1979, the year that set the current path in the Middle East.
How a surprising amount of what we see today began with events of that year. And how little it had to do with the West.
In the same way that orienting yourself on 20th century history is often well set up through study of WWI, understanding many of the forces at work today in the Middle East can be founded on events in 1979.
The 70s had been difficult for the Middle East. The decade had begun with the Black September in Jordan, where King Hussein, the last of the Hashemite kings, had reclaimed control of the South West of the country from Palestinian groups operating with virtual autonomy, launching terror attacks and guerilla raids into the occupied West Bank. Tens of thousands of people died in this civil war, mainly Palestinians. Jordan had accepted hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees during the Nakba, but they had begun acting to challenge the state itself. Many of these fedayeen fled to southern Lebanon, where they continued with their aggressive anti Israeli behavior. Their presence fueled sectarian divides, and helped to spark the horrific Lebanese civil war in the middle of that decade. A particularly horrible war fought between Shia, Sunni, Christian, Druze and other militia groups that lasted until 1990 and devastated the country. Syrian military were invited in to ‘help’ during this time — and are yet to leave…
A key indignity in Arab hearts and minds however was the Yom Kippur war of 1973. A surprise co-ordinated attack by Egypt in Sinai, and Syria in the Golan Heights, on the most holy Jewish day of the year caught Israel unprepared and nearly led to a defeat. This was especially true in the region of the Suez canal. The attacking countries saw this as a righteous war to reclaim territory lost in the 1967 six-day war. Military forces from across the Arab world including Morroccan, Iraqi, and Jordanian units sent in to help the Syrians in Golan were humiliated and soundly defeated, for the fourth time, despite outnumbering Israeli forces 15–1 in some sectors.
The Syrian leader at the time was the Ba’athist Hafez Al-Assad, from the Alawite sect of Islam, a Shiite branch. He was the father of Bashir who currently holds power.
The leader of Egypt was Anwar Sadat — who wished to modernize Egypt, and tried to reach accommodation with Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. His predecessor Nasser, the first Egyptian national to lead the country in centuries, was a promoter of pan-Arab unity and separate identity, in opposition to the West, anti-Imperialist, and anti-Islamist. He aligned with the USSR, nationalized Egyptian industries and reclaimed control of the Suez canal — leading to the second of the earlier Arab/Isreali wars — the 1956 Suez crisis. This small but significant war was notable in that the US, with the UN, pressured France, the UK and Israel to withdraw. The post WWII world order would not support colonialism from European masters it seemed — although they were to ignore French adventures in Indochina and Algeria simultaneously.
After the 1973 defeat — which was regarded locally as an Egyptian victory anyway, Sadat normalized relations with Israel, leading to one of the events we shall discuss for 1979 — the Egpytian-Israeli peace deal signed on the 26th of March, following the 1978 Camp David accords.
In the West the deal was seen as a breakthrough, and demonstrated progress in the seemingly intractable situation over the Jewish state of Israel. Even a 1978 Israeli invasion into southern Lebanon to prevent attacks from those Palestinian militias did not stop it. The hope was this would signal the start of a new era of co-operation and peace in this unstable region.
In the Arab world it was seen quite differently by many. It was regarded as a perfidious sellout by Sadat, lured by the West — which many in Egypt, the Arab, and wider Muslim world viewed as a very undesirable influence. There was already anger that US support for Israel during the 1973 war had helped inflict the fourth disastrous and humiliating defeat on their forces. It led OPEC to drive up oil prices as punishment, creating the 1973 oil crisis in the West. The loss of honor and dignity for Arabs was significant — especially as they believed God was on their side. This made Islamist calls to purify the practice of Islam to regain that heavenly favor extremely strong, and resonant.
Eventually Anwar Sadat would be brutally assassinated by a rogue Islamist army unit during a parade in 1981 — mainly because of the peace deal. They believed that by working with the Jewish enemy, he had forfeited any right to rule an Islamic nation, removing any injunction around killing a fellow Muslim. This unit was from Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a militant offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ironically their actions led to the authoritarian Mubarak regime, which lasted for 30 years until the Arab Spring of 2011. We’ll return to this later for a cameo from a key personality.
