Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda (Arabic for "the base") is a worldwide Sunni Islamist militant insurgent group. Founded by Osama bin Laden in 1988 in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is now dedicated to driving the United States out of the Middle East specifically and out of Muslim countries generally, to destroying Israel, and to toppling pro-Western governments in Islamic countries and replacing them with Islamic fundamentalist governments.

These three goals lead to the organization’s ultimate goal, which is the reestablishment of the caliphate, a nation uniting Muslims and spanning the Islamic world.

The organization is believed to be highly redundant, both financially and operationally. While the various cells that make up the organization are accountable to higher-level leadership, operations appear to be left to the individual cells, while higher levels provide material and logistical support.


Ideas and targets coming from the upper echelons filter down to the individual cells responsible for coordinating and executing the attacks. This redundancy increases the organization’s resiliency; when cells are destroyed or captured, the losses can be contained more effectively than if al-Qaeda were a more linear organization.

Al-Qaeda’s training camps are likewise well organized. The extent of the training and organization is best seen in the group’s multivolume Encyclopedia of Jihad. Several thousand pages in length, the encyclopedia details the bureaucratic workings of the group.

Covered topics include guerrilla warfare, assembling booby traps, tactics for fighting against armored or aerial combat units, urban warfare, intelligence security, data gathering, and chemical weapons tactics.

The group has been linked to or accused of taking part in terrorist acts across the globe beginning in the early 1990s. A list of the attacks against U.S. interests attributed to al-Qaeda includes the 1992 hotel bombings in Aden, Yemen; the February 6, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City; attacks carried out on U.S. military forces in Somalia in 1993 and 1994; the June 25, 1996, truck bombing of the Khobar Towers residential compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; the near-simultaneous bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on August 7, 1998; the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen on October 12, 2000; and the September 11, 2001, airline hijackings and attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

The United States is not the group’s only target, however. Al-Qaeda also is linked to the April 2002 bombing of the El Ghriba synagogue in Tunisia; the October 2002 nightclub bombing in Bali, Indonesia; the November 2003 bombings of synagogues and a British bank in Istanbul, Turkey; the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid, Spain; and the July 7, 2005, London transit bombings.

Al-Qaeda is most often represented and understood in regard to its founder, Osama bin Laden (aka Abu Abdallah). Bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on March 10, 1957. When he was six months old, his father, Muhammad bin Laden, the Yemeni immigrant who established the Saudi Binladin Group, relocated to Jeddah, where Osama grew up.

The Soviet Union’s December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan galvanized the Muslim world in defense of Afghanistan and provided the West with a proxy war through which to combat the Soviet Union. Bin Laden, who had studied economics at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, was one of many spurred to action in defense of Afghanistan.

He made his first trip to neighboring Pakistan in 1980, where he sought ways to contribute to the jihad. Bin Laden made several monetary contributions to the mujahideen, but quickly began looking for other ways to contribute.

Bin Laden joined with Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam to found the Services Bureau (Makhtab al-Khidimat, or MAK) in Pakistan in 1984. Azzam, who had taught at King Abdul Aziz University while bin Laden studied there, was indispensable in recruiting.

In addition to providing relief to war victims in Afghanistan, the MAK organized and coordinated the volunteers, donations, and weapons coming into Pakistan and Afghanistan in support of the jihad.

Azzam believed that the young Arab men streaming to Pakistan to participate in the jihad should be scattered among the Afghan functions. Azzam felt that such a mixing of Arabs among the local forces would reap benefits both in Afghanistan and abroad.

Bin Laden saw the situation differently and sought to create his own separate Arab fighting force. He believed that such a force would be a superior fighting unit compared to local Afghan forces. Bin Laden broke with Azzam and established training camps for his Arab force near Jaji, in eastern Afghanistan.

From this base, which they dubbed al-Masadah (the Lion’s Den), bin Laden’s "Arab Afghans" engaged the Soviets in the battle of Jaji in the spring of 1987. It was at this time that bin Laden grew closer to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) and one of its most prominent members, Ayman al Zawahiri, who would become bin Laden’s deputy in al-Qaeda.

