also have a significant stockpile of biological agents, most notably weaponized botulinum toxin and anthrax. In addition, Iraq had a force of modified Soviet-made Scud surface-to-surface missiles mounted on mobile launchers. These missiles had an effective range of 185 miles (300 km) and were capable of carrying a payload of conventional explosives as well as chemical or biological weapons.

Over the following months the U.S. military carried out its largest overseas deployment since World War II. By mid-November the U.S. had more than 240,000 troops in the Gulf and another 200,000 on the way, and the United Kingdom had sent more than 25,000, Egypt 20,000, and France 5,500. Some 25 other countries, including Canada, Syria, Bangladesh, and Morocco, had committed troops and weapons to the military buildup that was designated Operation Desert Shield. On November 29, 1990, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 678 by a vote of 12 to 2, sanctioning the use of force if the Iraqis had not left Kuwait by January 15, 1991. Only Cuba and Yemen voted against the resolution, with China abstaining. This was the first UN authorization of the use of force since 1950, when the Security Council approved military action against North Korea after its unprovoked attack on South Korea. With this resolution in place, the U.S. offered to engage in a dialogue with Saddam to extend the possibility of a peaceful settlement based on a timely Iraqi withdrawal.

Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, had advised Bush that if the U.S. wished to use its military to liberate Kuwait, several conditions needed to be fulfilled. The force employed must be overwhelming and utilized as a last resort, the goals must be clear and accompanied by a coherent exit strategy, and the operation must have broad domestic and international support. In time these criteria would come to be known as the Powell Doctrine. Powell had served as a field-grade officer in Vietnam, the last major U.S. conflict, and had witnessed the dangers of "mission creep"-that is, the growth of a military operation beyond its original stated goals without a clear end. The Powell Doctrine was intended to prevent a repeat of the Vietnam War, and, as it was implemented in the Persian Gulf War, it was wholly successful.

Another legacy of Vietnam was a debate over the war-making powers of the president of the United States. Article I of the U.S. Constitution gives only Congress the power "to declare war" and "to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions." Yet Article II says that the president is "commander in chief of the Army and Navy" and has the power, with the consent of the Senate, to make treaties with other nations. That ambiguity came to a head in 1973 during the Vietnam War, when Congress-over Pres. Richard Nixon's veto-passed the War Powers Act. That legislation required the executive branch to consult with Congress prior to major deployments of U.S. forces, but it was generally resisted or outright ignored by subsequent presidents. Bush, for his part, eventually sought congressional approval for the U.S. military operation in the Persian Gulf. On January 12, 1991, the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution was passed by the House (250-183) and the Senate (52-47). It cited UN Security Council Resolution 678 as its casus belli, and Bush signed the measure into law on January 14. The UN deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait was the following day.

Casualties, Kuwaiti oil fires, and Gulf War syndrome

There are no official figures for the Iraqi military operation, leading to vastly differing figures of combatants and casualties. Estimates of the number of Iraqi troops in the Kuwait theatre range from 180,000 to 630,000, and estimates of Iraqi military deaths range from 8,000 to 50,000. Allied casualties, by contrast, were remarkably light. Just 147 U.S. personnel and 47 British troops were killed in action; for the duration of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, U.S. noncombat deaths actually exceeded combat fatalities in the Kuwaiti theatre. Approximately 1,000 coalition troops were wounded.

During their retreat from Kuwait, Iraqi troops set fire to oil storage installations and more than 700 of Kuwait's 950 oil wells, creating an environmental disaster that affected the entire region. A pall of dense smoke covered Kuwait, causing a slight fall in temperature and blotting out sunlight in Kuwait city. The fires emitted a toxic mixture of hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide. Below the smoke, pollution was severe, with the number of soot particles about 1,000 times higher than normal. In nearby Bahrain May temperatures were 7 °F (4 °C) cooler than normal. Particles from the fires were detected more than 600 miles (965 km) away, and the massive injection of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere caused acid rain to fall as far away as the Black Sea and Pakistan. By November the fires, which had consumed about six million barrels of oil per day, had been extinguished, and temperatures and air quality in the area returned to normal values.

Exposure to the fires was proposed as one possible cause of Gulf War syndrome, a cluster of illnesses that were reported by some veterans of the conflict. As many as 300,000 of the 700,000 troops who served in the Middle East during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm complained of a variety of symptoms that included fatigue, anxiety, muscle and joint pain, headaches, memory loss, and post-traumatic stress reactions. While these claims were initially dismissed as psychological in nature, Gulf War veterans continued to insist that they were experiencing an array of chronic and debilitating maladies. Researchers eventually concluded that Gulf War syndrome was likely caused by exposure to a class of extremely toxic chemicals known as anticholinesterases. Anticholinesterases to which Gulf War veterans could have been exposed include nerve toxins such as sarin, the prophylactic anti-nerve-toxin drug carbamate pyridostigmine bromide, and organophosphate- or carbamate-containing insecticides. A 2016 study by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs found that veterans of the Persian Gulf War continued to report poorer health than those who had served in the military at the same time but had not deployed.

Aftermath and Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction

The terms of the peace were, inter alia, that Iraq recognize Kuwait's sovereignty and that it divest itself of all weapons of mass destruction-i.e., nuclear, biological, and chemical-and all missiles with ranges exceeding 90 miles (150 km). Pending complete compliance, economic sanctions would continue.

In the aftermath of Iraq's defeat, Kurds in the north of the country and Shiʿis in the south rose in a rebellion that was suppressed by Saddam with great brutality. These actions prompted the allies to prohibit Iraqi aircraft from operating in designated "no-fly" zones over these areas. As the other allies gradually left the coalition, U.S. and British aircraft continued to patrol Iraqi skies, and UN inspectors sought to guarantee that all illicit weapons were destroyed. Iraq's failure to cooperate with inspectors led in 1998 to a brief resumption of hostilities (Operation Desert Fox). Iraq thereafter refused to readmit inspectors into the country, and regular exchanges of fire between Iraqi forces and U.S. and British aircraft over the no-fly zones continued into the 21st century. In 2002 the United States sponsored a new UN resolution calling for the return of weapons inspectors, who then reentered Iraq in November. Member states of the UN Security Council, however, differed in their opinion of the degree to which Iraq had cooperated with inspections.

On March 17, 2003, the United States and the United Kingdom, which had begun to mass troops on Iraq's border, dispensed with further negotiations, and U.S. Pres. George W. Bush-seeking no further UN endorsement-issued an ultimatum demanding that Saddam step down from power and leave Iraq within 48 hours or face war; he even suggested that if Saddam did leave Iraq, U.S. forces might still be necessary to stabilize the region and to hunt for weapons of mass destruction. When Saddam refused to leave, U.S. and allied forces launched an attack on Iraq on March 20 and thus began what became known as the Iraq War.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Michael Ray.

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Persian Gulf War | Summary, Dates, Combatants, Casualties, Syndrome, Map, & Facts

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Persian Gulf War, conflict (1990-91) triggered by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait with the apparent aim of acquiring its large oil reserves, canceling a large debt owed to Kuwait, and expanding Iraqi regional power. A U.S.-led invasion ended Iraq's occupation and required Iraq to divest of its weapons of mass destruction.

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Livvi philpot

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In 1879, German journalist Wilhelm Marr originated the term antisemitism, denoting the hatred of Jews, and also hatred of various liberal, cosmopolitan, and international political trends of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often associated with Jews. The trends under attack included equal civil rights, constitutional democracy, free trade, socialism, finance capitalism, and pacifism.

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First we have to know what the holocost is

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View of the Pegnitz River (c. 1900) with the Grand Synagogue of Nuremberg, destroyed in 1938 during the November pogroms

Jews have lived in Europe for more than two thousand years. Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for killing Jesus. In the nineteenth century many European countries granted full citizenship rights to Jews in hopes that they would assimilate. By the early twentieth century, most Jews in central and western Europe were well integrated into society, while in eastern Europe, where emancipation had arrived later, many Jews still lived in small towns, spoke Yiddish, and practiced Orthodox Judaism. Political antisemitism positing the existence of a Jewish question and usually an international Jewish conspiracy emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century due to the rise of nationalism in Europe and industrialization that increased economic conflicts between Jews and non-Jews. Some scientists began to categorize humans into different races and argued that there was a life or death struggle between them. Many racists argued that Jews were a separate racial group alien to Europe.

The turn of the twentieth century saw a major effort to establish a German colonial empire overseas, leading to the Herero and Nama genocide and subsequent racial apartheid regime in South West Africa. World War I (1914-1918) intensified nationalist and racist sentiments in Germany and other European countries. Jews in eastern Europe were targeted by widespread pogroms. Germany had two million war dead and lost a substantial territory; opposition to the postwar settlement united Germans across the political spectrum. The military promoted the untrue but compelling idea that, rather than being defeated on the battlefield, Germany had been stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews.

