80 Years Ago in West Asia

The Arabs revolt against the Ottoman Turks in 1916, with promises that a united Arab kingdom would be established in west Asia after the end of the war. (Lawrence of Arabia, a British officer fighting with the Arabs, becomes famous.) This promise was not kept. Instead, the former Turkish provinces of West Asia were broken up. Emir Feisal ruled as king of Syria between 1918 and 1920, but was kicked out by the French. Feisal with British support was then made king of Iraq in 1921, while France kept Syria and Lebanon as colonies. Britain kept direct rule over Palestine but could not stop struggles between Jews and Arabs. Abdullah ibn Hussein was made emir (later king) of Jordan, which had been split off from Palestine. Meanwhile, the father of both Abdullah and Feisal, Sherif Hussein, fought a civil war in Arabia against the Saudi clan. In spite of British support, Hussein was defeated, and in 1926 the kingdom of Saudi Arabia under king Ibn Saud was proclaimed.

The Kurds break free from Turkish rule in 1918 and set up an independent Kurdistan. Britain crushes the Kurds and Winston Churchill, future prime minister of Britain, approves the use of poison gas to be dropped by aircraft against enemy villages, the first time airplanes would have been used to drop gas, but in the end this did not prove necessary. The Kurds occupied an oil producing area which was made a northern province of the new (British-dominated) kingdom of Iraq.

The Armenian genocide begins in 1915. Although the Christian Armenians had been subject to periodic persecution by the Turks, the killings this time were on scale not seen before and were aimed at wiping out the Armenians as a distinct nation. By the end of the First World War, between 1.5 to 2 million Armenians had been killed, and hundreds of thousands refugees scattered throughout the region. A number of Armenian orphans came to Canada.

Reza Khan (1878-1944), leader of the Persian Cossack cavalry division, and effective ruler of Persia since 1921, removes the last Qajar shah in 1925 and has himself crowned as emperor Reza Shah Pahlavi. He introduced educational reforms and rebuilt the army. The various nomadic tribes in Persia, after years of guerrilla fighting, were forced to settle down. He officially changed the name of Persia to Iran, and in 1927, ended the privileged status of Europeans in the country. Reza's popularity began to fall as his rule became increasingly dictatorial during the 1930s.