When the Soviets announced their planned withdrawal in April 1988, bin Laden began preparations to perpetuate and expand his forces. He began by moving his unit to the area around Jalalabad, Afghanistan, which became known as al-Qaeda; bin Laden would later say that the name remained with the group by accident. Following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, bin Laden, who had consistently expressed his contempt for the "atheist" Hussein and his Ba’athist government, approached the Saudi king with a plan to use his Arab Afghans to drive Hussein’s forces from Kuwait.

The Saudi government sought to restrict his movements within the kingdom. Bin Laden obtained permission in early 1991 to travel to Pakistan on the pretext of checking in on some business interests and never returned to Saudi Arabia.

In early 1992 bin Laden and al-Qaeda moved to Sudan, where they remained until 1996. Al-Qaeda and the National Islamic Front (NIF), the ruling party in Sudan, enjoyed a symbiotic relationship.

The NIF granted al-Qaeda a safe haven and freedom of movement, while bin Laden made substantial investments in Sudanese industry and agriculture and undertook several large-scale construction projects to develop the infrastructure and agricultural and industrial production capacity of Sudan.

While in the Sudan, bin Laden directed his forces in actions against the communist government of South Yemen. The Arab Afghans also were sent to Bosnia, where they had a substantial impact on that conflict. Bin Laden dispatched al-Qaeda forces into Somalia in response to the buildup of U.S. forces.

In December 1992 President George H. W. Bush sent 28,000 U.S. troops into Somalia on a humanitarian mission in support of United Nations (UN) relief efforts. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda dismissed all humanitarian claims and interpreted the U.S. presence as a way of putting pressure on Islamic regimes and as an effort to establish another base from which to attack Muslim nations.

Al-Qaeda regarded Yemen as a major victory. First, even though the hotels bombed in Yemen did not house U.S. personnel, the transfer of U.S. troops out of Yemen shortly after the hotel bombings indicated to al-Qaeda that they had been successful in driving the Americans from Yemen.

Bin Laden also claimed that the militarily superior U.S. forces were driven from Somalia by a poor, ill-armed people whose only strength was their faith. In his 1996 aliran declaring war against the United States, bin Laden claimed that the most important lesson to be learned from Somalia was that the United States would flee at the first sign of resistance.

The year 1994 was a watershed for bin Laden. He survived two assassination attempts and in April was stripped of his Saudi citizenship in response to the growing threat he represented to the regime.

A jawaban step in his radicalization came in August, when the Saudi government imprisoned clerics Salman al Awdah and Safar al Hawali, who were among the first and most prominent of the clerics circulating cassettes of their sermons against the continued U.S. presence in the Arabian Peninsula, and whose imprisonment bin Laden would later mention in his 1996 fatwa.

Bin Laden and al-Qaeda left Sudan in 1996 and returned to Afghanistan, a move prompted by several factors. In addition to the assassination attempts, bin Laden faced international pressure on the NIF and its de facto leader, Hassan al-Turabi.

The United States and Saudi Arabia sought to have bin Laden silenced and his activities curtailed, and al-Turabi found it increasingly difficult to maneuver and protect bin Laden.

When Sudan started pressuring bin Laden, he returned to Jalalabad. There bin Laden and al-Qaeda entered into a symbiotic relationship with the Taliban ("the students"), who were in the process of consolidating their control over much of the country.

This relationship was similar to that with the NIF in Sudan; bin Laden and his organization gained considerable freedom of movement and protection, while his benefactors benefited from agricultural, infrastructural, and industrial investment and development.

It was during the period between bin Laden’s return to Afghanistan and the 1998 aliran that civilians became targets. Both the 1996 aliran and bin Laden’s 1997 CNN interview spoke of civilians as collateral damage, not as legitimate targets in and of themselves.

By 1998 this had changed, and the aliran issued February 22, 1998, explicitly stated that Americans and their allies, civilians and military alike, were now al-Qaeda targets anywhere they could be found.

Communications from al-Qaeda repeatedly stress their belief that Western governments oppress Muslims and Muslim nations and are engaged in a war against Islam. Bin Laden describes the presence of U.S. forces in "the Land of the Two Holy Places" (Saudi Arabia) as the greatest insult and threat faced by the Islamic world since Muhammad’s lifetime.

In addition to decrying U.S. support for Israel, the group condemns U.S. support for what it considers "apostate regimes", particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden also points to the sanctions imposed on Iraq following the Gulf War as one reason to reject any human rights arguments coming from the West.

