Read the article over at UnHerd.

Almost twenty years ago, on 30 June 2006, Usama bin Laden released a eulogy for Ahmad al-Khalayleh, the Jordanian jihadist universally known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of the Islamic State movement. A translation of the eulogy is given below.

Zarqawi had established the nucleus of IS with Bin Laden’s seed funding in Taliban Afghanistan in late 1999 and moved to Iraq with his cadres in early 2002, linking up with the well-developed and increasingly emboldened jihadist underground, a year before the Anglo-American invasion that felled Saddam Husayn. In October 2004, after eighteen months of combat with the Coalition where it was quite clear the Zarqawists had some connection to Al-Qaeda, Zarqawi resolved all doubt by publicly swearing an oath of allegiance to Bin Laden and renaming his organisation Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (AQM). It was as emir of AQM that Zarqawi perished on 7 June 2006 and as such that Bin Laden eulogised him three weeks later.

The alliance forged by Bin Laden and Zarqawi between their jihadist currents would, a lot of murk and ambiguity notwithstanding, outlast both of them, but ultimately the theological and strategic tensions that had been visible at their first meeting just before the turn of the millennium proved too much of a strain. The relationship collapsed in 2014 and in many ways the story of the jihadist movement since then has been the struggle for supremacy between two poles that have steadily widened as they defined themselves against one another.

Eulogy for the Martyr of the Umma and the Emir of the Martyrdom-Seekers: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi1

Praise be to God, then praise be to God, praise be to God who said: “Think not that those killed in the path of God [sabil Allah] are dead. Rather, they live with their Lord, being provided for, rejoicing in what God has given them from His bounty, and receiving glad tidings about those who have not yet joined them but have been left behind: no fear shall be upon them, nor shall they grieve” [Qur’an 3:169-170].

Prayers and peace be upon our Prophet Muhammad, who said: “By the One in whose hand is the soul of Muhammad, I would love to raid in the path of God and be killed, then raid and be killed, then raid and be killed” [hadith, Sahih al-Bukhari].

As for what follows:

Our Islamic umma [community] has been struck with crushing grief by the loss of its fearless knight [or “bold horseman” (farisuha al-miqdam)], the lion of jihad, and the man of resolve and sound judgement: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Ahmad al-Khalayleh, following his killing in a sinful [or “wicked” (atheema)] American airstrike. To God we belong and to Him we return. We ask God to honour him with what he wished for, thus accepting him among the martyrs, granting him abundant reward and recompense, and beautifying consolation for his family and relatives.

O Muslims, indeed the grief is immense, and the situation is grave. We urge you toward what is beautiful, namely patience, and we encourage you toward what is abundant, namely reward [al-ajr].

[Arabic poetry, indicated henceforth by italics]

Thus let the calamity be immense and the matter grievous [/] for there is no excuse for an eye whose tears have not flowed

A youth who died amid striking and stabbing [/] a death that stands in place of victory since victory escaped him

Our precious Islamic umma: although the separation from the beloved ones, Abu Musab and his companions, has saddened us, it has gladdened us that their souls were poured out in these tremendous epics [al-malahim] while they were defending the shari’a of Islam. And although we have been afflicted by the loss of a knight [fursan] from among our greatest knights and an emir from among our greatest emirs, it has gladdened us that we have found in him a symbol and everlasting example for the generations of our glorious umma [to come]. The mujahideen shall remember him, supplicate for him, and praise him in poetry and prose, secretly and openly. We shall praise him according to what we knew.

For he was easy in companionship so long as he was not wronged [/] and if he sensed fear among the people, he charged forth without reproach

Abu Musab departed with his head held high, mighty of soul, free and proud, noble and loyal. He would never accept humiliation in his deen [lifeway, i.e., Islam], nor would he ever sleep upon oppression, nor would he flatter anyone or compromise regarding the truth. Stern against the disbelievers [or “infidels” (kafireen)], merciful toward the believers, inciting toward fighting, and waging jihad in the path of the deen.

Among his statements, may God have mercy on him, was: “There is no good in a life where our honour is violated, the dignity of our sisters is trampled, and the slaves of the Cross rule over us.”

Another of his statements: “We fight in Iraq and our eyes are upon Jerusalem, which shall not be regained except through a Qur’an that guides and a sword that grants victory.”2

He, may God have mercy on him, was the focus [or “object” (mahall)] of the love of his friends and the esteem of his enemies, the fair-minded among them, who testified for him and praised him, and there is no wonder in that.

He departed pure of garments; there did not remain a garden [/] on the morning he was laid to rest that did not wish to be his grave

Upon you be the peace of God always, for indeed I [/] have seen that the noble, free man has no lifespan [i.e., limit to his legacy]

Abu Musab followed the example of our Prophet Muhammad, and took as his example others who passed before him from among our leaders: Musab [ibn Umayr], Umar [ibn al-Khattab], Ali [ibn Abi Talib or Imam Ali], and Ja’far [ibn Abi Talib], may God be pleased with them all. Thus he plunged into the depths of war with a smile, so God raised his rank, elevated his remembrance, and he became an example for those after him.

The coward’s love of self led him survival [/] and the brave man’s love of war led him to war

And what difference is there between mankind [i.e., other men] and him [/] when he feared what is fearful and regards what is difficult as difficult?

Abu Musab, may the mercy of God be upon him, departed after God had granted fath [opening, conquest]. He established a base for defending the deen and for recovering Palestine, by God’s permission, and exacted revenge there on behalf of the oppressed [mustad’afeen], inflicting heavy losses upon the Americans, the allies of the Jews. He confounded them, killed their men, shattered their edifice [lit. “structure” (bunyanahum)], exhausted their wealth, disrupted their unity, and humiliated their arrogance, until those both near and far, the obedient and the disobedient, dared to challenge them. So it was that he entered history through its widest gates and ennobled it, and took the world by the hand toward the path of honour and made it known to it, through determination, decisiveness, and a proud refusal [to submit]. As a result, his biography was immortalised alongside the biographies of the eminent nobles.3

Do not weep except for a lion who has departed [/] bravely in the raging wars

Leave me in the wars that I may die honourably [/] for an honourable death is better than my life

Abu Musab taught humanity practical lessons in how freedom is seized. For freedom is not granted to the submissive beneath the domes of democracy. He taught humanity rebellion against idolatrous rulers [tamarud ala al-tughat], in an age in which the greatest taghut, the Pharaoh of the age, Bush and his companions, hold sway, trampling upon all values and covenants. In the invasion of Iraq and the prison of Guantanamo, you have a lesson. They terrorised the people, humiliated them with fire and iron, and treated presidents as though they were slaves.4

The Pharaoh of the age came to Iraq not caring about the objections and demonstrations of mankind, who said to him: “No to the shedding of red blood for the sake of black oil”. But he was contemptuous of the entire world and advanced into Iraq arrogantly, swaggering on account of his troops and equipment, imagining that the lions of the wilds [asad al-shara] had been transformed [into something weak], and that the men of Islam had receded after the Arab rulers, the kings and presidents, had given him every sign of obedience and loyalty, humiliation and submission. Each one of them was placing his hand upon his head, wondering when his turn would come to be placed in his grave.

The enemy attacked Iraq, then began oppressing the people mercilessly and demolishing villages utterly. The roar of aircraft filled the horizons and deafened the ears, while the explosions of gunpowder spread death and offended the nostrils. The mountains were shaking and swaying from the intensity of the bombardment, until hearts were in throats. Those possessing courage and understanding sought refuge in their homes; they were not stirred by words, and their feet would not carry them because of the severity of the terror. Falsehood raised its head high, the munafiqeen [hypocrites] broke their covenants and stood in the trench of the Christians and Jews. The Muslims became like scattered sheep on a rainy night in a land filled with predators.

It was under the shadow of that gloomy atmosphere—where you saw the semblances of leaders but no leaders, the semblances of ulema but no ulema, and the semblances of men but no men, except those upon whom God had mercy—in those difficult, earth-shaking circumstances, that there appeared the knight of Islam, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Like a lion stretching out upon its forelegs [/] bold-hearted, a lion of great stature and power

He appeared with a small band of believers. They were seventeen men, not seventeen armies.5 They bound themselves together, pledged themselves to one another, and made a covenant with God Most High that they would support His deen or perish in its defence, [as] men, and [real] men are few.

The people are a thousand, of whom [only] one is like a man [/] while one man may equal a thousand when a matter becomes serious

Whom were they going to fight? Those equal to them in number, or twice their number?! Never [or “by no means” (kalla)]. Or even ten times their number?! Never. Rather, they [the enemy] were waves like the sea, waves of equipment and soldiers of evil. But whoever magnifies God’s right in his heart and is granted tawhid [monotheism], the firm mountains will sway while he does not sway. So our knight dismounted, carrying the banner [or “standard” or “flag” (al-raya)], and resolved upon fighting until the end: either he would taste what Ja’far tasted, or he would taste victory.6

He planted his foot firmly in the swamp of death [/] and said to it: “Beneath your sole is al-hashr [“the gathering” (of mankind on Judgment Day)].”

So they plunged into the depths of war and began striking, with a small number of Kalashnikovs, a small number of anti-tank mines, and a small number of bazooka launchers. Abu Musab had previously come with some of his brothers to the jihad against the Russians [i.e., Soviets, in Afghanistan in the 1980s7], so he competed with his brothers [in racing to the battlefield] until he overtook those who had gone before him, and when he spoke he excelled over the other speakers. Through his coming, and that of his brothers, to the land of Afghanistan, they gained experience [lit. “inoculation” (ta’tim)] in battling a superpower, and the myth of the [invincibility of] great powers vanished from their minds. They transferred the great, surging boldness and the immense morale from Afghanistan to Baghdad, igniting the fuse of jihad. The energies of the youth erupted in every place, from the Upper Euphrates to its lower reaches, and to God belongs all praise and favour.

This is our knight about whom we are speaking. He accomplished all of that, after God granted him success, with his own modest means alone. There was not behind him an international alliance, nor a regional coalition, nor a global organisation. That is the bounty of God; He gives it to whom He wills, and God is All-Encompassing, All-Knowing.

The soul of Isam made Isam a leader [/] and taught him to charge into battle and boldly advance

Yes, this is the knight of Islam about whom we speak, who stood in the face of the Pharaoh of the age, in the face of American imperialism [al-imbiriyaliyya al-amrikiyya], after the international organisations failed, after the regional groupings failed, after the entire world failed to stop that brutal, exceedingly unjust aggression.8

A striker of heads, striking heads in the heat of battle [/] agile when the heavily-armoured horse becomes burdened

Perceptive in obtaining praise from every place [/] even if the lions concealed it between their fangs

Here we ask God to grant the best reward to our bold knight, and to bestow the best reward upon everyone who offered us condolences and comfort regarding our great knight, may God have mercy on him. We mention specifically al-Emir al-Mu’mineen [“the Commander of the Faithful” or “the Prince of the Believers”], [Taliban leader] Mullah Muhammad Umar, and we ask God Most High to grant him and his mujahid brothers victory over the infidels.9

Then I say to whoever accuses the knight of our umma of killing some segments of the Iraqi population: if someone comes to you claiming that a man gouged out his eye, wait until you see the accused, for perhaps the claimant himself gouged out his own eye!

In recent weeks, there has been increased clarity on this matter. The [Iraqi Sunni Arab parliamentary] deputy Mohammed al-Dayni has spoken about the scale of the oppression and torture being practised against the Muslims in Iraqi prisons. Likewise, leaders of the Association of Muslim Scholars [Hay’at Ulema al-Muslimeen] has previously spoken about the war of extermination to which the sons of Islam in Iraq are being subjected.

Abu Musab, may the mercy of God be upon him, had clear instructions: that he should concentrate his fighting upon the invading occupiers, primarily the Americans, and that he should leave alone anyone who desired neutrality. As for whoever insisted on standing and fighting in the trench of the Crusaders against the Muslims, he was to kill them, whoever they may be, regardless of their madhhab [school of Islamic jurisprudence] or tribe, because supporting infidels against Muslims is a nullifier from among the Ten Nullifiers of Islam [Nawaqid al-Islam], as is established among the people of knowledge [ahl al-ilm, i.e., the consensus of the ulema].

Next, I say to Bush: you must hand over the body of the hero to his family. Do not be excessive in your rejoicing, for the banner has not fallen, praise be to God. Rather, it has passed from one lion to another lion from among the lions of Islam, and we shall continue, by God’s permission, fighting you and your allies in every place—in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Somalia and Sudan—until we drain your wealth, kill your men, and you return defeated to your own lands, just as we defeated you before, by God’s grace, in Somalia.10

Likewise, I say to your proxy [or “agent” (wakil)] in Jordan: enough of your despotism [or “arbitrary rule” (istibdad)]. You prevented Abu Musab from entering his homeland alive, so do not now stand between him and that. The one most deserving of leaving Jordan is you, to the Hijaz, for that is your land and the land of your forefathers before Britain installed your grandfather, Abdullah the First, as its agent [amila] over Jordan. What frightens you about Al-Zarqawi, may God have mercy upon him, even from beyond the grave, is that you know that if the Muslims are left to their own devices concerning his funeral, then, by God’s permission, it will be a great funeral, a demonstration of the extent of the Muslims’ sympathy with their mujahideen sons.11

In conclusion, I say: Abu Musab, may God have mercy upon him, brings honour not only to his tribe, his homeland, and his umma, but humanity as a whole, because he embodied for it the meanings of honour and proud refusal [of surrender], sacrifice and self-ransom [al-tadhiya wal-fed’a12]. Indeed, his life story is valuable material for [use as] a contemporary model. If the world were to study his fragrant biography, its sons would learn how faith in God [iman bi Allah] makes men, so that they resist the people of injustice and misguidance [or “oppression and error” (al-zulm wal-dalal)].

It is incumbent on every educator, writer, and novelist worthy of the name to draw from his biography that which may give sustenance to the rising generation and the next generations. Similarly, it is incumbent on every free poet to compose poetry regarding this falcon. If I were among the knights of poetry, I would greatly multiply the rhymes in lamenting him, and thereby compete with Tamadur [bint Amr, a.k.a. Al-Khansa] in lamenting Sakhr. But there is no harm in my borrowing verses from the poetry of the poet of the contemporary Islamic da’wa [proselytism], [the Islamist propagandist on Al-Jazeera satellite channel] Shaykh Yusuf Abu Hilala:

The earth choked with the blood of the sacrifices, and the fields of struggle blazed,

And from the barren desolate wastelands there springs forth the source of pure water,

Shining proudly with the banners of al-aqeeda [the creed] and true acts of heroism,

Declaring: if giving becomes scarce, then we are the sacrifices for the deen.

***

Victory belongs to those dyeing their bodies with the blood of wounds,

Who refuse to sell away their lands in willing surrender,

And those who disdain the life of humiliation and violation.

***

A few moments whose terror would overwhelm the raging winds,

Hamdan plunges down through them like a falcon with clipped wings,

After he had stormed into death while bombardment had engulfed the surrounding regions.

***

I bent over kissing his bleeding wound, and my own wounds reopened,

Tears flowed upon my cheek, so I said: “O my soul and my comfort,

Would that you had mercy upon our hearts and turned away from this departing.”

***

Then the shrouded hero answered me, mocking my suggestion:

“Wipe away your tears; there is no comfort for me in your noble tears.

This is the path if your love is sincere, so carry my weapon.”

May God have mercy on Abu Musab, and may God have mercy on everyone who carried weapons for jihad in the path of God. The last of our supplications is that all praise belongs to Allah, Lord of the worlds, and prayers and peace be upon our Prophet Muhammad and upon his family and all his companions.

Shaykh Usama bin Muhammad bin Laden

4 Jumada al-Thani 1427 AH

30 June/Haziran 2006 AD

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FOOTNOTES

Read the article over at UnHerd.

A translation is given below of the main editorial in the 548th edition of Islamic State’s Al-Naba newsletter, published on 21 May 2026. The article, entitled, “Our Throats Before Islam”,1 i.e., that the jihadists will sacrifice their lives to defend the faith, is an interesting example of a recurring motif in IS propaganda, namely using Islamic history to justify atrocities and incite Muslims to violence against non-jihadist Muslims and non-Muslims.

The Naba article draws on the Islamic Tradition—the early biographies of the Prophet Muhammad, the hadith that record the sayings and actions of the Prophet and the lives of the Companions (Sahaba), select legal rulings—and a smattering of Qur’an verses to build an argument that presents IS’s ideology as the only legitimate interpretation of Islam, one which places jihad and the killing of Jews, Christians, and hypocritical Muslims above all other obligations.

This has always been IS’s method, to arrange the sacred history accepted by the mainstream of Islam to buttress radical conclusions. IS are not alone among Islamists in doing this. There is much less discussion of ideological warfare in the West these days when it comes to countering jihadism, and this is perhaps for the best given how badly those efforts have gone. But should interest revive, challenging the certainty about history that underlies the jihadist project would be an area to focus on.

In the case of this Al-Naba article, the immediate problem is that the Tradition, which largely interprets the Qur’an, since the text of the Qur’an is far from self-evident in its meaning (as the Qur’an itself acknowledges2), dates from about two-hundred years after Muhammad’s death (albeit we do not know exactly when Muhammad died) and was generated in the context of consolidating an Imperial creed to explain a world transformed by the Arab conquests. In Christian terms, this would be like constructing the life of Jesus by relying on the Gnostic Gospels that were written to make theological arguments around two centuries after Christ’s death, thus have little historical grounding in the realities of first-century Judea. Making it better known simply that there is a question mark over this history, even without the detail, might introduce just enough doubt to halt a potential jihadist recruit.

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If the question is the first (known) shark attack on a human being, archaeology has the answer: a man in Japan, whose 3,000-year-old skeleton has nearly 800 wounds.1 If the question is the first human representation of a shark attack, the current answer is a Greek vase dating to c. 725 BC, discovered in Ischia, Italy, which shows a man being assailed by a large fish that is probably a shark. The scope of this article is narrower, focusing on the earliest written accounts of shark attacks. However, this does allow a somewhat broader inquiry into how people have perceived sharks over time, albeit not all people, since the literary sources come entirely from Europe.2

It is possible—even likely—that the first written record of a shark attack appears in the work of the Father of History himself, Herodotus, two-and-a-half millennia ago.3 In 492 BC, Mardonius, the son-in-law of the Persian King Darius I, led an expedition to Greece, nominally to punish Athens and Eretria for supporting the Ionian Revolt, but “the Persians were really aiming at the conquest of as many Greek States as they could manage”, Herodotus tells us. The Persian fleet “was approaching the headland” of Mount Athos, Herodotus goes on, when “a violent northerly gale swept down”, and “the damage suffered by their ships was terrible”. “It is said” 300 ships were destroyed and 20,000 men killed, “dashed onto the rocks or drowned because they did not know how to swim, or else [they] perished of hypothermia”. Herodotus then reports: “Some of these casualties were due to the presence in the waters off Athos of an immense number of savage beasts which devoured the Persians”.4 It is overwhelmingly probable this refers to sharks, but we cannot be absolutely sure.

There is no serious doubt that when naturalists in the Classical period, such as Aristotle and as Pliny the Elder, wrote of “dogfish” or similar they were referring to sharks.5 The Greeks were a maritime people and the Mediterranean became a Roman lake: they saw sharks regularly. The tumult of the Roman Empire’s fragmentation reduced Europeans’ ocean-going capacity and the advent of Islam restricted their access: to even live on the coastline of Italy, let alone venture onto the Mediterranean Sea, was to be at high risk of being carried off by slave-seeking Arab pirates. Thus, in the Medieval era, confined basically to the Continent and fishing mostly in rivers, Europeans largely did not encounter sharks.

An exception to this rule was recorded around 1350. At that time, Europe had significantly recovered from the Roman collapse,6 and the brief period of counter-attack we call the Crusades,7 though it had failed in its objective of restoring Jerusalem and the Holy Land to Christendom, had succeeded in creating some more room to move in the Mediterranean. In this environment,8 Ludolf von Sudheim, a German Roman Catholic priest and a historian of the then-recently lost Crusader States, had been able to tour the Islamic-ruled eastern Mediterranean—the Land of Israel, the broader Levant, and Egypt—between 1336 and 1341.9 Ludolf’s chronicle of his travels discussed, inter alia, the various dangers of maritime journeys in small vessels: the sea itself; “pirates or corsairs”, especially around “Barbary” (the Muslim polities of North Africa); the “rocks and shoals”. Ludolf then mentions the “perils from great fish”:

About these you should know that there is in the sea a certain fish which the Greeks call Troya marina, which means sea-swine, which is greatly to be feared by small ships, for this same fish seldom or never does any mischief to great ships unless pressed by hunger. Indeed, if the sailors give it bread, it departs, and is satisfied; but if it will not depart, then it may be terrified and put to flight by the sight of a man’s angry and terrible face. However, the man must exceedingly careful when he is thus looking at the fish not to be afraid of it, but to stare at it with a bold and terrible countenance; for if the fish sees that the man is afraid it will not depart, but bites and tears the ship as much as it can. …

An exceedingly notable sailor has told me that when he was a youth he fell into peril with this in a small ship. There was with him in the ship a youth who thought himself exceeding brave and fierce, so that when the fish met him he … lowered himself down by a rope from the ship to the water to look at the fish with an angry face, as is the custom. But when he saw the fish he was straightway affrighted and shouted to his comrades to pull him up by the rope, and the fish, seeing the man’s fright, leaped out of the water as he was being drawn up, and with one bite took off half the man from his belly downwards[.]

The story is second-hand, and about events many years earlier. The tall tales of seamen are also notorious, particularly when it comes to the size of fish they encounter. Still, it could be true, and if it is, it is difficult to think what the creature could be other than a shark. But considerable ambiguity remains.

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As the Ludolf case shows, even the vocabulary for sharks faded in Europe through the Middle Ages. The change came with the Age of Discovery, specifically the conquest of the Americas.10

In 1561, Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominican friar whose campaign to defend Native Americans and indict the conduct of the Spanish Conquistadors provides a lot of the raw material for the Black Legend that endures to this day, completed a book that describes a scene where a Spanish overlord uses an Indian to dive for pearls.11 The danger to the Indians, Las Casas says, came from three types of animal: lagartos or crocodiles; tiburones that could “tear to pieces” even horses, seemingly meaning smaller sharks, such as tiger sharks and bull sharks; and marrajos that could “swallow [a man whole] on the first gulp”, i.e., larger sharks, the description matching closely the great white shark and probably the mako shark, too.12 From Las Casas:

On one occasion, it happened that an Indian, upon diving, saw a marrajo close to him, and came up fleeing up out of the water [onto the canoe]; the Spanish executioner argued with him asking why he came up so quickly without bringing anything; the Indian said that there was a great fish and that he feared it would kill him; the Spaniard forced him to return to diving and … beat the Indian with a stick. The sad Indian dove, and the marrajo, that was waiting for him, charged him and swallowed him.

It seems that at the beginning the Indian fought with the fish, and there was a swirl in the water for a while; the Spaniard understood that the fish had attacked the Indian, and seeing that the Indian was not returning, he killed a small dog that they had in the boat, and put it on a hook with a heavy chain, which they commonly carry for these fishes, and threw it in the water; and later the marrajo took it, for it was not satisfied, and the hook set in such way that it could not escape; the Spaniard feeling that the fish was hooked, gave it enough line, and slowly returned towards the beach in his canoe or boat.

Jumping to the land, he called for people to help him, they landed the beast, giving blows with axes and rocks or whatever they had, and killed it, opening its belly they found the unfortunate Indian and took him out, the Indian gave two or three gasps and he died there

There is no reason to doubt that pearl divers in the New World were menaced by sharks, but this story has the feel of myth about it, and the fact it appears without any rooted detail—names, time, place—in a work with a propagandistic purpose should increase the suspicion about its veracity.

Two decades on, in 1580, an officer sailing between Portugal and India wrote of seeing one of his crewmen fall overboard. The Early Modern equivalent of a lifebuoy, a wooden block tied to a rope, was thrown to the man:

Our crew began to bring in the man, who had managed to catch the block, but, when he was no more than half the range of a musket away, there appeared from beneath the surface a big monster known as tiburon; it rushed at the man and cut him to pieces right before our eyes. It was certainly a terrible death.

This is often said to be the first account of a shark attack in English, and it may be. There is, however, a problem in determining whether it was written in English, or translated into English. The word tiburón, borrowed by the Spanish from the Carib Indians or Kalinago of northern South America and used, as explained above, to designate the smaller man-eating sharks,13 was also used by the English for about a century, until the late sixteenth century, i.e., the time when this was written. The English would switch to the word xoc from the Mayans in Mexico, which ultimately evolved into “shark”.14 As such, either case—originally English or a translation—is plausible, and this uncertainty is merely one complication with this source, which is of very murky provenance: there is no precise date, the author is anonymous, and nobody knows where the text first appeared.

Regardless, something like the modern view of sharks, the mingled fascination and dread, seems to have been in place by the end of the sixteenth century. For example, in 1593, the English privateer—an entirely different thing to a pirate—Admiral Sir Richard Hawkins wrote:

The Sharke or Tiberune, is a fish like unto those which wee call dog-fishes, but that hee is far greater, I have seene of them eight or nine foot long; his head is flat and broad, and his mouth in the middle … [H]is skinne is rough, like to the fish which we call a rough hound, and russet, with reddish spots, saving that under the belly hee is all white: hee is much hated of sea-faring men, who have a certaine foolish superstition with them, and say that the ship hath seldome good successe, that is much accompanied with them. It is the most ravenous fishe knowne in the sea; for he swallowth all that hee findeth.15

An intermittently-famous shark attack in the United States dates from 1642 in what was then-New Amsterdam, a settlement on Manhattan Island that would become New York City:

It was a dark and stormy night when good Antony Van Corlaer arrived at the creek [Harlem River] which separates the island of Manna-hata from the mainland. The wind was high, the elements in an uproar, and no Charon could be found to ferry the adventurous sounder of brass [Van Corlaer was a trumpeter] across the water. For a short time, he vapored like an impatient ghost upon the brink and then, bethinking himself of the urgency of his errand, took a hearty embrace of his stone bottle, swore most valorously that he would swim across in spite of the devil, and daringly plunged into the stream. Scarce had he buffeted halfway over when he was observed to struggle violently battling with the spirit of the waters. Instinctively, he put his trumpet in his mouth and, giving a vehement blast, sank forever to the bottom.16

An “old Dutch burgher,” renowned for his honesty, witnessed Van Corlaer’s demise and told of how he had seen the “dvyvel” (devil) in the shape of a huge fish “seize the sturdy Antony by the leg and drag him beneath the waves”.17

The episode is listed in databases of shark attacks and appears in history books on the same subject, referred to as one of, if not the, earliest such incidents in the Colonial Americas. But it is a legend, originating in an 1809 book, A History of New York: From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, published under the name of Diedrich Knickerbocker, a pseudonym for Washington Irving. Irving, one of the most famous writers of his day, admired by contemporaries like Lord Byron and Charles Dickens, was an author of fiction: his History was satire and Van Corlaer never existed.18 Irving is remembered now, if at all, for the “Rip Van Winkle” short stories.

