The Middle East in International Relations by Fred Halliday

Author:Fred Halliday
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Internal warfare

This recurrence of external, great power military involvement in the region and of war between regional states has been accompanied by irregular war within states, the actions of opposition forces contesting external involvement and local states alike. The spectrum of such actions has ranged from substantial guerrilla campaigns, involving the mobilisation of thousands of armed men and the occupation of territory, as in Algeria (1954–62), Turkey (1984–98), Iraq (intermittently 1958–2003) and Yemen (1962–70), to war between confessional groups within one country (Lebanon, 1979–90), to lower-level campaigns of bombing and assassination (Egypt, 1990s; Iran from 1981 onwards), through to a more sporadic set of armed actions linked to political campaigns (second Palestinian intifadha, 2000 onwards). Actions of the irregular kinds have not been specific to the Middle East; yet the combination of such irregular actions with the broader context of international and regional military action, and with the invocation of particularist Middle Eastern justifications, be these nationalist or religious, has done much to shape external perceptions of the region as it has to inflame relations between states and peoples, and between different peoples themselves, in the region.

If rural uprisings against the state were recurrent in 1918–39, the use by nationalist forces of guerrilla warfare became more common after 1945: the Zionists in Palestine used this against British and Arab foe alike from 1946 to 1948, but it was as an instrument of struggle by Arab nationalists that guerrilla warfare has become best known in this region. In the early 1950s Egyptian fedayin carried out raids against British forces stationed in the Suez Canal zone. The Algerian war of independence, fought from 1954 to 1962, saw a high level of mobilisation for nationalist guerrilla war, in which hundreds of thousands of Arabs were killed.20 The 1960s were a high point for guerrilla war world-wide; in the Middle East this found expression in two radical nationalist campaigns: the launch of the movement against British rule in South Yemen, in the Radfan mountains, October 1963, and the launch of the al-Fath guerrilla campaign against Israel, in January 1965. Each, Palestinian and Yemeni, was to have wider consequences after the cataclysmic year of 1967: the British departure from Aden in November 1967 led to the taking of power by the National Liberation Front, later (1978) the Yemeni Socialist Party, one of the guerrilla factions, which then proceeded to promote a guerrilla organisation in the neighbouring Sultanate of Oman, the People’s Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf (PFLOAG), with the aim of liberating ‘the occupied Arab Gulf ‘. For its part the Israeli victory in the war of June 1967, and the crisis of the Arab regimes that followed, opened the way for a much more active campaign, against Israel and Arab states alike, by the Palestinian resistance.21

While the Palestinian guerrilla resistance had begun in January 1965, prior to the war of 1967, this latter conflict created a context in which much more extensive operations could be carried out: Israel had now

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