To make any sense of this at all we have to go back to World War I when borders were drawn arbitrarily without consulting Middle East Tribes. So, this put warring factions for centuries in the same countries with bad results. Whether Europe and the U.S. did this on purpose to have them fight each other rather than Europeans is anyone's guess. Or maybe they just thought they were creating order or both. Who knows at this point? This began the problems we see manifest today.
This kind of problem continued into World War II when the war was fought in North African and the Middle East over oil. Also during the 20th Century oil became more and more valuable to all countries. So, wherever oil was discovered it created great imbalances of power where oil was discovered and poverty where it was not discovered. This also changed the middle east a lot from where it was before.
So now the middle east does not resemble anything like it did before 1900 and is part of why things are so messed up there now.
Then you have to add the divisions caused by the Sunni Shiite divide of Muslims in the Middle East. IF you consider Sunnis to be the Catholics and the Shiites to be the Protestants maybe it makes more sense.
And if you study Christian history in Europe you know that Catholics and Protestants had 100 year wars over their religious points of view. In fact, the Pilgrims coming to the U.S. is a part of one of the Protestant reformation movements of the 1600s seeking freedom from persecution and those wars.
Imagine if Christians never came to peace in europe between Catholics and Protestants and you have what is going on in the Middle East right now and we might be looking at another 100 years war between Shiites and Sunnis. Right now the major force killing Shiites is ISIS (ISIL IS etc).
Understanding that ISIS is sort of like a Robin Hood to many Sunnis (about 10 to 11 million of them) might be useful in this context because they are so extreme they literally want every Shiite Muslim and Christian on earth to be beheaded and killed.
And that is where we are today. However, Russia isn't really attacking ISIS that much yet. Russia is attacking opposition to Assad only. Because Assad has bribed ISIS with oil wells and buys back oil that ISIS pumps and sells back to Assad. So, there is a business relationship between Assad and ISIS. And part of the arrangement is for ISIS to help Assad kill his opposition groups which is why even though ISIS brought down a Russian Plane, Putin still isn't going after the ones who actually did this to his country's passenger plane because Assad is bribing ISIS.
So, this is why everything is so very screwed up right now and so extremely convoluted in every way imaginable.
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