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A genuine report from two years earlier was written by Father Thomas Copley, a Jesuit missionary in Maryland, or “the Colony of Saint Mary”, as he referred to it. The representatives of the Society of Jesus wrote litterae annuae (annual letters) to Rome, explaining the progress of their ministries, and in 1640 Copley incorporated in his letter the story of a man who had been inclining to faith, then backed away from conversion and resumed a life of sin, even blasphemy. “[H]e was accustomed to smoke [the prayer-beads he had obtained] in his pipe with tobacco, after grinding them to powder, often boasting that he was eating up his ‘Ave Marias’,” wrote Copley:

But the divine vengeance did not let the wicked crime go long unpunished; for scarcely a year having passed, on the returning vigil of the day on which he had abandoned his purpose of embracing the Catholic faith, a more sacrilegious playfulness possessed him … [I]n the afternoon, when he had betaken himself to the river for the purpose of swimming, scarcely had he touched the water when a huge fish having suddenly seized the wicked man, before he could retreat to the bank, tore away, at a bite, a large portion of his thigh, by the pain of which most merited laceration, the unhappy wretch was in a short time hurried away from the living—the divine justice bringing it about that he, who a little while before boasted that he had eaten up his “Ave Maria beads,” should see his own flesh devoured, even while he was yet living.19

Modern researchers have argued that the evidence points to the attack taking place in August 1640 and the perpetrator being a bull shark, based partly on that species being a seasonal summer visitor to the Chesapeake Bay down to the present. The inference is reasonable, but not conclusive.

The difficulty with the sources examined so far is that we cannot be totally sure they refer to sharks and/or the reliability of the sources themselves is in doubt, with the contents being dubious or the authenticity being in question or both. The first unambiguously recorded shark attack on a human dates to 1749. The victim was Brook Watson, a British boy born in Plymouth in 1735.

Watson was orphaned when he was 6-years-old, in 1741, and sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the American colonies—Boston, Massachusetts, to be precise. Watson, inspired by his uncle, a trader in the West Indies, decided on a life at sea, and at the age of 14, he was given the job of cabin boy aboard a merchant ship. It was during downtime from this commission, while swimming in Havana Harbour off Cuba, that Watson was attacked by a shark.

As Watson later recounted, while his shipmates noticed the attack by his “voracious assailant” quickly, their rescue efforts were wrong-footed because he was pulled under the water and surfaced “at about 100 yards distance”. Then he was attacked and dragged under again. Watson was finally saved from the water as the shark closed in for a third attack, but the chances of saving his life were very low: “all the flesh was stripped off the calf from the bone downwards” on one leg and the “foot … divided from the [other] leg”, Watson wrote.20 Yet, despite such injuries, and the medical technology of the mid-eighteenth century, Watson survived. A surgeon managed to stop the bleeding, and Watson made it through the subsequent gauntlet of amputation and infections.21 Fitted with a wooden leg, Watson was back at work within three months, and went on to have a colourful life as a founder of Lloyd’s of London, a Loyalist during the American rebellion, and a politician in Britain. He died ennobled as Sir Brook Watson at the ripe old age of 72 in 1807.

The sourcing is not perfect. Watson’s account was written in April 1778 for a newspaper to promote the painting (see above), Watson and the Shark, by Anglo-American artist John Singleton Copley, which shows the moment of Watson’s rescue just before the shark closed in for its third and probably fatal attack. Twenty-nine years is time enough for memory to be unreliable about the details, and the promotional purpose of the account leaves open the possibility of elaboration. Nonetheless, the basics of the story are confirmed beyond question. Watson and his contemporaries had the concept and lexicography of a shark pinned down specifically,22 all were agreed a shark is what had attacked Watson, and there is the impressive physical evidence of Watson’s missing leg.23

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FOOTNOTES

The Supreme Leader (Rahbar-e Mo’azzam) of the Islamic Revolution, Ali Khamenei, was killed on 28 February, the first day of the U.S.-Israeli military campaign in Iran. On 8 March, his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, was hastily upgraded to “ayatollah” in regime messaging and appointed as replacement Rahbar. Almost immediately, stories began to circulate that Mojtaba, who has not been seen in public since his elevation, was seriously injured and not in command of the regime. This has been the dominant media narrative for the last two months, but there are reasons to doubt its veracity.

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In December 2025, Netflix put out a documentary directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, Cover-Up, about the life and work of Seymour Hersh, the famous or notorious American investigative journalist.

No effort is made to conceal that the makers of Cover-Up are consecrated, long-term fans of Hersh. Indeed, part of the “story” of the documentary is that these devotees—Poitras, who has wanted to make a film about Hersh since 2005, and Obenhaus, who has been a collaborator with Hersh on three “investigative documentaries”—are finally being granted access to the great man and his archives, and he regrets agreeing to it. Hersh’s prickly demeanour is on display the first time we see him in the present day. Agitated about Poitras and Obenhaus seeing his files and exposing the names of his sources, Hersh says: “I barely trust you guys”. By later in the film, Hersh is having a meltdown and declaring: “I’d like to quit”.

This subplot aside, the film is structured as a series of case studies, shown to us using archive footage and present-day interviews, wherein Hersh, through guile and tenacity, exposes the truth about American wrongdoing, leading to a global media coverage and punishment of the villains.

To Poitras’s credit, Cover-Up is not the complete hagiography she produced in Citizenfour (2014), about Edward Snowden, the systems administrator at the National Security Agency (NSA) who enabled the most sustained assault on Western intelligence and defected to Russia in 2013. But the basic formula remains the same: the United States is presented—using genuine misdeeds, half-truths, and pure imagination—as a murderous rogue State, against which Poitras’s subject is a lone voice of truth and resistance, omitting where possible and spinning where not awkward elements in their biography to sustain this illusion.

An important element of this is bookending Cover-Up with stories Hersh reported on in 1968 and 2004. The first story, Vietnam, is self-evident, the natural starting-point since it is what made Hersh’s name. The second, Iraq, is potentially explicable in narrative flow and audience terms: it was objectively the biggest moment in Hersh’s career since Vietnam and it is probably the story he is best-known for among the younger Netflix-viewing segment of his largely liberal and Left-wing fan base, so it is a way of finishing on a high note. It is, however, somewhat jarring in a documentary that is otherwise essentially chronological—we get up to Hersh’s activities in the 2020s, and then it suddenly cuts back two decades. But the effect on the flow of the narrative is the least of it. What is most striking is what this arrangement conceals from the narrative.

The very brief section on the 2010s and 2020s alludes to the disquiet Hersh’s writings in this period have caused even among his admirers without getting into details. One such admirer wrote fifteen years ago of “Hersh’s recent turn away from the investigative reporting that made him famous into unsubstantiated conspiracy theories”, and this is now a widespread view of Hersh on the Left. Hastily changing the subject to Iraq, where Hersh is on the “right” side according to the politics of his supporters, prevents the issue of Hersh’s missteps narratively metastasising into questions that could complicate the image of Hersh the rest of the documentary has cultivated, and avoids concluding on downbeat note of Hersh “in decline”. Most importantly, since the film stresses Hersh’s consistency, it prevents the emergence of the dangerous question that would have torpedoed the entire enterprise: What if there was no “recent turn” and Hersh was like this all along?

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From Cover-Up’s opening moments, in the vignettes it uses to set the scene for Vietnam, we get a sense of its approach.

Footage is played from a press conference with President Lyndon Johnson in November 1967, where he says the U.S. is making incremental progress in Indochina. The intent is clearly to show LBJ and the American government as delusional at best, and probably dishonest. But LBJ was correct. The U.S. prevailed militarily in Vietnam, then for political reasons abandoned what it had secured under the cover of a fake “peace” agreement, a recurring tendency in American policy.

A document is then shown, with the section reading, “Pentagon acknowledges that civilian areas in N[orth] Vietnam have been damaged during [bombing] raids”, highlighted. In combination with the clip of Hersh lamenting the “open murder in Vietnam”, it is meant to convey that the U.S. intentionally killed civilians in Vietnam, but that is not what it says. There are civilian casualties in war; even the invention of precision weapons has not changed that fact of life. But there were fewer civilians killed in the Vietnam War—which was spread over three countries (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) and nearly twenty years—than in Korea over three years. The two conflicts were strategically identical, with the U.S. defending an imperfect Southern republic from conquest by a Soviet colony to the North; it is objectively strange that the one waged more scrupulously is the one commonly regarded as inherently criminal. The kind of decontextualised propaganda Cover-Up engages in is a large part of the answer for why this is so.

The story Hersh reported on that made him famous was the My Lai massacre, a gruesome atrocity by a U.S. Army unit in a Vietnamese village on 16 March 1968. Perhaps 400 civilians were murdered, most of them women and children and old people. During the three-hour rampage, many other crimes, including rape and mutilation, were committed.

As Hersh tells it, he had just quit his job at the Associated Press—after a fight with the editor, of course—and received a telephone call from a friend with a source in the military, giving him a tip that there was an “atrocity in Vietnam that they’re covering up”. Discovering that the leader of the offending platoon, Lieutenant William Calley, was under house arrest on a barracks in Utah, Hersh went down there. While speaking to the commanding officer, Hersh could see Calley’s charge sheet on the desk and copied it down. Hersh then spoke to Calley, who claimed he had done nothing wrong: he had acted under orders and civilians had been killed incidentally in a fire-fight. Calley said his Captain, Ernest Medina, could vouch for him, and called him on the telephone, intending to get him to speak to Hersh. Instead, Medina said he did not know what Calley was talking about and slammed the receiver down, by Hersh’s account. Calley was ultimately convicted and imprisoned.

What surely leaps out from this story is that the U.S. military was already in the process of punishing the perpetrators at My Lai. Indeed, Hersh’s article in November 1969 in the Dispatch News Service, the one that changed his life, was made possible by the leaking of documents from this judicial procedure and by the testimony of officials involved in the investigation, which had been underway since March 1969 and Calley was charged in September 1969. So when Hersh says in the film, “After my story came out, the Army did an investigation” [emphasis added], he restates the fundamental lie on which his career has been built. Hersh did not alter the course of justice. What Hersh did was make the massacre public knowledge, transforming it into a global story the Soviet Union could utilise in political warfare to reinforce its onslaught against South Vietnam and the American troops trying to protect it.1

Hersh sees no problem with this: he advocates in Cover-Up for total press immunity from secrecy laws so it can publish anything it wants and boasts that while the Pentagon wanted to handle My Lai internally, “I broke that game up”. Fine. Most journalists would say Hersh was simply describing the job here. But Hersh’s “right” to do this, and whatever supposed benefits there were to the U.S. public knowing about My Lai, are clean different things to the claim that Hersh’s reporting was the only reason justice was done. Moreover, the gravamen of the My Lai saga is not the disclosure. It is what happened next, Hersh’s attempt to impose a larger meaning on it, which gets to the heart of the Hershian method—and which is most journalistically questionable.

There is “always another level”, Hersh says early in Cover-Up. “There had to be more”, he says of My Lai. This kind of thinking manifestly lends itself to poor journalism—to starting with a story and back-filling the evidence by credulously citing sources who say what you want to hear—and it is intrinsically vulnerable to degenerating into conspiracy theories, if every story must be bigger than it appears and sources saying it is will be believed.

Despite saying that Calley told him a tissue of lies in their meeting, Hersh decided to believe Calley’s claim he obeyed superior orders in My Lai, saying on a contemporary television program: “It raises the very real question: Were there really orders to shoot everything in the village? And if so, is this being done all the time?” Hersh moved swiftly from “just asking questions” to grand assertions that the Pentagon was lying when it said My Lai was an aberrational incident that said nothing at all about the U.S. Army. Hersh justifies this by saying he “kept on finding people” who told him a tale of an American “descent into madness” in Vietnam. In practice, what Hersh meant is he spoke to several of the My Lai killers who were keen to make the blame institutional, not personal.

One of these people was Michael Terry, whose hysterical comment to Hersh for his My Lai article—it was a “Nazi-type thing”—is highlighted in Cover-Up. What is omitted is that Hersh described Terry as a “witness”; only later was Terry forced, under the weight of evidence, to confess he was one of the killers. Another was Paul Meadlo, whose mother provided the quote that gave Hersh his headline: “I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer.” Mrs. Meadlo had an obvious incentive to blame the Army, rather than accept she raised a bad man, and it was ideologically convenient for Hersh, so he acted as stenographer for this dubious assessment of the situation.

Two weeks after the article, Hersh coaxed Meadlo himself into an interview with Mike Wallace on CBS Radio, where he disclaimed any real responsibility by insisting Calley had forced him to shoot civilians. Cover-Up eschews the context that would have helped here. Calley’s orders, if we assume they were real, also applied to helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who stopped the My Lai atrocity by threatening to shoot his own colleagues. Thompson played the part that was in his character, and Meadlo played the part in his.

All this gave Hersh what he needed to transform My Lai into an indictment of America tout court: “We’ve been sort of committed to a program of almost at random murder, rape, et cetera [in Vietnam]”, said Hersh in a contemporary television interview shown by Cover-Up. “I think everybody just looked the other way, including the reporters who obviously must have heard about it, some of them.”

To build the argument that My Lai was not an isolated incident, Hersh ignores the hard evidence that acquitted Captain Medina and thus the U.S. Army command of any responsibility for the massacre, and foregrounds the fashionable speculation that the “body count” metric was not being used as a rough guide to who was winning the war, but as an encouragement to U.S. Army units to go around murdering civilians to meet quotas.2 More tangibly, Hersh drew attention to a second massacre on the same day, in the same area, which at least has the benefit of being true. U.S. forces killed about ninety civilians in My Khe, a couple of miles from My Lai. But again Cover-Up lives up to its name and we are denied context.

The impression is allowed to stand that two anti-civilian massacres in one day by the Americans in Vietnam was the norm. So, do we find a systematic pattern of atrocities by U.S. troops in 1968 and 1969? We do not. There is one murky incident on the U.S. side that killed a dozen civilians but probably was not a war crime, and two massacres by the U.S.-allied South Koreans, where the worst that can be said of the U.S. is that it did not pressure its ally sufficiently to punish these crimes.3

What further distorts the picture is that the enemy in Vietnam is virtually omitted from Cover-Up. It would be unfair to expect a biographical documentary to give a comprehensive history of the Vietnam War, but it could have given some sense of the nature of the conflict. As it is, those relying on Cover-Up could be forgiven for thinking there were no opposing combatants in Vietnam and the U.S. had waged a senseless genocidal war on civilians.4 Even if the documentary was to omit the generally atrocious campaign of the Communists,5 it might have given a modicum of perspective by referencing the slaughter of 5,000 or more people by the Communists at Huế a month before My Lai, an exterminatory operation carried out as a matter of policy, centrally planned and ordered from Hanoi.

Speaking of Hanoi, at the end of this section it is noted that Hersh went to the city for several weeks in 1972, but this is used merely a segue, since it was after this trip that Hersh was hired by the New York Times. It seems a shame this was not delved into. An interesting episode in itself, it could have been a mechanism to examine the enemy in Vietnam and Hersh’s views of same.

There is a short section giving a potted family history. Hersh’s parents are Jews from Poland and Lithuania, who got to the U.S. in the 1920s. Almost all their relatives who remained in the Old World were wiped out in the Nazi Holocaust. Then it is on to Watergate, his first Times story.

We begin with a recording of President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, which the makers of Cover-Up obviously think makes Hersh look good because Nixon says Hersh is “probably a Communist agent” and Kissinger grovellingly assents (“Exactly. Exactly.”), when Hersh self-evidently was not. What caught my attention in the clip is that Nixon’s anger was because he believed Hersh was inventing a story out of “whole cloth”, and my prior is to assume Nixon was correct—or as good as. It could be that Hersh was being manipulated by “sources” using him in the venerable Washington way to wage bureaucratic-political warfare via fabricated “leaks” in the press. As Hersh himself said in a clip shown from the 1970s, “I give service to leaks”. The thought that followed was, “Like Woodward and Bernstein”, and, amusingly, within seconds Bob Woodward, the slave to his sources par excellence, was on screen giving the mythologised version of his Watergate reportage.

Hersh’s main contribution was a January 1973 report in the New York Times that four of the five Watergate burglars were still being paid. It does not seem to have moved the needle on the legal process investigating Watergate and it would be a stretch to connect it to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. Nonetheless, it was genuinely impactful in reigniting the press clamour for stories about Watergate after a couple of quiet months since Nixon’s landslide re-election in November 1972.

There is a digression on Hersh’s methodology, and he candidly describes it as: “Amazing people talking to me”. How this investigative journalism differs from access journalism one might wonder, and one will continue to wonder because the question is not even posed. “Amazing” is an apt enough description for many of Hersh’s sources, though. “Incredible” would work, too, and this aspect looms larger and larger in the Hersh canon, as we shall see.

In late 1974, Hersh had two “scoops”. The first was a yarn contributing to the rich mythology that Kissinger was behind the military coup in Chile in 1973, a point of doctrine for Leftists who cannot accept that Salvador Allende undid himself by destroying the economy and democracy. Hersh is still a believer in the ‘American economic imperialism’ fantasy of General Augusto Pinochet’s rise, saying Allende was overthrown because he “nationalised copper mines that were owned by people who were big supporters of Nixon financially”. The second was a report on Operation CHAOS, a CIA operation that in Hersh’s outraged telling involved “spying on American kids!” What the Agency had been doing was investigating Soviet infiltration of the student and activist movements, a counterpart to the FBI’s much-maligned COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program).

The ostensible crime in the CHAOS operation is that the CIA is only supposed to gather “foreign” intelligence. The difficulty was that Communists recognised no borders and served an apparatus headquartered in Moscow, which is not exactly a “domestic” issue. Regardless, in the post-Nixon witch-hunt atmosphere about really all authority, but especially the intelligence services, the critics got their way. Hersh is given a lot of credit for these developments in the film. Cover-Up suggests, if not quite says, Hersh’s reporting caused the creation of the Rockefeller Commission into CIA “abuses” that led on to the even more politicised and vindictive Church Committee in the Senate. The 1970s Congressional reforms neutered the CIA under various forms of “oversight” and established “the wall” between the CIA and FBI, with 9/11 as the result. It goes without saying that Cover-Up has no comment on the lack of a public inquest into the KGB.6

When Hersh enumerates the anti-constitutional actions the CIA apparently engaged in, he lists “foreign assassinations, domestic spying, [and] mind control”. One of these things is obviously not like the others, and it was not a passing slip from Hersh. The “mind control” reference is to Project MKULTRA and Cover-Up expands on this considerably in a segment that doubles as a critique of James Angleton, the controversial CIA counter-intelligence chief, with whom Hersh clashed. Hersh says MKULTRA was about “trying to make a Manchurian candidate” and “reprogram somebody to be an assassin”. The reality of MKULTRA is rather more mundane, but it was exposed with the most sensationalist slant by the Congressional Committees, along with many other CIA programs: some “red team” exercises, some exploratory, some operationalised, and all of them fodder for the conspiracy theorists ever since.

There is a moment during this part of the film where Hersh drops in an extraordinary claim about the death in 1953 of Frank Olson, a CIA officer involved in MKULTRA in its early days: “I have every reason to believe that was an organised CIA hit”. This is just left hanging; he is not asked why he thinks this or how he knows. Perhaps the evidence of suicide is too banal to countenance when there is “always another level”.

The take-home message Cover-Up wants from this section is that Hersh fearlessly confronting the rogue spies was the cause of the removal from office of Angleton, Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger, and CIA Director William Colby. It is usually the Duke of Wellington who is credited with the line, “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.” As Hersh reveals in his memoir, Colby was the source for the reporting on the “Family Jewels” document that compiled CIA operations judged retrospectively untoward. In other words, the story was, once again, of the American State self-correcting, and Hersh using the documentation of this self-correction to misrepresent America as a republic where systemic criminality goes unpunished.

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Hersh rounded out his stint at the New York Times by working with Jeff Gerth to write about corporations, a subject he cheerfully admits he “knew nothing about it”. This curtain-raises a section where some criticism of Hersh gets an airing.

In 1997, four years after signing the contract, Hersh published a book on John F. Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot, which as the title suggests was not an admiring look at the 35th President. Hersh portrayed JFK as distracted from his duties by an uncontainable sex life, with this moral corruption entangling him in financial corruption with the mafia and the private recklessness leading to public policy recklessness, particularly foreign policy disasters like the Bay of Pigs. Even those who believe Hersh discovered real new material acknowledge that it was a “bad book”, filled with hearsay nonsense from people who could not know the things they claimed to know. Cover-Up does not focus on the book, though, but how it was put together, which brought Hersh as close as he has been to career destruction.

In the summer of 1995, Hersh signed an agreement with a source, Lawrence X. Cusack, for a tranche of Kennedy documents, among them letters testifying that Kennedy had had an affair with Marilyn Monroe, and a year later, to generate hype and publicity ahead of the book’s publication, Hersh (and Obenhaus7) made a deal with NBC News to produce a documentary based on the documents and interviews with some of the Kennedy-era Secret Service men Hersh had tracked down for the book. Filming started—then abruptly stopped. The documents were fake, as NBC (and ABC, which had been given some of them) realised almost immediately upon viewing them. This is elided in Cover-Up, but the documents were blatantly forged. One letter dated 1961 had a ZIP code, when ZIP codes were introduced in 1963. Another letter from Kennedy was written on a typewriter invented eight years after Kennedy was murdered.

In Cover-Up, Max Friedman, a research assistant of Hersh’s, offers the defence that, while Hersh had “maybe talked to too many people about these [forged] papers” and started including material from them into his manuscript, he took the fake stuff out before he published the book. Small mercies. Hersh himself at the time said in an interview that he felt like a “dupe”, yet he was also “relieved because it cleared up a whole number of impossible to reconcile issues”. Hersh does not seem to realise the gravity of this confession: he had discovered glaring contradictions in his sources, but he did not have an acute enough sense of the historical method—and did have too much of a story he wanted to tell—to see what these contradictions meant. In the present day, Hersh says: “The fact that they [the documents] weren’t true, that’s just part of the process”. But it was not part of his process, the key point Cover-Up obfuscates. It was NBC and ABC who detected the forgery Hersh was desperate to believe.

For all the deficiencies of Cover-Up’s handling of Hersh’s “Marilyn papers” fiasco, it is the section containing my favourite moment of the whole film. Amy Davidson Sorkin, a fact-checker at the New Yorker, where some of Hersh’s best-known work has been published,8 is brought in and wonderfully remarks: “It was definitely a cautionary tale for journalism, but also for Sy and his strengths, and his things that maybe are not necessarily strengths”. I don’t think she was trying to be laugh-out-loud funny, but she accomplishes it all the same.

In February 2023, Hersh published his first article on Substack, which asserted, on the word of an “unnamed source”, that the U.S. Navy sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022, and that the administration of President Joe Biden began planning the operation in December 2021, three months before Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine. Moscow was initially suspected; evidence pointing to a Kyiv false-flag emerged as early as March 2023 and has grown since then. What there has never been any evidence for is U.S. responsibility, the accusations of the Russian government and Hersh’s source notwithstanding.9 Asked about this in Cover-Up, Hersh looks and sounds confused, and gets very defensive. “Even if there’s nine sources, sometimes it’s much better just to make it one”, Hersh says, giving some half-baked “security” reason. A clearly flabbergasted Poitras asks Hersh how he can say this: What if the single source is wrong? “Then”, says Hersh, “I’ve got twenty years of working with the guy that I’ve been wrong on.” Hold that thought. (It is just after this Hersh says he wants to quit.)

If the Ukraine section contains the sole moment where Hersh is challenged in the film, it should also be noted that it is yet another instance where context is removed. Cover-Up chose the Hersh story on Ukraine where genuine uncertainty remains. It omitted the flagrantly false Hersh story two months later, citing “one knowledgeable American intelligence official”, to accuse Kyiv of buying fuel from Russia and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of stealing “untold millions” of American dollars in a complex corruption scheme

Ninety-odd minutes in, we get to Syria. Hersh pronounces himself “shocked” at how quickly Bashar al-Asad fell (weren’t we all). Hersh says, obliquely, “I wrote stories for the London Review [of Books]. There were reports that Asad nerve gassed his own people. I saw him two or three or four times, and I didn’t think he was capable of doing what he did, period. And let’s call that wrong. Let’s call that very much wrong.” Asked if this was “an example of getting too close to power”, Hersh says: “Of course”. Hersh goes on: “The human rights people were all over him. I never thought he was Mother Teresa, but I thought he was okay. But if I have made a claim in prior interviews to be perfect, I would now withdraw it. That’s all. I wasn’t perfect.” And with that, after just about one minute, the Syria file closes, and we move on to Iraq in 2004.

When Hersh spoke about the LRB pieces, the magazine cover image of one—“Whose Sarin?”, from December 2013—flashes up on-screen (see above), but it would be easy to miss the headline at the very top of the page, and even if viewers do see it, unless they already have the background knowledge, it is going to be meaningless. For those who do not know: Hersh heavily implied, channelling his “sources”, four months after chemical weapons of mass destruction were used to kill hundreds of people in Damascus, that the Syrian insurgency had gassed itself and its supportive population. In April 2014, the LRB published another Hersh article, this one more forthright in claiming that Syria’s insurgents—with the connivance of Turkey—had carried out the poison gas attack to provoke Western intervention against Asad, and President Barack Obama had faltered on his “red line” in August 2013 because he knew the intelligence picture was more complex than he let on in public.

This was not a one-off mistake. This was two five-thousand-plus-word articles over four months. How did this happen? Who were the sources (in outline, obviously; not their names)? Why did he believe these sources over the public U.S. intelligence assessment and the copious open-source evidence—photographs, videos, testimony—from the “first YouTube war”? Did he vet the sources in a way that differs from what he usually does? We do not even discover what he thinks now in any serious sense. Does he at this point accept his sources were wrong? If so, does he think they lied or were mistaken? And does he wish for the LRB articles to be retracted?

These questions are never asked, and this whole “critical” section—which lasts about fourteen minutes—is like this. We get no genuine answers from Hersh or insight into what has led him astray, which seems to be the point: to go through the motions of self-criticism for the sake of form, but not to actually leave any black marks against Hersh’s name. The Syria segment is only the most egregious, and likely the most effective. It would be staggering if even half the viewers of this documentary have any idea what is going on during that minute.