In April 1979 another event in Persian Iran caught everybody off guard. The crumbling Pahlavi dynasty, re-installed with UK and US help in the 50s after the overthrow of the Mosaddegh government, was facing fierce opposition. The Shah had ruled oppressively and corruptly — and underdeveloped his nation at the same time. When national protests, originally violently repressed, became massive the Shah fled the country, to be replaced by a religious leader — the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini. Iranians sick of a corrupt western backed authoritarian ruler, whose hated SAVAK secret police were a scourge on the whole society welcomed the religious figure as their new supreme leader. He instituted the Islamic Republic of Iran, run on a curious system known as the veleyat-e-faqih, or Guardianship of the Jurist. Sharia, in other words. The full implementation of a perfect Islamic society run from the top by religious clerics, in full accordance with Islamic law.
The US embassy in Tehran was overrun later in the year by armed students, who took around 50 hostages from the Embassy staff, and held them for 444 days. This was because the US refused to hand over the exiled Shah, who had gone to the US seeking treatment for cancer. This set the tone in Iran, continued to this day, of a foreign policy consisting mainly of opposition to the US and Israel. A failed US rescue mission fueled belief they had God watching over their revolution, and seriously weakened the Carter administration. They also despised and opposed the Sunni Royal House of Saud, as being illegitimate guardians of the holiest sites in Islam, the cities of Medina and Mecca. Their revolution was far more significant than a simple territorial takeover as far as they were concerned. They saw it as a claim to legitimacy for the Shia side of Islam to finally gain ascendancy and control of the Muslim world — after losing their heir to the line of Caliphs 1400 years before.
The Sunni/Shia divide in Islam seems slightly obscure to observers from other faith backgrounds, or non-believers. It boils down to a disagreement over who should lead the Islamic world —as Caliph — once the prophet Mohammed died in 632. As the beloved prophet had neglected to name a successor it was left to those around him to decide who led the newly gained territories and subjects of the newest, and final, revelation by Allah — the same God Jews and Christians worship.
The central disagreement was that one faction thought the bloodline of the prophet should take over (Shia) while another thought the rightly guided companions of the prophet should lead instead (Sunni).
The Sunni won the argument, and everybody pledged bay’a (loyalty, submission) to the first Caliph, Abu Bakr. The Shia got their way with the 4th Caliph, Ali, a cousin of Mohammed. He was assassinated at Kufa, Iraq — and his successor, the grandson of the prophet, Hussein, was cheated, betrayed and killed in a famous battle at Karbala. This made way for the Umayyad Caliphate, and Sunni ascendancy, a supremacy of sorts, that has basically held to this day. 80% of Muslims identify as Sunni, and enjoy privileged and majority positions in most Islamic societies in comparison to their Shia counterparts. All the monarchies in the Middle East are Sunni. The Ba’athists in Iraq were Sunni. The Hashemite King Hussein of Jordan (Hashem was the grandfather of the prophet) is Sunni. The House of Saud are Sunni. Bahrain, Qatar, the U.A.E. In all of these societies, the Shia are more working class and poor, generally speaking.
The one society where this is reversed is in Syria, where the Alawite minority are the elites, and the Sunni the lower class. In Saudi Arabia Shia are a minority population in the eastern part of the land. this will become significant shortly.
This ascendant Shia pure Islamic Republic was a form of challenge to the power balance of the Middle East. Islam’s underdogs had risen and now were in a religious position to challenge secular governments as being illegitimate. The threat to regimes across the region was quite real, and required a response.
Just two months after the Ayatollah’s power grab, another took place right next door in Iraq. It was a more secular takeover, but all the same a sinister new power arose in the form of Saddam Hussein, in his infamous purge of the Ba’ath party. A former brutal enforcer for the regime that gained power over Iraq in a military coup, moves by his boss to join the Ba’athists in Syria and share power forced his hand. He unseated al-Bakr and called a meeting of his party, which he insisted be videotaped. It is a truly horrifying film to watch.
A beaten and totally cowed Abdel-Hussein, the Revolutionary Command Council secretary who had objected to Saddam becoming chairman, takes the stage and begins calling out names, one by one, of ‘co-conspirators’ in a ‘plot to destroy the Ba’ath and Iraq’ on behalf of the Syrian regime. The men whose names are called are collected by security forces and taken outside. Saddam would later order the remaining party members — the ones ‘not involved in the plot’, to execute their former colleagues themselves.