The Nazi Party was founded in the wake of the war, and its ideology is often cited as the main factor explaining the Holocaust. From the beginning, the Nazis-not unlike other nation-states in Europe-dreamed of a world without Jews, whom they identified as "the embodiment of everything that was wrong with modernity". The Nazis defined the German nation as a racial community unbounded by Germany's physical borders and sought to purge it of racially foreign and socially deficient elements. The Nazi Party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, were also obsessed with reversing Germany's territorial losses and acquiring additional Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe for colonization. These ideas appealed to many Germans. The Nazis promised to protect European civilization from the Soviet threat. Hitler believed that Jews controlled the Soviet Union, as well as the Western powers, and were plotting to destroy Germany.

Amidst a worldwide economic depression and political fragmentation, the Nazi Party rapidly increased its support, reaching a high of 37 percent in mid-1932 elections, by campaigning on issues such as anticommunism and economic recovery. Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933 in a backroom deal supported by right-wing politicians. Within months, all other political parties were banned, the regime seized control of the media, tens of thousands of political opponents-especially communists-were arrested, and a system of camps for extrajudicial imprisonment was set up. The Nazi regime cracked down on crime and social outsiders-such as Roma and Sinti, homosexual men, and those perceived as workshy-through a variety of measures, including imprisonment in concentration camps. The Nazis forcibly sterilized 400,000 people and subjected others to forced abortions for real or supposed hereditary illnesses.

Although the Nazis sought to control every aspect of public and private life, Nazi repression was directed almost entirely against groups perceived as outside the national community. Most Germans had little to fear provided they did not oppose the new regime. The new regime built popular support through economic growth, which partly occurred through state-led measures such as rearmament. The annexations of Austria (1938), Sudetenland (1938), and Bohemia and Moravia (1939) also increased the Nazis' popular support. Germans were inundated with propaganda both against Jews and other groups targeted by the Nazis.

Persecution of Jews

The roughly 500,000 German Jews made up less than 1 percent of the country's population in 1933. They were wealthier on average than other Germans and largely assimilated, although a minority were recent immigrants from eastern Europe. Various German government agencies, Nazi Party organizations, and local authorities instituted about 1,500 anti-Jewish laws. In 1933, Jews were banned or restricted from several professions and the civil service. After hounding the German Jews out of public life by the end of 1934, the regime passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. The laws reserved full citizenship rights for those of "German or related blood", restricted Jews' economic activity, and criminalized new marriages and sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. Jews were defined as those with three or four Jewish grandparents; many of those with partial Jewish descent were classified as Mischlinge, with varying rights. The regime also sought to segregate Jews with a view to their ultimate disappearance from the country. Jewish students were gradually forced out of the school system. Some municipalities enacted restrictions governing where Jews were allowed to live or conduct business. In 1938 and 1939, Jews were barred from additional occupations, and their businesses were expropriated to force them out of the economy.

View of the old synagogue in Aachen after its destruction during Kristallnacht

Anti-Jewish violence, largely locally organized by members of Nazi Party institutions, took primarily non-lethal forms from 1933 to 1939. Jewish stores, especially in rural areas, were often boycotted or vandalized. As a result of local and popular pressure, many small towns became entirely free of Jews and as many as a third of Jewish businesses may have been forced to close. Anti-Jewish violence was even worse in areas annexed by Nazi Germany. On 9-10 November 1938, the Nazis organized Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), a nationwide pogrom. Over 7,500 Jewish shops (out of 9,000) were looted, more than 1,000 synagogues were damaged or destroyed, at least 90 Jews were murdered, and as many as 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, although many were released within weeks. German Jews were levied a special tax that raised more than 1 billion Reichsmarks (RM).[c]

The Nazi government wanted to force all Jews to leave Germany. By the end of 1939, most Jews who could emigrate had already done so; those who remained behind were disproportionately elderly, poor, or female and could not obtain a visa. The plurality, around 110,000, left for the United States, while smaller numbers emigrated to South America, Shanghai, Mandatory Palestine, and South Africa. Germany collected emigration taxes of nearly 1 billion RM,[c] mostly from Jews. The policy of forced emigration continued into 1940.

Besides Germany, a significant number of other European countries abandoned democracy for some kind of authoritarian or fascist rule. Many countries, including Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, passed antisemitic legislation in the 1930s and 1940s. In October 1938, Germany deported many Polish Jews in response to a Polish law that enabled the revocation of citizenship for Polish Jews living abroad.

Germany and its allies Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Italy invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Although the war was launched more for strategic than ideological reasons, what Hitler saw as an apocalyptic battle against the forces of Jewish Bolshevism was to be carried out as a war of extermination with complete disregard for the laws and customs of war. A quick victory was expected and was planned to be followed a massive demographic engineering project to remove 31 million people and replace them with German settlers. To increase the speed of conquest the Germans planned to feed their army by looting, exporting additional food to Germany, and to terrorize the local inhabitants with preventative killings. The Germans foresaw that the invasion would cause a food shortfall and planned the mass starvation of Soviet cities and some rural areas. Although the starvation policy was less successful than planners hoped, the residents of some cities, particularly in Ukraine, and besieged Leningrad, as well as the Jewish ghettos, endured human-made famine, during which millions of people died of starvation.

Soviet prisoners of war in the custody of the German Army were intended to die in large numbers. Sixty percent-3.3 million people-died, primarily of starvation, making them the second largest group of victims of Nazi mass killing after European Jews. Jewish prisoners of war and commissars were systematically executed. About a million civilians were killed by the Nazis during anti-partisan warfare, including more than 300,000 in Belarus. From 1942 onwards, the Germans and their allies targeted villages suspected of supporting the partisans, burning them and killing or expelling their inhabitants. During these operations, nearby small ghettos were liquidated and their inhabitants shot. By 1943, anti-partisan operations aimed for the depopulation of large areas of Belarus. Jews and those unfit for work were typically shot on the spot with others deported. Although most of those killed were not Jews, anti-partisan warfare often led to the deaths of Jews.

Mass shootings of Jews

At least 3,000 Jews were killed during the 1941 Lviv pogroms, mainly by local Ukrainians.

The systematic murder of Jews began in the Soviet Union in 1941. During the invasion, many Jews were conscripted into the Red Army. Out of 10 or 15 million Soviet civilians who fled eastwards to the Soviet interior, 1.6 million were Jews. Local inhabitants killed as many as 50,000 Jews in pogroms in Latvia, Lithuania, eastern Poland, Ukraine, and the Romanian borderlands. Although German forces tried to incite pogroms, their role in causing violence is controversial. Romanian soldiers killed tens of thousands of Jews from Odessa by April 1942.

Prior to the invasion, the Einsatzgruppen were reorganized in preparation for mass killings and instructed to shoot Soviet officials and Jewish state and party employees. The shootings were justified on the basis of Jews' supposed central role in supporting the communist system, but it was not initially envisioned to kill all Soviet Jews. The occupiers relied on locals to identify Jews to be targeted. The first German mass killings targeted adult male Jews who had worked as civil servants or in jobs requiring education. Tens of thousands were shot by the end of July. The vast majority of civilian victims were Jews. In July and August Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS ( Schutzstaffel), made several visits to the death squads' zones of operation, relaying orders to kill more Jews. At this time, the killers began to murder Jewish women and children too. Executions peaked at 40,000 a month in Lithuania in August and September and in October and November reached their height in Belarus.

Shooting from behind became popular because killers did not have to look at their victims' faces and the dead were likely to fall into the grave.

The executions often took place a few kilometers from a town. Victims were rounded up and marched to the execution site, forced to undress, and shot into previously dug pits. The favored technique was a shot in the back of the neck with a single bullet. In the chaos, many victims were not killed by the gunfire but instead buried alive. Typically, the pits would be guarded after the execution but sometimes a few victims managed to escape afterwards. Executions were public spectacles and the victims' property was looted both by the occupiers and local inhabitants. Around 200 ghettos were established in the occupied Soviet Union, with many existing only briefly before their inhabitants were executed. A few large ghettos such as Vilna, Kovno, Riga, Białystok, and Lwów lasted into 1943 because they became centers of production.

Victims of mass shootings included Jews deported from elsewhere. Besides Germany, Romania killed the largest number of Jews. Romania deported about 154,000-170,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina to ghettos in Transnistria from 1941 to 1943. Jews from Transnistria were also imprisoned in these ghettos, where the total death toll may have reached 160,000. Hungary expelled thousands of Carpathian Ruthenian and foreign Jews in 1941, who were shortly thereafter shot in Ukraine. At the beginning of September, all German Jews were required to wear a yellow star, and in October, Hitler decided to deport them to the east and ban emigration. Between mid-October and the end of 1941, 42,000 Jews from Germany and its annexed territories and 5,000 Romani people from Austria were deported to Łódź, Kovno, Riga, and Minsk. In late November, 5,000 German Jews were shot outside of Kovno and another 1,000 near Riga, but Himmler ordered an end to such massacres and some in the senior Nazi leadership voiced doubts about killing German Jews. Executions of German Jews in the Baltics resumed in early 1942.