The Iraq story is Abu Ghraib, and it is almost precisely My Lai redo. In early May 2004, Hersh reported for the New Yorker on the revolting torments inflicted by a group of U.S. Military Police (MPs) on detainees at a prison in Iraq. The story was based on the documents produced by the U.S. military investigation that had begun in January 2004, specifically the Pentagon’s Taguba Report,10 reports from the Army Criminal Investigation Division, and the sworn statements of witnesses. The U.S. was already in the process of delivering justice. All Hersh did was make this public so the enemy could make use of it—the enemy in this case being the Islamic State movement. Within the month, Hersh was trying to work up these gruesome individual acts, the kind of thing that happens in every war, into a charge of institutional and systematic criminality against the United States.

Cover-Up relates how the dissident Hersh pressured the Establishment CBS 60 Minutes show into running their story on the Abu Ghraib crimes on 28 April 2004. CBS had initially acceded to a Pentagon request to delay publication and Hersh threatened to scoop them. The attempt to present Abu Ghraib as resulting from intentional U.S. policy—by linking it to the “torture” techniques authorised against Al-Qaeda captives after 9/11—is oddly elliptical and weak. The reason is presumably that if Cover-Up had zoomed in on the details, it would have been quite plain that what happened at Abu Ghraib was recreational cruelty led by a couple of determined sadists, unconnected to any effort to elicit information. The film managed to get Antonio Taguba himself on for an interview, where all he says is how “angry” he was about what happened and that there was some suspicion he had leaked his report.

The most time in this ten-minute section on Iraq goes to Camille Lo Sapio, the “anonymous source” who responded to Hersh’s radio appeal—he literally gave out his mobile telephone number—and provided him with the photographs the criminal MPs had taken of their handiwork. Hersh claims there would have been “no story” without the photographs, which is implausible, though doubtless in a decreasingly literate age such as ours pictures helped spread and sustain the story. Hersh’s claim, apparently sourced from an officer in the Iraqi Army, that people were rounded up at random and sent to be tortured at Abu Ghraib is simply false, as his claim that “children were being [sexually] assaulted” at the prison. There is no evidence of this in the thousands of photographs, and none of the reports, official or journalistic, contain even rumours of such a thing.

Throughout the Iraq portion of Cover-Up, there were clips played of Americans on radio and television phone-in shows being angry at Hersh for his Abu Ghraib reporting. The message is how brave Hersh is to stand for truth against the tide of jingoism, and this is the theme of the last few minutes, harking back to the My Lai days, an apparent nod to the near-perfect symmetry between the two stories.11 We see radio stations playing “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley”, a country song from 1971 suggesting that Calley had been betrayed while fighting for his country. Hersh expresses some displeasure at the length of Calley’s prison sentence. And then Poitras asks why, in the face of all this opposition, he carries on. Hersh says: “You just can’t have a country that does it and looks the other way. If there’s any mantra to what I did, that’s it.” We close out with a message on-screen reading: “Dedicated to all those killed and denied justice, and those who resist, past and future.”

I mentioned several times above in the various case studies that what was most wrong with the presentation was not anything said, but the stripping of context, and one can apply that as a meta-criticism. Of all of the defects in Cover-Up—the slant and distortion, the half-truths and untruths—the most serious problem with it is what is not present. One can argue it is disreputable to do a film about Hersh’s life and work that all-but avoids the last fifteen years, when even some of the old comrades have questioned in public whether Hersh still has both oars in the water. It is straightforward malpractice to make space (barely) for the Syria and Ukraine cases in a survey of this period, and leave out Hersh’s May 2015 article in the London Review of Books questioning the “official narrative” of the U.S. raid that killed Usama bin Laden four years earlier.

With “a retired senior [U.S.] intelligence official” as his “major” source, some “information from inside Pakistan”, and two “longtime consultants to the Special Operations Command” providing splashes of colour, Hersh contended that Bin Laden’s demise was an act of theatre disguising the “premeditated murder” of “an unarmed elderly civilian”, as his primary source puts it. The raid was not the result of a decade of U.S. intelligence work and the Navy SEALs on the night did not have to dodge Pakistani defences, wrote Hersh. Rather, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)—the controllers of the jihadist insurgency in Afghanistan—had sold out Al-Qaeda’s leader, who was living on the dime of the Saudi Kingdom he had affected to war against for a quarter-century. Usually, when the ISI wants to trade in one of its jihadist assets for American favour, it simply arrests them and hands them over. For reasons Hersh felt need not concern us, the ISI decided in 2011 that its interests would be best-served by enabling an American raid that made it look incompetent, on a location a stone’s throw from its premier military academy so the whole world would know Aabpara harboured Bin Laden.

The Bin Laden piece was undoubtedly Hersh’s most impactful story in this most recent phase of his career. It was all over the American networks, made it to the BBC in Britain, and as far away as the ABC in Australia. But the mainstream press that usually receives Hersh missives with reverence reacted harshly to this one. It was at this time former doting disciples started writing of Hersh going “off the rails”. The outraged confusion of Hersh’s die-hard supporters among the radical “anti-imperialists” to this press treatment of their hero was wholly justified, because Hersh had done nothing out of the ordinary in using cranky “sources” to concoct a deranged anti-American fable. What had changed was the political consensus of Hersh’s target audience. With Obama as President, not Nixon or George W. Bush, dubious and conspiratorial accusations of criminality against the U.S. government were much less welcome on the American Left.12 This was the cause of such pushback as there was on the Syria stories, and Biden was in office over Ukraine, a cause in any case ubiquitously popular beyond the fringes.

Had Cover-Up included the Bin Laden raid imbroglio, one could easily see it presenting just such a defence, of Hersh holding to his principles while all around him surrendered to partisan exigency, and pointing concretely to the New Yorker, which took a pass on the Bin Laden piece,13 despite repeatedly publishing Hersh in the mid-2000s when he used exactly the same methods and standards to foretell an imminent American war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The magazine’s vaunted fact-checkers waived through claims no more outlandish and no more sourced than those in the 2015 article, including that Vice President Dick Cheney and the dreaded “neoconservatives” were planning to initiate the Iran war with a false-flag and that the Bush administration was considering using “tactical nuclear weapons” on Iran. Tellingly, as late as 2012, Hersh was publishing unsubstantiated claims in the New Yorker about shady U.S. policies towards Iran—that dated back to the Bush administration.

One can just as easily see why Cover-Up drew a veil over the entire business. It is greatly to the credit of Poitras and Obenhaus that they avoid this narrative of a Hersh “decline”, which is basically a mechanism for those who like his work on Vietnam and Iraq especially, and Watergate, Kissinger, and the CIA, to keep all of that, and firewall it off from the later work they do not like. The Iran stories of the 2000s, written in the same period and venue as the Abu Ghraib pieces, make nonsense of this idea. But the premise of total Hershian continuity in method and motives needs very careful curation if the resultant picture is to be a positive one. Syria and Ukraine as two isolated missteps ten years apart is bearable. The preposterous Abbottabad raid story is not. It could contaminate Hersh’s oeuvre on its own, and defending it on business-as-usual grounds would almost certainly create more scepticism about all of Hersh’s other work than it would converts to his Bin Laden tale.

Equally unbearable would be giving any sense of the true range of Hersh’s reporting disasters. In 2008, Hersh claimed (in the New Yorker) that Israel’s Operation ORCHARD had not demolished a nuclear-weapons site in Syria months earlier (he was hazy on what was hit and speculative on why). Hersh’s 1991 book said inter alia that Israel targeted Soviet cities with nuclear weapons and passed U.S. intelligence to Moscow, these contradictory claims sourced to Ari Ben-Menashe, a con man who “lies like people breathe”, according to none other than Hersh. Hersh’s 1986 book claimed the poor Soviets had been viciously smeared for massacring the 270 civilians aboard Korean Air Lines Flight 007. Hersh’s false accusation in 1983 that Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai was a CIA agent ended up in court. Hersh was author of “the longest correction ever published” in 1981 for the New York Times, confessing his error in claiming former U.S. Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry had been involved in coup-plotting against Allende. It is not simply that the more errors Cover-Up had shown, the less reliable Hersh would seem. It is that when the errors are stacked together, it discloses something more than ineptitude: the errors all go in one direction.

At the present time, criticism of the use of “anonymous sources” tends to either insinuate or explicitly claim that those sources do not exist, and the journalist in question is a fabricator, telling a story they want to tell and pretending it was told to them by others. The problem with Hersh is narrowly distinct. Arthur Schlesinger’s remark during the public debate about the Kennedy book, that Hersh is “the most gullible investigative reporter perhaps in American history”, is often quoted by critics, and rightly so. But it is important to give the second half of that quote: “He will believe anything so long as it discredits John Kennedy.”14 Mutatis mutandis, this is the Hersh method distilled. Hersh’s is a willed gullibility. Hersh’s sources do the fabricating and he believes them, or affects to, if what they tell him supports the ideological narrative he is constructing. Any connections to reality in the articles generated by this methodology are accidental.

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FOOTNOTES

The 545th edition of Al-Naba, the Islamic State’s weekly newsletter, was published on 30 April 2026, and had as its main editorial a polemic against Al-Qaeda for allying with the tribal-separatist Tuaregs in Mali. A translation of the editorial is given below.

The trigger for the editorial is the major advances made in northern Mali, starting on 25 April, by Al-Qaeda’s Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimeen (JNIM), in partnership with the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA1). While unmentioned by Al-Naba, part of what enabled this rapid shift in fortunes is that when the moment came, the Russian forces that the Malian junta had brought in to replace the French and Western counter-terrorism mission folded without much of a fight, though they remain nominally in place as the insurgents move on the capital, Bamako.

The Islamic State is unimpressed with this development, noting among other things that it has happened once before and ended in tears, a reference to the events of 2012-13, when a Tuareg rebellion combined with the jihadists to conquer northern Mali, before the alliance broke down, paving the way for France to reverse their gains. Conceivably this could happen again, which would certainly embarrass Al-Qaeda, but for IS the focus of the Naba editorial is on the ideological dimension.

It was ostensibly differences in ideology, between Al-Qaeda’s transnational Islamic vision and the Tuaregs’ ethno-nationalism, which caused the schism last time: what changed in the interim to make an alliance possible again? IS’s answer is that Al-Qaeda has moved away from pure Islam to appease tribal separatists. IS mocks Al-Qaeda for not only adopting into its fold secularists, nationalists, and democrats—a bad enough violation of jihadist principle—but adopting specific people it had condemned as enemies and apostates until it suddenly switched its messaging to calling them “brothers” last week. For IS, this is a replay of Syria and many other theatres, merely the latest evidence that Al-Qaeda’s methodological approach and doctrine are bankrupt.

What is perhaps most interesting is what is not in the editorial: any reference to the Islamic State in the Sahel capitalising on the chaos, reportedly taking over abandoned Russian camps in Labbezanga and Tessi, and for a time taking some sort of control in Menaka city. The likely reason for this is that IS’s position in Mali remains fluid and fragile. IS tends to keep quiet about its operational advances until it assesses that it is able to defend them, at which point it publicly celebrates its successes.

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Base Oscillations! (Dhabadhabat Qa’idiyya!)

“It [the Islamic State] was broadcasting to the umma the methodology of separation [al-mufasala], while others were issuing amorphous methodologies that produced jahiliyya monstrosities with a jihadist colouring, such as secular administration, national emirates, and other ambiguous constructs all striving for the same end.”

This quotation from the last Al-Furqan speech was neither a false accusation nor speculating about the unseen without knowledge, but rather it was a careful reading of the movements of Al-Qaeda and its sisters, especially in Africa. What recently occurred in the Mali arena was not surprising, nor was it born of contingency. Rather, its indications and signs had been reaching the mujahideen one after another. It came as the product of a frenzied jahiliyya [pre-Islamic ignorance, pagan] mobilisation between the militia of Al-Qaeda and its sisters, striving in pursuit of “the same end” that the Syrian and Afghan governments achieved under the umbrella of the “international system”, whose “speck” Al-Qaeda sees in Syria while it turns a blind eye to the “log” in Afghanistan!2

Anyone following Al-Qaeda’s statements in Mali over the past two years will have noticed clearly the obvious change in its discourse and its inclination towards courting the “international community”! And its striving for holding dialogues and [reaching] understandings with parties that used to be labelled, in “traditional jihadist convention”, as enemies and apostates! If these statements had come out in earlier phases, the dervishes of Al-Qaeda would have busied themselves with rationalisations and patching them up with [claims of] “poor translation and Arabisation”, just as they did for a long time with the statements of the Taliban, until the tear grew too wide for them, so they returned years later to acknowledge them! Indeed, even worse than them, but in the statements of the “General Command”!

Al-Qaeda members spent years denying the existence of these relationships and alliances with the apostate Azawadi fronts, especially in their joint war against the Islamic State, before Al-Qaeda announced as glad tidings this alliance with “their brothers in the Azawad Liberation Front”, as it described them, whereupon its supporters began circulating the news of this alliance with all pride and admiration, after having expended every effort in denying it previously, and now they are expending their effort in legitimising it.

In truth, Al-Qaeda’s problem is not this alliance, “denied” previously and “praised” today, for it is not the first and will not be the last. They will have no difficulty in justifying it, just as they did before with similar alliances in Yemen, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere, which proved the failure and the invalidity of their justifications.

The real problem lies in the nature of the project that brought together Al-Qaeda and their apostate nationalist, patriotic brothers in Mali?!

The “Azawad Liberation Front”, with its old and new components, is a separatist, nationalist, patriotic, democratic front whose highest objective is: “the independence of the Azawad region” and obtaining “self-rule” [hukm dhati] recognised internationally or regionally, and it has not departed from this objective since the outbreak of its jahili conflict decades ago up until this very moment.

Rather, it [the FLA] used to see the presence of Al-Qaeda in northern Mali as sabotaging its efforts aimed at obtaining that purely nationalist objective, especially since its success requires international and regional support and endorsement, and especially since it had tried an alliance with these jihadists in the past, but it ended on the pretext of the divergence [ikhtilaf] of the two projects. So the question now posed is: What change has occurred in these two projects for them to agree and come together again?!

Has the apostate Azawadi front abandoned its nationalist project and its historical dream for the sake of Al-Qaeda? Or has Al-Qaeda abandoned its global jihad project for the sake of this ethno-tribal nationalism from which its current leader [Iyad Ag Ghali (Abu al-Fadl)] descends?! Have the secularists changed, or have the jihadists changed?! Or have the two sides dissolved into a new amorphous mixture of the kind Al-Qaeda’s members have become addicted to plunging into, especially after the “Arab Spring” episode, which revealed what had been hidden in the trajectory of Al-Qaeda, its methodological [or ideological: manhajiyya] turbulence and fluctuations, concealed by the bright beginnings [i.e., 9/11] and exposed by the searing trials?

Some of the leaders of this apostate Azawadi front disavowed this alliance in their statements to media outlets, saying: “If they wish to merge with us, then they must withdraw from the global Al-Qaeda organisation”, while other leaders justified their alliance by [reference to] the bond of the tribe and “cousinage”,3 and said that “the core of the organisation [i.e., JNIM], its main body and the majority of its elements, are from the Azawad of northern Mali, and they share the same political motives in opposing the Malian regime”.

So will this alliance between the two sides stop at this point? Or will it develop into a “severing of ties” [or “disengagement”: fakk irtibat] in which the bond of the tribe overcomes the bond of the deen [lifeway, Islam], proceeding according to the principle of “Azawad for the Azawadis!” on the model of “Syria for the Syrians”?! And will Al-Qaeda accept this severing of ties, if it occurs, and consider it “an interest, flexibility, and political maturity”, which it affirms and blesses? Or will it wait to see whether it serves its interest, and then remain silent about it and compromise with it, as it did with Al-Jolani at the beginning?!4 Or will it wait until it is certain that it has been sidelined, and then disown it and turn against it, and thereafter lecture about creed [or doctrine: aqeeda] and shari’a?

Or will this alliance end with the two sides fighting and turning against one another, as happened previously, thereby revealing the invalidity of the justifications that Al-Qaeda’s members marshalled behind this alliance, and causing the evaporation, once again, of Al-Qaeda’s hypotheses and illusions, the likes of which it previously advanced in Syria, and today disavows and attributes solely to Al-Jolani?!

The glaring contradictions in the Qaedaist methodology [al-manhajiyya al-qa’idiyya] are too numerous to enumerate in the present space and to track their fluctuations. One of the latest of these contradictions is the differentiation between the Afghan government and the Syrian government, despite both coming about in similar circumstances. Al-Qaeda sees in the “first” an Islamic model, while it has come to see in the “second” something else that it is still too cowardly to name openly, and instead whispers about behind the statements of its “General Command”, which have exhausted its followers and drawn them into an endless whirl of delusions and improvised patchings, in contrast to the Prophetic methodology [of the Islamic State], which is founded upon certainty, firmness, and clarity, not upon vacillation, instability, softness, and methodological vagueness.

Among the examples of Al-Qaeda’s vagueness: its differentiation between the apostate governments before and after the revolutions! Another among them: its drifting, obscure position regarding the apostate armies, which Al-Qaeda divides into “honourable” and “dishonourable”! A distinction is made between their soldiers and their officers, sometimes it pardons their soldiers and calls upon the youth to “not flee from compulsory conscription into them”! This and other oddities and suspicious things on this issue will inevitably be uncovered in the coming trials, for the truth is not veiled by the clouds of falsehood.

Thus continues the saga of turbulence and wandering in the Qaedaist methodology, which nothing will halt except a sincere return to the Prophetic methodology, and a complete disavowal of factionalism [or partisanship: al-hizbiyya] and the veneration of its figures, whom they have made a judge and a standard by which they adjust their stances, such that their leaders have become an authority over the shari’a!! And the mistakes of the past have become a guide [or evidence: dalilan] and a driver for their continuation, instead of correcting them and desisting from them. “God has full power over His affairs, but most men know not” [Qur’an 12:21].

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FOOTNOTES

It is by now conventional wisdom across ideological lines in the West that it was official policy in Imperial Russia to promote antisemitism as part of a (doomed) strategy to deflect popular resentment away from the Tsarist government and suppress the Revolutionary movement.1 This belief became widespread in Western Europe and the Americas shortly after the pogroms which erupted in the wake of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by socialist terrorist-revolutionaries in March 1881, and has been a constant ever since.2 The narrative’s endurance, not only at the popular level but in scholarship, is remarkable because it is a “distortion of the evidence” so severe it amounts to a “conspiracy theory”.3

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The Arabic word deen (دين)1 is often translated as “religion”, and it does refer to Islam, but this is not the same thing.

CHRISTIANITY AND “RELIGION”

The word “religion” derives from the Latin religio, meaning that which binds man to the heavens.2 In the pagan Roman Empire, this was about practice, not belief: “The focus of the term was on public, communal behaviour towards the gods of the state”.3 “Sacrificial offerings, the chastity of virgins, [and] the whole range of priesthoods” counted as religiones,4 and the purpose of offering these sacrifices and rites was to ensure the protection of cities from the wrath of the gods.5

Christians would adopt the word religio, but, as happened with much of the Classical inheritance, turned it to an entirely new meaning.6 The Church was the sole religio for Christians with God, and the State was seen as a separate realm. Jesus had said, “Render … unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”,7 and Christians set out into the world with this understanding.8 The early history of Christianity, as a tiny sect suffering official persecution for three centuries, was the context for this, but the view did not change after Christianity triumphed in the Roman Empire. In the 420s AD, a century after the first Christian Emperor, Augustine contrasted the eternal and unchanging dimension of religion, the City of God, with the saeculum, a word initially denoting the span of human life that had come to mean the limits of living memory. Mortality defined the saeculum, a realm where the saecularia (secular things) were in constant flux as memory faded from one generation to the next, and in time death would take all things—men, the cities, the Empire itself.9

Christendom would split shortly after the millennium, with the Orthodox East and Latin West departing on variant courses. Yet in both there remained the unique duality of Church and State. Whether in harmony or discord, with one or other dominant, they were two separate institutions.10 The Papal Revolution would remake Latin Christendom to embed Augustine’s distinction between religio and the saeculum society-wide,11 and in the sixteenth century a second bout of revolution and schism would convulse the West that further sharpened the distinction. “By the end of the seventeenth century, it was … more and more common [for Western Christians] to confine religio and the religiones to the realm of the inner self”,12 to define the public space as “secular”. Especially in the wake of the French Revolution that accentuated the trends of the prior two upheavals, Western notions travelled East and ultimately far beyond Christendom.

It may seem obvious to many that an exhausted Continent after the Wars of Religion would want to remove religion from politics, to make it a private matter rather than an issue States fought over, but, as Brent Nongbri has so well put it, “the isolation of something called ‘religion’ as a sphere of life” that can be “separated from politics … is not a universal feature of human history. In fact, in the broad view of human cultures, it is a strikingly odd way of conceiving the world.”13

“Religion” and the “secular” do not exist objectively, irrespective of culture and geography: the worldview wherein reality can be divided this way is a historically contingent creation of Christian theology, institutionalised in the Latin West by the medieval Papacy.14 The illusion to the contrary results from the remarkable success of the West in its period of global preponderance at repackaging the distinctive assumptions of Latin Christendom as the common property of mankind.15

ISLAM AND THE DEEN

“Islam is not merely a system of belief and worship, a compartment of life … distinct from other compartments which are the concern of nonreligious authorities”, the late Bernard Lewis once explained. Islam “is the whole of life, and its rules include [among other things] civil, criminal, and even what we would call constitutional law.” Reflecting this, deen “conveys much more” to Muslims than “religion” does to Christians.16

The difference begins with the etymology. Deen is clearly related to the Hebrew word din (דין), and has cognates in other Semitic languages, Aramaic and Syriac among them, which derive from a root meaning “law” or “judgment”. The interaction in Arabic, by way of dayn (“debt which falls due on a given date”), led to deen denoting “custom”.17 (Some have argued deen is a Persian loanword, but this is not convincing.18) “What ties these terms together”, notes Nongbri, “is that they refer to social transactions, a far cry from the sort of private, internal, apolitical sense of ‘faith’ or ‘religion’.”19

“Deen” in the sense of “custom” would lead to the idea of “direction” (huda), as in a guide, the guide being God, and the direction being the suitable one for each person—linking back to the Semitic root of “judgment”. This is the framework for the Qur’anic term Yawm al-Deen (the Day of Judgment), when God will give direction to each human being, and the emergence of “deen” to signify “the corpus of obligatory prescriptions given by God, to which one must submit”, in the words of Louis Gardet.20 The close association between deen and islam (submission) was present early, in the phase when the Arab creed was an indeterminate Biblical monotheism. For the Ishmaelites or Hagarenes, as the Arab conquerors were known, the true expression of allegiance to God (the deen) was submission to Him (islam).21 The outlook would remain when what was by then an Imperial creed crystallised into a more exclusivist format—when, so to speak, “Islam” became a proper noun—around the ninth century AD.

The transition from the early creed—what the Qur’an calls Millat Ibrahim (the Way of Abraham)22—to Islam as we know it involved the generation of a Tradition that further “defined the obligations and prescriptions laid down by God” encompassed in the word deen, Gardet explains, and, while there was some contest about the details, these included: faith in Him; correct practice in daily living and worship, significantly following the example of the Prophet Muhammad and the Companions (Sahaba); and upholding the Holy Law (Shari’a), which regulates both the private and public spheres.23

As in Christianity, the historical context shaped Muslim understanding.24 In contrast to Moses, who was prevented from entering his Promised Land,25 and Jesus, who was crucified, the Prophet Muhammad was victorious in his lifetime. Muhammad was “the Seal of the Prophets”,26 and he was Head of State, with all that implied of enforcing the law, administering justice, making war, and making peace.

It should be emphasised, Muhammad and his Successors (Caliphs) did not create or give laws: Islam recognises no human role in legislation for God is the true sovereign of the umma (Islamic community) and the duty of His temporal deputies is merely to uphold God’s Holy Law.27 This is why, when the Tradition describes Muhammad putting his enemies to death, it reads to Christians as if they were enemies of Muhammad’s government and Islam, but the Tradition makes no such distinction. This complete fusion of what Christians consider “religion” and “politics” is what explains Islam’s pitiless treatment of apostates: to abandon the faith was not to make a personal choice; it was to defect from the umma, thus apostasy carried (and still carries) the connotation of treason,28 which until very recently all were agreed was a capital offence.

From this perspective, there is one sense in which “deen” conveys less than “religion”. “Religion” is intimately bound to the Church in Christianity, a whole apparatus with its own history, hierarchy, and sacramental role. There is no equivalent in Islam: the mosque is a building for worship and study, not an institution, and the imam, the “one who is in front”, is a functionary, not an ordained figure.29 (Shi’ism’s apparent exception to this rule is a very recent innovation.30) In classical Islam, therefore, to speak of “Mosque and State” is meaningless. Consequently, deen lacks the implied institutional meaning that “religion” has, and the languages of Islamdom—Arabic, Turkish, and Persian—were devoid of the pairs of words that signify the two realms: “religious” and “secular”, “sacred” and “profane”, “spiritual” and “temporal”, “ecclesiastical” and “lay”. It was not a deficiency in these very rich languages. Rather, the concept of the rival spheres did not exist, so no vocabulary was needed to describe them.31

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SECULARISM AND ISLAM

Unlike in Christendom, where the pattern was countries containing religions, in Islamdom there was the deen containing countries. In Europe, the territorial unit—England, say—was the primary identity and the subjects could (eventually) have different beliefs about God. In the Middle East, there was some variation in political affiliation by territory—occasionally a local dynasty arose—and they were certainly aware of ethnic and cultural differences, but identity was defined by creed.32 There were Muslims, the umma with the Caliph at its head, and non-Muslims. That this classification was the only one that mattered can be seen in, for example, nineteenth-century Ottoman newspapers, which carried items such as: “There was an accident on the bridge, and one unbeliever was injured.”33 There was no polemical point being made; it simply reflected the Muslim assumption about the basic division in humanity.

Islamdom’s first experience with secularism was in the form of the French Revolution,34 which aroused some curiosity as it presented itself as non-Christian. The contemporary impact was minimal, but the long-term consequences, in inspiring reformers and transmitting the idea of nationalism, was very great.35 The first serious steps toward Westernisation, that is remoulding Islam along Christian lines, happened in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Sultan was forced by the British to (nominally) abolish the jizya (non-Muslim poll tax) and slavery, and justified it in most Protestant terms by explaining that the words of the Qur’anic text did not really mean what they had for twelve centuries. Muhammad, it turned out, was an abolitionist all along.36 There were subsequent reforms of this kind, but discussing and internalising the justifications for them was hampered by an elemental problem.