The paranoid megalomaniac Hussein would invade Iran the following year, thinking the new Islamic Republic disorganized and weak, and trying to grab resource and shipping lane rich regions in dispute with the Persian neighbor for decades. Iran fought back fiercely. The war would drag on until 1988, with at least a million lives lost. Terrible interludes including chemical attacks on Kurds suspected of allying with Iran, Iranian villages, and Shia populations within Iraq were common. Missile attacks, oil refinery destruction, sinking tankers in the Gulf (which bought the US navy into the fight), a mistaken Iraqi attack on a US ship, the downing of a civilian airliner by mistake by US missiles. All these horrors and far more occurred during this brutal war of attrition, including Iran sending human wave attacks at Iraqi positions at several points, and the introduction of the abominable idea of suicide bombers on the Iranian side.
Saddam also saw himself as a new powerful Arab leader for all Arab Muslims, and as a Sunni himself, part of a powerful ruling minority in Iraq for centuries, he leveraged this aspect. He paid cheques to families of Palestinian ‘martyrs’ killed in clashes with the Israelis, and had an infamous ‘blood Quran’ printed, apparently in his own blood. He was not an Islamist — in fact he suppressed any hint of it in Iraq. He was merely a cynical secularist happy to fan the flames of sectarianism to keep power.
This country, dubbed by one exiled author as ‘the Republic of Fear’ would go on to invade Kuwait in 1990, bringing an immense response from a US and UN led coalition to expel them and destroy Saddam’s ability to threaten his neighbors in the future. The administration of George Bush Senior followed UN mandates to the letter, and stopped the military short of taking Baghdad , unseating Hussein and occupying the country. He encouraged Iraqis to take matters into their own hands, which many did — expecting support. They were left to their own means while coalition troops literally watched as tens of thousands of Shia, Kurdish and other groups were slaughtered by what remained of Iraq’s security forces. These failures would return to haunt US forces after the 2003 invasion.
There was also another factor to this war that set later events in motion. A little known meeting was held between an obscure man called Osama Bin Laden and Prince Turki, the intelligence chief for Saudi Arabia. OBL offered to use his Al Qaeda force (probably only about 200 strong at the time) to defend Saudi borders, and eventually build a force big enough to restore Kuwait. He was laughed out of the office. Humiliation. The Royal family instead allowed the offered ‘Desert Shield’ by the US. Bin Laden objected fundamentally to even the idea of infidels setting foot on the holiest land of Islam.
Osama had set up Al Qaeda with the Egyptian Dr Ayman Zawahiri after fighting during the 1980s with mujaheddin forces in Afghanistan, which was invaded by Soviet forces on Christmas eve 1979. Our fourth event.
Having begun as a strong and wonderful country in the 50s and 60s, with modern buildings and infrastructure, international investments, and a change from a monarchy to a more parliamentary system, driven by the monarch, Afghanistan was a rising star. A key stop on the hippy trail of the 60s and early 70s, this strange land with modern cities here and there living next to a tribal rural population whose lifestyles and culture had not seen much if any change in centuries, enjoyed a long and proud history. They also considered themselves to be ‘perfect’ Muslims, in all ways.
Those running the country tried to leverage the cold war to their advantage, taking help and investment from both sides of the Iron curtain. Many deals were struck, and relationships forged. Students wishing to study were taken in large numbers to US universities, while education of military officers was handed over to the Soviet Union. Several power grabs later a military backed government with Marxist leanings made sweeping changes to Afghan life that were ill conceived, and disastrous. Land reforms dispossessed tribal lands centuries old, and water management and crop yields plummeted. Soon a mass insurgency of the third rail of Afghan society, the religious who had received their educations in the Egyptian hotbed of Islamist thinking, arose.
These Mujaheddin fighters fought the government, eventually leading to a Soviet invasion to stabilize the nation. The USSR had no desire to see another Islamic Revolutionary state next to Iran, and right at the seat of the Central Asian Muslim Republics. A Jihad exported into these Republics would be disastrous for the Politburo, who were busy influence peddling and attempting to thwart US interests globally.
The fierce resistance the Mujaheddin put up caused the Soviets to obliterate large swathes of rural land. About half of the country’s 24,000 villages were destroyed. The Red Army uses a tactic known as maneuver by fire, which means they essentially destroy a position before occupying it. 1,000,000+ were killed, and 3.4 million fled into neighboring Iran, and also Pakistan who received the majority. The men stayed to fight the infidel invaders, the women, elderly and children went over the border.