Al-Qaeda’s idea of the ummah (community of believers; the Islamic world) in opposition to the world derives from the teachings of two prominent Islamic scholars.

Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328) was a 14th-century Islamic scholar who taught that jihad is the duty of each individual Muslim when Islam is attacked, that the Qu’ran should be interpreted literally, and that all Muslims should read the Qu’ran and Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet) for themselves and not rely on a learned clergy. A second influence on al-Qaeda was Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), an Islamist associated with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Describing the world as existing between states of belief (Islam) and unbelief (jahiliyya), Qutb condemned Western and Christian civilization. Urging jihad against all enemies of Islam, Qutb believed that there is no middle ground and that all Muslims must take to jihad when Islam is threatened.

These influences are apparent in al-Qaeda’s activities and rhetoric. Bin Laden believes that since the Christians, Jews, and Hindus have nuclear weapons, it is only fitting that Muslims obtain them as well.

Bin Laden also echoes Ibn Taymiyyah in his assertions that the Saudi government is aiding the "crusaders" in plundering the wealth of the ummah, the vast Middle Eastern oil reserves, and by acting to keep oil prices below fair-market value.

Al-Qaeda’s leadership cadre is well educated. Bin Laden has a university degree in economics, and his inner circle contains doctors; agricultural, civil, and electrical engineers; and computer scientists, but no religious scholars.

Rahman’s aliran echoed the call to attack the United States and its allies—civilian and military, anywhere in the world—and contained exhortations to sink ships, shoot down airplanes, and burn corporations and businesses.

Two separate attacks on U.S. warships were made in subsequent years, with the USS Cole attack following an unsuccessful attack on the USS The Sullivans one year earlier. On September 11, 2001, the plot masterminded by Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who were arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and 2003, respectively, proceeded along the lines of Rahman’s fatwa.

Muammar Qaddafi

Muammar Qaddafi

Muammar Qaddafi was born in the desert region of Sidra (Sirte), Libya, in 1942. He was the youngest child from a nomadic Bedouin family. Qaddafi attended the Sebha preparatory school in Fezzan, where he formed a secret society, the Free Officers, patterned on Gamal Abdel Nasser’s group in Egypt that championed the causes of pan-Arabism and Arab socialism.

In 1961 Qaddafi was expelled from Sebha because of his political activism. In April 1963 Qaddafi became a trainee officer at the military academy in Benghazi and began to work his way up through the army officer corps.

In 1966 he volunteered to go and study with the Royal Corps of Signals in Britain, where he learned radio electronics and telecommunications. He was able to develop a code that the secret Free Officers group used to maintain contact with one another throughout Libya.


Qaddafi and his close friends from Sebha became the core of the revolutionary group that overthrew King Idris and removed Italian influence from Libya. Qaddafi called off the projected coup against the king twice before going ahead with it on September 1, 1969.

While Idris was out of the country, the Free Officers arrested the king’s leading supporters in a bloodless coup. The first objective was to take control of the main barracks and the radio station. After securing the radio station, Qaddafi gave an impromptu speech announcing that the monarchy had ended and that Libya had been given back to the people.

Qaddafi was appointed president of the Revolutionary Command Council, the main governing body of the country. The Free Officers promptly refused to renew agreements with Britain and the United States for their military bases in Libya; they also emphasized Arab unity.

They nationalized most banks and other business and declared Islam the religion of the state while stating that religious freedom would be accorded to all other faiths. In the midst of the cold war, the Western nations,—particularly the United States—were hostile to these changes and Qaddafi’s fiery brand of Arab nationalism.

In hopes of creating a pan-Arab state, Qaddafi proclaimed the Federation of Arab Republics (Libya, Egypt, and Syria) in 1972, but the three countries could not agree on specific terms. In 1973 Qaddafi talked for the first time about his third universal theory, an economic and political philosophy that was neither capitalist nor communist.

At this time he also nationalized all foreign petroleum assets. Increased revenues from petroleum during the 1970s enabled Qaddafi to initiate massive programs of domestic development and to build a modern infrastructure.

At the same time, Libyan forces occupied the 60-mile-wide Aouzou Strip on the border of Chad. The skirmishes between Libya and Chad continued sporadically for years to come. Qaddafi gave massive amounts of financial aid to African nations and was a prominent figure in the Organization of African Unity.