Even as the notion of “secularism” began to filter into Islamdom, there were no words to describe it, and the vocabulary that did develop remains stamped with its alien origins. The Turks, interfacing for Islamdom with Christendom, were the first to encounter secularism, in the French Revolutionary period, and were then the first to apply it in the 1920s, creating a Republic that officially disestablished Islam. The word for “secular” in the Turkish Constitution is laik, a word obviously borrowed from the French laïque. The Persians also took in laik and adopted “secular” unadorned (سکولار). As Arabic is both a Muslim and Christian language, there was a word to hand for “secular”, “temporal”, etc.: alamani (lit. “worldly”). The word’s etymology and Christian roots would be occluded, and it would be revocalised as ilmani, but for many Muslims this did little to hide its foreignness.37

The turning point was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s decision, having directly remade Turkey as a Western nation-State, to abolish the Caliphate in 1924. This removed the linchpin of the umma, forcing upon the rest of Islamdom fundamental questions of legitimacy, allegiance, and identity, and did so at just the moment Western power and influence was at its height in the region.

Some, like the Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen), tried to bar the road, arguing that Islamdom had been brought low by too much “modernisation”, a thin disguise for Westernisation, which had taken Muslims very far from the authentic Islam that was the answer to the crisis. But the Brethren were contesting the laws of gravity in the circumstances. Most Muslim governments and intellectual elites took the opposite view, and in so doing—in arguing the disaster resulted from insufficient modernisation—they implicitly blamed Islamic rule for the backwardness. A brief liberal era dawned under Western tutelage and then Arab nationalism—hostile to the West but committed to Westernisation, a construct largely of Christian Arab intellectuals—swept all before it, until it, too, failed, symbolised in the defeat of the Arab war on Israel in 1967. After this, on the seventh day of the Six-Day War as some say, the long debate about what went wrong intensified in Islamdom and the Islamist prescription for how to put it right found more of an audience.

Islamism in its various forms—Sunni and Shi’a, Ikhwani and jihadi-Salafist, political and terroristic—shares the same core “objective of undoing the secularizing reforms …, abolishing the imported codes of law and the social customs that came with them, and returning to the Holy Law of Islam and an Islamic political order”.38 This was the central point in the writings and speeches of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1978-79, the first major victory of the Islamists, which has had an enormous impact in shifting the regional balance of sentiment and power against the modernisers/Westernisers.

Khomeini set out his vision in a manifesto a decade before the fall of the Shah. The argument, and charge, dominating the book is that Westerners and more particularly Westernisers, since Islamist ire has always been focused most intently on the internal enemy,39 have sought to limit the scope of Islam’s role in Muslim society, to negate the deen and shunt the scholars charged with upholding it off to the side, leaving them, like Christian clerics, to administer their houses of worship and speak only on matters of personal spirituality. It was this trend Khomeini was determined to reverse:

Do not allow the true nature of Islam to remain hidden, or people will imagine that Islam is like Christianity …, a collection of injunctions pertaining to man’s relation to God, and the mosques will be equated with the church. … God, Exalted and Almighty, by means of the Most Noble Messenger, sent … laws and practices for all human affairs and laid injunctions for man extending from even before the embryo is formed until after he is placed in the tomb. In just the same way that there are laws setting forth the duties of worship for man, so too there are laws, practices, and norms for the affairs of society and government. … All the voluminous books that have been compiled from the earliest times on different areas of law, such as judicial procedure, social transactions, penal law, retribution, international relations, regulations pertaining to peace and war, private and public law—taken together, these contain a mere sample of the laws and injunctions of Islam. There is not a single topic in human life for which Islam has not provided instructions and established a norm.40

Khomeini went on:

[Foreign “imperialists”] have tried with their propaganda and insinuations to present Islam as a petty, limited affair, and to restrict the functions of the fuqaha [jurists] and ulema [scholars, theologians] to insignificant matters. … The propaganda institutions of imperialism have whispered to tempt and persuade us to separate the deen from politics, that the ruhaniyat [Shi’a ulema] must not interfere in social matters, and that the fuqaha do not have the duty of overseeing the destiny of the community of Islam. Unfortunately, some people have believed them and fallen under their influence, with the result that we see.41

The irony is Khomeinism accentuated, rather than reversed, the Christianisation of Islam. The Revolution in its iconography was inflected with Marxism (a Christian heresy)—notably acting in the name of the “oppressed” (mostazafeen)—and in power the Khomeinists have created something unprecedented in the history of Islam, rule by men who can only be described as “clergy” in the Christian sense.42 All indications are that most Iranians have decided clerical entanglement in politics has gone too far and would like to try the secular remedy Christians adopted when they came to the same view.

The situation in Turkey is murky, though there are some signs of similar dynamics to those in Iran. In the Arab world, the trendline is much clearer. The polarisation since the 1970s has rendered the popular understanding of ilmani more as “godlessness” or atheism, even “immorality”, while those identifying with the word have become fewer and harder-edged in their attitude towards Islam.43 The attempt for a time to switch to “civil State” as a more genuinely neutral alternative has not been very effective, partly because it was closely associated with Egypt’s “Arab spring” experiment, which saw the Muslim Brotherhood elected and then removed in a bloody military coup, a sequence that satisfied nobody. The deeper problem is one that lexicography cannot paper over. What was apparent in the early 2000s, that secularism was “in a bad way in the Middle East”,44 that there was an increasingly “widespread Muslim rejection” of the concept,45 on ideological and utilitarian grounds, for being both alien and ineffective in reversing the socio-political decline, is even more true two decades later.

It is no accident, as the comrades used to say, that the most virulent form of Islamism since Khomeinism, the Islamic State (IS), emerged in the Arab world. When IS speaks of al-ilmaniyyun (the secularists), it uses the term virtually interchangeably with kufr (infidels, unbelievers) and murtadeen (apostates), and includes them on the list of subversives and traitors, with democrats and nationalists, who import and imitate Western ways that undermine Islamic society and the shari’a. The centrality of this belief in IS’s worldview is demonstrated in the movement’s reaction to the Gaza war. IS has exploited the increased space for antisemitism and Islamic militancy since 2023, especially in Europe and her daughters,46 but it has refused to embrace the populist and popular Palestine Cause as such, repeatedly condemning HAMAS and its allies and supporters as “nationalist” deviants, warring against Israel for the sake of the territory in former Mandate Palestine, rather than waging a jihad for the deen that targets Jews as part of a global campaign against infidels.

Marking ten years since the proclamation of the caliphate in 2024, the IS spokesman began his speech by saying IS’s greatest achievement was to have established a polity where Muslims were “governed by the deen of their Lord”, itemising the comprehensive system of State institutions that “spread virtue and suppressed vice”, and “demolished the idols of jahiliyya [pre-Islamic ignorance], patriotism, and nationalism”. The core of IS’s project, consistent with the Islamist movement since the 1920s, is to cleanse Islamdom of alien accretions,47 particularly those from Christendom and specifically secularism, and thereby restore the popular understanding of Islam to its (imagined) pure and pristine origins, thus enabling the restoration of the all-encompassing deen to govern the life of believers and the society they live in, namely a unified Islamic State for all Muslims.

IS’s methods provoke overwhelming revulsion in the Muslim world; the caliphal vision in principle rather less so. “The Islamic State … draws on, and draws strength from, ideas that have a broad resonance”, writes Shadi Hamid. “[Muslims] may not agree with the group’s interpretation of the caliphate, but the notion of a caliphate is a powerful one, even among more secular-minded Muslims” [italics original].48

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ISLAM AND EUROPE

If secularism has not fared well in Muslim lands, what of Muslims in secular lands? The question of Muslim populations in Europe is a novel and recent one, emerging after the Second World War.49 What was not new was the source of the frictions encountered by the Muslim newcomers, which echoed the problems experienced by Jews, Christendom’s only minority for much of its existence. Muslims, after all, were being normal in their expectations of the writ of the divine. It was Christendom that had the strange perceptions on this front.

Christians had long used the term Ioudaismos as if it was a Jewish counterpart to Christianity, but what it had signified at those times when Jews used it was the Jewish way of life, the totality of what it meant to be Jewish: the language, customs, culture, and practices of a nation (ethnos) bound to one another and to a sacred territory centred on Jerusalem.50 The Christian offer of salvation by dissolving this distinctiveness and joining a universal brotherhood was more successful in the guise of the French Revolution, which provided a model that spread across Europe in the nineteenth century: Jews who set aside the Mosaic Law and other attributes of peoplehood could individually become citizens who followed the religion of “Judaism”.51 The backlash to this, Jews advocating a return to Ioudaismos in full, including a renewed drive to restore the Children of Israel to their homeland, would become known as “Zionism”.

Muslim migrants in the late twentieth century entered a Europe that in its own estimation had moved beyond tolerance—an inherently intolerant concept, suggesting a dominant group is putting up with certain things from minorities—to acceptance and equality. Works like James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough in the late nineteenth century had embedded the framework of “world religions”,52 a secular veneer on the Christian presumption that its values are universal, and “religious freedom” was the order of the day in the West, not least as a counterpoint to the half of Europe lost to the Soviet Union. Yet, as Tom Holland has written, this was exactly the problem: the notion “that all religions were essentially the same”, and that secularism “was neutral between all religions”, was a conceit “only those who believed in the foundation myths of secularism”, those who are products of Christendom, could believe.53 Western secularists in their own minds were treating all equally by asking, crucially without admitting what they were doing, the same price of acceptance from everybody: that they force their creed into the Christian mould.54 But the cost was not equal for all. Muslims felt the demand to undergo this Procrustean process as deeply traumatic—and understandably resisted it.55

The tension with Jews traditionally was between their particularism and the universalist aspirations of Christian States. The issue looked similar with Muslims in the early phase, when their numbers were small, the question being merely “integration”, i.e., getting the newcomers to accept Christianised perceptions of identity. The analogy with the Jews broke down fairly quickly, however, because the faultline with Muslims was not just their wish to retain their distinctiveness, but their rival universalism. Islam is a proselytising, “triumphalist” creed; its ideal is for all of humanity to see its truth. As Muslim numbers increased, and the second and third generations proved more “radical” than the first,56 the question of who should accommodate to whom became a live one.

The Muslim role in Western politics is increasing, in part through the Islamist alliance with the far-Left—the unholy alliance of the Black and the Red, as the Shah called this revolutionary force which toppled him—and more broadly as European Muslims gain proficiency in navigating a democracy. The “Muslim vote” is no longer ignorable in many countries, and between elections Muslims have availed themselves of all the usual means of influencing policy: forming organised elites to engage the State, communal mobilisation, turning economic power to political ends, sectional lobbying, securing representation across civil society, and the rest of it. This increasing Muslim assertiveness comes as Western hegemony fades, and with it the illusion that Christian assumptions are the norms of mankind.57 The loss of Western self-confidence that caused this retreat abroad infuses the approach domestically, a policy of the pre-emptive cringe.58

“Islam and Islamic values now have a level of immunity from comment and criticism in the Western world that Christianity has lost and Judaism has never had.” When Bernard Lewis said that nearly twenty years ago, the West had already been living under a de facto Islamic blasphemy law for some time. Left-wing anti-religious iconoclasm, once a powerful force in Western politics, has been replaced with a concern for Islamic sensitivities that extends even to a suffocating ambiguity about the morality of massacring the Charlie Hebdo staff. In the collision between the post-1945 Western taboo on antisemitism, and the prevalence of antisemitism among Muslims, it is the former that has given way. If some Muslims have the sense that it will be “third time lucky”, that demography and migration will accomplish what was thwarted at Tours and Vienna, one must grant that they have come by the perception honestly.

Such an outcome is by no means certain. There are countervailing indicators. Some younger Muslims have gone as far as joining with their non-Muslim counterparts in defining themselves primarily by Left-wing politics, including the social liberalism. Muslims rejecting Islam, even implicitly, is a fringe phenomenon and likely to remain so, but it is an interesting data point. The most remarkable thing is how many Muslims have internalised the idea of “the secular”, reshaping their identity from being part of an umma following the deen to being citizens of European countries who have a “religion”. Perhaps this will become the dominant perception of the faith and resolve the “integration” question. While it seems unlikely in the lifetime of anybody reading this given Islam’s exceptional resistance to secularisation, it remains a possibility. Another option, if neither side can reshape the other in its image, is the perpetuation of some version of the status quo, with Islam as an undigested component of Western societies, the stresses and strains of the relationship in various phases more and less visible and severe.

CONCLUSION

The main point I hope to have carried is that to translate deen as “religion” is an error. “Religion” is inadequate and misleading, projecting Christian assumptions onto a phenomenon born of a civilisation where such assumptions do not apply. A better one-word translation of deen would be “lifeway”.

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FOOTNOTES

The argument over whether what happened to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915-16 constitutes genocide is the subject of a forthcoming post. Putting that article together has proven to be partly an engagement with the changing state of academic and public opinion in the West, which has now overwhelming settled on the conclusion that genocide is the correct description. A brief sketch of this intellectual history seemed interesting enough for a standalone piece.

THE EARLY HISTORY

Politics has loomed large over this subject from the beginning. There was significant Entente propaganda related to the Armenian massacres during the First World War. Britain was particularly prominent in this: one intelligence operative, Arnold Toynbee, produced The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (a.k.a. “The Blue Book”) in 1916,1 which expressed the genuine British outrage at the calamities inflicted on the Ottoman Christians, but also had an eye on drawing the United States into the war.2 This was among the reasons Entente propaganda also often blamed Germany as much as the nationalist Ottoman government of the Young Turks or Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).3 The attempt to prosecute accused CUP war criminals in 1919-20 was by the virulently anti-CUP post-war Turkish government that operated under Allied occupation and had political incentives to produce “legal” findings that vindicated Allied wartime propaganda,4 an objective made easier by the procedures in no way resembling fair trials.5 Toynbee’s work and the newspaper reports of the Constantinople trials are still cited as primary sources.

The other main public works around this time were memoirs, from diplomats (most prominently, the U.S. Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Henry Morgenthau6), missionaries, Armenian survivors, and other eyewitnesses—or alleged eyewitnesses. Because another important phenomenon after the Great War was Armenian revolutionaries and activists fabricating luridly incriminating documentary testimony to influence Western opinion and policy towards Turkey, including the infamous Naim-Andonian Documents that contain forged telegrams purportedly from Ottoman Interior Minister Talat Pasha explicitly ordering the annihilation of the Armenians.7 Once the political contestation over the post-war settlement had ended in the early 1920s, there was a precipitate fading of interest as Europe retreated into itself and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk worked to embed his secular revolution in Turkey.

There was some revival of interest in the 1940s, again for political reasons, when activists and statesmen, in the shadow of the Holocaust, were pushing to encode genocide in “international law”.8 Indeed, Raphael Lemkin, coiner of the word “genocide” in 1944, was influenced by the Armenian case and saw it plainly as an example, though this is complicated because what Lemkin meant by genocide and the actual definition in the Genocide Convention are clean different things. The Convention was precise in defining genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such”. Lemkin’s concept of genocide was far more amorphous, incorporating not only violence against property, such as churches and libraries, which he termed “cultural genocide”, but social processes like assimilation.9

THE COLD WAR

Aggressive Soviet designs against Turkey from the late 1940s into the 1950s prompted further interest in the Armenian Question. Moscow had prevailed in the Second World War, conquering much of Eastern Europe from its former Nazi ally, and then set about conquests further afield. The Soviets tried military means in places like Iran, Greece, and Korea, and political means elsewhere, notably in Turkey.

The Soviets wanted to “revise”—read: control—the situation on the Turkish Straits, the Dardanelles and Bosporus, and the Armenians were Moscow’s chosen lever. In 1946, the Soviets initiated a global active measures campaign to present the “Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic” as the fulfilment of Armenian national aspirations, mobilising a massive wave of “repatriation” (nerkaght),10 then made territorial claims in eastern Turkey by proclaiming these were “Armenian historical lands” that should be added to Soviet Armenia and re-populated with Armenians.11 It was against this backdrop that a rare book on 1915 was published in Turkey, The Armenians in History and the Armenian Question (1950), by one of the few surviving prominent CUP officials, Esat Uras, effectively arguing the Russians were at it again in using the Armenians to try to dismember the Turkish State.12

Turkey joining NATO in 1952 forced Moscow Centre to adjust its methods of political warfare, turning away from the Armenian heartlands to the diaspora. The Soviets landed on the nascent Armenian genocide-recognition campaign as a mechanism to instrumentalise the Armenian diaspora, especially in the United States.13 It is impossible to imagine that the Cold War context, where Turkey was “a valued associate of the United States”, had no influence on the general aversion of Western elites to discussing the Armenian massacres up to the 1960s, and the view of academic historians who dealt with 1915 that it was as an “unrelieved tragedy”, which came about because of the Ottoman belief the State faced an existential crisis due to the internal Armenian rebellion in alliance with the invading Russians, a belief “doubtless greatly exaggerated, but [with] enough basis in fact” that nobody could say they would not have done the same to “save themselves” in similar circumstances.14

As previously explained:

[The Soviets encouraging the genocide-recognition movement] created some minor initial difficulties within Soviet Armenia, but the Soviet Revolution’s official theology had adapted to incorporate the “national liberation movements” within the Third World Strategy, and it was easy enough to channel Armenian national sentiment into this program. Space was made for Soviet Armenian publications arguing that 1915 was genocide, and these books, translated into English and other Western languages, circulated in Armenian émigré activist circles. These works were foundational to the movement that would in time pressure Western legislatures to recognise Turkey as guilty of genocide, and in parallel emerged Armenian terrorist organisations that targeted Turkish diplomats and civilians in the name of revenge for the genocide and forcing Ankara to abandon its policy of “denial”.

There were two main terrorist groups: the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide (JCAG), later rebranded the Armenian Revolutionary Army (ARA), the “deniable” terrorist wing of the Dashnaks,15 one of the nationalist-socialist revolutionary groups that led the 1914-15 rebellion in the Ottoman Empire, which had moved into alignment with the Soviet Union in the 1960s, and the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), an outright KGB creature.16 It was the activities of these terrorists in particular and ASALA specifically, in the early 1970s, the success of their “propaganda of the deed” amid the chic for the “guerrilla” or fedayeen embodied in the Soviet-dependent Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), that brought the Armenian massacres back into the international discussion in a serious way.

The heightened interest, and focusing of resources, paved the way for the genocide-recognition movement to gain a foothold in academia—and, of course, triggered the counter-campaign by the Turkish government,17 to smother a too-long-delayed confrontation with the truth or to combat a scandalous libel, as one prefers.

Two of the prime movers in setting up the Western academic infrastructure of Armenian genocide-recognition were Richard G. Hovannisian and Vahakn Dadrian, both Armenian-Americans. Hovannisian was born in California in 1932 to a father who survived the deportations. Dadrian was born in Constantinople in 1926 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1947. Both were involved in Armenian diaspora politics, a milieu where the institutions—from youth groups up to lobby organisations like the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA)—are affiliated with the Dashnaks. It was moving in such circles Hovannisian met his academic mentor, Simon Vratsian, the last Prime Minister of the short-lived, Dashnak-led First Armenian Republic (1918-20), and Dadrian became closely associated with the Zoryan Institute, which is not a Dashnak institution, exactly, but it did have among its founders Gerard Libaridian, a hereditary member of the Dashnak Party.

A lot of the Armenian literature on 1915 available in the early 1970s was either the Soviet historiography itself, by authors like E. K. Sarkissian and R. G. Sahakian, or was derivative of these works and shaped by their methods. What Hovannisian and Dadrian wanted to do was create an academic corpus making the genocide case in a format respectable by Western standards. The dynamics in the Armenian diaspora would assist in this. As Libaridian later noted, there was a significant Armenian cultural upwelling from the 1970s onwards, which overall sharpened a collective identity, but it was a minefield trying to focus on specifics. The one issue that united everyone—the church, religious dissidents, the Dashnaks, the anti-Dashnak nationalists, the Communists who believed Soviet Armenia was the sole legitimate vehicle of national aspirations—was advocating for recognition of the genocide. Libaridian found this somewhat stifling: he had wanted the Zoryan Institute to look to the future as well as the past, to focus on issues like Armenian-Turkish reconciliation, but he was in a tiny minority. 1915 was “the beginning and end of everything” for Zoryan’s donors, researchers, and students, and he ultimately departed.

There was resistance to Hovannisian, Dadrian, and their allies at first. The reaction of some scholars who engaged the emerging genocide-recognition literature was downright contemptuous, seeing the dismal failures in handling sources and so on as inevitable in what was so obviously a political-activist project dressed up as scholarship.18 Specialists working in the Ottoman archives were similarly dismissive, contending that inter alia the Hovannisian-Dadrian theories fell to pieces on impact with the historical records that “manifest numerous efforts [by the Ottoman government] to investigate and correct a situation in which [peoples of all ethnicities and faiths] were being killed by a combination of revolts, bandit attacks, massacres and counter massacres, and famine and disease, compounded by destructive and brutal foreign invasions”, where everyone, “Muslim and non-Muslim alike, had their victims and criminals”.19 It is instructive of the atmosphere in this debate that the response to author of this assessment, Jewish-American scholar Stanford Shaw, a professor of Turkish history based at UCLA, was to publicly vilify him for months before Armenian terrorists bombed his home in California in October 1977.20

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THE TIDE TURNS

The initial resistance notwithstanding, the balance of academic opinion was to shift remarkably quickly. The reputational and physical threats played their part. Another factor was the academic neglect of prior decades, which provided an institutional blank slate on which Dadrian in particular could instantiate the basic contours of Armenian Genocide Studies that still powerfully influence the research agenda to this day.21 For instance, Dadrian responded to the earlier criticism by acknowledging that the Ottoman documents show a policy wherein “the deportees were to be protected, fed, and safely transported, and sanctions would be applied to those officials who mistreated the deportees or allowed them to be mistreated by others”, but he developed an argument that behind this “beguiling appearance of benevolence” were mechanisms of deception, a “two-track” system that hid the real orders for genocide.22 This argument is now part of the furniture in Armenian Genocide Studies, often rehearsed using the exact same sources and interpretations as Dadrian.23

Another contingent factor was that the Armenian genocide-recognition movement had become seriously organised in the 1960s, simultaneous with Jewish activism to undo the repression of the memory of the Holocaust at Nuremberg, and throughout the 1980s the movement in its academic form would converge with scholars of Jewish history and Holocaust-awareness,24 notably Israel Charny and Robert Melson, to enshrine the Armenian massacres in the broader Genocide Studies field as “the first holocaust”. These scholars cited one another in building up a foundational literature, and their sense of moral mission, of uncovering a hidden truth and righting a long-standing injustice,25 was attractive to the young just entering academia and more established scholars, and to scholars from disciplines as broad as history, the law, the political and social sciences, sociology, psychology, even medicine and English literature.26

The Armenian genocide-recognition movement also benefited from being part of the zeitgeist. It was in the 1980s that the trend of national and ethnic groups campaigning to have their past or present suffering classified as genocide really took off,27 and these political campaigns fed into an increasing academic fashion for regarding the Convention definition of “genocide” as too narrow and restrictive.28 The push came from other angles, too, notably those who wanted to criminalise war itself as genocide,29 a push that has not been abandoned. “Genocide” coming to be used very loosely in everyday language cannot be blamed on popular misunderstanding, since by now there are academic arguments for describing as “genocide” events where there is no bloodshed at all.30 Whether one calls it a paradox or just cynicism, the underlying effort has been to disassociate “genocide” from the Holocaust to make it more widely available, even as the word’s value to the various claimants derives entirely from the association, and the Armenians were far from alone in tacitly acknowledging this by framing their case in terms of its apparent similarities to the Holocaust.31

By the early 1990s, the Armenian genocide-recognition movement had prevailed in sentiment in academia,32 and its institutional dominance was essentially complete by the end of the decade, though Ottoman history has been a slight holdout.33 A signifier of this was the passage of a resolution in 1997 recognising the Armenian genocide by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), an organisation much better known now than it was then. Another indicator was the publication of a book of essays edited by Hovannisian in 1999, where he decried the “uneasiness of civil libertarians” with “legislative and judicial prohibitions on denial” that the Armenian massacres were genocide.34 “The Armenian Genocide is not a hypothesis but a certainty”, wrote another contributor: to contest this is to victimise the “traumatised” and generally become “an accomplice to the prolongation of the effects of the genocide”, which must be stopped, by the courts if necessary; “the freedom of the historian” is not a relevant consideration in this picture.35

One could mark the change in just a few years. In 1994, Armenian activists in France sued Bernard Lewis for “negationism” because he had expressed the view that what happened to the Armenians in 1915 and the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews were different. During the trial, few academics or journalists actively defended the effort to prosecute Lewis for thought crimes; they mostly kept quiet, and there was even a smattering of articles worrying about the free speech implications.36 By the 2010s, mainstream academic journals were publishing articles saying that any appearance of debate on the Armenian genocide was “manufactured” by bad actors equivalent to tobacco industry lobbyists creating doubt about the link between smoking and lung cancer,37 and several more European States had passed laws making it a criminal offence for one side in an historical debate to express themselves.38

THE BROADER ACADEMIC CONTEXT

The process for establishing and reinforcing an academic orthodoxy is by now tolerably well-known: the citation cascade, asymmetric scepticism and burdens of proof in peer-review depending on whether the author supports the hegemonic view or dissents from it,39 a handful of books from the dominant faction becoming curricula references, the visible consensus deterring dissidents even wanting to enter the field, those dissidents who try to enter experiencing difficulties with hiring boards, and the dissidents already in the system getting gradually squeezed out by the decisions on promotion and tenure, the sources and allocation of grant money, the escalating social pressure and reputational cost of non-conformity, and, not to put too fine a point on it, death.40

To know of this process does not in itself prove or even suggest the consensus in any one field is wrong. It works very well to keep flat-earthers out of physics and creationists out of biology. By this stage, however, it would also be naïve to take for granted that an academic consensus generated by so very human a process represents reality.