Bin Laden had gone into Afghanistan in 1984 and used his immense wealth and position in Saudi society to raise funds and help the mujaheddin fight the Godless communists. This small Arab contingent amongst the many Afghan militias was regarded as pretty ineffective and played no significant part in the eventual Soviet defeat — but they nevertheless thought they did, because God was on their side once more.
Dr Zawahiri had come to work initially as a medic in the field hospitals in Pakistan treating Mujaheddin wounded and refugees, after being jailed and tortured in Egyptian prison for three years. He was swept up as part of the hunt for the people involved in the assassination of Sadat and the persecution of Jihadist groups that followed — which I mentioned near the start of this piece. There is film of him speaking in English to the court in Egypt in 1982. He appears at the 2:50 point in this film of the trial. His time in prison hardened his resolve to violently fight against the Egyptian government, and a wider push for Islamic cultural supremacy throughout the region, and eventually the globe. Both he and Bin Laden were drawn to old ideas gaining new traction throughout the Muslim world that in order to win God’s favor once again, it was necessary to return Islamic societies to an earlier, purer state. Sharia, and emulation of the prophet, were the path.
The Arab Mujaheddin received no funding from the Pakistani ISI, or intelligence service-unlike their Afghan counterparts. The intelligence service was channeling up to US$10b in funding from the CIA to assist the ‘freedom fighters’ against the Soviet menace, and a matching dollar amount from Saudi government and private funds, and other Sunni Gulf State contributors. Bin Laden and Zawahiri were able to leverage their own status within Saudi and Egyptian societies to raise millions of dollars worth of their own funding. When the Soviet army withdrew their last forces in February of 1989, and collapsed soon after, the Mujaheddin thought they had defeated a superpower. God was once again pleased with the pious men defending a Muslim land with Jihad. Both men saw the usefulness of a non-state Muslim army to defend lands from infidel encroachment, and formed Al Qaeda (the base). Their ventures over the next few years, and further refining of their Jihadist ideology would eventually lead to the September 11 attacks on the US in 2001. Unfortunately the country fell into brutal civil war between various Mujaheddin warlords, ending when a new force, the Taliban, won victory by 1996.
But how were those radical ideas spreading so effectively? Why were Jihadists becoming so much easier to find and recruit from around the world while Bin Laden and Zawahiri were building their ‘base’ in Sudan and Afghanistan?
This brings us to the last event I want to mention. It is probably the least known or remembered here in the West — but maybe the most far reaching in terms of geopolitical effect. The November siege of the Grand Mosque at Mecca by about five hundred Islamist extremists — demanding the downfall of the house of Saud as rulers. They took 15,000 hostages from among the faithful on New Years day of the year 1400 on the Islamic calendar.
They had a better one. One of their leaders, Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani, was proclaimed by his followers as the Muslim Madhi, or savior, and all Muslims were called to obey him. The group, loosely known as al-Ikwhan, was led by a charismatic member of a prominent Saudi family, Juhayman al-Obeidi.
The Grand Mosque is the most holy site in Islam. It contains the mystical rock known as the Kaaba — a rock apparently carried out of the Garden of Eden by Adam, and in possession of Abraham (yes, Islam really is a direct continuation of the Jewish and later Christian faiths. Yahweh is God is Allah). One of the reasons it is so important to Islam is that the prophet Mohammed, at the age of 35, well before his revelations, is said to have solved a dispute over placement of the rock in a renovation of the holy shrine. This is the site of the annual Hajj pilgrimage, a duty for every Muslim at least once in their lifetime. Pre-Covid, the average annual attendance during the 5 days from the 8th to the 13th of Dhu al-Hijjah, a month in the Islamic calendar was 2.3 million. The record attendance in 2012 was 3.16 million. The Mosque can hold up to 1,000,000 pilgrims at a time.
The Mosque had been recently renovated by one of the most important and influential Saudi businessmen in history — Mohammed Bin Laden, father of Osama.