After the expansion of killings to target the entire Soviet Jewish population, the 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen proved insufficient and Himmler mobilized 21 battalions of Order Police to assist them. In addition, Wehrmacht soldiers, Waffen-SS brigades, and local auxiliaries shot many Jews. By the end of 1941, more than 80 percent of the Jews in central Ukraine, eastern Belarus, Russia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been shot, but less than 25 percent of those living farther west where 900,000 remained alive. By the end of the war, around 1.5 to 2 million Jews were shot and as many as 225,000 Roma. The murderers found the executions distressing and logistically inconvenient, which influenced the decision to switch to other methods of killing.

Most historians agree that Hitler issued an explicit order to kill all Jews across Europe, but there is disagreement when. Some historians cite inflammatory statements by Hitler and other Nazi leaders as well as the concurrent mass shootings of Serbian Jews, plans for extermination camps in Poland, and the beginning of the deportation of German Jews as indicative of the final decision having been made before December 1941. Others argue that these policies were initiatives by local leaders and that the final decision was made later. On 5 December 1941, the Soviet Union launched its first major counteroffensive. On 11 December, Hitler declared war on the United States after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The next day, he told leading Nazi party officials, referring to his 1939 prophecy, "The world war is here; the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence."

It took the Nazis several months after this to organize a continent-wide genocide. Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), convened the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942. This high-level meeting was intended to coordinate anti-Jewish policy. The majority of Holocaust killings were carried out in 1942, with 20 or 25 percent of Holocaust victims dying before early 1942 and the same number surviving by the end of the year.

Extermination camps

Deportation to Chełmno

Gas vans developed from those used to kill mental patients since 1939 were assigned to the Einsatzgruppen and first used in November 1941; victims were forced into the van and killed with engine exhaust. The first extermination camp was Chełmno in the Wartheland, established on the initiative of the local civil administrator Arthur Greiser with Himmler's approval; it began operations in December 1941 using gas vans. In October 1941, Higher SS and Police Leader of Lublin Odilo Globocnik began work planning Belzec-the first purpose-built extermination camp to feature stationary gas chambers using carbon monoxide based on the previous Aktion T4 programme[205][206]-amid increasing talk among German administrators in Poland of large-scale murder of Jews in the General Governorate. In late 1941 in East Upper Silesia, Jews in forced-labor camps operated by the Schmelt Organization deemed "unfit for work" began to be sent in groups to Auschwitz where they were murdered. In early 1942, Zyklon B became the preferred killing method in extermination camps after gassing experiments were conducted on Russian POWs in late August 1941.[206]

The camps were located on rail lines to make it easier to transport Jews to their deaths, but in remote places to avoid notice. The stench caused by mass killing operations was noticeable to anyone nearby. Except in the deportations from western and central Europe, people were typically deported to the camps in overcrowded cattle cars. As many as 150 people were forced into a single boxcar. Many died en route, partly because of the low priority accorded to these transports. Shortage of rail transport sometimes led to postponement or cancellation of deportations. Upon arrival, the victims were robbed of their remaining possessions, forced to undress, had their hair cut, and were chased into the gas chamber. Death from the gas was agonizing and could take as long as 30 minutes. The gas chambers were primitive and sometimes malfunctioned. Some prisoners were shot because the gas chambers were not functioning. At other extermination camps, nearly everyone on a transport was killed on arrival, but at Auschwitz around 20-25 percent were separated out for labor, although many of these prisoners died later on through starvation, mass shooting, torture,[221] and medical experiments.[222]

Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka reported a combined revenue of RM 178.7 million from belongings stolen from their victims, far exceeding costs. Combined, the camps required the labor of less than 3,000 Jewish prisoners, 1,000 Trawniki men (largely Ukrainian auxiliaries), and very few German guards. About half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust died by poison gas. Thousands of Romani people were also murdered in the extermination camps. Prisoner uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibor meant that these camps were shut down earlier than envisioned.

Camp

Location

Number of Jews killed

Killing technology

Planning began

Mass gassing duration

Auschwitz II-Birkenau

900,000-1,000,000

Stationary gas chamber, hydrogen cyanide

September 1941
(built as POW camp)

February 1942-October 1944

Liquidation of the ghettos in Poland

Cumulative murders of Jews from the General Governorate at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka from January 1942 to February 1943

Plans to kill most of the Jews in the General Governorate were affected by various goals of the SS, military, and civil administration to reduce the amount of food consumed by Jews, enable a slight increase in rations to non-Jewish Poles, and combat the black market. In March 1942, killings began in Belzec, targeting Jews from Lublin who were not capable of work. This action reportedly reduced the black market and was deemed a success to be replicated elsewhere. By mid-1942, Nazi leaders decided to allow only 300,000 Jews to survive in the General Governorate by the end of the year for forced labor; for the most part, only those working in armaments production were spared. The majority of ghettos were liquidated in mass executions nearby, especially if they were not near a train station. Larger ghettos were more commonly liquidated during multiple deportations to extermination camps. During this campaign, 1.5 million Polish Jews were murdered in the largest killing operation of the Holocaust.

In order to reduce resistance, the ghetto would be raided without warning, usually in the early morning, and the extent of the operation would be concealed as long as possible. Trawniki men would cordon off the ghetto while the Order Police and Security Police carried out the action. In addition to local non-Jewish collaborators, the Jewish councils and Jewish ghetto police were often ordered to assist with liquidation actions, although these Jews were in most cases murdered later. Chaotic, capriciously executed selections determined who would be loaded onto the trains. Many Jews were shot during the action, often leaving ghettos strewn with corpses. Jewish forced laborers had to clean it up and collect any valuables from the victims.

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising became significant as a symbol of Jewish resistance against the Nazis.

The Warsaw Ghetto was cleared between 22 July and 12 September. Of the original population of 350,000 Jews, 250,000 were killed at Treblinka, 11,000 were deported to labor camps, 10,000 were shot in the ghetto, 35,000 were allowed to remain in the ghetto after a final selection, and around 20,000 or 25,000 managed to hide in the ghetto. Misdirection efforts convinced many Jews that they could avoid deportation until it was too late. During a six-week period beginning in August, 300,000 Jews from the Radom District were sent to Treblinka.

At the same time as the mass killing of Jews in the General Governorate, Jews who were in ghettos to the west and east were targeted. Tens of thousands of Jews were deported from ghettos in the Warthegau and East Upper Silesia to Chełmno and Auschwitz. 300,000 Jews-largely skilled laborers-were shot in Volhynia, Podolia, and southwestern Belarus. Deportations and mass executions in the Bialystok District and Galicia killed many Jews. Although there was practically no resistance in the General Governorate in 1942, some Soviet Jews improvised weapons, attacked those attempting to liquidate the ghetto, and set it on fire. These ghetto uprisings were only undertaken when the inhabitants began to believe that their death was certain. In 1943, larger uprisings in Warsaw, Białystok, and Glubokoje necessitated the use of heavy weapons. The uprising in Warsaw prompted the Nazi leadership to liquidate additional ghettos and labor camps in German-occupied Poland with their inhabitants massacred, such as the Wola Massacre, or deported to extermination camps for fear of additional Jewish resistance developing. Nevertheless, in early 1944, more than 70,000 Jews were performing forced labor in the General Governorate.

Deportations from elsewhere

Jews are deported from Würzburg, Germany to the Lublin District of the General Governorate, 25 April 1942.

Unlike the killing areas in the east, the deportation from elsewhere in Europe was centrally organized from Berlin, although it depended on the outcome of negotiations with allied governments and popular responses to deportation. Beginning in late 1941, local administrators responded to the deportation of Jews to their area by massacring local Jews in order to free up space in ghettos for the deportees. If the deported Jews did not die of harsh conditions, they were killed later in extermination camps. Jews deported to Auschwitz were initially entered into the camp; the practice of conducting selections and murdering many prisoners upon arrival began in July 1942. In May and June, German and Slovak Jews deported to Lublin began to be sent directly to extermination camps.

In Western Europe, almost all Jewish deaths occurred after deportation. The occupiers often relied on local policemen to arrest Jews, limiting the number who were deported. In 1942, nearly 100,000 Jews were deported from Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. Only 25 percent of the Jews in France were killed; most of them were either non-citizens or recent immigrants. The death rate in the Netherlands was higher than neighboring countries, which scholars have attributed to difficulty in hiding or increased collaboration of the Dutch police.

The German government sought the deportation of Jews from allied countries. The first to hand over its Jewish population was Slovakia, which arrested and deported about 58,000 Jews to Poland from March to October 1942. The Independent State of Croatia had already shot or killed in concentration camps the majority of its Jewish population (along with a larger number of Serbs), and later deported several thousand Jews in 1942 and 1943. Bulgaria deported 11,000 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Greece and Yugoslavia, who were murdered at Treblinka, but declined to allow the deportation of Jews from its prewar territory. Romania and Hungary did not send any Jews, which were the largest surviving populations after 1942. Prior to the German occupation of Italy in September 1943, there were no serious attempt to deport Italian Jews, and Italy refused to allow the deportation of Jews in many Italian-occupied areas. Nazi Germany did not attempt the destruction of the Finnish Jews and the North African Jews living under French or Italian rule.