To throw the issue into some relief we can look at Science, where (unlike history) there is generally (at least in theory) only one correct answer to a question, and still the issue of consensus and the evidentiary metrics it rests on arises. Parapsychology or “psi”—telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis—is a real thing by the standard evidence criteria of Science, having to its name a dozen meta-analyses validating hundreds of studies with statistically significant effects.41 Yet all of Science is not currently preoccupied with rewriting the laws of physics to take account of this because what everyone (except the factional devotees of psi) understands is that “psi is a control condition for science, an unwitting jester in the court of academia”: the actual revelation from these studies is that “the published literature [of Science as a whole] provides only a contorted reflection of the true state of affairs” and that “the academic system is broken [because] our standard scientific methods allow one to prove the impossible”.42

The brokenness can be seen from the other direction, where there is a consensus in Science that a phenomenon is real. A phenomenon can be validated by numerous converging lines of evidence from scholars in a wide range of disciplines applying their various techniques—with the consensus so solid that research has moved beyond arguments about validity to mapping the technical details of its functioning—and it is no guarantee that the phenomenon in question does, in fact, exist. For example, until recently, 5-HTTLPR was considered by scholars in genetics (molecular, human, and several other subfields), psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, neuroimaging, and psychopharmacology to be an important genetic factor in causing depression, and then it was not. This is not intrinsically a problem: self-correction is what Science is about, after all. No, the problem was, as Scott Alexander explained:

We “figured out” how 5-HTTLPR exerted its effects, what parts of the brain it was active in, what sorts of things it interacted with, how its effects were enhanced or suppressed by the effects of other imaginary depression genes. This isn’t just an explorer coming back from the Orient and claiming there are unicorns there. It’s the explorer describing the life cycle of unicorns, what unicorns eat, all the different subspecies of unicorn, which cuts of unicorn meat are tastiest, and a blow-by-blow account of a wrestling match between unicorns and Bigfoot.

As Alexander went on to note, this was a case that exemplified why minimising the “replication crisis” was misguided: the problem was not people overstating effects or the context-dependency of same. “The problem is more like ‘you can get an entire field with hundreds of studies analyzing the behavior of something that doesn’t exist’.” The fallout from 5-HTTLPR has virtually demolished candidate genes as a field.

Nor is Science immune to a false consensus driven by politics and self-interest. The ideological capture of the academic apparatus and medical bodies determining the “treatments” for children who believe they are transgender is now clear for all to see. A particularly tragic and larger-scale case is research into Alzheimer’s disease. Sharon Begley reported in 2019: “for decades, believers in the dominant hypothesis [that the build-up of beta-protein amyloid plaques cause Alzheimer’s] suppressed research on alternative ideas: They influenced what studies got published in top journals, which scientists got funded, who got tenure, and who got speaking slots at reputation-buffing scientific conferences.” Undoubtedly, there were some malign actors,43 but in the main “the amyloid camp was neither organized nor nefarious”, Begley wrote. “Those who championed the amyloid hypothesis truly believed it, and thought that focusing money and attention on it rather than competing ideas was the surest way to an effective drug.”

If this is the situation in so “hard” a subject as medical Science, one’s wariness—not nihilistic distrust, but scepticism—should be set higher in general for the findings of “softer” subjects like history, the humanities, and social sciences, and higher still for politicised fields therein.

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Post has been updated about the Soviet “repatriation” campaign, the Dashnaks’ Cold War alignment, and the attack on Shaw

^FOOTNOTES

I have a piece out in the Manara Magazine of the the Cambridge Middle East and North Africa Forum (MENAF), co-authored with Robert Clark.

The Armenian revolutionary movement in the Ottoman Empire, which began in the late nineteenth century with the intention of creating a national polity in eastern Anatolia, produced many heroes. Armenians among themselves still celebrate many of them to this day, such as: Andranik Ozanian, Aram Manukian, Garegin Pastermadjian (Armen Garo), Garegin Nzhdeh, Drastamat Kanayan (Dro), Arshak Gavafian (Keri), Kevork Chavush, and Hrayr Dzhoghk. These men worked to inculcate the Armenian national idea and led the armed campaign that sought to make it a reality, culminating in the uprising on the eve of Ottoman entry into the First World War, which not only the Armenians could foresee was the death knell for the Empire. Their names have been occluded to varying degrees by shifting political tides.

Armenian activists and publications from 1914-15 into the 1920s were entirely forthright in celebrating the successes of the nationalist revolutionaries who fought the Ottomans and generally did not disguise that this was done in direct alliance with Russia and the Entente.1 What curtailed this kind of thing was the remnants of the brief Armenian Republic falling under Soviet rule in 1920. The Soviets denounced the wartime rebels and “the Dashnak Republic” as “bourgeois nationalists”. There were changes in the 1950s after Turkey joined NATO and particularly by the 1960s. Moscow saw the utility of the campaign to have the 1915-16 Armenian massacres recognised as genocide in instrumentalising the Armenian diaspora for political warfare against Turkey, specifically the influential Armenian community in the United States.2 This created some minor initial difficulties within Soviet Armenia, but the Soviet Revolution’s official theology had adapted to incorporate the “national liberation movements” within the Third World Strategy, and it was easy enough to channel Armenian national sentiment into this program.

Space was made for Soviet Armenian publications arguing that 1915 was genocide, and these books, translated into English and other Western languages, circulated in Armenian émigré activist circles. These works were foundational to the movement that would in time pressure Western legislatures to recognise Turkey as guilty of genocide, and in parallel emerged Armenian terrorist organisations that targeted Turkish diplomats and civilians in the name of revenge for the genocide and forcing Ankara to abandon its policy of “denial”.3 The confrontational atmosphere and broad popularity of the “guerrillas” revived the Armenian willingness to incorporate the insurgents into the story of 1915, albeit often reframing their role as resisting genocide.4

Academics have been somewhat more hesitant to complicate the genocide debate by giving full recognition to the achievements of the Ottoman-Armenian revolutionaries in developing their movement from the 1890s, the consistency and efficacy of their provocation strategy over two decades, the scale of the rebellion they managed in 1914-15, and their political versatility in securing external support.5 This is a shame because it is a very interesting story in its own right, and foreshadows so many things.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE ARMENIAN NATIONAL MOVEMENT

The organised Armenian national movement in the Ottoman Empire began in the 1860s, but it really took off in the 1870s against the backdrop of the “Great Eastern Crisis”.

A Christian revolt spread through the Ottoman Balkans starting in 1875, most importantly to Bulgaria, where the fierce government reaction electrified opinion in Christendom, leading to one of the first modern international “human rights” campaigns.6 In 1877, Russia stepped in and, after the traditional period of military calamity, overwhelmed the Ottomans. The Russian-dictated peace in the Treaty of San Stefano in March 1878 so alarmed the other European powers—especially Britain, which had propped up the Ottoman Empire through most of the nineteenth century, in no small part as a bulwark against Russia—that the Congress of Berlin was convened to revise the terms.

In the superseding July 1878 Treaty of Berlin, Britain, having signalled a willingness to go to war to prevent Russia reaching its theological-strategic dream of capturing the Ottoman capital, Constantinople, and the Straits, managed to whittle down the Russian victory.7 London could not prevent the Ottomans losing control of Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia in the west, but it did secure the return of Macedonia to the Ottomans. Similarly, while the Russian annexation of territory containing Batum, Kars, and Ardahan—all cities with important Armenian minorities—was a fait accompli, Britain reversed Russia’s plans for the rest of the east. Russia was to have occupied the so-called Six Provinces in eastern Anatolia where the Ottoman-Christian population was most-heavily concentrated over the widest area,8 nominally only long enough to oversee “reforms”.9 The British and Ottomans understandably doubted the Russians would ever leave.

Britain instead settled for a clause on the Armenian Question in the Berlin Treaty that obliged “the Sublime Porte … to carry out, without further delay, the ameliorations and reforms demanded by local requirements in the Provinces inhabited by the Armenians”. Crucially, the Great Powers arrogated to themselves a right to “superintend [the reforms’] application”. Britain was the centre of humanitarian agitation about the “Bulgarian horrors” and demands for a morality-driven foreign policy. The clause appeared to satisfy British strategic and moral concerns, but it would provide the Russians much greater satisfaction.

The Ottoman Empire was used to being subject to European political and ideological influence,10 and to Ottoman-Christians being an important conduit. Almost as soon as the Ottomans got seriously enmeshed in the European State system they had to content with the destructive reverberations of the French Revolution, notably nationalism. Ottoman-Christians, with their conceptual and linguistic links to the West, were the most vulnerable to this Enlightenment contagion, and the Greeks were early victims. However, the Armenians were initially less affected,11 and well into the nineteenth century were known as “the loyal community”.12 The direct European interference in Ottoman internal affairs after 1878 was new, and this change cannot be disentangled from the reconfiguration of relations between the Ottoman State and its Armenian subjects over subsequent decades.

The nascent Armenian national movement burgeoned in an internationalised context, its political aspirations integrally tied to European patronage.13 The Bulgarian example—of Christian revolutionary organisations instigating a rebellion and international outrage at the Ottoman response leading to a Russian intervention that secured independence—inspired emulators among the Armenians.14 The difference was that as the Armenian revolutionary committees formed over the next decade, there was already a framework in place for their armed provocations to induce Russian intervention (and, as we shall see, this tacit cooperation that existed from the beginning would become ever-more direct over time). The 1878 treaty, which tried to square the sincere British commitments to Ottoman territorial integrity and improving the humanitarian situation for Ottoman-Armenians, had created a set-up where Russia could use the latter as a pretext to undermine the former.15

This did not go unnoticed. The Porte would come to see the Armenian national movement and the “international law” instruments surrounding it as a stalking horse for secession and foreign annexation of Ottoman territory. At a popular level, the corollary was increasing Muslim resentment towards Armenians and other Christians as a “fifth column”: a disloyal and threatening vector for foreign schemes against the Empire.

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ARMENIAN “NATIONAL LIBERATION” WARFARE

The first underground Armenian revolutionary entity, established in 1885, was the Armenakan Party, whose main leader was in France.16 The party was more liberal ideologically, ambiguous about violence; and failed to establish a broad base of support or much practical influence outside of Van. The two primary Armenian revolutionary committees were the Hunchaks and Dashnaks, founded in 1887 and 1890, respectively.17 These groups are sometimes called “Armenian Narodniks” and for good reason: ideologically, both combined nationalism and socialism in the manner of the Russian Narodniki terrorist-revolutionaries; not-coincidentally, both operated in an international milieu where the Narodniki were powerful; and both were created abroad and had among their leaders Armenians who had either been born in the Russian Empire or lived there most of their lives. The Hunchaks were founded in Switzerland, specifically in Geneva by men in close proximity to exiled Narodniki,18 and the Dashnaks originate in Russia itself. There was schism and factionalism, as so often occurs with extremist groups,19 but broadly they pushed in the same direction.

The Hunchaks were overtly devoted to independence—and ultimately to irredentism, wishing to conquer “Ottoman Armenia” first, and then expand this State to include Russian- and Persian-Armenians. The Hunchaks sought to indoctrinate Ottoman-Armenian “peasants and workers” with nationalist-socialist propaganda; to stir up protests and other forms of disobedience, such as refusals to pay tax; and to “elevate the spirit of the people” via terrorism, which was always framed as “self-defence”.20 The Dashnaks spoke more ambiguously of “freedom”, defined in Marxian terms, and tended to frame their objectives in an Ottoman context, even officially expressing wariness about external support.21 In theory, this made the Dashnaks the “moderates”, willing to engage the Ottoman government and settle matters internally with concessions on national rights and autonomy. In practice, the distinction eroded by the 1900s, if not before, with both committees conducting their campaigns through a combination of a legal political party and terrorism, exactly as the Narodniks did in Russia, with the difference that the Armenian revolutionaries acted with an eye towards inducing European Great Power intervention.

In May 1893, the British Consul in Erzurum, Robert W. Graves, met a captured Armenian from one of the committees, who echoed the Russian terrorist-revolutionaries precisely in his explanation that socialist ethics meant the ends justified the means and the worse the situation was for Armenians, the better the chances were for revolution. “He was paid for this work by funds from abroad”, Graves cabled to the ambassador in Constantinople, “and the attention of the movement was, he declared, to cause such disturbances in the country as should attract attention to the oppressed condition of his fellow-countrymen and compel the interference of foreign powers.” Graves met many more Armenian revolutionaries and reflected later in his memoirs: “They were quite cynical when remonstrated with on the wickedness of deliberately provoking the massacre of their unfortunate fellow-countrymen … without any assurance that the lot of the survivors would be any happier, saying calmly that the sacrifice was a necessary one and the victims would be ‘Martyrs to the National Cause’.”22

A report commissioned by the British ambassador to the Porte, Sir Philip Currie, noted in March 1894 that “the immediate aim of the [Armenian] revolutionaries is to incite disorder, to cause inhumane reprisals, and thus to provoke the intervention of the Powers in the name of humanity.” Interestingly, the report—without knowing it—documented another similarity with the Narodniks: the Armenian revolutionaries’ support base was semi-educated young men, while the mass of Ottoman-Armenians were indifferent at best. The secular and religious leaders of the Ottoman-Armenian population had opposed revolutionary doctrines emanating from the West for nearly a century,23 evidently with some success.

Also in 1894, the Armenian Patriarch in Constantinople, Khoren Ashekian, powerfully condemned the Armenian nationalists for sowing communal strife that could only lead to disaster for Armenians when the inevitable Turkish backlash arrived and the revolutionaries’ false belief the Russians would save them was exposed. The Hunchaks responded by trying to assassinate Ashekian, twice,24 setting the template for the Armenian committees’ behaviour and that of the many revolutionary movements to come, always at least as concerned with eradicating dissent in the community they claimed to represent as combatting the State.

Cyrus Hamlin, an American Protestant missionary to the Ottoman-Armenians since the 1840s and one of the founders of the elite Robert College in Constantinople, spoke to a Hunchak leader in December 1893, who explained that the Armenian revolutionaries planned to take their “opportunity to kill Turks and Kurds, set fire to their villages and then make their escape into the mountains”, whereupon “enraged Muslims will … fall upon the defenceless Armenians and slaughter them with such barbarity that Russia will enter in the name of humanity and Christian civilisation and take possession [of eastern Anatolia].” When Hamlin denounced this as immoral, the Hunchak responded: “It appears so to you, no doubt; but we Armenians have determined to be free. Europe listened to the Bulgarian horrors and made Bulgaria free. She will listen to our cry when it goes up in shrieks and blood of millions of women and children.”25

The Hunchaks, the leading Armenian revolutionary element in the first phase, had a strategy of provocation encoded in their founding program, Article 6 of which read: “The time for the general revolution will be when a foreign power attacks Turkey externally. The party shall [at that time] revolt internally.”26 As the above shows, this was not an abstraction: it was what the Armenian terrorists across all of the committees at ground level understood themselves to be doing. Sometimes it did not work at all, as with the arson attack in then-Ottoman-ruled Thessaloniki in 1890, which the Hunchaks were almost certainly behind. A third of the city burned down, but there were no indiscriminate reprisals on Ottoman-Armenians.27 And, as the Armenian committees were soon to discover, though not to learn from, the tactic might work insofar as it provoked massacres, without bringing a decisive, Bulgarian-level European intervention.

In August 1894, Hunchak fedayi (guerrillas), consciously seeking Great Power intervention, ignited an Armenian rebellion at Sasun that spread across eastern Anatolia.28 In a foreshadowing of 1915, the official repressive measures were accompanied by horrific massacres of Armenian civilians, many carried out by the “Hamidiye”, the Cossack-modelled irregular units of Kurdish tribesmen created in 1891 to protect the eastern frontier.29 European sentiment was duly aroused and in May 1895 the Great Powers presented a Reform package to Sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876-1909), which he was obliged to sign in October. But the measures were not binding and were never implemented. Nonetheless, the political effect of Great Power intervention on the back of Armenian provocations was quite profound, even in the short-term, epitomising and exacerbating the confrontational communal-political trends in the Ottoman Empire. It was taken as confirmation of the Muslims’ darkest fears, with a concomitant escalation of repression that made 1896 a year that lives in infamy for Armenians even now, and yet it was also seen as strategic vindication by the Armenian revolutionaries.30

The magnitude of the Armenian revolutionary challenge was evident in Armenian rebels contesting control of the cities, notably Zeytun (now Süleymanlı) and Van, up to a late stage in the crisis in 1896. Even after urban fighting ended, Armenian revolutionaries staged a terrorist “spectacular”, a classic “propaganda of the deed”, by occupying the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople on 26 August 1896. It was indicative of intra-Armenian dynamics that the perpetrators at this stage were the Dashnaks: the Hunchaks had been enduringly wounded, physically and politically, by the 1894-96 events, and the Dashnaks would become the leading element of the national movement. European diplomats arranged safe-passage for the terrorists to France and the European press reported on their cause sympathetically, not least because the bank seizure touched-off a wave of pogroms against Armenian civilians in the capital that killed thousands before the Ottoman government could stop them.

The Porte tried to draw a line under all this with an inquiry to, inter alia, reassure Ottoman-Armenians of the State’s good intentions and to quiet foreign criticism. It backfired, predictably and absolutely, uncovering official failings and misdeeds the Armenian revolutionaries could use in their propaganda and focusing unprecedented international critical attention on the Ottoman government.31

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In July 1897, a Dashnak-led, Hunchak-supported contingent of Armenian fedayeen—the Russian-born Dashnak Sargis Mehrabyan is perhaps the best-known—invaded the Ottoman Empire from Iran and assaulted the encampment of the Kurdish Mazrik tribe on the Khanasor plain in Van Province. The raid was billed as revenge for the anti-Armenian atrocities in Van a year earlier, which the tribe was allegedly primarily responsible for. About 250 Kurds were massacred, many savagely mutilated. The Dashnaks insisted—and European reports of the event took their word—that those killed were all adult males; some accounts say women and children were among the dead.32

In March-April 1904, another Armenian revolt rocked Sasun. Hundreds of Dashnaks, led by Andranik, infiltrated the area from Russia, distributed weapons to local rebels, and began attacking Muslim villages, seemingly with the intention of provoking reprisals that could trigger European intervention. The Ottomans suppressed the revolt—the most prominent Dashnak martyr was Hrayr Dzhoghk—and thousands of Armenian civilians were reportedly massacred yet again, though the British Consul visited the area soon afterwards and said that, on the evidence he had seen, “it would be difficult to sustain charges of massacre and atrocities”.33

An Armenian revolt in Muş, west of Lake Van, in the summer of 1905, was relatively swiftly overcome, apparently with 5,000 fatalities all around.34

All through this period, less visible to foreign newspaper-readers, there was relentless Armenian subversion and guerrilla activity. A glimpse of this phenomenon can be seen in the life of Kevork Chavush, a Dashnak fedayi commander in the Sasun area. Working to raise nationalist consciousness among Armenians and create tensions with the State—over land, taxes, any flash-point he could find—Chavush was known as “the man with the dagger who was always ready to punish those who molested the defenceless people”. An example of what this meant was Chavush’s assassins, after the suppression of the 1904 revolt, stabbing a Kurdish chief to death in his home, along with his wife and children. Chavush was killed in a clash with Ottoman troops in 1907. Such deliberately terrorising assassinations were standard fare from the Armenian fedayeen.35

The nationalist coup in mid-1908 (“The Young Turk Revolution”), which brought the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) to power, changed the situation for a time. The CUP, though indelibly associated with the anti-Armenian atrocities of 1915, had worked with the Armenian revolutionaries in opposition and took a liberal approach to the Armenian Question in government. The CUP equalised rights for Christians, creating increased legal space for Armenian political activism, granting Armenians permission to bear arms, and brought Christians into the Ottoman army, while taking measures to reduce the Kurdish threat to the Armenians by disbanding the Hamidiye, imprisoning renegade commanders, and appointing local administrators committed to disciplining the Kurds.36

In response, the Armenian committees officially called off the terrorism campaign, until the cooperation with the CUP broke down in early 1912.37 The official stance did not always reflect ground reality in the provinces, and in 1911, as relations with the CUP frayed, there was a “politics by day, terrorism by night” dimension to the Dashnaks.38 In the meantime, the Armenian-CUP cooperation itself created new sources of trouble, namely blocs of opponents on either side. Some Armenians favoured the old ways of subsidiarity and among Muslims the CUP policies were broadly opposed for favouring minorities.39 These ultras made themselves felt, most notably in March-April 1909, with a failed Islamist and monarchist counter-coup in Constantinople, and an Armenian uprising in Adana incited by the local bishop, Moushegh Seropian, which spiralled into communal violence throughout Cilicia that is said to have killed up to 20,000 people.40

Chavush and people like him made a lot of effort to arm Armenian civilians in eastern Anatolia, and the stated justification was a good one: self-defence against the marauding Kurdish tribes, whose menace continued despite the political changes at the centre in the 1908-12 period, not least because—as we will get to—the Kurds could acquire arms from outside.41 As in many similar situations of instability and civil strife, this individually rational solution contributed to the overarching problem it was meant to solve. The Ottomans never formally lost the Six Provinces, as they did with the Balkans, but Ottoman State collapse at the periphery was the same at either end of the Empire. The de facto rulers in the east were the Kurdish tribal chiefs, some of whose nomadic militias were implicitly allied to the State, but pinpointing who was on who’s “side” in the Russo-Ottoman borderlands is damnably difficult. Kurdish tribal leaders and sub-leaders regularly fought against Ottoman gendarmes and troops. Armenian committees fought against the Ottoman government and sometimes fought with Ottoman State forces against the Kurds. The Ottoman government intermittently paid and even armed the Dashnaks to destabilise neighbouring rivals. The one constant was Kurdish attacks on Christians, a blend of ideological sectarianism and sheer banditry.42

THE RUSSIAN DIMENSION

It was in these troubled waters that the Russians were fishing by the late 1890s, a policy of meddling in the internal politics of the Ottoman Empire, specifically in the Six Provinces, that continued uninterrupted through the outbreak of the First World War up to late 1917 and in certain respects continued after the Bolshevik coup. The Russian dimension to events in eastern Anatolia in this period is so pervasive that, as Sean McMeekin has written, it is a “serious distortion of the truth to tell the story of the Armenian tragedy of 1915 without reference (or with only passing reference) to Russia. It is akin to writing about, say, the ‘bloodbath in Budapest’ during the ill-fated Hungarian Revolution of 1956 without reference to the Soviet Union.”43

The Tsardom had a habit of working with all sides to a conflict, and seeing conflict itself as advantageous, not any specific outcome.44 In eastern Anatolia, that meant Russia being the primary armourer of the Kurds and the Armenians. As Russia had no intention of assisting any of its clients to achieve particular purposes, only a modest outlay was needed to sustain a positive feedback loop of omnidirectional chaos that weakened Ottoman State power and authority. Ottoman troops were tied down in counter-insurgency operations, while support to the Kurds—so extensive there were Kurdish language institutes in Saint Petersburg—enabled depredations against the Armenians that increased Armenian calls for Russian protection.45 Into the bargain, the Ottoman government was often blamed by foreign States and humanitarian activists for Kurdish outrages, damaging the Porte politically, and the Armenian revolutionaries felt themselves ever-more reliant on Petersburg.46

Russian ambitions went beyond hiving off the “Armenian Provinces”. It was hoped in Petersburg to dismember the whole Ottoman Empire and annex large chunks, including the capital. It was in the wake of the 1894-96 Armenian uprisings and massacres that “Russia first began serious logistical research into the possibility of staging an amphibious operation at the Bosphorus”, and the Russians intensified the development of these plans after the violence in 1909. A Russian operational plan from this period envisioned “agents from the Christian population”—Macedonians and Bulgarians in Europe, Greeks and Armenians in Anatolia—preparing the way for a Russian invasion by cutting off rail lines to Constantinople, whereupon native Christians would “burn down all the wooden bridges spanning the Golden Horn and set fire to Stambul”.47

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The long Ottoman decline that began in the late seventeenth century culminated with the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, and the importance of this episode in shaping what happened in 1915 can hardly be overstated. Coming a year after Italy had taken Libya, it accentuated the general Ottoman sense of existential dread—that the Empire was defenceless against foreign enemies—and it was singularly unnerving, bringing the frontier dangerously close to the capital, and removing the Balkan territories that had “for long [been] the centre of gravity of the Ottoman Empire”.48 The Russian role, more reactive than enthusiastic it is true, was nonetheless key in organising the Balkan coalition that attacked the Ottomans.49

The impact of the Balkan defeat on the Ottomans heading into 1915 had at least three elements.

First, the public messaging cast a long shadow. The Russians led in lauding the outcome as a victory for Christendom, eliminating the final Islamic toehold in Europe. On the one hand, it drove home to the Ottomans that they were at their lowest ebb, in no condition to handle minor Christian States, never mind the Great Powers. On the other hand, it stoked an Ottoman Muslim thirst for anti-Christian revenge.

Second and related, the arrival in the Ottoman Empire of half-a-million Muslim refugees (Muhacir), uprooted after centuries of colonial settlement and bearing horror stories of massacres and worse, inflamed sectarian sentiment further. This was personal for some in the elite, since quite a number of the CUP leaders originated in the Balkans, including the Bulgarian-born Talat Pasha, the Party chairman and Ottoman Interior Minister (as well as Grand Vizier after February 1917). Muhacir atrocity narratives mobilised anti-Christian violence even before 1915 and in the events of 1915 a significant number of the perpetrators were the Muhacir, who had, by happenstance and some degree of design, been placed in the Christian areas.50

Third, the immediate-run Russian diplomacy and covert action that fused the Balkan events with the Armenian Question in everyone’s mind.

The Balkan Wars seemed to herald the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. In late 1912, Russia tried to organise the Kurdish tribes in the east into a unified force that could finish the job.51 Kurdish unity cannot be accomplished by any human force and it is an open question if God Himself would fare any better. Fortunately for Russia, it had maintained a diverse portfolio of clients in eastern Anatolia, and the Armenian option proved much more fruitful.