In 1974 Qaddafi gave up all his political and administrative functions, but still remained head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces. On March 2, 1974, Qaddafi proclaimed that Libya was to be known as the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahariya. He subsequently stepped down from all public offices but remained the real ruler of Libya from behind the scenes.

In 1975, Qaddafi published the first of three documents called The Green Book, which expounded his personal philosophy and political belief translated into a aktivitas of action. The Green Book became part of every Libyan’s life and was studied in schools; extracts were broadcast daily, and its slogans were publicized throughout the nation.

Part one of the book, The Solution of the Problem of Democracy—The Authority of the People, concentrated on the political structure of Libya and rejected the concept of parliamentary democracy.

Part two, published in 1977 and entitled The Solution of the Economic Problem—Socialism, discussed the weaknesses of both communism and capitalism. Part three, published in 1981 and entitled The Social Basis of the Third Universal Theory, dealt with a wide range of issues including nationalism and the status of minorities and women.

Qaddafi’s hostility toward Israel and the West brought him closer to the Soviet Union. Western governments also blamed him for a series of terrorist attacks against civilian targets.

Gaddafi at the 12th Summit of the African Union, February 2009

In 1981 U.S. and Libyan air forces clashed over the Gulf of Sidra. Hoping to stop terrorist attacks, President Ronald Reagan authorized a bombing raid to assassinate Qaddafi in 1986. Although his adopted daughter died in the attack, Qaddafi survived this and other attempts on his life.

During the 1990s, Qaddafi began to adopt a more moderate approach to the West and provided financial compensation for some terrorist victims in order to repair diplomatic relations.

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was established in 1964 under Ahmed Shukairy to represent Palestinian national demands for self-determination. In 1964 the Palestine National Council (PNC, or parliament) of 350 representatives met in East Jerusalem and voted on the Palestine National Charter, or declaration of independence, that declared historic Palestine as the homeland of the Palestinian Arabs. The charter has been amended several times.

In 1968 the charter added that "armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine". In 1988 the PLO under Yasir Arafat’s orders agreed to drop the use of terrorism, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and essentially accept the establishment of the independent state of Palestine in the Occupied Territories of the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank—the so-called mini-state solution.

Although some Palestinian groups opposed Arafat on these issues—the changes were agreed upon by the Palestine National Council, dominated by pro-Fatah Arafat supporters. Fatah (the Palestine National Liberation Movement) continued to dominate the PLO until 2006.


After the Arab defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Shukairy stepped down as chairman of the PLO, and Yasir Arafat, the leader of Fatah, the largest guerrilla group, was elected chairman.

Arafat remained the leader of the Palestinian national movement until his death in 2004. The PLO constantly struggled to remain independent from any Arab government and often found it difficult to steer a neutral course among rival Arab governments.

Secular and all-inclusive, the PLO was an umbrella organization of some 10 different Palestinian groups, including the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), under Dr. George Habash, and the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP), led by Naif Hawatmeh; the Arab Liberation Front, supported by Iraq; and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command, a PFLP splinter group supported by Syria and sometimes Libya.

The Palestine National Council operated until the 1993 Oslo Accords as a government in exile. The PNC comprised over 300 members, including fighters, union members, students, and women. The Palestine Central Council acted as an advisory board of approximately 60 representatives from all the various factions.

The Executive Committee ran the PLO on a daily basis and comprised 15 members. In contrast to many other Arab governments, the PLO was highly democratic and engaged in lively and often public debates about strategies and tactics.

The Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) was the PLO’s military wing and was often made up of fedayeen (self-sacrificers). By the 1970s the PLA had an estimated 10,000 fighters based mostly in Lebanon and Syria.

After the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon the PLA was forced to scatter to a number of Arab countries. After the establishment of the Palestine Authority (PA) under the 1993 Oslo Accords, many soldiers were subsumed under the police force.

The Palestine National Fund was the PLO’s economic arm. The fund was financed by donations from Palestinians in exile as well as taxes levied on Palestinians working in some Arab nations such as Libya. Individual Arab governments, such as oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, also provided aid. Those regimes cut off aid after the PLO supported Saddam Hussein and Iraq in the First Gulf War.