Woman with Ostarbeiter badge at work at IG-Farbenwerke in Auschwitz

Beginning in 1938-especially in Germany and its annexed territories-many Jews were drafted into forced-labor camps and segregated work details. These camps were often of a temporary nature and typically overseen by civilian authorities. Initially, mortality did not increase dramatically. After mid-1941, conditions for Jewish forced laborers drastically worsened and death rates increased; even private companies deliberately subjected workers to murderous conditions. Beginning in 1941 and increasingly as time went on, Jews capable of employment were separated from others-who were usually killed. They were typically employed in non-skilled jobs and could be replaced easily if non-Jewish workers were available, but those in skilled positions had a higher chance of survival. Although conditions varied widely between camps, Jewish forced laborers were typically treated worse than non-Jewish prisoners and suffered much higher mortality rates.

In mid-1943, Himmler sought to bring surviving Jewish forced laborers under the control of the SS in the concentration camp system.[d] Some of the forced-labor camps for Jews and some ghettos, such as Kovno, were designated concentration camps, while others were dissolved and surviving prisoners sent to a concentration camp. Despite many deaths, as many as 200,000 Jews survived the war inside the concentration camps. Although most Holocaust victims were never imprisoned in a concentration camp, the image of these camps is a popular symbol of the Holocaust.

Including the Soviet prisoners of war, 13 million people were brought to Germany for forced labor. The largest nationalities were Soviet and Polish and they were the worst-treated groups except for Roma and Jews. Soviet and Polish forced laborers endured inadequate food and medical treatment, long hours, and abuse by employers. Hundreds of thousands died. Many others were forced to work for the occupiers without leaving their country of residence. Some of Germany's allies, including Slovakia and Hungary, agreed to deport Jews to protect non-Jews from German demands for forced labor. East European women were also kidnapped, via lapanka, to serve as sex slaves of German soldiers in military and camp brothels[325][326][327] despite the prohibition of relationships, including fraternization, between German and foreign workers,[328][329] which imposed the penalty of imprisonment[329] and death.[330][331]

Continuing killings

Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia, annexed by Hungary in 1938, on the selection ramp at Auschwitz II in May or June 1944. Men are lined up to the right, women and children to the left. About 25 percent were selected for work and the rest gassed.

After German military defeats in 1943, it became increasingly evident that Germany would lose the war. In early 1943, 45,000 Jews were deported from German-occupied northern Greece, primarily Salonica, to Auschwitz, where nearly all were killed. After Italy switched sides in late 1943, Germany deported several thousand Jews from Italy and the former Italian occupation zones of France, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece, with limited success. Attempts to continue deportations in Western Europe after 1942 often failed because of Jews going into hiding and the increasing recalcitrance of local authorities. Most Danish Jews escaped to Sweden with the help of the Danish resistance in the face of a half-hearted German deportation effort in late 1943. Additional killings in 1943 and 1944 eliminated all remaining ghettos and most surviving Jews in Eastern Europe. Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were shut down and destroyed.

The largest murder action after 1942 was that against the Hungarian Jews. After the German invasion of Hungary in 1944, the Hungarian government cooperated closely in the deportation of 437,000 Jews in eight weeks, mostly to Auschwitz. The expropriation of Jewish property was useful to achieve Hungarian economic goals and sending the Jews as forced laborers avoided the need to send non-Jewish Hungarians. Those who survived the selection were forced to provide construction and manufacturing labor as part of a last-ditch effort to increase the production of fighter aircraft. Although the Nazis' goal of eliminating any Jewish population from Germany had largely been achieved in 1943, it was reversed in 1944 as a result of the importation of these Jews for labor.

Death marches and liberation

In January 1945, more than 700,000 people were imprisoned in the concentration camp system, of whom as many as a third died before the end of the war. At this time, most concentration camp prisoners were Soviet and Polish civilians, either arrested for real or supposed resistance or for attempting to escape forced labor. The death marches led to the breakdown of supplies for the camps that continued to exist, causing additional deaths. Although there was no systematic killing of Jews during the death marches, around 70,000 to 100,000 Jews died in the last months of the war. Many of the death march survivors ended up in other concentration camps that were liberated in 1945 during the Western Allied invasion of Germany. The liberators found piles of corpses that they had to bulldoze into mass graves. Some survivors were freed there and others had been liberated by the Red Army during its march westwards.

Holocaust deaths as an approximate percentage of the 1939 Jewish population:

The deadliest phase of the Holocaust was Operation Reinhard, which was marked by the introduction of extermination camps. Roughly two million Jews were killed from March 1942 to November 1943. Around 1.47 million Jews were murdered in just 100 days from July to October 1942, a rate approximately 83% higher than the commonly suggested figure for the Rwandan genocide.[397]

Separate Nazi persecutions killed a similar or larger number of non-Jewish civilians and POWs; estimated by Gerlach at 6 to 8 million, at more than 10 million by Gilbert[398] and at over 11 million by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[399] In some countries, such as Hungary, Jews were a majority of civilian deaths; in Poland, they were either a majority or about half. In other countries such as the Soviet Union, France, Greece, and Yugoslavia, non-Jewish civilian losses outnumbered Jewish deaths.

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Jews have lived in Europe for more than two thousand years. Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for killing Jesus. In the nineteenth century many European countries granted full citizenship rights to Jews in hopes that they would assimilate.

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Pressured out of their homes in the Asian steppes by the Mongols, the nomadic Turkish tribes converted to Islam during the eighth and ninth centuries. By the tenth century, one of the Turkish tribes, the Seljuks, had become a significant power in the Islamic world and had adopted a settled life that included Islamic orthodoxy, a central administration, and taxation. However, many other Turkish groups remained nomadic and, pursuing the gazi tradition, sought to conquer land for Islam and to acquire war booty for themselves. This led them into conflict with the Seljuk Turks, and to pacify the nomadic tribes, the Seljuks directed them to the eastern domain of the Byzantine Empire, in Anatolia. The tribe known as the Ottomans arose from one of the smaller emirates established in northwestern Anatolia after 1071. The dynasty was named after Osman Gazi (1259-1326), who began to expand his kingdom into the Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor, moving his capital to Bursa in 1326.

The political and geographical entity governed by the Muslim Ottoman Turks. Their empire was centered in present-day Turkey, and extended its influence into southeastern Europe as well as the Middle East. Europe was only temporarily able to resist their advance: the turning point came at the Battle of Varna in 1444 when a European coalition army failed to stop the Turkish advance. Only Constantinople ( Istanbul) remained in Byzantine hands and its conquest in 1453 seemed inevitable after Varna. The Turks subsequently established an empire in Anatolia and southeastern Europe which lasted until the early twentieth century.

Although the Ottoman Empire is not considered a European kingdom per se, Ottoman expansion had a profound impact on a continent already stunned by the calamities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the Ottoman Turks must, therefore, be considered in any study of Europe in the late Middle Ages. The ease with which the Ottoman Empire achieved military victories led Western Europeans to fear that ongoing Ottoman success would collapse the political and social infrastructure of the West and bring about the downfall of Christendom. Such a momentous threat could not be ignored and the Europeans mounted crusades against the Ottomans in 1366, 1396, and 1444, but to no avail. The Ottomans continued to conquer new territories.

One of a number of Turkish tribes that migrated from the central Asian steppe, the Ottomans were initially a nomadic people who followed a primitive shamanistic religion. Contact with various settled peoples led to the introduction of Islam and under Islamic influence, the Turks acquired their greatest fighting tradition, that of the gazi warrior. Well trained and highly skilled, gazi warriors fought to conquer the infidel, acquiring land and riches in the process.

While the gazi warriors fought for Islam, the greatest military asset of the Ottoman Empire was the standing paid army of Christian soldiers, the Janissaries. Originally created in 1330 by Orhan Gazi, the janissaries were Christian captives from conquered territories. Educated in the Islamic faith and trained as soldiers, the janissaries were forced to provide annual tribute in the form of military service. To counter the challenges of the Gazi nobility, Murad I (1319-1389) transformed the new military force into the elite personal army of the Sultan. They were rewarded for their loyalty with grants of newly acquired land and janissaries quickly rose to fill the most important administrative offices of the Ottoman Empire.

During the early history of the Ottoman Empire, political factions within Byzantium employed the Ottoman Turks and the janissaries as mercenaries in their own struggles for imperial supremacy. In the 1340's, a usurper's request for Ottoman assistance in a revolt against the emperor provided the excuse for an Ottoman invasion of Thrace on the northern frontier of the Byzantine Empire. The conquest of Thrace gave the Ottomans a foothold in Europe from which future campaigns into the Balkans and Greece were launched and Adrianople ( Edirne) became the Ottoman capital in 1366. Over the next century, the Ottomans developed an empire that took in Anatolia and increasingly larger sections of Byzantine territories in Eastern Europe and Asia Minor.

Ottoman expansion into Europe was well underway in the late 14th century. Gallipoli was conquered in 1354 and a vast crusading army was crushed at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396. The disaster was so great that the knights of Western Europe were discouraged of launching a new expedition against the Turks. The appearance of the Tatars under Tamerlane early in the fifteenth century temporarily delayed Turkish advances but the Ottomans soon resumed attacks on Byzantium and Eastern Europe. A Hungarian - Polish army was decimated at Varna in 1444 by Murad II and Ottoman conquests were virtually unchecked during the reign of his son, Mehmed II the Conqueror (1432-1481).