In December 1912, as the Ottoman Empire seemingly fought for its life against Russia’s allies in the Balkans, Armenian committee violence flared to life. Arshak Vramian, one of the Dashnak terrorists at the Ottoman Bank in 1896 and by this time an American citizen, told the French Vice-Consul in Van: “It does not matter if the Armenians are killed instead of living as they are living! We are determined to restart the revolutionary action we had suspended for four years”.52 Vramian had specified that he meant assassinations and the Mayor of Van, Bedros Kapamajian, an Armenian, was duly murdered.53

The same month, Russia put the Armenian Question back on the international agenda, coinciding, though not coincident, with a diplomatic-agitation mission to Europe by Boghos Nubar, a prominent Ottoman-Armenian activist. Nubar set himself up as head of the Armenian National Delegation in Paris and sent letters on behalf of the Armenian Catholicos to Russian diplomats imploring Petersburg to pressure the Porte into granting Armenian autonomy. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Sazonov seized on this to secure British and French backing for new Reform talks, while hinting broadly that Russian occupation of eastern Anatolia was inevitable. The tell as to the real source of Russia’s angst at that time was the raising of petitions calling for Ottoman-Armenians to be given Russian citizenship (a Russian Imperial tactic not-unfamiliar at the present time). The Ottoman government had generated a plan to resettle the Muhacir displaced from the Balkans in the Six Provinces and Petersburg wanted to thwart it “because the policy would have reduced Russian influence in the region”.54

The success of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) in particular in the Balkans provided an inspirational model, and the Armenian revolutionaries went all-in on terrorism as the means to accomplish their goals in 1913. The Dashnaks and Hunchaks refashioned their structures in eastern Anatolia along IMRO-style paramilitary lines. The Armenian guerrillas smuggled weapons into the Ottoman Empire on an unprecedented scale in early 1913 from Iran and Russia, where the Okhranka, the Tsar’s secret police, ensured that border guards looked the other way. The Armenian committees’ ostensibly principled “anti-imperialism” was all-but openly cast aside: Dashnaks met Russian officials and made clear their view of Russian imperialism as an emancipatory force. This sentiment spread wildly among the Armenian population. Aleksandr Olferiev, the Russian Vice-Consul in Van, reported gleefully in March 1913 that the “mood of Armenians” throughout the province, previously somewhat ambiguous, was now “one of complete Russophilia … the Dashnaks are completely on our side.” The next month, Olferiev documented that Van had become “an armed camp”: “all the Armenian merchants are stockpiling guns in their stores”.55

Russian delight was slightly disrupted by the Kurdish tribes, who, sharing in the common belief of the Ottoman State’s imminent demise, were emboldened to ravage the Christians on a major scale. Peterburg rather cynically protested to Constantinople on 29 May 1913, and was then unpleasantly surprised when, ten days later, the arriving Ottoman troops in Van were joined by 500 Dashnaks in putting the Kurds to flight. Armed revolt scuppered for now, the Russians redoubled their political warfare. Despite the complexity on the ground, with its clear evidence the Ottoman government was trying to protect the Armenian population even when it meant sending troops needed for a war that was closing in on its capital, the Russians escalated the international campaign accusing the Porte of atrocities against the Armenians and demanding Reforms “according to the 1895 draft”.56

A Reform treaty, over German objections, was forced on the Ottomans in February 1914: notably, it was signed solely by Russia on behalf of the European Great Powers. The terms would have infringed Ottoman sovereignty in the Six Provinces by creating a system of European inspectorates that not only judged the reforms’ progress but administered them. Germany was able to help the Ottomans slow-roll the implementation process—and the Great War ultimately prevented the inspectors, who had been appointed, taking up their posts.57 However, the sequence of events leading up to the treaty, its terms, and the repeated, menacing remarks of Sazonov during negotiations—threatening a Russian invasion if there was one more massacre of Armenians—“confirmed for the Porte that the whole Armenian reform issue was just a Trojan horse for Russian imperialism”.58

AND THE WAR CAME

It was not foreordained that the Ottoman Empire would join the First World War on the side of the Central Powers—or at all. Britain had tried to keep the Ottomans out of it, and many in the Ottoman government, more acutely aware than ever of the Empire’s weakness, favoured neutrality. However, the Ottomans had been moving closer to Germany for some time and the longstanding Ottoman-British alliance decisively broke down simultaneous with the outbreak of war in Europe.

During Kaiser Wilhelm II’s grand tour of the Ottoman Empire in 1898, he had ostentatiously declared himself protector of all the world’s Muslims. The Kaiser was genuinely, personally drawn to Islam and the rumour Germany now had a Muslim Emperor spread widely in the Middle East. Strategically, the Kaiser was thinking at this stage of working through the Caliph to raise a global jihad that would trigger rebellion among Britain’s Muslim subjects—and the Kaiser would, by 1914, have the same idea for Russia.59 German money and weapons flooded into the Ottoman Empire, German military personnel were increasingly prevalent throughout the Ottoman army, and German diplomats became influential over Ottoman State administration and decision-making. The construction of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, which began in 1903 and would weaken Britain’s naval strength, symbolised this entanglement. One could be forgiven for thinking in mid-1914 that the Ottoman government had already gone over to the Germans.

In this context, it is debateable whether Britain “requisitioning” two fully-paid-for Ottoman dreadnoughts at British shipyards on 29 July 1914—the event often pointed to by Turks as determining Ottoman policy in the First World War—was cause, catalyst, and/or pretext.60 For one thing, the Ottomans had, as Britain feared, offered to send one of the ships to Germany.61 For another, when the Porte was officially informed of the requisition on 3 August, it had already, a day earlier, signed a secret treaty with Germany promising to come into the war on the Central Powers’ side if Russia got involved. Austria joined the treaty on 5 August—the same day the Ottomans publicly declared neutrality. Ten days later, a German Admiral, Wilhelm Souchon, was made commander-in-chief of the Ottoman fleet. By this time, Ottoman and German subversive missionaries had been dispatched to the Persian Gulf (then-under British control) and to Iran and Afghanistan (surrounding British India) to encourage them to jihad against the Entente. As we shall see, the Ottomans were effectively at war with Russia by September. The Ottomans then closed the Dardanelles to Allied shipping on 1 October.62 Whatever one’s interpretation of the causality, the result was the supremacy over the Ottoman State of a CUP cadre closely bound to the German General Staff.

Overcoming the neutrality faction in the Ottoman government was accomplished by the German-allied Ottoman War Minister, Enver Pasha, conspiring with Admiral Souchon to launch a naval raid against Russia in the Black Sea on 29 October 1914. The Russians had already begun their invasion by the time they declared war on the Ottomans on 2 November. Britain and France followed with war declarations against the Porte on 5 November. The Ottoman Sultan-Caliph proclaimed a jihad against the Entente on 11 November, and three days later the proclamation was read out in Constantinople by the ulema, along with five fatwas, lavishly paid for by Germany, declaring it a duty for Muslims to wage war on the Christian enemies of Islam, except Austrians, Germans, and Americans. Theologically, this made no sense, and in practice the distinctions were difficult to hold on to. The fatwas could easily be read as sanctioning violence against Christian civilians even in neutral European countries, and the popular interpretation—manifested within days—was that the call was for war against Christians, full stop.63 It is impossible to believe that this holy warmongering was not a factor in what happened in 1915.

The British Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, was greatly saddened by this turn of events, lamenting, “The Turkish Empire has committed suicide, and dug with its own hands its grave”.64 The CUP government had entered the war hoping to reverse the Empire’s decline, but soon confronted Asquith’s prescience, buffeted by the interlinked twin existential crises for the Ottoman State of external invasion and internal Armenian rebellion, which began before the war and escalated once it was underway, led by the Armenian terrorist-revolutionary committees that openly collaborated with the Entente, especially Russia, and drew on various forms of popular participation from an Armenian civilian population that in the main saw Ottoman dissolution as liberation. It was in these circumstances that the Armenian calamity took place.

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The Armenian Volunteers

The Dashnaks’ eighth World Congress—bringing together the organisation’s branches from Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Europe, and the United States—met in in late July 1914 in Erzurum,65 and concluded on 2 August 1914 with a public decision that Armenians should do their duty as citizens of their individual States, not get involved in foreign intrigue. The Ottoman-Armenian delegation cited this decision in refusing the reported offer of CUP representatives at the Congress to grant autonomy to “Turkish Armenia” in exchange for the Dashnaks helping to foment rebellion inside Russia. Turks are not shying at shadows in questioning the sincerity of this, and suspecting a Russian-coordinated rebellion against the Ottoman State was already in the works.66

In 1923, shortly after it was all over—the rebellion, the deportations, the massacres, the rise and fall of an Armenian Republic, and the Sovietization of what was left—the Dashnak leader and first Prime Minister of the Republic, Hovhannes Kajaznuni, bluntly stated:

At the beginning of the Fall of 1914, when Turkey had not yet entered the war …, Armenian revolutionary bands began to be formed in Transcaucasia with great enthusiasm … Contrary to the decision taken during their general meeting at Erzurum only a few weeks before, the A.R.F. [Dashnaks] had active participation in the formation of the bands and their future military action against Turkey. … We had no doubt the war would end with the complete victory of the Allies; Turkey would be defeated and dismembered, and its Armenian population would at last be liberated.

We had embraced Russia whole-heartedly without any compunction. Without any positive basis of fact, we believed that the Tsarist government would grant us a more-or-less broad self-government in the Caucasus and in the Armenian vilayets liberated from Turkey as a reward for our loyalty, our efforts, and assistance. … [W]e had lost our sense of reality and were carried away with our dreams. … We overestimated the ability of the Armenian people, its political and military power, and overestimated the extent and importance of the services our people rendered to the Russians. … The Turks knew what they ought to do and did it.67

This view was echoed by Kapriel Papazian, head of the Ramgavar Party:

[T]he answer given the Turks [in refusing to help ignite rebellion inside Russia] was based on a resolution adopted by the [Erzurum] convention. The fact remains, however, that the leaders of the Turkish Armenian section of the [Dashnaks] did not carry out their promise of loyalty to the Turkish cause when the Turks entered the war. … They were swayed in their actions by the interests of the Russian government, and disregarded, entirely, the political dangers that the war had created for the Armenians in Turkey. Prudence was thrown to the winds; even the decision of their own convention of Erzurum was forgotten, and a call was sent for Armenian volunteers to fight the Turks on the Caucasian front.68

As indicated in those quotations, the sentiment of the committees was general among Armenians. One of the leading historian-advocates of Armenian genocide-recognition has written of this time: “Although most Armenians maintained a correct [outward] attitude-vis-a-vis the Ottoman government …[,] the manifestations of loyalty were insincere, for the sympathy of most Armenians throughout the world was with the Entente”.69

It was in this heady atmosphere, with Russian deliverance and national liberation seemingly at hand, that many Armenians reacted to the Ottoman general mobilisation order on 3 August 1914, the day after the secret treaty with Germany, with open defiance, and the line between draft resistance and rebellion was a fine one. Thousands of Armenians conscripted into the Ottoman army deserted: some formed armed bands that clashed with the State; some, with the assistance of the Dashnaks, crossed the border into Russia, heading for Tiflis, where the Chief of Staff of the Russian Caucasus Army, General Nikolai Yudenich, already had an operations room to enlist Armenian volunteers. Many more Armenian civilians similarly voted with their feet and moved to Russia, a migration flow that would reach 200,000 by late 1915.70 Veteran Ottoman-Armenian revolutionaries, the deserters, and civilian volunteers were merged into Russian military units with Iranian-Armenians and Russian-Armenians, both from the Russian Caucasus “proper” and the slice of the Ottoman east Russia annexed in 1878.

One of the prominent Ottoman-Armenian representatives at the Erzurum Congress, Garegin Pastermadjian (Armen Garo), had signed-up with the Russians by mid-September 1914. Pastermadjian, a Dashnak terrorist at the Ottoman Bank in 1896 and a deputy in the Ottoman Parliament during the reconciliation period with the CUP, would command of one of the Armenian volunteer units that invaded the Ottoman Empire as part of the Russian army six weeks later.71 The commander of another of these units arrived about the same time, Arshak Gavafian (Keri), a roving Ottoman-Armenian insurgent, who had inter alia fled Sasun in 1904 and engaged in the Iranian “Constitutional Revolution” the next year.72 The dazzling Ottoman-Armenian Dashnak General Andranik, another unit leader, whose most recent round with the Porte was fighting alongside the Bulgarian rebels, arrived in Tiflis much earlier, on 2 August 1914, and was soon joined by Garegin Nzhdeh, another participant in the Balkan Wars, and Hampartsum Arakelyan, editor of Mshak, the leading Armenian-language newspaper in the Caucasus.73 Another of the unit commander’s present from early on, Drastamat Kanayan (Dro), had a very similar life trajectory to Nzhdeh: both were technically Russian-born but spent most of their lives involved in Ottoman affairs and lived long enough to collaborate with the Nazis in the next war.

The prestige of these men and many others proved magnetic in bringing Armenians, Ottoman or otherwise, into Russian ranks.74 By the end of August 1914, the Russian train-and-equip program for Armenian volunteers was so swamped Yudenich had to ask the Stavka for 25,000 more rifles. “The Russian army, then, actively sought to arm Ottoman Armenians [inside the Ottoman Empire] even before Turkey entered the war, with the full cooperation of the Dashnaks, General Andranik, and Armenian leaders in Tiflis. So, too, was the Russian Foreign Office involved, and at the very highest level.”75 We will come to this dimension of the Russian operation in more detail momentarily.

As participants in the enterprise make clear, the organisation of the Armenian volunteers into formal units was complete by mid-September 1914, and these units were attached to Russian army all along the line in the Caucasus. Other Armenians were trained by Russian intelligence for reconnaissance and sabotage missions.76 The Russian army had five Dashnak Armenian volunteer druzhinas when it invaded the Ottoman Empire in November 1914 and a sixth legion led by Hunchaks was soon added. There were also multiple smaller irregular volunteer detachments.77

The number of Armenian volunteers is, as with so many historical numbers, highly politicised and fundamentally unknowable. There were not less than 6,000 spread through the six druzhinas, and that increased considerably in short order. One of the Russians’ key Dashnak collaborators reported that “20,000 Armenian volunteers … responded to the call” to “take up arms against the Turks”.78 The British estimated the Russians had nearly 45,000 Armenian volunteers by the end of October 1914.79 Another Armenian volunteer said their number was 20,000 just “at the front” in Van by mid-1915.80 Armenian political leader Boghos Nubar puts the figure around 50,000,81 and Russian historians give the same figure, estimating that 11,500 of them were Ottoman-Armenians spread across twenty-three Russian units.82

Taner Akçam, a leading historian arguing the Ottomans committed genocide in 1915-16, has claimed that the Russians’ Armenian volunteers had a “far greater” psychological than military importance, in their impact on the “imagination” of the Ottoman leaders towards their Armenian subjects.83 Contemporary Ottoman, Armenian, and Russian sources all disagree with this, describing the Armenian volunteers as highly-motivated and proficient, playing a significant role in the initial military disasters for the Ottoman army in eastern Anatolia.84 It was in recognition of this Armenian contribution to Russian arms that Tsar Nicholas II made a personal visit to the Armenian Cathedral in Tiflis on 13 December 1914, where he was publicly hailed by Alexander Khatisian, the president of the Armenian National Bureau, who made a speech saying: “Armenians from all countries are hurrying to enter the ranks of the glorious Russian Army, and with their blood, to serve the victory of the Russian Army … Let the Russian flag wave freely over the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. … Let the Armenian people of Turkey, who have suffered for the faith of Christ, receive resurrection for a new, free life under the protection of Russia.”85 If there was “imagination” in the Ottoman government’s view of Armenian dynamics, it seems to have been shared by some significant portion of the Armenians themselves and the Russian Emperor.

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The Armenian Rebellion

The Ottoman government’s sense that an Armenian rebellion was in the works had been building over about a year by the summer of 1914, and not without reason.

Some consular reports suggest the Ottoman State’s crackdown on the Kurds in mid-1913 worked for a time to increase public security in the east.86 Other foreign dispatches in the same period suggest the lawlessness was worse than it had been for years. Regardless, the Ottoman government did not believe the ongoing stockpiling of weapons by the Armenian committees was for “self-defence”, not least because the government itself was increasing the amount of arms given to Armenians for that purpose.87 The Ottomans believed the committees’ strategy remained one of preparing for a rebellion in tandem with Russian intervention, which had been delayed by the diplomatic contingencies of mid-1913. It was a view not without foundation.

In mid-1913, the Armenian committees—the Dashnaks, the Hunchaks, and the Armenakan Party—had met in Van and agreed to form a united front, coordinating their revolutionary activity. As so often in insurgent alliances, the most ideologically radical and operationally violent element dominated, namely the Dashnaks (though the Hunchaks had been radicalising on their own). Similarly commonplace was the Dashnaks’ utilisation of this alliance to extend a shadow governance capacity—“taxing” Armenians in Van, for example—which normalised the population cooperating with the insurgents and gave the insurgents access to increasing resources that were used to provide goods and services, a feedback loop that progressively solidified the insurgents’ de facto control and legitimacy.88 Captain Molyneux-Seel, a British official at the Consulate in Van, argued in May 1913 that the committees’ alliance resulted from a meeting Van Dashnak leader Arshak Vramian had “with the Russian authorities” in Tiflis, and a month earlier Molyneux-Seel had reported to London: “[The Armenians have] thrown off any pretence of loyalty they may once have shown, and openly welcome the prospect of a Russian occupation of the Armenian Vilayets.”89

In January 1914, the British Vice-Consul in Van, Ian M. Smith, reported that the Armenian revolutionaries’ “secret importation of arms”, mostly from Russia, was on such a vast scale it was ceasing to be secret: “I have seen Armenians openly carrying these arms in the country districts … In Van it is said that the Armenians are now better armed than the Kurds”. Smith also noted the political dynamics pushing towards confrontation: within the alliance of Armenian committees, the Dashnaks were unquestionably supreme “owing to the more active and extreme policy it pursues”. This included the Dashnaks imposing themselves—and purging Armenian moderates—throughout Van province.90 Van would prove the seismic hinge point, but not yet.

In March 1914, a month after the Ottomans had signed the reform treaty with Russia, a rebellion erupted in Bitlis, just west of Van. It was led by Kurds, specifically a mullah named Selim Efendi al-Hizani. Mullah Selim and the 300 Kurdish chieftains who joined him nominally wanted the restoration of the shari’a and considered the CUP impious, but the Christian economic predominance in the east and the CUP disarming the Kurds had at least as much to do with it. The rebellion was put down by 2 April. The CUP regime at one level breathed a sigh of relief that the Kurds had targeted the government, rather than the Armenians, which would have created dire consequences for relations with the Great Powers at that moment. The warning was taken, though, with measures put in place such as “granting the local governors wider latitude to declare martial law and request military reinforcements, [and] Minister of the Interior Talat ordered that special attention be paid to protecting Christians from future attacks”.91

On the other hand, the Ottoman government was alarmed by the clear Russian fingerprints on the Bitlis uprising, despite ostensibly-friendlier diplomatic relations of late. Mullah Selim was defeated so rapidly because he had jumped the gun: if he had waited, several Kurdish powerbrokers who were actually in Russia would have returned with the weapons transfers they had been arranging. As it was, all the Kurdish chiefs could do was offer words of support, but it showed that Russia had not given up on its Kurdish assets, the disappointing realisation a year earlier that the Kurds could not be brought under a collective Russian-directed leadership structure notwithstanding.92 Ensuring nobody missed what had happened, Selim took shelter in the Russian Consulate and Petersburg refused to hand him over (he was still there when open war began in November). The Porte, therefore, tried to win the Kurds over by granting “financial subsidies, making leading Kurds senators, and pressing the Kurds of Istanbul to use their influence over their brethren in Anatolia”. It was yet another treatment that made the illness worse—and complicated the policy of protecting Christians—but the Ottomans were short of options, unlike the Russians, who could play the Kurdish and Armenian cards simultaneously in “eroding Ottoman control of Eastern Anatolia”, and it was working.93

Just over two weeks later, on 19 April 1914, Talat warned the provincial authorities in Adana and Aleppo that the Armenians in Zeytun and the region around Alexandretta (İskenderun) were smuggling in weapons and preparing for a rebellion. Then there was a lull and some in the Ottoman government began to think—or to hope—that their fears had been misplaced.94 In July, worrying signs reappeared, such as shipments of Russian weapons into the heavily-Armenian Eleşkirt Valley,95 and in the shadow of the Great War commencing the direst Ottoman fears started to manifest.

* * * *

There is a tendency, acknowledged even by those who strongly support recognising the 1915 events as genocide, for scholars to ignore the wartime Armenian rebellion in the Ottoman Empire because to mention it is perceived as giving ammunition to the “Turkish” argument that the deportations were just that, a security measure against a rebellious population with incidental, not intentional, fatalities.96 The unspoken issue is that any claim of genocide is inherently to make an analogy with the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry, and the Armenian rebellion greatly complicates such a parallel. It is a fact nonetheless.

The real debate is to some extent about the scale of the Armenian rebellion and most fundamentally about the connection between the Armenian volunteers and the Ottoman-Armenian insurgencies. One side sees a firm dividing line between the Russian-controlled “external” volunteers and “internal” rebel activity that was geographically local and had an indigenous impetus. The other side sees two prongs of a holistic Russian strategy. Armenian leaders contemporaneously largely took the latter view, as can be seen from Kajaznuni and Papazian above. Another example is Boghos Nubar, who said the invasion of the volunteers with the Russians was supposed to be the mechanism for igniting Ottoman-Armenian rebellion, that the volunteers would provide an example to their Ottoman “compatriots … in a common action to acquire the rights of autonomy”, as he put it.97 Russian officials said the same thing.98

From early August 1914, Armenian draft resistance was widespread in Zeytun, a city where Armenian nationalist unrest went all the way back to 1862, with recent rounds in 1895-96 and 1909. The committees soon appeared to organise Armenian demands that they be excused service in the Ottoman army and allowed to set up their own volunteer unit that would “defend” the city, i.e., administer it autonomously. This would have been refused at any time, but the language of “volunteers” at that moment, with what the Russians were doing in the Caucasus, naturally spooked the Ottoman government. The committees exacerbated Ottoman dread by reacting to the refusal with an armed revolt in Zeytun on 30 August 1914. The court house was attacked, Ottoman officers (and some of their families) were killed, and telegraph lines brought down. The guerrillas were scattered quickly, but not crushed. A low-level insurgency persisted in Zeytun up to December.99

The archives show that it was right around this time the Russian Foreign Minister Sazonov told the Tiflis command to begin arming “Armenians and Assyrian Christians” inside the Ottoman Empire so that they could act behind the lines for Russia as soon as war began, and Sazonov was insistent that the Armenians be ordered not to “undertake anything without our instructions”. General Yudenich, the man on the spot, more familiar with eastern Anatolia and aware of Russian limitations, wrote back on 29 August, in a memo entitled, “On the Arming of Ottoman Armenians”, that, if Russia embarked on this course of pushing the Armenians into rebellion without much greater resources devoted to it, it would leave the Armenians “to defend themselves exclusively under their own power” and in all likelihood this would result in the Ottomans “annihilating the Armenians”. Yet Yudenich then recommended smuggling “at least 20,000 rifles and accompanying ammunition” to Ottoman-Armenians, ostensibly so they could defend themselves. Interpretations differ on whether this is proof of Yudenich’s prescience about the Ottomans’ genocidal ambitions, or proof of Russian-instigated Armenian treachery that made the deportations inevitable.100

The Armenian committees at the time had no illusions about what a dangerous game they were playing with the lives of Ottoman-Armenians by allying with the Russians and plotting to rebel against the Ottoman government once war broke out, but after two decades of their provocation strategy this was more of an inducement than a deterrent. Aram Turabian, one of the Dashnaks’ chief propagandist-recruiters abroad (based in Paris), stated bluntly that the Armenian revolutionaries “knew very well to what they were exposing the innocent inhabitants of the regions of Armenia under Turkish rule; but in the history of a people there are moments when … it becomes necessary to sacrifice … a part of the present generation to safeguard the future”.101

The Russian plans to stoke internal Ottoman disorder via the Armenians were theoretically covert, but it was more of an open secret, given the integral connection with the overt Armenian volunteers program and the scale of what Saint Petersburg was up to.

In the first week of September 1914, the Ottoman ambassador in Tehran reported that the Russians were arming Armenians in Iran and the Caucasus, and the Russian Consul in Tabriz was recruiting more Armenians by promising to reward those who supported the Russian war effort with an Armenian State on conquered Ottoman land. Around the same time, Ottoman spies in Petersburg reported: “The Russian Government aims to win the support of the Armenians so as to provoke a revolt in Eastern Anatolia any time it chooses.” Ottoman military, police, and intelligence sources in eastern Anatolia all converged on the view that an Armenian rebellion awaiting the green light from Russia was being prepared. On 16 September, the Tsar issued a statement telling Armenians that “the hour of liberty” had “finally sounded”. The next day, the commander of the all-important Ottoman Third Army in eastern Anatolia notified his troops, “Russians, with the assistance of Armenians from Caucasia, have incited our Armenians with promises of independence”, and called for vigilance and counter-measures to interdict the flow of Russian weaponry to Armenian rebels.102

A military report on 24 September, after clashes between Third Army troops and Armenian rebels in Van city, once again took note of Russian weapons and ammunition pouring over the border.103 In Hopa, on 5 October 1914, the Ottomans confronted Armenian guerrillas estimated to number 800, all armed with Russian weapons. To the south, at Erzurum, Ottoman troops fought Armenian çete (armed bands).104 In early October, the Third Army informed the Ottoman General Staff that Russian-born Armenians who had experience in the Russian army were infiltrating the Empire with maps, money, weapons. On 20 October, a counter-insurgency raid in Hasankale (Pasinler) discovered Russian rifles in Armenian homes. Three days later, the Third Army reported the movement of large numbers of Armenian armed guerrillas in Muş, Bitlis, Van, and Erivan.105

What the Russians were doing with the Armenians was not unique. Foreign powers using disaffected nations within multinational Empires had been standard practice in European statecraft since Napoleon unleashed nationalism on the Continent a century earlier, and the Ottomans had learned to play this game, too. The pointed omission of Russia’s subversive activities from the Ottoman war declaration in November 1914 was a tacit acknowledgement the Porte did not have a leg to stand on with such complaints: since August, it had been enlisting Russian deserters in its army, and instrumentalising Russian Muslims through the Special Organisation (S.O., Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa) to instigate revolt in the Caucasus.106

This was not, as is sometimes claimed, because the CUP had pan-Turanist and/or pan-Islamic goals.107 Those elements of the Party had been repressed by 1913, and the Ottomans entered the war with rather modest aims: restoring sovereignty, specifically by ending the Capitulations; securing territorial integrity on the 1914 borders, with the only exception being the goal to recover Batumi, Kars, and Ardahan lost to Russia in 1878; and more generally weakening Russia as far as possible.108 The S.O. was deployed to stir-up trouble behind the Russian lines in pursuit of these objectives, not without success.109 (Within this framework, there is some truth to the argument—often made simultaneous with the pan-Islamism/Turanism one, bizarrely—that the CUP was pushing towards the creation of a demographically contiguous nation-State in Anatolia to present the world a fait accompli in the aftermath of the doomed Empire, though how consciously is unclear.110)

The bottom line is that the Ottomans and Russia were in all serious senses at war from September 1914 through their various agents and proxies.111 As part of this undeclared Russo-Ottoman war, eastern Anatolia was engulfed by violence for two months before the Russian invasion. The Russians were not the puppet-masters of every insurgent action in eastern Anatolia in September-October 1914, nor did they try to be. The Russians provided the support system to the principle elements of the violence, the communal civil war and the Armenian “national liberation struggle”, as they had for years, and were content for it to cascade into a downward spiral. In the chaos, many residents reasonably concluded that remaining unarmed bordered on suicidal, and, humans being what they are, many militias formed initially for local self-defence swelled to a point where they were capable of predating on their neighbours and did just that.112 With Russian weapons available to all, Armenian guerrillas attacked the State and looted and massacred Muslim villages, and Kurdish irregulars nominally loyal to the State, Turkish and Kurdish gangs, and Muslim villagers raided and massacred Armenian settlements.113 The blurring of motives and allegiances, offense and defence, hardly mattered to the Russians. What counted was that this all amounted to “a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions” for the Ottoman Third Army, which was waiting to meet the Russian invaders while barely holding on to its fragile supply-lines.114

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The Formal Outbreak of the Russian-Ottoman War

The Russian invasion of the Ottoman Empire on 1-2 November 1914, the Bergmann Offensive,115 targeted the Erzurum-Sarikamish Road, with a strong supporting attack towards Oltu and supplementary assaults on Karakose and Dogubayazit. The Armenian volunteer formations fighting with the Russian Army were particularly visible in the brief seizure of Dogubayazit. Ottoman losses were moderate and by the end of November, the front stabilised with Russia occupying a strip fifteen miles deep in the Ottoman Empire.116 Internally, however, the “situation went from bad to worse”.117

Leaving his post on the night hostilities began, Aleksandr Adamov, the Russian Consul in Erzurum, where the Ottoman Third Army was headquartered, sent a final dispatch to Petersburg saying that the Ottoman-Armenians of Erzurum and “all cities surrounding it, including Erzincan, Sivas, Mana Hatun, and Kayseri, not to mention in the villages and rural areas, … are awaiting with impatience the arrival of Russian troops who will free them from the Turkish yoke”. The Dashnaks in Erzurum, once close to the German Consul, had “turned fully Russophile” and “hidden their weapons in secret storage caches”, wrote Adamov: when “the Russians are right on their doorstep” they will rise in rebellion. Perhaps Adamov’s expansive vision of the assets Russia had inside a country it was about to invade were mistaken—the phenomenon is not unknown Russian history—but Sazonov took it seriously enough to send Adamov’s memo straight to the Stavka.118 And there were indications Adamov had not been wholly delusional.

