Sample Solution

The complexities of the Gulf region reside in no small measure in the presence of significance communities of Shi’ite Muslims in Iraq and the areas of Gulf States (including Saudi Arabia) that face the Arabian Gulf. The fact that the majority of the world’s proven oil reserves lie under precisely this particular region has, of course, not been lost on the leaders of the nations of the western world as they have become ever more dependant on such sources of supply. 78 The exact size of these Shi’ite communities constitutes the kind of information that the rulers of the countries concerned prefer not to release; Iraq certainly has a Shi’ite majority. As the proselytizing activities of the Iranian revolution expanded across the Gulf, it was clearly in the interest of Saudi Arabia and the other oil-rich states of the southern Gulf and Iraq engage in a war with Iran that would help to curve the increasing amount of political agitation that was occurring within the Shi’ite communities. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980 was immensely costly in terms of human lives and military hardware. It was when Kuwait in order to achieve a number of political goals: to fulfill Iraq’s long-standing claim to the territory, to punish Kuwait for its oil-pricing policies, and – a well-tried ploy – to distract attention from his own domestic difficulties. The result of Iraq’s invasion was the Gulf War, involving yet another incursion by western forces into the region, the destruction of most of Iraq’s social infrastructure and the emergence in the aftermath of the conflict of a number of potentially interesting new alignments, not the least of which is the possibility of peace agreements between Israel and its various neighbours.
While these have been some of the most prominent political events in recent decades, the Arab world has also witnessed a series of apparently never-ending conflicts in regions that are less in the limelight of publicity: in the south of the Sudan, an ongoing conflict between the Muslim ruling forces of the northern part of the country and the people of the south; in former Spanish Sahara, a conflict between Polisario forces supposed by Algeria and Moroccan Army: in the state of Libya, a continuing involvement in internal affairs of Chad to the south; and in Iraq (along with Iran and Turkey) the struggle of the Kurdish peoples for independence and a separate homeland.
Conflict, then has been a continuing feature of the recent history of the Middle East region a contemporary reflection perhaps of a reality that has scored this strategically (and now economically) important area for centuries. Conflict is also a major theme of many works of modern Arabic fiction, hardly surprising in view of the events described above on the societies of the nations involved. Alongside of the international, national and communal conflicts involving weapons of destruction, there have also been conflicts of politics and ideology. 79 As noted above, the 1967 defeat led to a comp