Constantinople itself was captured in 1453, sending a shock wave across Europe, and its name was changed to Istanbul. With the fall of Byzantium, a wave of Byzantine refugees fled to the Latin West, carrying with them the classical and Hellenistic knowledge that provided additional impetus to the burgeoning humanism of the Renaissance.

Athens fell in 1456 and Belgrade narrowly escaped capture when a peasant army led by the Hungarian Janos Hunyadi held off a siege in the same year, nevertheless, Serbia, Bosnia, Wallachia, and the Khanate of Crimea were all under Ottoman control by 1478. The Turks commanded the Black Sea and the northern Aegean and many prime trade routes had been closed to European shipping. The Islamic threat loomed even larger when an Ottoman beachhead was established at Otranto in Italy in 1480.

Although the Turkish presence in Italy was short-lived, it appeared as if Rome itself must soon fall into Islamic hands. In 1529, the Ottomans had moved up the Danube and besieged Vienna. The siege was unsuccessful and the Turks began to retreat. Although the Ottomans continued to instill fear well into the 16th century, internal struggles began to deteriorate the once overwhelming military supremacy of the Ottoman Empire. The outcome of battles was no longer a foregone conclusion and Europeans began to score victories against the Turks.

Despite military success of their territorial expansion, there remained problems of organization and government within the Ottoman Empire. Murad II attempted to limit the influence of the nobility and the gazi by elevating faithful former slaves and janissaries to administrative positions. These administrators came to provide an alternative voice to that of the nobility and, as a result, Murad II and successive Sultans were able to play one faction against the other, a feature that came to typify the Ottoman Empire. The power of the janissaries often overrode a weak sultan and the elite military force occasionally acted as "king-makers".

Another weakness was that primogeniture was not used in Islam and the transference of power from a deceased sultan to his son was frequently disputed. If a sultan died without a male heir or if he left several sons, succession was violently contested. In the early period, to prevent ongoing rivalries, all male relatives of a newly crowned sultan were put to death. Later, however, the potential rivals were merely imprisoned for life. Some historians consider that this policy of imprisonment contributed to the decline of the Ottoman Empire as mentally unstable and politically inexperienced sultans were rescued from prison and placed upon the throne. Nevertheless, despite frequent disputes over succession, the Ottoman Empire managed to produce effective leaders in the late Middle Ages and a comprehensive government policy developed.

Despite the difficulties of succession and administrative control, the Ottomans had a number of advantages that contributed to their success, the enormous wealth of the Empire being the most significant asset. As the Ottoman Empire expanded, it acquired control of the trade routes to the East and many European powers, such as Venice and Genoa, paid great sums for the privilege of access to these routes.

Although the atrocities of the "Infidel Turk" struck fear into the hearts of all Christians in the late Middle Ages, in actuality, the Ottomans generally allowed religious groups to continue to practice their own faiths within the conquered territories. They also tended to preserve the established feudal institutions and, in many cases, permitted the co-existence of law codes to regulate the different ethnic and religious groups. Their administrative and governmental systems were well developed and highly effective and most lands under Ottoman control were well managed during this time.

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Pressured out of their homes in the Asian steppes by the Mongols, the nomadic Turkish tribes converted to Islam during the eighth and ninth centuries. By the tenth century, one of the Turkish tribes, the Seljuks, had become a significant power in the Islamic world and had adopted a settled life that included Islamic orthodoxy, a central administration, and taxation.

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The history of antisemitism - defined as hostile actions or discrimination against Jews as a religious or ethnic group - goes back many centuries; antisemitism has been called "the longest hatred". Jerome Chanes identifies six stages in the historical development of antisemitism:

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Maps-of-War is a multimedia site dedicated to producing diverse, creative visuals that enhance our understanding of war and its history.

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http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/oct/12/afghanistan-war-simple-explanation/http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/oct/12/afghanistan-war-simple-explanation/

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On May 14, 1948, in Tel Aviv, Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaims the State of Israel, establishing the first Jewish state in 2,000 years. Ben-Gurion became Israel's first premier.

In the distance, the rumble of guns could be heard from fighting that broke out between Jews and Arabs immediately following the British army withdrawal earlier that day. Egypt launched an air assault against Israel that evening. Despite a blackout in Tel Aviv-and the expected Arab invasion-Jews celebrated the birth of their new nation, especially after word was received that the United States had recognized the Jewish state. At midnight, the State of Israel officially came into being upon termination of the British mandate in Palestine.

Modern Israel has its origins in the Zionism movement, established in the late 19th century by Jews in the Russian Empire who called for the establishment of a territorial Jewish state after enduring persecution. In 1896, Jewish-Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl published an influential political pamphlet called The Jewish State, which argued that the establishment of a Jewish state was the only way of protecting Jews from anti-Semitism. Herzl became the leader of Zionism, convening the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897. Ottoman-controlled Palestine, the original home of the Jews, was chosen as the most desirable location for a Jewish state, and Herzl unsuccessfully petitioned the Ottoman government for a charter.

After the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, growing numbers of Eastern European and Russian Jews began to immigrate to Palestine, joining the few thousand Jews who had arrived earlier. The Jewish settlers insisted on the use of Hebrew as their spoken language. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, Britain took over Palestine. In 1917, Britain issued the " Balfour Declaration," which declared its intent to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Although protested by the Arab states, the Balfour Declaration was included in the British mandate over Palestine, which was authorized by the League of Nations in 1922. Because of Arab opposition to the establishment of any Jewish state in Palestine, British rule continued throughout the 1920s and '30s.

Beginning in 1929, Arabs and Jews openly fought in Palestine, and Britain attempted to limit Jewish immigration as a means of appeasing the Arabs. As a result of the Holocaust in Europe, many Jews illegally entered Palestine during World War II. Jewish groups employed terrorism against British forces in Palestine, which they thought had betrayed the Zionist cause. At the end of World War II, in 1945, the United States took up the Zionist cause. Britain, unable to find a practical solution, referred the problem to the United Nations, which in November 1947 voted to partition Palestine.

The Jews were to possess more than half of Palestine, although they made up less than half of Palestine's population. The Palestinian Arabs, aided by volunteers from other countries, fought the Zionist forces, but by May 14, 1948, the Jews had secured full control of their U.N.-allocated share of Palestine and also some Arab territory. On May 14, Britain withdrew with the expiration of its mandate, and the State of Israel was proclaimed. The next day, forces from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded.

The Israelis, though less well equipped, managed to fight off the Arabs and then seize key territory, such as Galilee, the Palestinian coast, and a strip of territory connecting the coastal region to the western section of Jerusalem. In 1949, U.N.-brokered cease-fires left the State of Israel in permanent control of this conquered territory. The departure of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from Israel during the war left the country with a substantial Jewish majority.

During the third Arab-Israeli conflict-the Six-Day War of 1967-Israel again greatly increased its borders, capturing from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria the Old City of Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. In 1979, Israel and Egypt signed a historic peace agreement in which Israel returned the Sinai in exchange for Egyptian recognition and peace. Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) signed a major peace accord in 1993, which envisioned the gradual implementation of Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process moved slowly, however, and throughout the 21st century, major fighting between Israelis and Palestinians has resumed in Israel and the occupied territories.

Fact Check

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State of Israel proclaimed | May 14, 1948 | HISTORY

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On May 14, 1948, in Tel Aviv, Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaims the State of Israel, establishing the first Jewish state in 2,000 years. Ben-Gurion became Israel's first premier. In the distance, the rumble of guns could be heard from fighting that broke out between Jews and Arabs immediately following the British army withdrawal [...]

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Sara Nale

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United States foreign policy in the Middle East - Wikipedia

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United States foreign policy in the Middle East has its roots as early as the Barbary Wars in the first years of the U.S.'s existence, but became much more expansive after World War II. American policy during the Cold War tried to prevent Soviet Union influence by supporting anti-communist regimes and backing Israel against Soviet-sponsored Arab countries.

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Ottoman Empire, empire created by Turkish tribes that grew to be one of the most powerful states in the world in the 15th and 16th centuries. Its dynasty was founded by a prince (bey), Osman, after the Mongols defeated the Seljuqs at the end of the 13th century.

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NOTE TO READERS
"Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations" has been retired and is no longer maintained. For more information, please see the full notice.

On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. U.S. President Harry S. Truman recognized the new nation on the same day.

Eliahu Elath presenting ark to President Truman

Although the United States supported the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which favored the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had assured the Arabs in 1945 that the United States would not intervene without consulting both the Jews and the Arabs in that region. The British, who held a colonial mandate for Palestine until May 1948, opposed both the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine as well as unlimited immigration of Jewish refugees to the region. Great Britain wanted to preserve good relations with the Arabs to protect its vital political and economic interests in Palestine.