While Zeytun was more-or-less brought under Ottoman government control in the first week of December 1914, by then Armenian guerrilla activity had become commonplace all over eastern Anatolia, from sabotage operations, notably cutting telegraph wires, to (attempted) assassinations of Ottoman officials, the bombing of police stations, and brigandage on the roads. Most of this was concentrated near the front, in Erzurum, Bitlis, and Van, where two Armenian districts, Karçekan and Gevaş, were reported as being in full-fledged revolt on 21 December.119 But there were armed Armenian attacks on infrastructure, services like mail delivery, and Ottoman gendarmes and troops as far behind the lines as Muş, Suşehri, Aleppo, and Dörtyol,120 and, in January-February 1915, Armenian guerrilla warfare would spread west and escalate, to Erzincan, Sivas, and Cilicia, among other places.121

The gathering momentum of the Armenian insurgency in early 1915 was especially alarming because the military picture had drastically turned against the Ottomans. Enver had ordered a major push against the Russians on 22 December, which had started well, with the Ottomans invading Iran up to Qotur and troops (led by a German officer) re-taking Ardahan on 27 December, but the detachment was too small to hold it.122 Russian reports praise the Armenian volunteers’ contribution to stemming the Ottoman offensive at this point.123 By the first days of the New Year, the Ottoman army had been surrounded and defeated at Sarikamish, and in the retreat over the next ten days probably 50,000 Ottoman soldiers were killed, half in combat and the rest frozen to death and struck down by disease in the mountain passes. Many of the 20,000 or so wounded died of typhus in the hospitals and thousands were taken captive. The Ottomans lost about two-thirds of the 120,000 troops Enver sent into battle.

The Ottomans absorbed this calamity with the additional misery that once the snows faded the Russians would begin a new offensive. What the Ottomans did not and could not know was that the Sarikamish offensive had achieved one vital thing: it derailed Sazonov’s plans to initiate a general Ottoman-Armenian uprising. Sazonov’s deputy cabled Tiflis on 17 December 1914, reminding Yudenich that “any order for an Armenian uprising must only be given after receiving prior agreement with the Foreign Ministry”, and subsequent cable traffic was finalising arrangements for such an order. Then came the Ottoman onslaught, in the wake of which the Russians somewhat got cold feet about an Armenian rebellion. Again, the Ottomans could not know this, nor the Armenians for that matter,124 and the signals from Russia seemed designed to actively mislead about their intentions.

Russkoe Slovo, one of the largest mass-circulation Russian newspapers, published a letter from an Armenian lawyer named Calkus on 24 January 1915 reading: “In Turkey’s eyes, … we were guilty of treason. Armenians confess to this treason without any further ado. … The Armenian is a traitor to Turkey because Turkey is not his mother but his stepmother. A growing number of Armenians are volunteering in the ranks of the Russian army. They are streaming toward Russia from the far corners of the world … They believe in Russia and Russia’s mission.” An Armenian deputy, the Kadet Mikayel Papadjanian, stated in the Russian Duma on 28 January 1915: “The Armenian population of Turkish Armenia joyously greeted our victorious [Russian] army. Armenians helped wherever and however they could, and prepared a hearty welcome for the Russians.”125

In mid-February 1915, a delegation of Ottoman-Armenian revolutionaries from Zeytun arrived in Tiflis saying they had 15,000 men ready to “pounce on Turkish [army] communications” if the Russians gave them arms and ammunition. Count Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, the formal overall commander of the forces that had beaten the Ottomans at Sarikamish, met the Armenian rebel leaders personally. Vorontsov-Dashkov disclaimed any ability to help—Zeytun was too far from Russian positions, he said—but offered to put the Zeytun rebels in touch with Britain and France. One can say that Ottoman government fears about this—and they did very quickly learn about it—were to that extent overblown. However, the Armenians merely getting from Cilicia to Tiflis must have required significant Russian logistical support. Moreover, “Simply by meeting with the Zeytun Armenians[,] … Vorontsov-Dashkov had committed a deeply provocative act.” And it was no idle thing to connect Ottoman-Armenian rebels with the Anglo-French Allies.126

Back in November 1914, Boghos Nubar had offered Britain and France support in the Zeytun area: “Armenians in Cilicia are ready to enlist as volunteers to support a landing in Iskenderun, Mersin, or Adana. … [T]hey will rebel against the Turks if they are supplied with arms and ammunition.”127 By February 1915, the British and French were bombarding the Dardanelles, in visible preparation for an assault on the Ottoman capital, and after ditching their own plan to open a second front around Alexandretta—they settled for some British shelling of the coast—were engaged in a conspiracy with Ottoman-Armenian rebels to do it for them. Britain had made contact with Armenians in Cilicia, whom it planned to arm as “part of a scheme for the occupation of Alexandretta”, as a War Office cable of 4 March 1915 records. By that time, Britain had already arranged via Mikayel Varandian for the Armenian committees abroad to send 20,000 of their men—half from America, half in the Balkans—to Cyprus to be organised into an invading force to join the internal rising in Cilicia.128 Around this time, Armenians were seen coming ashore at Dörtyol, in Cilicia, from a British warship.129

In the event, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, convinced the British Cabinet to abandon the plans for a southern front using the Armenians to focus on a knock-out blow in Constantinople, but the Armenians in Cilicia had already gone ahead with their rebellion, quite possibly with Russian encouragement—it was a Russian request to London for a diversionary operation on 1 January, when the fighting at Sarikamish appeared to be going the Ottomans’ way, which set the British and French on the fateful road that ended at Gallipoli,130 and during the preparations the Russians had remained engaged in the Anglo-Armenian discussions through their London Embassy.131 Led by the Hunchaks, the armoury of the gendarmes in Zeytun was raided on 24 February 1915, and, in the emerging pattern of these revolts, numerous gendarmes were killed and the telegraph poles were destroyed.132 In early March, armed Armenian deserters tried to take over Zeytun and throughout the month armed combat continued, at one point with the rebels occupying an Armenian monastery for five days and killing ten soldiers from inside.133

In early April 1915, with the Ottomans having lost hundreds of soldiers in Zeytun and still struggling to pacify it,134 the commander of the Fourth Army took the decision to deport the Armenians to Konya, nearly 350 miles northwest, to eliminate the social basis for rebellion on this crucial military supply route. Despite stern instructions for the protection of Armenians and swift punishment of Muslims who violated these orders, the process was badly organised and Armenian deportees suffered: they lacked provisions and the soldiers reacted with inadequate vigour when Muslims attacked the convoy in various locations. This was the first instance of Armenian deportation and the lack of preparation testifies to its contingent and reactive nature. Of note, too, though Talat formally signed-off on it, the initiative came from the local military authorities; it remained an isolated case for some time; and the Armenians were relocated further into Anatolia.135 It is not the fact pattern one would expect if the CUP went into the war with a premeditated plan for the genocidal clearance of Armenians from Anatolia.

The Van Rebellion

Throughout the spring of 1915, as the attritional grind set in in the east, “Russian soldiers, guided by Armenians, raided Muslim villages in the Caucasus, Van, and Bitlis. Louis Mosel, a German officer, reported that in the Caucasus, ‘a large part of the population is fleeing death at the hands of Russians and their Armenian collaborators’.” The Germans tried asking the Armenian Patriarch to restrain his flock, but he said there was no point in him trying and Armenian historians agree he had been overshadowed by the Dashnaks in Constantinople “secretly encouraging the volunteer movement in the Caucasus”.136 Even in retrospect, Armenians present could be remarkably blasé about the anti-Muslim atrocities, for instance writing in passing that the rebels “disposed of about sixty Turks” living in one village.137 Inevitably, Muslims who survived the outrages of the Russians and the Armenians, whether volunteers or rebels, and were displaced into the interior, then revenged themselves on innocent Armenians.

Throughout the Ottoman east in early 1915, an especially inflamed form of the situation in preceding years played out as “national liberation” warfare and foreign invasion mingled with sectarian-communal violence, and the ever-marauding Kurdish tribes were under less State oversight than ever. Such was the situation around Van,138 close the Russian border and so long the centre of gravity for Armenian nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, where the Armenian revolutionary movement would fatefully reach the height of its success.

There is no doubt there had been massacres of Armenians in Van province in the early months of 1915, and this has led to a narrative wherein the Armenian rebellion that seized Van city in April 1915 was “a kind of preventive ‘Warsaw Uprising’.”139 The evidence adduced for this comes from some Central Powers officials, specifically Joseph Pomiankowski, the military attaché at Austrian Embassy, who described the Van uprising in precisely such terms, as “a desperate effort by Armenians, who witnessed the beginning of the murders and understood that their turn would come”, and German liaison officer, General Friedrich Posselt (“Posselt Pascha”), as well as some missionaries, notably two American Protestants, Clarence Ussher and Stanley E. Kerr, who claimed that 55,000 Armenians had been massacred by the time the Armenians in Van rose.140

The evidence is highly problematic. Pomiankowski, for example, was based in Constantinople and speaking years later. Posselt was stationed in Erzurum, and his testimony from that narrow vantage point differs sharply from the conclusion of General Otto Liman von Sanders, the overall head of the German military mission attached to the Ottoman Army from 1913 to 1918, who had access to all reports—German and Ottoman—from all over the Empire.141 The missionary testimony is self-evidently parti pris and formulaic. Nobody can take Kerr’s fatality figure seriously and in the case of Ussher, a British official had remarked as long before as 1905, “I myself know by experience that Dr. Ussher’s statements are unreliable”. An American diplomat added that Ussher was “most unreliable, and given to gross exaggeration owing to his innate dislike of Turks and his inordinate fanaticism”.142

The “Defence of Van” narrative does not just struggle for evidence on its own account: it is contradicted by the evidence of the local context, the actual course of the rebellion, and the broader context of the First World War.

Even without the admission of one of the Dashnaks on the council that administered Van under rebel rule that activity began in October 1914,143 the protracted build-up of arms by the Armenian committees in Van would cast doubt on the claims of a spontaneous “defensive” rising. The reality is that the military picture was the other way around by the end of February 1915: the Ottoman administration in Van was losing in the contest with the Armenian guerrillas. Across Van province, government buildings were being occupied and Muslim villages attacked and sometimes massacred. Quite a number of what the missionaries describe as Armenian massacres were Ottoman soldiers fighting rebels in areas like Havasor, Timar, and Başkale, where indiscriminate attacks and horrific excesses against Armenian civilians did indeed take place, and even more so Muslim villagers exacting “revenge”. But this was in a situation not of the Ottoman government’s making, where an escalating Armenian rebellion in Van was sufficient to tie down an Ottoman division by March-April that was intended for Iran (the Ottoman foothold in Iran grabbed in December was lost in April because of this) and in the districts of Çatak and Saray the State did not regain control until the autumn.144

Four of the Russians’ Armenian volunteer legions had been quickly grouped into the “Van detachment”, so named since it drew significantly on Ottoman-Armenians from that region, and focused its attention there.145 The Russians army had gotten bogged down before it could reach Van, though, so resorted to infiltrating armed Armenian bands trained in Tiflis—before war officially broke out and on a larger scale afterwards. As mentioned above, Ottoman intelligence had detected these movements, and the communications between the Armenians and Russians requesting weapons and supplies was rough enough that the Ottomans intercepted much of it.146 As the Armenian rebellion in Van crested and closed in on the provincial capital, the Ottomans tried to abort it via a decapitation strike: they succeeded in killing Arshak Vramian on 17 April, but the most important leader, Aram Manukian, an experienced Dashnak terrorist leader and one of the founders of the Armenian Republic in 1918, escaped. Manukian was able to impose a unified command over the insurgency and bring it into Van city, which fell to the rebellion on 20 April.147

The Armenian rebels were well-armed, able to draw on caches stored over eighteen months and more, and disciplined and organised enough, reinforced with rebels who flooded in from elsewhere in the province, to hold off three Ottoman police divisions, the First Expeditionary Force, and the Kurdish militiamen wielding heavy weapons, including cannons, for a month. The Armenian rebels in control of Van swiftly dispatched runners to the Russians, whose cause they believed their actions were helping.148 One of the letters approved by Manukian for Yudenich said that the Armenians of Van were “expecting Russian help every day”. The Russians were so proud of the letter they sent it to the Allies—though eliminated the word “Russian”, downplaying any sense of political coordination and portraying the Armenian appeal as a humanitarian one to the Entente generally. The Russians reached Van on 17 May in the form of a Cossack contingent guided by thousands of Ottoman-Armenian deserters, forcing the Ottoman garrison to retreat.149

On 20 May, the Russians’ Armenian volunteers, led by Sargis Mehrabyan, arrived in Van, followed shortly by the regular Russian army, who were greeted by cheering Armenian crowds. The commanding Russian General was given the keys to the city, and the Russian occupiers appointed Manukian head of the defence council administering the city.150 For the Armenians, this was deliverance: there was a joyous “night of orgy, a saturnalia”, sacking, looting, and burning Ottoman buildings.151 For the Muslims, the slaughter was unmerciful.152

While interpretation of the Van events has become the epicentre of controversy over 1915, this was not really so at the time. The Ottoman government, of course, saw this as the Armenian rebels acting as a fifth column in a premeditated operation to enable the advance of their Russian masters by seizing and handing over a city. German officials, some friendly to the Armenians, saw it the same way,153 as did the Armenians’ great champion, U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, who wrote to Washington of “an Armenian insurrection to help the Russians [that] had broken out at Van”.154 And the Armenians themselves agreed. The “idea that Van had been delivered to the Russians by the Armenian rebels” was not regarded contemporaneously as an accusation: “Armenian newspapers in the Caucasus boasted openly about this throughout 1915”.155

* * * *

When the camera is pulled back to survey the whole picture, one can understand why the Ottomans saw this as their nightmares becoming a reality. So soon after the insurrection in Zeytun, Van seemed to ratify the Ottoman perception that a generalised Russian-orchestrated Armenian rebellion was underway.156 In combination with the almost-exactly-simultaneous landing of Allied troops at Gallipoli on 25 April, how could there be any doubt Van’s fall was the first domino in a pre-planned Entente operation? The stated British and French intent was to conquer Constantinople, and thereby the Ottoman Empire, to open up a direct supply line to Russia—which was closing in, with its Armenian collaborators, from the east.157

It was while being attacked on two fronts, with the fate of the Empire at stake and the invaders having recruited an enemy within so far as the Ottoman government was concerned, that the arrest of the Armenian leadership in Constantinople was ordered on 24 April 1915, the event Armenians mark as the beginning of the genocide. The Tehcir (Relocation) Law, passed by the Ottoman Parliament on 27 May and publicly published on 1 June, ordered the deportation of the Armenian population from the militarily sensitive areas, starting with the Six Provinces in the east. The ferocious debate that continues more than a century later about whether this was a desperate exigency measure in the midst of an existential security crisis, with inherently tragic human consequences, or official cover for a long-planned policy of annihilation, will be taken up in a subsequent post.

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FOOTNOTES

The 536th edition of Al-Naba, the weekly newsletter of the Islamic State (IS), released on 26 February 2026, had as its main editorial a polemic accusing Al-Qaeda of being co-opted by the Islamic Revolution that rules Iran. The Naba article, entitled, “The Rafidite Co-optation of the Jihadists” (al-Istiqtab al-Rafidi lil-Jihadiyeen), builds off a line in the most recent speech by the official IS spokesman, Abu Hudhayfa al-Ansari, which was given a few days earlier. A translation of the article is given below.

The basic argument Al-Naba makes is that Al-Qaeda has been drawn into the Iranian camp since its leadership took shelter there in January 2002. Since Al-Qaeda has had a relationship with the clerical regime dating back to the 1990s and Al-Qaeda’s probable emir since 2022, Muhammad Saladin Zaydan (Sayf al-Adel), is based in Tehran, one would have to concede there is a point here. By IS’s account, this association has corrupted Al-Qaeda ideologically, as demonstrated finally and incontestably by the organisation’s most recent statements that ferociously condemn the American-Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic, in marked contrast to Al-Qaeda’s silence and worse when the U.S.-led Coalition assaulted IS’s “caliphate”.

For IS, Al-Qaeda being co-opted into Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” results from the inherent flaws in its doctrinal methodology (manhaj), which, rather than separate cleanly between truth and falsehood, has seen Al-Qaeda incline favourably towards misguided Islamists when they seem popular and powerful, notably HAMAS in Gaza and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It ended in tears in those previous cases and it will again with Iran, by IS’s reckoning.

The Rafidite Co-optation of the Jihadists

In his recent address, Shaykh Abu Hudhayfa al-Ansari—may Allah preserve him—shed light on the old deviation in the jihad arenas, and perhaps what most caught our attention was his statement about the jihadists falling “under Rafidi doctrinal guidance and co-optation”,1 and not the reverse. Some may pass over this phrase without understanding it, or some may think it an exaggeration or a fallacy, while Al-Qaeda’s members [al-qa’idiyyun] will convince themselves that it is a false slander, because it was issued by the only adversary [i.e., the Islamic State] with whom they “never cease” to dissociate, nor do they accept conciliation with it, nor permit appeasement of it, nor even neutrality towards it of the kind granted to the sects of apostasy in the East and West.

In order to understand this part of the address, we go back in memory to the period of the fall of the Taliban after the American invasion [in late 2001], and the displacement of many of the leaders and families of Al-Qaeda towards the border triangle between Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, especially in Zahedan [in the far-east of Iran]. There began the phase of Iranian doctrinal guidance and co-optation of Al-Qaeda, as confirmed by several recognised leaders of Al-Qaeda who are now deceased, not to mention the testimonies they left behind.

Iran exploited the condition of displacement and the siege imposed on Al-Qaeda, and opened its doors to them in order to contain and absorb them as a functional weapon within its “Axis [of Resistance]”, which had already absorbed many other Islamic movements, including the Palestinian organisations [i.e., HAMAS and Palestinian Islamic Jihad] that were expelled in the 1990s to Marj al-Zuhur in southern Lebanon; the leaders of Hizb al-Shaytan [“the Party of Satan”, i.e., Hizballah/IRGC] rushed to them and engaged in ideologically guiding and co-opting them, which produced this stark Palestinian factional alignment behind the Iranian Axis [that they are willing to stick with] until the end.

Iran repeated the same tactic with Al-Qaeda, to the extent that some leaders of the two experiences described the Iranian role as “a generous host”! In fairness, some of the hawks of Al-Qaeda rejected this Iranian approach for various reasons that were not purely methodological, while other leaders submitted and acquiesced, so Iran contained them for years and stored them [in reserve] for its black day, and by now they are at the top of Al-Qaeda’s [leadership] pyramid.

We have come to read statements from the “General Command” of Al-Qaeda, whose outward appearance is of Sunni alignment but whose inner reality is Iranian alignment, as if they were issued by one of the branches of the “Axis of Resistance”, albeit with a crude wrapping in the name of the umma and [pretended concern with] the fate of the umma. It is known that the term “umma”, as Al-Qaeda uses it, is an evasive term used to paper over all the methodological contradictions and everything that the umma cannot tolerate from the sects that are waging war against it.

It is necessary for us to point out that what we mean by Rafidite doctrinal guidance here is not in the methodological sense of Shi’isation; Iran has not imposed Shi’ism on its “Sunni” proxies and pawns. Iran does not want them as a Rafidite mass, but rather as functional pawns that stand with it in the face of the “sole pole” [i.e., the post-Soviet unipolar alliance led by the United States], as it was called in the most recent statement of Al-Qaeda.

The most recent statement of Al-Qaeda [released on 4 February 2026], which came after the American–Iranian tension reached its peak and coincided with other statements from the arms of the “Axis of Resistance,” stated that these American deployments “are not to fight a specific State” and that these “events concern it [i.e., AQC] and concern every Muslim”, that “all are targeted”, that “the legal position is an obligation to fight [the Americans]”, and that it does not permit “silence or watching”.

We did not find even a tenth of a tenth of this Al-Qaeda [call to] mobilisation and [use of the] language of decisiveness and fighting during the raging Crusader campaign against the cities of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Instead, its marathon speeches were overflowing with hatred and incitement against the mujahideen at the height of the Crusader assault upon them, and that global assault, according to Al-Qaeda, did not “target all” nor did it “make fighting obligatory”! Nor did that fierce assault “concern” Al-Qaeda! Whereas it has come to “concern” it today when the fire has drawn near to the Iranian ship and it is close to sinking.

This is the Iranian co-opting and doctrinal guidance of the jihadists, and it has appeared with complete clarity in this test, to the point that even the Crusader journalists singled it out and found it objectionable, while the followers of Al-Qaeda split over it into factions and sects: one group denied it entirely, thereby denying a long record from the history of its leaders; another group turned a blind eye to it; and another group began to justify and legitimise this alignment, invoking the same discourse adopted by the Ikhwani outfits at the height of the war on Gaza, which promoted a narrative whose meaning is that Iran and its Axis constitute the last line of defence for the umma of Islam!! This is what is implicit in Al-Qaeda’s most recent statement, which addressed the “governments of the region”, saying that they “will be eaten the day others are eaten”. So who is this “one being eaten” whom Al-Qaeda fears for, and with whom it threatens its opponents?!

In an insult to the intelligence of its followers, Al-Qaeda attempted to justify its Iranian alignment by dragging Afghanistan into the discussion, claiming that America’s “eye is fixed on Khorasan and the [Taliban’s Islamic] Emirate!”, the Emirate which the Crusaders granted to the Taliban under the protection of American aircraft, just as they granted those before them rule on the back of American tanks.

Similarly, the “General Command” strove hard to justify its alignment behind Iran by drawing a comparison between the American rhetoric surrounding the campaign against Afghanistan in the past and the campaign against Iran in the present, saying that America previously raised the slogan of a “War on Terrorism” and “the liberation of the peoples of the region”, just as it does today. The [Al-Qaeda] statement, however, omitted and only implied what it clearly meant: “just as it now raises the slogan of war on Iran”.

To cap it all, there was Al-Qaeda addressing those it called “the rational ones in the circles of decision-making”, and appealing for them to display wisdom and rationality in preserving and defending the lands and the people! We did not know that the term tawaghit had acquired a new coinage in Al-Qaeda’s lexicon to become “the rational ones in the circles of decision-making”. So is Al-Qaeda preparing to meet, or ally, or cooperate with the tawaghit, these “rational ones in the circles of decision-making”?! [This is of a piece with Al-Qaeda having] previously addressed the “conscious generation” not to evade military service in the apostate armies and called upon them to “make use of it”.

In the same vein, Al-Qaeda claimed that its fighting over the last few decades “formed a solid shield … from which the major States of the East benefited in competing with the sole pole!” And it denounced the “designation of peaceful groups as terrorist” and the “overthrow” of what it called “governments that identify themselves to Islamic action”. In doing so, it is reproaching Saudi Arabia and its counterparts in a crude “pragmatic” discourse, the implication of which is: rapprochement with the Islamists is something you could have used as a shield for yourselves against the current threats, just as we were a shield for [certain] States against other States [in the past].

All of these methodological calamities were uttered in a single statement by the “General Command” of Al-Qaeda, which they claim is based in Afghanistan. What prompted us to address it was the remark of Shaykh al-Ansari in the course of his discussion of the Rafidite doctrinal guidance of the jihadists, which has produced a temporary Al-Qaeda alignment behind Iran, because Al-Qaeda is addicted to moving between axes and alignments. It had nearly raised the sign of “Rabi‘a” on the day [the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed] Morsi came to power [in Egypt in 2012], and the bitter harvest became sweet; but when the ship of the Ikhwan sank, the “wise men” of Al-Qaeda returned to criticising them in the same long video series with which they had opened rapprochement toward them.

And today some of them seek refuge with Iran as a political alignment, accompanied by justifications whose invalidity has become clear at every stage, both legally and practically; tomorrow, after the Iranian ship sinks, Al-Qaeda will return to reviling and insulting Iran. Al-Qaeda will continue leaping from one vessel to another until it is finally faced with drowning—so when will you save yourself, O lost one, and make for the lifeboats?

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FOOTNOTES

Read the article over at UnHerd.

Abu Hudhayfa al-Ansari, the official spokesman of the Islamic State (IS) since August 2023, gave his fourth speech on 21 February 2026. The title of the speech, “The Right Guidance Stands Clearly Distinct from Error”, is drawn from the Qur’an (2:256). A brief summary and a translation of the speech are given below.

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A previous article looked at the terrorist infrastructure, sustained by Palestinians and centred on Lebanon, which formed the crucial external support system for the 1978-79 Islamic Revolution in Iran that brought down the Shah and ushered Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini into power. There was, however, a parallel network supporting the Iranian Revolution in Lebanon. In Distant Relations: Iran and Lebanon in the Last 500 Years (2006), Houchang E. Chehabi and Hassan I. Mneimneh give a survey of this other network (pp. 182-214), primarily through the life of one of its key operatives, Mostafa Chamran.

