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After Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father as president of Syria in 2000, people joked that life was better. If you criticised the president it was only you who disappeared, and not your family and friends as well, as would have happened previously.
When, in the early heady days of the Arab uprising of 2010-12, schoolboys in the down-at-heel southern town of Daraa graffitied “Your turn next Doctor!” — a reference to the fact that Assad had trained as an ophthalmologist and had a slightly nerdy image as the head of the Syrian Computer Society — they were arrested and tortured, but their families were able to organise a demonstration. The security forces’ violent response revealed that, in reality, nothing had changed. However, thanks to the internet, the protests spread and the country descended into civil war. “In one of history’s ironies”, writes Christopher Phillips, “the modern technology that Assad had encouraged now facilitated moves to challenge his rule.”
Eight years ago Phillips, a professor of international relations at Queen Mary University of London, published The Battle for Syria, a superb book in which he argued that outsiders were chiefly responsible for the escalation of that war. In his new book, he applies this thesis to the “new Middle East”, as he calls it, in which violent non-state actors are a growing factor, local powers are jockeying in several different places simultaneously, and — fuelling both these trends — the US is no longer the dominant force.
Phillips could have done this by writing a history of the region since the shortlived Arab uprising. But that would have been a roving story and more complicated to follow. Instead, inspired by Tim Marshall’s bestselling geopolitical guide Prisoners of Geography — to which he acknowledges a stylistic debt — he has taken a different approach, picking 10 places where there is conflict, by which he means significant interference as well as outright war. Six of these are nation states, or what is left of them: Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon. The others are Palestine, Kurdistan, the Gulf and the Horn of Africa. Through these, Battleground tells a story focused on the past 15 years, right up to the early weeks of the latest war in Gaza.
Each chapter follows a formula. After introductions that do not assume much prior knowledge — “Libya is vast and empty,” is one opening gambit — and then some potted history, Phillips eases the reader into the recent, often complicated, details. His core argument is that simple explanations such as “oil” or “religion” fail to explain any of these conflicts. Rather they are the result of the interaction of domestic and external factors. What makes Battleground so interesting is its extraordinary description of the confounding role of several states, notably Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE and Qatar.
Some figures sum up what is going on. Between 1945 and 2008, he says, each war drew in “just over two foreign interveners” on average. Since then that number has shot up, to more than six. The exceptions in that earlier period, Oman and Lebanon, have now become the rule, chiefly because of the growing activism of regional powers. Driven by a mix of fear and opportunism, they are expending a lot of money and diplomatic and military energy trying to thwart each other. Nine different countries have deployed military forces to Libya at some point since 2011 — a total that includes the UK, France, Italy and Russia. By late 2015 it was thought that as many as 30,000 people, from 70 different countries were fighting for non-state actors in Syria.
Phillips also joins the dots between these conflicts. Turkey’s failure to achieve regime change in Syria because of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intervention explains why Ankara intervened so forcefully in Libya in 2019 to frustrate the ambitions of Moscow-backed warlord Khalifa Haftar.
In a similar vein, Saudi Arabia and the UAE attacked Yemen in 2015 after it became clear they too were getting nowhere in Syria, where their initial aim had been to stop the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood benefiting if Assad was removed from power. In Yemen their goal was to oust the Houthis, a movement from Yemen’s Shia minority, the Zaydis, which had seized the capital Sana’a and appeared to have links to Iran.
However, because the Saudis and the Emiratis had different objectives the groups they backed ended up fighting one another. The Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman thought the war would be over in six weeks. Nearly a decade on, the Houthis are undefeated, now have advanced Iranian weaponry and — since this book went to press — have begun targeting shipping in the Red Sea in support of the Palestinian cause.
Phillips writes crisply and critically, covering a lot of ground in the 20 or so pages he allocates to each conflict and has succeeded in his aim of rendering “complex geopolitics in an accessible form”. I never knew president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey was a professional footballer before he entered politics; the book could have done with more splashes of this sort of human colour, not least because the story that it tells is so dark.
There is little in Battleground for optimists. Western policymakers, Phillips thinks, will have “to accept the region may be unstable for some years while the regional and global players reach a new balance of power. This could be a bloody and violent process.” If anything, that sounds like a very British understatement.
Battleground: Ten Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East by Christopher Phillips Yale University Press £18.99, 320 pages
James Barr is a historian of the modern Middle East and author of ‘A Line In The Sand’ and ‘Lords of the Desert’
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