Soon after President Truman took office, he appointed several experts to study the Palestinian issue. In the summer of 1946, Truman established a special cabinet committee under the chairmanship of Dr. Henry F. Grady, an Assistant Secretary of State, who entered into negotiations with a parallel British committee to discuss the future of Palestine. In May 1946, Truman announced his approval of a recommendation to admit 100,000 displaced persons into Palestine and in October publicly declared his support for the creation of a Jewish state. Throughout 1947, the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine examined the Palestinian question and recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. On November 29, 1947 the United Nations adopted Resolution 181 (also known as the Partition Resolution) that would divide Great Britain's former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states in May 1948 when the British mandate was scheduled to end. Under the resolution, the area of religious significance surrounding Jerusalem would remain a corpus separatum under international control administered by the United Nations.

Although the United States backed Resolution 181, the U.S. Department of State recommended the creation of a United Nations trusteeship with limits on Jewish immigration and a division of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab provinces but not states. The State Department, concerned about the possibility of an increasing Soviet role in the Arab world and the potential for restriction by Arab oil producing nations of oil supplies to the United States, advised against U.S. intervention on behalf of the Jews. Later, as the date for British departure from Palestine drew near, the Department of State grew concerned about the possibility of an all-out war in Palestine as Arab states threatened to attack almost as soon as the UN passed the partition resolution.

Despite growing conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews and despite the Department of State's endorsement of a trusteeship, Truman ultimately decided to recognize the state Israel.

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Milestones: 1945-1952 - Office of the Historian

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Real Holocaust Footage Holocaust Movies Holocaust Torture Holocaust Survivors Holocaust Concentration Camps Holocaust Gas Chambers Holocaust Documentary History Channel Holocaust Holocaust Experiments Holocaust Museum Nazi Germany Holocaust Songs Nazi Concentration Camps Auschwitz Concentration Camp Holocaust Footage Hitler's Holocaust

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One-hundred years ago this week, one of the greatest conflicts in human history began. It has been referred to as the War to End All Wars, the Great War and, more commonly, World War I (WWI).

It started on July 28, 1914 when the Austria-Hungary Empire declared war on Serbia, and would go on for another four years, ending on November 11, 1918.

Ultimately, it is estimated that nearly 17 million people lost their lives as a result of this bloody conflict.

As Burt Solomon puts it for the Atlantic,

"It was, simply, the insanity of the only carnivorous species that kills its own kind for no good reason."

The impact of World War I is still evident today. Worse than that, it seems that humans have learned very little from the tragic events of the conflict.

Following the cessation of WWI, the 20th century continued to produce bloodshed. In addition to WWI, within 100 years, the world witnessed World War II, the Holocaust, the Korean War, the War in Vietnam, and the Cold War, among other bloody ordeals.

One might argue that World War I set the stage for most, if not all, of these conflicts.
Violence begets violence.
In the words of Burt Solomon:

It [WWI] was a sad, pointless war, for which we're still paying a price... The world was a nastier place after the war than before it.

Solomon has hit the hammer on the nail, particularly when it comes to the current state of the Middle East in relation to the events of WWI.

Prior to the Great War, one of the largest empires in human history, the Ottoman Empire, reigned over a vast territory that includes much of what we now refer to as the Middle East.

Ultimately, however, World War I marked the end of the Ottoman Empire, as it had already been slowly dwindling in size, scope and influence over the centuries. Four years after the conflict ceased, the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed and was replaced by what is now modern Turkey.

As Professor David R Woodward notes for the BBC:

After four centuries of continuous rule, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, creating a vacuum that contributed to tensions between local inhabitants and external powers or interests.

In essence, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East fell into the hands of European powers like Great Britain and France. The decisions they would make surrounding the region would only serve to increase the likelihood of violent conflict, rather than alleviating it.

The vacuum created by the fall of the Ottomans meant that land, power and resources were up for grabs. Still extremely driven by the mentality of imperialism, Western countries were more than happy to fill that void.

Clive Irving sums up this process for the Daily Beast quite succinctly:

The Ottomans had managed Arabia through a decentralized system of provinces... Tribal, sectarian and territorial conflicts made it a constantly turbulent place, despite the hammer of Ottoman rule... The Western idea of nation building was the future of Arabia. As World War I drew to its end and the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the Orientalists [Westerners] saw an opportunity to bring modern coherence to the desert by imposing new kingdoms of their own devising, as long as the kings would be compliant with the strategic interests of the British Empire.

Much like today, natural resources (oil) were at the center of the most powerful state's concerns at the end of WWI.

Hence, it would be wrong to argue that the Ottoman Empire created stability in the Middle East, as it has been a tumultuous region for thousands of years.

However, when the West began to partition the region, they paid absolutely no attention to the complex ethnic and religious divisions that have defined the Middle East for centuries. Simply put, they were only concerned with perpetuating their own interests, regardless of the consequences.

Had they been more attentive and less selfish, they might have saved themselves, and the Middle East, a great deal of strife in the long-run.

As Irving so aptly puts it, "In reality, the Iraqi borders had been arbitrarily drawn and disregarded 2,000 years of tribal, sectarian, and nomadic occupation... Iraq was a Western construct that defied thousands of years of history."

Today, we are still seeing the consequences of these actions, as the region never achieved true stability over the decades that followed.

The West has continued to approach the Middle East in a very shortsighted manner, choosing allies based on what is profitable, rather than what is right.

Not surprisingly, at present, Iraq and Syria are consumed by chaos. Syria is in the midst of a bloody and devastating Civil War. Simultaneously, the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS or IS) has taken over a large swath of territory across Mesopotamia.

They have also declared a Caliphate, professing their desire to establish political and religious hegemony over the entire region. Currently, they continue to grow stronger both militarily and financially, and they are beginning to threaten countries beyond Iraq and Syria, such as Jordan.

Concurrently, the Kurds have taken advantage of the chaos by seizing more territory in the region, including oil fields in Iraq. The Kurds were split across several nations when the Western powers partitioned the region a century ago, and have never had a country of their own.

Correspondingly, the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government recently asked his parliament to prepare for a vote on self-determination, which could lead to a referendum and perhaps independence.

The Obama administration has opposed this move, largely because a unified Iraq would be more beneficial to the US in terms of its economic and strategic interests.

Basically, the US government is concerned about access to natural resources.

It is quite hypocritical that the self-proclaimed beacon of self-determination, the United States, does not support the right of an ethnically distinct people to determine their own future.

At the same time, it's not surprising, as we live in a world in which states are driven by their own self-interests; it's survival of the fittest in this anarchical global system.

Accordingly, for those that believe that history plays no role in the present, think again. World War I was a century ago, and it can be directly linked to the chaos in the Middle East today.

George Santayana once famously stated, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." While this saying has become somewhat overused over the years, it is still decidedly accurate. If we cannot learn from the mistakes of our past, we will not evolve as a species.

We have fought in wars in which we have literally killed one another by the millions; when one puts this into context, it is simply baffling.

For thousands of years, humans have been attempting to understand why we go to war with each other. No one was come up with a satisfactory answer.

Some of the greatest minds in history have dedicated much of their work to this question and have still failed to provide a comprehensive explanation: Thucydides, Augustine of Hippo, St. Thomas Aquinas, Clausewitz, E.H. Carr, Morgenthau... The list goes on and on. The fact is, there is no clear answer.

Our survival depends on cooperation and solidarity, yet we still insist on killing one another. It is a paradoxical and tragic state of affairs.

Have we progressed as a species over time? Sometimes it feels as though we've only gotten more efficient at killing one another.

Likewise, Burt Solomon contends,

Indeed, evidence is slim that we've grown wiser since the war intended to end all wars did nothing of the sort. Still, if it's any consolation amid the tragedies and disorder of today's world, Homo sapiens have been way stupider in the past than they are right now.

Yes, we are far from perfect, but as a species, we have great potential. There have been many horrific events over the course of human history, but also a great number of magnificent triumphs and accomplishments.

Perhaps the greatest quality humans possess is potential. Potential for good, and the potential to change and adapt.

At present, we need to use that potential to address the confluence of forces that converge upon our dynamic world. It's much smaller and more interdependent than we often realize.

The Middle East would be a tremendous place to begin this process, but the fact is there are many situations across the globe that also require imminent attention.

Therefore, we might begin by learning from our past, in order to shape a brighter future.

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Why The Collapse Of The Ottoman Empire Explains The Middle East Today, 100 Years Later

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One-hundred years ago this week, one of the greatest conflicts in human history began. It has been referred to as the War to End All Wars, the Great War and, more commonly, World War I (WWI). It started on July 28, 1914 when the Austria-Hungary Empir...

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After coming to power in 1933, Germany's Nazi Party implemented a highly organized strategy of persecution, murder, and genocide aimed at ethnically "purifying" Germany, a plan Hitler called the "Final Solution".

Six million Jews and five million Slavs, Roma, disabled, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and political and religious dissidents were killed during the Holocaust.

As Champetier de Ribes, the French Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials explained, "This [was] a crime so monstrous, so undreamt of in history ... that the term 'genocide' has had to be coined to define it."