Originally a refugee from the Hadramout region of Yemen, a place known for amazing buildings for centuries, he found work in a burgeoning Saudi Arabia in the 1930s-40s. He soon gained a reputation for brilliant work, and found favor with the King. Most construction work in Saudi was funded by an American company, Bechtel, who were building the Arabian American Oil Company — Aramco. Bechtel paid for almost all the original infrastructure of the country, and much of it was built by the Bin Laden group. After building a road that joined the cities of Jeddah and Mecca together, he was proclaimed as ‘the man who joined the nation together’ (one translation). He was killed in a plane crash in 1967, so never got to see the completed Mosque.
The siege of the Mosque lasted for weeks, and eventually required the help of French IGN special forces to devise a plan to retake the building and free the remaining hostages. Lawrence Wright claims in his book ‘The Looming Tower’ that these commandos converted to Islam in order to be allowed entry into the sacred space. The Royal family also needed permission from the religious clerics for a fatwa to permit violence on holy ground. It was given.
Casualty figures for this event are difficult to find, but the general consensus is hundreds of Militia were killed, and many hostages. Saudi security forces also suffered huge losses in the fight. Any militants captured were beheaded in public squares as punishment — 68 of them.
The incident was a shock to the ruling Royals, and a dire warning. In their efforts to modernize Saudi society, they had enraged the pious. Saudi religious culture is built around the teachings of a strict 18th century scholar, known as Wahhabism. The king Ibn Saud had used his own form of Islamist shock troops, the Ikhwan, to conquer and subdue the entire Arabian peninsular in the time after WWI and the collapse of the Ottomans, who had ruled the area on and off for centuries. This purist cult of violence became uncontrollable, and Ibn Saud sought the blessing of his Wahhabist clerics to deal with them. It was granted, solidifying the make up of political and social power in Saudi Arabia that exists to this day. If you take a meeting with members of the Saudi Royal family, there are an equal number of clerics analyzing each request and decision.
Like many countries in the region at the time of the 50s and 60s, the influence of western style, freedom and lifestyle was taken up by many in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Afghanistan — mainly in the large cities. In Saudi Arabia, women could drive, work, and were even beginning to read the news on television with their faces and hair uncovered. The rapid influx of oil money had radically transformed a society that was extremely traditional only a few years before. This was too much too fast for a society that had been religiously raised on the strict interpretation of Wahhabism, and they pushed back. The rulers knew they had to gain the favor and co-operation of the religious clerics, or their power was in jeopardy.
The Iranian Shia revolution was an equally threatening development, and caused an uprising in the East of the country by the Shia minority. Action was required.
Meetings with the religious authorities, and decisions reached, in the wake of this event led to a strict crackdown on Saudi society. Women lost their rights, far more strict enforcement of Islamic law was mandated — and an agreement was reached to counter the Iranian/Shia influence — the spread of Wahhabist education throughout the Muslim world.
Thousands of Madrassa were built across the globe using Saudi funding. Mosques were also built, and funding of extremist pious Sunni forces were prioritized. This is why the Saudis put in the same vast amount of support for the Afghanistan war. While building 2,000 Madrassa in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
The Afghan refugee children fleeing the Russians were trained in these Madrassa. It was the only way out of the camps, and a guarantee of access to nutrition and a degree of safety for the children. Many Afghan women were enthusiastic to hand over their children for the hope of some kind of future.
Those children, trained in strict Wahhabist traditions, funded by Saudi oil money, became the core of the Taliban. Literal translation ‘The students’.
Iran and Saudi Arabia have been waging a proxy war across the Muslim world for 40+ years now, directly related back to these events. Iranian militias are involved in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. They supply Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis with weapons and intelligence. Their Quds forces and IRGC are the special forces of the Persians, spreading their influence wherever they can. The Saudis counter this by funding Sunni militias like Al Nusra, and continuing to spread Wahhabist Salafist teachings across the globe. Many wealthy Saudi businessmen fund ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban — and their offshoots in North Africa, like Al-Shabbab and Boko Haram.
As we see with the ISIS K attack at Kabul airport this morning, this affects the entire planet. Why would they attack right now? Because their ideology still calls for a massive confrontation with the ‘armies of Rome’ (Christendom). If we look at the world since the inception of Al Qaeda, The twin embassy bombings in Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 leading to the 9/11 attacks, along with other attacks like Paris, 7/7, the Bali Bombings, and countless others demonstrate that this is a world problem, not one confined to ‘over there’.
By the way the K in ISIS K stands for Khorasan. The original source for the Black Banners of Al Qaeda and ISIS.