After the 1967 war, some groups within the PLO endorsed terrorist attacks on civilians. The PFLP simultaneously skyjacked four planes, landing them at a remote airstrip in Jordan in 1970; this incident precipitated "Black September", when the Jordanian army attacked and defeated Palestinian forces and ousted the PLO, which then moved its base of operations to Lebanon.

Attacks on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics followed in 1972. The cycle of violence escalated as PLO groups launched raids inside and outside of Israel and Israel assassinated Palestinian leaders in the Middle East and Europe. As a result many innocent civilians on both sides were killed and wounded.

Within the Arab world the PLO was recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Although it was condemned as a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States, the PLO gradually gained international recognition, and, once it renounced terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist, even Israel and the United States entered into both public and secret negotiations with it.

The PLO also established an extensive network of social services, including schools, orphanages, and hospitals. The Palestine Red Crescent was active in providing health and emergency care. SAMED provided an economic infrastructure of small businesses, workshops, and factories manufacturing textiles and even office furniture in Lebanon and Syria.

Many of these institutions were destroyed in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In the 1970s the PLO also sponsored some agricultural cooperatives in Sudan, Somalia, and other African nations. It also sponsored art and cultural events.

The Palestine Research Center, based in Beirut, focused on collecting materials and publishing books and articles on Palestinian history in order to preserve its cultural heritage. The center was also destroyed, and materials were taken by the Israelis in the 1982 war. The PLO also maintained information bureaus and had diplomatic representatives in major world capitals.

In the midst of the 1987 Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in the occupied territories, a rival Islamist organization, Hamas, emerged to challenge Fatah’s leadership. Financed by devout Muslims, especially in conservative Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, Hamas prospered first among poor Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip.

Because it competed with the PLO, Israel initially ignored Hamas but subsequently found that in many ways it proved a more dangerous enemy. When the PLO, in spite of concessions to Israel, failed to achieve a viable Palestinian state, many more young Palestinians who had grown up under Israeli military occupation joined Hamas.

When the Palestine Authority was established in the territories evacuated by the Israeli military in 1994, Arafat became the leader of the PA; he won a clear-cut majority as president in open and fair elections in 1996.

However, the PA leaders, most of whom were members of Fatah who had spent years outside the Occupied Territories, were also accused of corruption and inefficiency. After Arafat’s death Mahmud Abbas was elected president in 2005.

Fatah dominated the Palestinian parliament until it was defeated by the Islamist Hamas party in the 2006 elections and Ismail Haniyeh became prime minister. As the two main political forces—Fatah and Hamas—competed for power and the Israeli occupation of most of the territories continued, the future of the PLO remained uncertain.

Kuwait

kuwait flag

Kuwait is one of the Gulf States, located at the head of the Persian Gulf, with Iraq to its north and east and Saudi Arabia to its south. Iran is located directly across the Gulf waters. The geography of Kuwait is dominated by mostly flat deserts interspersed with a few oases in Kuwait’s 6,880 square miles of territory. Kuwait is a diminutive form of the word for fort. The official language is Arabic.

From the 19th century onward the Sabah clan allied with the indigenous commercial elites, and Kuwait developed as a thriving mercantile community with an economy based on foreign trade. Although never directly under Ottoman rule, the Al-Sabahs paid financial tributes to the empire and recognized the sultan’s power, but Ottoman threats to annex Kuwait pushed the Sabahs to ally with Britain.

An 1899 treaty gave Britain control over Kuwait’s foreign affair, and Kuwait became a British protectorate. From that time forward, border issues continually plagued the country. The British relinquished control in 1961.

Kuwait Map

After independence the Sabah family governed Kuwait as emirs with a constitutional monarchy. The emir ruled the country through the council of ministers, which mostly consisted of family members appointed by the emir himself.

The judicial system was based on Islamic law, or sharia, particularly the Maliki school of jurisprudence, but many of the criminal and commercial laws were based on prior British laws. The legislative branch was composed of a National Assembly (Majlis al-Ummah), whose 50 members were elected to four-year terms.

Political parties are legally banned and instead, several organizations have representatives in parliament. Prior to 2005, voting was restricted to men who were able to prove that their ancestry in Kuwait dated prior to 1920 and who were not members of the armed forces. In 2005, women were granted the right to vote. After 2005 the government granted citizenship to 5,000 biduns, people without documents—originally from Syria, Iraq, and Jordan—per year.