Precursors to Genocide

After Germany's loss in WWI, the Treaty of Versailles punished Germany by placing tough restrictions on the country. The treaty made Germany take full responsibility for the war, reduced the extent of German territory, severely limited the size and placement of their armed forces, and forced Germany to pay the allied powers reparations. These restrictions not only increased social unrest but, combined with the start of the Great Depression, collapsed the German economy as inflation rose alongside unemployment.

In the German parliament, the Nazi party, led by Adolf Hitler, gained popularity. The number of seats Nazis controlled in the parliament rose from 12 in 1928 to 230 in 1932, making them the largest political party. The strong showing guaranteed the Nazi party would need to be part of any political coalition. Believing he could check Hitler's ambition, President Hindenburg reluctantly made Hitler the Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933.

Shortly after Hitler came to power, the Reichstag building, seat of the German parliament, burnt down. Communists were blamed for setting the fire and Hindenburg declared a state of emergency, passing the Reichstag Fire Decree that suspended basic rights like trial by jury. The German Communist Party was suspended and over 4,000 members were detained without trial. The next month, Hitler's cabinet passed the Enabling Act which allowed him to enact laws without the consent of the parliament for four years, effectively transforming the German government into a de facto Nazi dictatorship.

From this moment on, the Nazi regime adopted hundreds of laws restricting the rights and liberties of the Jewish people. Jews were expelled from the civil service and barred from entering particular professions, stripped of their citizenship, and forbidden from intermarrying or even having a relationship with anyone of "German or German-related blood".

The government defined a Jewish person as someone with three or four Jewish grandparents, not someone who had religious convictions. This meant that people who had never practiced, or hadn't practiced Judaism in many years, or even converted to Christianity were subjected to persecution. Although anti-semitism was pervasive in 1930s Germany, these restrictions frequently extended to any person the Nazis considered to be "non-Aryan".

Throughout the nights of November 9-10, 1938, rioting across Germany, Austria, and part of German-controlled Czechoslovakia targeted Jewish people and their places of business and worship. These nights have come to be known as Kristallnacht, or "The Night of the Broken Glass".

Over those two nights, hundreds (and possibly thousands) of synagogues were burned; more than 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses were looted and destroyed, and almost 100 Jews were killed during the violence. Some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and transported to concentration camps.

The rioting was triggered by the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat in Paris, by a Polish Jewish teenager, Herschel Grynszpan, on November 7th. Grynszpan did not attempt to escape and claimed that the assassination was motivated by the persecution of the Jewish people. Despite being attended to by Hitler's personal physician, vom Rath died two days later.

Although the events of November 9th and 10th were reported to be a spontaneous outburst of violence among the German people, they were actually closely organized by the Nazis.

After this night, the German government supported dozens of laws and decrees that took away Jews property and livelihood. By the end of the year, Jews were prohibited from attending school. One billion reichsmarks of Jewish property was seized as collective punishment against the nation's Jews for the murder of von Rath. Those able to flee the country did. In the year after Kristallnact, more than 100,000 Jews left Germany as the situation deteriorated.

World War II

Throughout the late-1930s, the Nazi government began to forcibly acquire ethnically German territory in Austria and Czechoslovakia that was taken from Germany at the end of the First World War. Although the international community initially allowed Germany to incorporate these territories into the growing German Empire, it became increasingly clear that Hitler's ambition did not stop at these small territories. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany, beginning the Second World War.

Between April and June of 1940, Germany invaded Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg consolidating power across neutral Western Europe. On June 22, 1940, France signed an armistice with Germany, which divided France between the German-occupied territory in the north and the Vichy regime in the south. Although officially neutral, the French state during this time was generally pro-Nazi and cooperated with Germany's racial policies.

In the first half of 1941, after conquering Yugoslavia and Greece, Germany broke off its alliance with the Soviet Union and launched an invasion of the Soviet Union known as Operation Barbarossa. Hitler described his vision for the war with the Soviet Union as an "extermination of Bolshevik Commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia".

To the Nazi regime, there would have been no doubt that a war against Bolshevism was implicitly a war against the Jewish population of the Soviet Union. A division of Hitler's SS known as the Einsatzgruppen traveled behind the German army and acted as death squads, exterminating civilian populations in the most efficient way possible. During the early part of Operation Barbarossa these were frequently people who had fled the Nazi's earlier invasion of Poland.

On December 7, 1941, the United States entered the war following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Four days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, bringing them into the European Theatre.

Beginning with the British air raids on Cologne in May of 1942, the Allies launched a strategic bombing campaign that would target cities and industrial plants across the Reich for the next three years. In the summer of 1942, Germany and its allies focused on the Soviet Union unsuccessfully. The Soviet Union gained the dominant role, which it would maintain for the rest of the war.

On June 6, 1944, also known as D-Day, more than 150,000 Allied soldiers landed in France. In December the Germans started an unsuccessful counterattack in Belgium and northern France, known as the Battle of the Bulge. Continuing to gain momentum, the Soviets began an offensive in January 1945, liberating western Poland and then forcing Hungary to surrender.

On April 16, 1945 Soviets surrounded Berlin, Germany's capital. When the Soviets began advancing towards the Reich Chancellery, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. Then on May 7th, Germany surrendered to the Western Allies in Reims, France and a few days later to the Soviets in Berlin. All told more than 60 million people, or about 3% of the world's population at the time, were killed during the course of the Second World War.

Jews were forced to move, often to different cities or countries, and live in designated areas, referred to as ghettos. Most of the ghettos were "open" which meant Jews were free to come and go during the daytime. As time past, more and more ghettos became "closed" meaning that Jews were trapped and not allowed to leave. No ghettos were ever established within the borders of Germany and most were only meant as a temporary means of isolating Jews from the German population until they could be moved elsewhere.

When the Nazi's rose to power they built facilities to hold and, eventually kill, their enemies. When the first concentration camps were built in 1933, this primarily meant political dissidents and opponents of the Nazi government, such as German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats but would grow to include asocial groups - Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, the homeless, the mentally ill and homosexuals. It was not until Kristallnacht that the prisoners became primarily Jewish.

Once Germany took over Poland in 1939, it created forced-labor camps. Thousands of prisoners died from working conditions, exhaustion, and starvation. After the outbreak of World War II, the number of concentration camps increased exponentially. The number of prisoners of war camps also rose, but after the first years of the war most were converted into concentration camps. Nazis forcibly relocated Jews from ghettos to concentration camps.

Treatment inside the concentration camps were horrible. Prisoners were given tiny rations of food and forced into physical labor. They often slept more than three to a bed without pillows or blankets, even in the winter months. In many concentration camps, Nazi doctors conducted medical experiments on prisoners against their will, in many cases killing the prisoners in the process.

In 1942, fifteen Nazi leaders met at a conference in Wannsee, Germany to discuss the "Jewish Question". Their job was to decide the most efficient way to exterminate the Jews. They decided that Jews would be sent to extermination camps where they would be sent to showers. But instead of water coming out of the faucet, they faced their death when poisonous Zyklon-B gas leaked through the showerheads to suffocate them. This decision at the conference is called the "Final Solution."

It was not until this point in the war that systemic extermination of the Jewish people was considered. Before this point, none of the concentration camps had been built to explicitly carry out the mass murder of the Nazi's enemies.

The first such extermination camps were introduced during Operation Reinhardt, which targeted the elimination of the Jewish people within the General Government of Occupied Poland and Ukraine. After the first killing center open at Chelmno, the use of these extermination tactics spread quickly. At the height of deportations, the Birkenau killing center murdered 6,000 Jews a day.

While there were only 23 main camps between 1933 to 1945, the Nazi regime established some 20,000 other camps used for forced labor, transit or temporary internment. During the Holocaust it is estimated that 6 million Jews were slaughtered along with, 3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 3 million Polish Catholics, 700,000 Serbians, 250,000 Gypsies, Sinti, and Lalleri, 80,000 Germans (for political reasons), 70,000 German handicapped, 12,000 homosexuals, and 2,500 Jehovah's Witnesses.

The Response

U.S. Response

After WWII had ended, photographs of the Holocaust stunned the public. Newspapers in the United States had reported on the oppression of the Jews in Germany during the war. In 1942, many newspapers were writing details of the Holocaust, but these stories were short and were not widely read. In 1943, after sources had confirmed the killings of at least two million Jews in concentration camps across Europe a Gallup poll found that less than half of Americans believed these reports to be true; 28% thought they were "just a rumor". The reports were unconfirmed and sometimes denied by the United States government.

In 1944, Josiah DuBois, Jr. wrote a memorandum to then-Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. entitled " Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews ", which condemned the bureaucratic interference of U.S. State Department policies in obstructing the evacuation of Holocaust Refugees from Romania and Occupied France. The Report would spur the Roosevelt administration to create the War Refugee Board later that year.

The International Response

Despite, wide reporting of Holocaust atrocities including gas chambers, many prominent analysts doubted the authenticity of these reports. Prominently, Roger Allen, a member of the British Foreign Office discounted intelligence reports on the use of gas chambers in Polish extermination camps because he could "never understand what the advantage of a gas chamber over a simple machine gun or over starving people would be."

Advocacy organizations worldwide called for British Royal Air Forces to bomb concentration camps particularly at Auschwitz. Although the plan was adopted by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill poor information-sharing between parts of the British government led the order to be ignored and the plan dropped. Such calculations were hardly the low point of Allied Responses. One story has that, low on supplies, the Nazis offered the British a million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks, which one British diplomat promptly refused saying, "What would I do with one million Jews? Where would I put them?"

Although many people responded with obstructionism and doubt, several rescue operations were run throughout Axis-controlled Europe. Some were the work of prominent individuals like Raoul Wallenberg and Carl Lutz who worked largely alone while other operations were far more complex. A network of Catholic bishops and clergymen organized local protests and shelter campaigns throughout much of Europe that are today estimated to have saved 860,000 lives. Danish fishermen clandestinely ferried more than 7,000 Jews into neutral Sweden while the French town of Chambon-sur-Lignon sheltered between 3,000 and 5,000 refugees.

On May 19th, 1939, the sailed from Hamburg, Germany to Havana, Cuba with 937 passengers; almost all of them were Jews escaping with their lives. This was one of the last ships that left Germany before the outbreak of World War II. Most of the passengers had applied for U.S. visas and were only planning on staying in Cuba until they could enter into the United States. The U.S. State Department in Washington, the U.S. consulate in Havana, and the owner of the St. Louis were aware that they might not be able to enter Cuba, but the passengers were never told.

The passengers had landing certificates and transit visas by the Cuban Director-General of Immigration, Manuel Benitez Gonzalez. But, a week before the ship left, Cuban President Federico Laredo Bru published a decree that overturned all recent landing certificates. For them to land in Cuba, they needed written authorization from the Cuban Secretaries of State and Labor and a $500 bond. Most of the passengers were not prepared for the bureaucratic mess they were about to face in Cuba.

The St. Louis arrived in Havana harbor on May 27th. Of the 937 passengers on board, only 28 passengers were allowed into Cuba. 22 of these passengers were Jewish and had valid U.S. visas, 4 were Spanish citizens and 2 were Cuban nationals, all with valid documents. This story gained a lot of publicity; it was spread throughout Europe and the United States. The U.S. newspapers reported the story compassionately, but only a handful suggested that the refugees should come to the United States. The United States government decided not to take the steps to permit the passengers into the country.

After the U.S. government refused to permit the passenger's refuge, the St. Louis left Cuba for Europe. The St. Louis sailed so close to Florida that they could see the lights of Miami. The passengers were able to find refuge in other European countries so they didn't have to return to Germany. Great Britain took 288, the Netherlands admitted 181; Belgium took 214, and 224 passengers found temporary refuge in France. When Germany invaded Western Europe, 532 of the original passengers were trapped. Just over half survived the Holocaust.

The Aftermath

Nuremberg Trials

To prosecute the leaders of the Holocaust, the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg was formed in 1946. The U.S., the UK, the Soviet Union and France each supplied two judges (a primary and an alternate) and a prosecution team for the trial. Twelve leading Nazi officials were sentenced to death for the crimes they had committed, while three received life sentences in prison, and four had prison terms for up to twenty years.

Three defendants were acquitted. However, many of the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust were never tried or punished, including Hitler who had committed suicide. Since then, the international community has continued and improved accountability through forums such as the International Criminal Court, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

The Word 'Genocide'

Raphael Lemkin, a holocaust survivor who worked on the Nuremberg Trials, coined the term genocide and spent 4 years pushing for it to be added to international law. As Champetier de Ribes, the French Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials explained "This [was] a crime so monstrous, so undreamt of in history throughout the Christian era up to the birth of Hitlerism that the term 'genocide' has had to be coined to define it." Ultimately, in 1948 The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide was adopted, and it entered into force in 1951. The convention defined genocide in legal terms based on Lemkin's work, and is the basis for genocide prevention efforts today.

The Pledge: Never Again

After the Nuremberg war crimes trials finished, the United States spearheaded the effort to end genocide and become a champion for the prevention of crimes against humanity. The U.S. pushed for greater international effort, helping to draft the 1948 Genocide Convention. President Harry Truman addressed Congress urging the Convention's passage. He stressed the role the United States had to play in " outlawing the world-shocking crime of genocide."

These pleas went unheard and though an original signatory of the convention the United States did not ratify the Genocide Convention for another forty years and then only with reservations. Presidents of the U.S. have vowed "never again" but have looked the other way when genocide happened again and again.

To fill this void, civil society organizations such as United to End Genocide have taken up the pledge and advocate for the international responsibility to prevent mass atrocities like genocide.

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After coming to power in 1933, Germany's Nazi Party implemented a highly organized strategy of persecution, murder, and genocide aimed at ethnically "purifying" Germany, a plan Hitler called the "Final Solution". Six million Jews and five million Slavs, Roma, disabled, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and political and religious dissidents were killed during the Holocaust.

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Break Up of the Ottoman Empire - ParkerPedia

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Your encyclopedia for 7th Grade Social Studies.

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Persian Gulf War - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

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The Ottoman Empire was an imperial state that was founded in 1299 after growing out of the break-down of several Turkish tribes. The empire then grew to include many areas in what is now present-day Europe to and it eventually became one of the largest, most powerful and longest-lasting empires in the history of the world. At its peak, the Ottoman Empire included the areas of Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, Hungary, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and parts of the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. It had a maximum area of 7.6 million square miles (19.9 million square kilometers) in 1595 (University of Michigan). The Ottoman Empire began to decline power in the 18th century but a portion of its land became what is Turkey today.

The Ottoman Empire began in the late 1200s during the break-up of the Seljuk Turk Empire. After that empire broke up the Ottoman Turks began to take control of the other states belonging to the former empire and by the late 1400's all other Turkish dynasties were controlled by the Ottoman Turks.

In the early days of the Ottoman Empire, the main goal of its leaders was expansion. The earliest phases of Ottoman expansion occurred under Osman I, Orkhan and Murad I. Bursa, one of the Ottoman Empire's earliest capitals fell in 1326. In the late 1300's several important victories gained more land for the Ottomans and Europe began to prepare for Ottoman expansion.

After some military defeats in the early 1400s, the Ottomans regained their power under Muhammad I and in 1453 they captured Constantinople. The Ottoman Empire then entered its height and what is known as the Period of Great Expansion, during which time the empire came to include the lands of over ten different European and Middle Eastern states. It is believed that the Ottoman Empire was able to grow so rapidly because other countries were weak and unorganized and also because the Ottomans had advanced military organization and tactics for the time. In the 1500's the Ottoman Empire's expansion continued with the defeat of the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria in 1517, Algiers in 1518 and Hungary in 1526 and 1541. In addition, parts of Greece also fell under Ottoman control in the 1500s.

In 1535 the reign of Sulayman I began and Turkey gained more power than it had had under previous leaders. During the reign of Sulayman I, the Turkish judicial system was reorganized and Turkish culture began to grow significantly. Following Sulayman I's death, the empire began to lose power when its military was defeated during the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.

Throughout the rest of the 1500s and into the 1600s and 1700s the Ottoman Empire began a considerable decline in power after several military defeats. In the mid-1600s the empire was restored for a short time after military victories in Persia and Venice. In 1699 the empire again began to lose territory and power subsequently.

In the 1700s the Ottoman Empire began to rapidly deteriorate following the Russo-Turkish Wars and a series of treaties during that time caused the empire to lose some of its economic independence. The Crimean War, which lasted from 1853-1856, further exhausted the struggling empire. In 1856 the independence of the Ottoman Empire was recognized by the Congress of Paris but it was still losing its strength as a European power.

In the late 1800s, there were several rebellions and the Ottoman Empire continued to lose territory and political and social instability in the 1890s created international negativity toward the empire. The Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 and uprisings by Turkish nationalists further reduced the empire's territory and increased instability. Following the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire officially came to an end with the Treaty of Sevres.

Despite its collapse, the Ottoman Empire was one of the largest, longest lasting and most successful empires in the world's history. There are many reasons as to why the empire was as successful as it was but some of them include its very strong and organized military and its centralized political structure. These early, successful governments make the Ottoman Empire one of the most important in history.

To learn more about the Ottoman Empire, visit The University of Michigan's Turkish Studies website.

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A Quick Summary about the Ottoman Empire

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The Ottoman Empire was an imperial state that was founded in 1299 after growing out of the break-down of several Turkish tribes. The empire then grew to include many areas in what is now present-day Europe to and it eventually became one of the largest, most powerful and longest-lasting empires in the history of the world.

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Remembering the holocaust

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See The Persian Gulf War for more details about the dates and events of this war.

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SS7H2 The student will analyze continuity and change in Southwest Asia (Middle East) leading to the 21st century.
a. Explain how European partitioning in the Middle East after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire led to regional conflict.
b. Explain the historical reasons for the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948; include the Jewish religious connection to the land, the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and Zionism in Europe.
d. Explain U.S. presence and interest in Southwest Asia; include the Persian Gulf conflict and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.