Foreigners, called expatriate workers in Kuwait, are needed to fill positions in the workforce and especially in the oil, construction, and service sectors. Since these immigrant workers are not entitled to free government services and benefits and cannot become citizens, there is some hostility between the native Kuwaiti population and the majority immigrant population.

Kuwait City

The economy is mostly based on oil and overseas investments. In the 1970s the oil industry increased its extraction and processing capabilities, and by the mid-1980s 80 percent of the oil extracted in Kuwait was also being refined there. Oil production led to a Kuwaiti economic boom, with both direct and indirect services and products. By 2006 Kuwait had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world.

Kuwait

Kuwait is one of the Gulf States, located at the head of the Persian Gulf, with Iraq to its north and east and Saudi Arabia to its south. Iran is located directly across the Gulf waters. The geography of Kuwait is dominated by mostly flat deserts interspersed with a few oases in Kuwait’s 6,880 square miles of territory. Kuwait is a diminutive form of the word for fort. The official language is Arabic.

Kuwait Map

From the 19th century onward the Sabah clan allied with the indigenous commercial elites, and Kuwait developed as a thriving mercantile community with an economy based on foreign trade. Although never directly under Ottoman rule, the Al-Sabahs paid financial tributes to the empire and recognized the sultan’s power, but Ottoman threats to annex Kuwait pushed the Sabahs to ally with Britain.

An 1899 treaty gave Britain control over Kuwait’s foreign affair, and Kuwait became a British protectorate. From that time forward, border issues continually plagued the country. The British relinquished control in 1961.

After independence the Sabah family governed Kuwait as emirs with a constitutional monarchy. The emir ruled the country through the council of ministers, which mostly consisted of family members appointed by the emir himself.

The judicial system was based on Islamic law, or sharia, particularly the Maliki school of jurisprudence, but many of the criminal and commercial laws were based on prior British laws. The legislative branch was composed of a National Assembly (Majlis al-Ummah), whose 50 members were elected to four-year terms.

Political parties are legally banned and instead, several organizations have representatives in parliament. Prior to 2005, voting was restricted to men who were able to prove that their ancestry in Kuwait dated prior to 1920 and who were not members of the armed forces. In 2005, women were granted the right to vote. After 2005 the government granted citizenship to 5,000 biduns, people without documents—originally from Syria, Iraq, and Jordan—per year.

Foreigners, called expatriate workers in Kuwait, are needed to fill positions in the workforce and especially in the oil, construction, and service sectors. Since these immigrant workers are not entitled to free government services and benefits and cannot become citizens, there is some hostility between the native Kuwaiti population and the majority immigrant population.

Kuwait City

The economy is mostly based on oil and overseas investments. In the 1970s the oil industry increased its extraction and processing capabilities, and by the mid-1980s 80 percent of the oil extracted in Kuwait was also being refined there. Oil production led to a Kuwaiti economic boom, with both direct and indirect services and products. By 2006 Kuwait had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world.

Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988)

The Algiers Treaty of March 6, 1975, signed by Iran’s Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and then vice president of Iraq Saddam Hussein, was intended to solve long-standing border and waterway disputes between the two neighboring countries.

Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988)

However, with the overthrow of the shah in 1979, which put Iran in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists, the political dynamics changed. By 1980 Iran’s new leaders started to hint that they did not feel obligated by the shah’s earlier commitments, and Iraqi leaders were complaining that Iran still had not returned certain border areas promised under the 1975 treaty.

In September 1980 Iraqi armed forces moved to reclaim those lands, and on September 22 they crossed the border into Iran. The invasion had consequences that Iraqi president Hussein had not expected.


In launching the attack on Iran, Hussein thought the war would be brief and would lead to the downfall of Iran’s religious leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom Hussein disliked. Instead, the power of Khomeini and other Islamic revolutionaries increased as Iranians united and rallied to support the war.

Few had expected Iraq to win the war outright. Although Iraq had better technology, more weapons, and a stronger air force, Iran had three times the population and about four times the geographic area of Iraq. Thus the Iran-Iraq War seesawed back and forth for eight grueling years.

Some methods of World War I were employed; Iran, for example, often conducted useless infantry attacks, using “human assault waves” made up in part by young, untrained conscripts, as in the Kerbala offensives, which were repulsed by the superior air- and firepower of the Iraqis.

Iraq, concerned with the war’s trench warfare and stalemate, had its overtures for a peace agreement undercut when its reputation was tainted by United Nations reports that it had used deadly (and illegal) chemical weapons against Iranian troops in 1984.

Military volunteer of Iran army

Although both Iran and Iraq attacked each other’s oil-tanker shipping in the Persian Gulf, Iran’s attacks on Kuwait’s and other gulf states’ tankers caused the United States and several Western European nations to station battleships in the gulf to protect those tankers.

This in turn led, on July 3, 1988, to the accidental shooting down of an Iranian civil airliner by the U.S. cruiser Vincennes, which killed all 290 crew members and passengers aboard.

As many as 1 million people died in the Iran-Iraq War, approximately 1.7 million were wounded, about 1.5 million were forced to flee as refugees, and major cities were destroyed on both sides. The oil industries of both countries also suffered extensive damage due to the fighting; oil exports, and earnings from those exports, naturally dropped.

More important, the large oil reserves of Iran and Iraq represented the potential for significant international economic power, but both nations had together largely wasted $400 billion on the war and along with that the chance to build up their societies.

The effects of the war clearly reached beyond the two combatants. Iran’s need for additional weapons led to a compromising relationship for the administration of U.S. president Ronald Reagan in 1985. In the secret Iran-contra affair, Iran was able to obtain weapons from the United States (the country that Khomeini had called “the great Satan”) in exchange for the release of hostages in Lebanon.

At about the same time U.S. aid of all types began to appear in Iraq, whereas the Soviet Union supplied about two-thirds of Iraq’s weapons. The Iran-Iraq War also ended Khomeini’s attempts to spread his fundamentalist Islamic revolution abroad.

Although stymied in his ambitions to make Iraq the leading power in the Persian Gulf (and the Arab world), Iraqi president Hussein learned new fighting strategies that he would later use against another neighboring country, Kuwait, which had been his ally during the conflict.

By the time a cease-fire finally arrived on August 20, 1988, the Iran-Iraq War had been the longest and most destructive conflict in the post–World War II era, and none of the basic friction points between Iran and Iraq had been settled.

However, in August–September 1990, while Iraq was busy with its invasion of Kuwait, Iraq and Iran quietly restored diplomatic relations, and Iraq agreed to Iranian terms for the settlement of the war: the removal of Iraqi troops from Iranian territory, division of sovereignty over the Shatt al Arab waterway, and an exchange of prisoners of war.

Ottoman-Safavid Wars

Ottoman-Safavid Wars

The protracted conflict between the Ottomans and the Safavids was based on territorial and religious differences. Both great empires sought to control vast territories in present-day Iraq, along the Caspian and their mutual borders.

As Sunni Muslims, the Ottoman Empire also disagreed with the Shi’i Safavids over basic religious tenets and practices, similar to the disputes between various Catholic and Protestant powers in Europe.

In 1514, the Ottoman sultan Selim I, father of Suleiman I the Magnificent, declared a holy war against the Safavids, whom he considered heretics. Armed with cannons, the Ottoman army defeated Shah Isma’il, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, and occupied much of northern Persia (present-day Iran).


Suleiman continued the fight against Shah Tahmasp I (reigned 1524–76), but Tahmasp retaliated with a policy of “scorched earth,” making it impossible for the Ottoman forces to live off the land, as was usual for invading armies at the time. Tahmasp also struck an alliance of convenience with the Habsburgs, a major enemy of the Ottomans.

The Ottomans succeeded in taking Tabriz in northern Persia, but, stretched beyond his limits, Suleiman reluctantly signed a treaty with the Safavids in 1555. The Safavids managed to retain control over northern Persia and territory along the Caspian Sea but lost Iraq to the Ottomans. Following Suleiman’s death, Shah Abbas I managed to regain temporary control over Baghdad and Basra in Iraq, but after Abbas died, the Ottomans retook the territories.

The subsequent 1639 peace treaty between the two rival empires established borders that are almost identical to those shared by present-day Iraq and Iran. The two great powers remained enemies but no further warfare broke out.

Over the course of their rivalry, both empires achieved major military victories and suffered military defeats, but neither was able to defeat decisively the other. Their futile warfare undermined the economic and military power of both and was a major factor in their long declines.