EARLY LIFE

Born in Tehran in 1932, Chamran joined the Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI) soon after it emerged as a religious splinter from the Mossadeqist nationalist National Front in 1961. The Iranians in LMI were the core of the other network in Lebanon that helped Khomeini to power, While LMI ended up having a generally confrontational relationship with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), there was an ambivalence in that they were not wholly separate from the Palestinian-reliant network. This was baked-in from the start. For instance, the LMI, while supposedly “moderate” or “modernist” with a certain aversion to the traditional Shi’a clergy, had among their founders “the Red Mullah” Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani, who was also the spiritual leader of the Mojahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK). MEK was a close collaborator with the PLO and under an alliance formed with Khomeini in the early 1970s acted as the terrorist wing of his Revolution in 1978.1

That there was always an international dimension to the Iranian opposition to the Imperial Government can be seen in Chamran’s story. As Chehabi and Mneimneh explain, Chamran lived in the United States from the late 1950s—he would obtain a PhD in engineering and physics from Berkley—and he was no rank-and-file member of LMI. Chamran was among the founders of “LMI Abroad”, an interconnected LMI contingent operating in the West.

With Chamran in the U.S. were Ebrahim Yazdi and Sadeq Ghotbzadeh, later two of the three leaders of Khomeini’s PR shop in Paris at the height of the Revolution and officials in the first post-revolutionary government. In France, there was Sadeq Tabataba’i, whose sister was married to Ahmad Khomeini, the Imam’s son, and he was a nephew of Musa al-Sadr (about whom more soon). Tabataba’i, another propagandist for Khomeini in Paris in late 1978, was (appropriately enough) Deputy Prime Minister for Public Relations after the Revolution. And perhaps most importantly there was Ali Shariati in Germany, the key ideologist in bridging the Black and the Red, the Islamists and Communists, who led the Revolution. A religious fanatic who had differences with Khomeini only over the exact power of the clergy in an ideal State and a sociologist steeped in the nascent “post-colonial” theology, Shariati was an ardent admirer of the nationalist socialists who drowned Algeria in blood and the main populariser of Frantz Fanon among the Iranian opposition.

The Persian translation of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth that Shariati spread was created c. 1966 by Abolhassan Banisadr, never an official LMI member but always close to it and very much in the Red Islamist current. It goes without saying, Banisadr was a resident of Paris, and he was the third key official in managing Khomeini’s propaganda image and message after the Imam arrived in the city in October 1978. While Shariati died six months before the Islamic Revolution began, Banisadr accompanied Khomeini back to Iran in 1979 and became the first president of the Islamic Republic in 1980.

Chehabi and Mneimneh refer to LMI Abroad as the “radical” wing of the party, but if so it was only briefly: it was their doctrines and practices that came to define the LMI. Mehdi Bazargan, the founding leader of LMI who stayed in Iran, was crucial in misleading the American Embassy on Khomeini’s behalf during the 1978-79 crisis,2 and Bazargan was the first Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic.

After the defeat of Khomeini’s first rebellion in 1963, triggered by the Shah’s modernising “White Revolution” (specifically the provision of education to girls), and the Imam’s deportation—he went to Iraq in 1965 and stayed there for thirteen years—the Shah entered the decade where he was at the zenith of his power, memorably securing for Iran an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the West in the “oil shock”. Most of the opposition inside Iran, certainly the constitutional elements, went into abeyance. Chamran and LMI Abroad, by contrast, had been drawn to violence and set about enacting it, the authors note. Algeria had mesmerised them and this was the era when the Soviet “Third World Strategy” was thickening into a global campaign of subversion. Chamran and his set were hardly alone in feeling the allure of Cuba becoming a Soviet colony under the charismatic Fidel Castro, and attention was turning to Vietnam as American involvement deepened to hold back the Soviet onslaught fronted by Ho Chi Minh.

BEGINNING A TERRORIST CAREER

In “late 1963”, Distant Relations records, Chamran, Yazdi, and Ghotbzadeh negotiated with Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Soviet-aligned leader of the radical camp in the Middle East, to set up an anti-Shah formation in Cairo, the Special Organization for Unity and Action (SAMA). Chamran was “chosen to supervise the military training of its members”, the beginning of a long career as a roving terrorist trainer. Iranian militants were trained at the SAMA camp for two years, but relations with the Egyptian despotism broke down. Nasser, a pan-Arabist, began to agitate against Iran in ways SAMA’s leaders felt threatened the nation, not the Shah. Nasser had taken to referring to “the Arabian Gulf” and labelled the Arab-majority Khuzestan province of Iran “Arabistan”, even supporting secessionists there.

By 1966, Yazdi had moved SAMA’s headquarters to Lebanon, a weak State home to camps run by the PLO, which would in time make it weaker still. Other SAMA operatives went to Iraq and set up camps in Baghdad and Basra. “Chamran was left in Cairo to wrap up operations there and joined Yazdi in Beirut a few months later”, Chehabi and Mneimneh write. “But in the spring of 1967, relations between Iran and Lebanon deteriorated and the resulting pressure of the Lebanese government forced first Chamran and then Yazdi to return to the United States.” SAMA was dissolved at this point.

The Chamran clique had in any case “concluded that the time was not ripe for armed struggle against the Shah and that therefore the fight against his regime had to take the form of inculcating students with a revolutionary Islamic consciousness, for which purpose Islamic Student Associations were created in the United States and Europe.” This mission was to prove highly successful. Among the Shah’s reforms was increasing access to education for the poor, including enabling them to be educated abroad. There were about 100,000 Iranian students in Europe and America in 1978 and instead of feeling grateful to the Shah for their opportunities, they became, in the main, a force-multiplying cadre of activists for the Islamic Revolution. Chamran himself did not remain in the U.S. for long.

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KHOMEINI’S PALESTINIAN-BASED NETWORK IN LEBANON

As the Palestinian-centric network for Khomeini’s Revolution has been covered in-depth already, that story will not be reiterated here, but it is important to have an outline of that infrastructure in mind to understand the other network, and Chehabi and Mneimneh confirm and add some interesting details.

When the attempt of Yasser Arafat’s PLO to take over Jordan in September 1970 ended in defeat and expulsion to Lebanon, the link between the Palestinians and the Iranian opposition was already in place. Senior MEK leaders were in the PLO’s Jordanian camps and followed Arafat to Lebanon. The attempt of a separate MEK cadre in Dubai to get to Beirut created a major diplomatic incident and brought Lebanon’s status as an incubator of Iranian radicals to wider attention. From Chehabi and Mneimneh:

The … [MEK] Dubai group was arrested before getting to Lebanon and the Dubai police put them on an aeroplane to Iran. Their extradition was thwarted, however, when their comrades hijacked the aircraft and took it to Baghdad, where Iraqi authorities [the Ba’th Party by this point] arrested the militants. When Ayatollah Khomeini refused to intervene with the Iraqi government on their behalf [for fear of compromising his sanctuary], Abu Nidal [real name: Sabri al-Banna], then-PLO representative in Baghdad, came to the rescue by arranging for them to be taken to Damascus after 40 days in gaol. In late January 1971, they arrived in Beirut with identity cards provided by [Arafat’s FATAH faction of the PLO] that pretended they were Palestinians. They spent about a fortnight at Shaykh Zinad camp near Tripoli [in northern Lebanon] before being taken to a camp near Tartus in Syria. In April [1971, FATAH] evacuated that camp, whereupon the Iranian guerrillas in training went to Beirut.

In Lebanon, MEK studied “ideology, sabotage operations, forging documents, and producing explosives”, Chehabi and Mneimneh continue. “Having undergone their training, individual Iranians would return to Iran carrying weapons concealed on their bodies and in their luggage. In Lebanon, they posed as Palestinians and, having received identity papers from [FATAH] that gave them new names, they enjoyed a certain amount of immunity on account of the ‘Cairo Agreement’ the Lebanese government had been constrained to sign with the PLO in 1969. To account for their faulty Arabic and Persian accents, they pretended they had been brought up in Afghanistan.”

MEK’s first attempt at terrorism within Iran, to disrupt the celebrations of 2,500 years of Monarchy in October 1971, was thwarted by SAVAK, the Shah’s political police, and most of its leadership inside Iran was arrested. MEK’s first official communique was published in Beirut on 9 February 1972. One of its leaders at that time, Mohsen Nejat Hoseini, says MEK’s “external branch … was active” in Lebanon, Syria, Aden, Baghdad, Paris, London, and Tripoli (Libya), with members “constantly travelling between these areas”. Hosseini adds:

Lebanon was, because of the relative freedoms it afforded, the most appropriate country for semi-clandestine activity in the Middle Bast, and so we chose Lebanon to be the centre of our international contacts and communications. Many of our initial contacts with militant and revolutionary organizations in other countries took place in Lebanon. Moreover, our comrades and sympathizers in Iran always came to Lebanon if they wanted to get in touch with the external organization. …

[Acquiring weapons was easy because i]n the south of Beirut there were brokers for arms deals. To gain access to the busy world of arms dealers, all one had to do was to gain the confidence of a short fat man who sat on a stool in a tea store and played with his worry beads. … He could deliver any weapons and equipment that were not too bulky at a prearranged place in Beirut. If no deal was possible with this man, there was always the barbershop … and if one ran into a problem there one could go to the grocery store[.]

Later in 1972, as MEK rebuilt, it reached a tactical alliance with Khomeini: MEK got greater religious legitimacy and the Imam got reach into Iran, as well as an indirect relationship with the PLO. In 1973, Khomeini established a direct relationship with the PLO. Khomeinist militants began to receive training soon afterwards from the PLO’s Force 17, an “elite” unit that evolved out of Arafat’s Praetorian Guard. The arrangement raised Arafat’s stature by making him a player in the Shah’s Iran, the most powerful and influential regional State at the time, and gave Khomeini greater freedom of action.3 Instead of relying on requests to MEK for actions inside Iran, Khomeini had his own soldiers trained in terrorism and intelligence by the Palestinians in Lebanon.

The other main Iranian terrorist group, the Communist Fedayeen, was already receiving training at the PLO bases in Lebanon. The Fedayeen ostensibly eschewed relations with either of the two big Communist powers, the Soviet Union and Red China, and in Lebanon rejected the “mainstream” Communists scene because it was connected to the Iranian Tudeh (Communist) Party, a KGB creature like all the other “fraternal” Parties. The Fedayeen enmeshed with the more marginal Lebanese Communist forces, like the Communist Action Organization in Lebanon, who opposed to the presence in the country of Syria, the Soviets’ great Arab ally. In practice, however, the Fedayeen was close to the Soviets, in its internal ideology and structure, and in its relations, receiving vast amounts of money and weapons via Moscow.

The PLO itself was deepening its relations with Moscow at this time, and MEK and the Fedayeen were particularly close to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a contingent of the PLO operationally controlled by the Soviet KGB. The two groups also utilised PFLP training camps in South Yemen and Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Libya, the one a Soviet colony and the other as good as. Qaddafi provided MEK and the Fedayeen—and Khomeini directly—with money, as he did many Lebanese factions. The unity of the external milieu that sought Revolution in Iran—Khomeini, the PLO, and Qaddafi, with the Soviets in the background—would be matched by internal unity in mid-1977 when the Mojahedeen and Fedayeen came into alliance.4

CHAMRAN AND KHOMEINI’S OTHER NETWORK IN LEBANON

Yazdi had been travelling back and forth to Lebanon even when he was based in Cairo, and developed relations with Musa al-Sadr, the effective leader of Lebanon’s Shi’is, whom he had known from their student days in Tehran. Al-Sadr, an Iranian by birth, was a traditionalist insofar as he had conventional clerical qualifications, did not subscribe to Khomeini’s revolutionary program for clerical rule (velayat-e faqih), and retained the patronage of the Shah of Iran, but he was “modern” in the sense of being more involved in politics and more brazenly so than was usual for the Shi’a ulema. During one of Yazdi’s trips to Lebanon, Al-Sadr “told him that he was looking for a director for the technical school he had established in Tyre and Yazdi suggested Mostafa Chamran”, according to Chehabi and Mneimneh. Chamran moved to Lebanon in 1971 to take the job.

Chehabi and Mneimneh record Chamran’s later explanation of what he did after arriving in Lebanon:

As soon as I settled in southern Lebanon in 1971, I started classes in Islamic ideology in the style of the Islamic Student Associations. From each village I chose one or two believing and Muslim teachers, totalling about 150. These would visit the school once a week and conduct sessions at which Sadr, Shaykh [Muhammad] Mahdi Shamseddin and Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah gave talks as well. There were discussions and criticism and little by little I joined the discussions and gave a series of ideological lessons. About half of these people left, the other remained and became the first core group of the Movement of the Deprived (Harakat al-Mahrumin). In Beirut we did the same, although there the difficulties were greater. … Thus we trained the best Shi’i youth, and it was these young believers who later became the cadres of the Movement of the Deprived and of Amal.

(There is a lot of foreshadowing there, especially the mention of Ayatollah Fadlallah, the spiritual guide of what became known as Hizballah, the Lebanon-based unit of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution (IRGC) formed in 1979 to protect Khomeinism in Iran and export it beyond.5)

This was the beginning of a situation where, in broad strokes, Khomeini operated a direct apparatus in Lebanon that revolved around the PLO, comprising his own cadres and at various levels of remove the Mojahedeen and Fedayeen, while working—primarily through Chamran and the LMI—to cultivate loyalists within Al-Sadr’s infrastructure, which was separate and quite hostile to the PLO, yet intersected with it to some degree all the same. It led to a complex, lethal game where who was doing what for whom and why was murky, in real-time and to the participants themselves. Even in hindsight, unpicking it and explicating the alignments neatly is not always easy.

Khomeini had lieutenants in Lebanon before he began impacting the politics of that country, most importantly Jalaleddin Farsi and Mohammad Montazeri, and they reported back very negatively about Al-Sadr, shaping the Imam’s view. The crux was relations with the PLO. It is jumping ahead, but Farsi and Montazeri became lynchpins of the Khomeinist-PLO alliance during the Revolution and were prime movers in that alliance forging the IRGC afterwards. Farsi arrived in Lebanon in 1970 and rapidly took against Al-Sadr. He also was not impressed with Al-Sadr’s seminaries, did not take kindly to Al-Sadr’s indifference to the Maronite-dominated “Lebanese” Army watching over the Amal camp with its guns directed at Palestinian positions, and was outraged to find Al-Sadr passing intelligence to SAVAK on anti-Iranian activities in Lebanon. Montazeri, a young cleric, son of Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri, was “one of Khomeini’s most prominent disciples”, the authors note, and while his connection to Lebanon was fainter—he spent most of his time travelling the world, proselytising for Khomeinism with the goal of creating an “Islamist International”—he had firm relations with the PLO and “was particularly close” to Colonel Qaddafi, a detail to keep in mind.

Solidifying Khomeini’s animus to Al-Sadr was his vital aide, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur, who was sent to Beirut in 1973 to arrange the details of the Imam’s personal line to Arafat. Mohtashamipur also knew Lebanon well already, Chehabi and Mneimneh note, having travelled there for military training soon after Khomeini went to Iraq in 1965 and Mohtashamipur continued travelling in and out of the country. Al-Sadr had sinned ideologically in a way Mohtashamipur could not forgive in June 1970, Chehabi and Mneimneh explain. That was when Grand Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim died in Najaf, and Al-Sadr directed the Shi’a clerical council in Lebanon to recognise another of the Najafi hawza, Abu al-Qasim al-Kho’i, as the new marja (source of emulation), rather than Khomeini. Then there were Al-Sadr’s practical sins. When Mohtashamipur visited Al-Sadr’s learning establishments in the south, he judged the quality of education low and the discipline even worse, with the Lebanese and particularly African foreign students spending more time swimming in the sea and visiting bars at night than reading. “The seminary was more like a sanatorium than a centre of knowledge and learning”, Mohtashamipur fumed. Above all of this was the Lebanese Shi’a-Palestinian tension.

The PLO’s disregard for Lebanese sovereignty after its arrival in 1970—the sense of Sunni Palestinians trying to take over a second country and turning Lebanon into a nest of international terrorists—destabilised Lebanon’s delicate sectarian balance. It angered the Christian-led government, and the clashes between the PLO and the Christian militias were what mushroomed into all-out civil war in early 1975. It was in the south, however, where the PLO was most intrusive, its bullying gangs roaming the Shi’a-majority zone, resented all the more for being foreign and Sunni. And alongside building a State-within-the-State that eroded what little power the Shi’is had, the PLO’s cross-border terrorism provoked Israeli incursions from as early as 1968. Mohtashamipur recognised early, Chehabi and Mneimneh document, that the Shi’is, including the ulema, were blaming the PLO for the consequences of Israel’s actions in southern Lebanon.

This put Khomeini in a bind. On the one hand, even if the Imam had not needed the PLO to build his revolutionary cadre, Khomeini was already attuned to the Palestine Cause as a useful mechanism for mass-mobilisation and genuinely desirous of Israel’s destruction. On the other hand, Khomeini worried that an open breach between the Lebanese Shi’is and the Palestinians would make the Shi’a stepchildren, in the phrase of the late Fouad Ajami, look bad in front of Islam’s Sunni majority, and if Khomeini publicly turned on Al-Sadr it would cut off his points of entry into the Lebanese Shi’a population and especially its clerical hierarchy, which were important to his plans. In the event, the turmoil of the Lebanese civil war was to be Khomeini’s salvation, the beginning of a pattern that still holds, wherein Khomeinism thrives on chaos and violence, no matter how much people delude themselves that the Islamic Revolution values “stability”.

Al-Sadr, after long resistance, bowed to the inevitable and took the plunge into the world of militias, creating the Amal Movement in 1974, with Chamran as its military leader, ostensibly against the threat from Israel, but Al-Sadr’s eyes were on the Palestinians.6 In the short-term, this ambiguity worked. Internally, it allowed Al-Sadr’s followers to elide, in their own minds and in their presentation to others, the question of whether they regarded the Palestinians as more menacing than the Israelis, an ideological Rubicon few wanted to cross. Chamran’s own “attitude to Palestinians was marked by ambiguity”, Chehabi and Mneimneh write. “He supported them wholeheartedly in their struggle against Israel, but at the same time witnessed the nefarious effects of their tactics for Shi’i villagers living near the Israeli border”. Chamran was particularly incensed that the PLO, while “compensating” the families of its PLO “martyrs” made no such payments to the families of the Shi’a villagers the PLO got killed.

Al-Sadr’s stance was political shrewd enough that even the PLO accepted it for a time—a crucial time, when Amal was in formation. Arafat lent Chamran FATAH “instructors” to train recruits at the Amal camp near the Syrian border. Indeed, Arafat personally “visited the camp a number of times”, according to Chehabi and Mneimneh. While Chamran’s mission was primarily to train Lebanese Shi’is, he would claim that “hundreds of Iranians were also trained at this camp”. Given that the authors document—even if they minimise—Chamran’s connection with MEK, saying they were “on friendly terms” and Chamran helped the Mojahedeen with the logistics of smuggling weapons into Iran, it is strange that there is no consideration of whether the Fedayeen and Mojahedeen were among these “hundreds”. In either event, this overlap was enough to worry the Shah’s government. The Iranian ambassador in Beirut complained about the Amal camp in 1974 and the same year the Shah severed relations with Al-Sadr because of the association with Chamran.7

Reality was destined to overtake Al-Sadr, though. War is a great clarifier and Al-Sadr’s equivocations over ideology and affiliation rather quickly came to seem less convincing and adroit, and more incoherent. It gave Khomeini an opening to offer a clearer doctrine to Al-Sadr’s followers, and Al-Sadr himself would fall victim to the tangled web he tried to navigate.

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THE LEBANESE CIVIL WAR AND THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION

Once the Lebanese Civil War erupted in 1975, the Shi’is suffered terribly. Al-Sadr looked to Yazdi for advice on publicising the Shi’is plight in the West, and Chamran used his teaching position to recruit for the Amal militia. It was in these early months that the division with the PLO sharpened, though interestingly Chamran was less inclined to blame Arafat. “As Chamran tells the story,” Chehabi and Mneimneh record, “Arafat was favourably disposed to Amal but the Communists who infiltrated the PLO and its member organizations begrudged Musa Sadr his support among the poor and did their best to harm Amal in the field. They did so by deserting their Amal allies at crucial moments exposing them to enemy fire or provoking the [Phalangist] Kataeb to attack Amal positions. … When hungry Shi’is turned to the better-off Palestinians for assistance, they were told to ask Musa Sadr to help them.”

The LMI’s Sadeq Ghotbzadeh, by now based in France, was another frequent visitor to Lebanon. Ghotbzadeh tried to reconcile the PLO and Amal, meeting Nabih Berri (the Amal leader since 1980). Here one can see the messy matrix in Lebanon, where the war of all against all was so total—between and within all communities and political persuasions—that describing “sides” cleanly is often very difficult. Chehabi and Mneimneh write: “[Ghotbzadeh] was of course close to Musa Sadr and Chamran, but he also maintained close ties with the PLO; in fact he briefly manned its Paris office after the assassination [in January 1973] of the PLO representative in Paris, Mahmud Hamshari, until a replacement was sent”.8

There were some signs of progress: “when LMI [and Amal] activists organized a memorial service for Ali Shariati in [June] 1977, Yassir Arafat attended and gave a speech.” It was a mistake to read too much into this, though. As Chehabi and Mneimneh amusingly note: “Arafat’s close relations with various Iranian opposition groups did not prevent him from periodically approaching the Shah through intermediaries to ask for money.” A more telling straw in the wind was that “[Jalaleddin] Farsi was the only major Iranian oppositionist not to attend Shariati’s memorial service in Beirut, implying that by organizing it under the auspices of the LMI and Amal, Yazdi and [Ghotbzadeh] wanted to profit from Shariati’s popularity.” The upshot was that Ghotbzadeh’s “efforts [to reconcile Amal and the PLO] came to naught, for Arafat had a low opinion of the LMI’s tactics for overthrowing the Shah and worked more closely with Jalaleddin Farsi and the Mojahedin [MEK]”. As the Islamic Revolution loomed, lines were being drawn and they would harden as it unfolded.

When the Islamic Revolution stirred in January 1978, Lebanon became the nerve-centre, feeding PLO-trained militants into Iran and the Soviet-oriented Palestinians themselves joined in force before the end. As Khomeini escalated into the endgame in late summer of 1978, he moved to clear the board. The Qom hawza that could have given the Shah an ideological counterweight was neutralised, its younger clergy suborned by Khomeini with Qaddafi’s money and its elders intimidated from inhibiting the Revolution by Khomeinist militiamen, rendering Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari a virtual prisoner in his house.9 As the Shah looked to repair relations with Al-Sadr as an alternative, Khomeini, Arafat, and Qaddafi conspired to lure Al-Sadr into a trip to Libya; he was last seen in Tripoli on 31 August 1978, his exact fate a mystery from that day to this. The Imam moved to Paris in October 1978. Yazdi joined him; Ghotbzadeh and Banisadr were already there. Together they would lead a campaign of political warfare, with the complicity of the Western media, that combined with the mayhem Khomeini orchestrated inside Iran to destroy the Shah by January 1979.

ISLAMIC REVOLUTION IN IRAN

On 17 February 1979, six days after the Islamist-Marxist coup against the Interim Government, Arafat was received in Tehran. It was billed as the first visit by a “Head of State” after Khomeini’s triumph was complete, a marker of how important the PLO had been to the Islamic Revolution. Just as symbolic, Chamran returned to Iran the same day, after two decades away, merging Khomeini’s two Lebanese networks within Iran. Overall, there can be no doubt the PLO-centric network was the more important to the Islamic Revolution, in the struggle with the Shah and in the regime created afterwards. However, this does not mean the other network did not have some momentous impacts, one of which was being significantly responsible for preventing the PLO itself gaining influence in post-revolutionary Iran.

Chamran “took a leading role in the formation of the Revolutionary Guards”, Chehabi and Mneimneh note, and the PLO may well have come up with the idea. The PLO had some military forces in Iran—they had helped with the terrorism during the Revolution—and Montazeri asked Arafat to bring in more FATAH troops to train the new IRGC. The proposal was blocked and the PLO’s military role inside Iran after the Revolution would transpire to be brief and limited, in no small part because of Chamran, according to Chehabi and Mneimneh. Chamran was able to exert influence in part through his LMI allies who had been appointed by Khomeini to front the provisional government. Chamran’s motives were strategic in part, but at root he was bitter about the PLO’s behaviour towards Amal and suspected Arafat’s role in Al-Sadr’s “disappearance”. It was inconceivable to Revolutionaries at this time that the Imam was behind it.

The PLO’s diminution in Iran after the Revolution was not solely due to Chamran and the LMI faction. Iran’s revolutionary clergy in general were wary of the Palestinian militants’ lack of devotion to the shari’a, in particular a “perceived loose sexual morality” within FATAH.10 Whether they knew about Arafat is unclear. And what did for Arafat ultimately was his usual antics in trying to play all sides off each to his own advantage. It worked in the Arab states; it cut no ice with Khomeini. Arafat was swiftly put in his place, which did not involve influence over Iranian internal affairs, and once Arafat sided with Saddam Husayn’s Iraq in the war against Clerical Iran he was cut adrift until the early 2000s.

A similar experience awaited Khomeini’s other erstwhile allies, many of whom thought they could ride the wave the Imam had called up to power and then send the old man to a seminary. Their discovery of who was using whom was swift and brutal.

Chehabi and Mneimneh document that all of Qaddafi’s contributions to the Islamic Revolution—the money and weapons, sullying what was left of his public image by so blatantly murdering Al-Sadr for Khomeini at the crucial moment, publicly celebrating the fall of the Shah, and granting immediate political recognition to the Imam’s regime—did not even buy Qaddafi the right to a State visit, despite a direct request. When a lower Libyan official was finally allowed into Iran in late April 1979, Khomeini ostentatiously demanded that he ask Qaddafi to locate Musa al-Sadr, while reassuring his guest he was not accusing the Maximum Leader of anything. Qaddafi’s Libya and Khomeini’s Iran would retain the solidarity so common among anti-Western rogue States—its like an axis or something—but there was a certain frostiness between the rulers.

Of Khomeini’s Iranian allies, such liberals and democrats as there were in the Revolution went first, the symbol of their destruction being the banning of the National Democratic Front in August 1979. LMI was next, its role in prettifying the Imam for Western audiences and the Iranian middle-class having ended. Bazargan’s government was felled three months later. Bazargan and Yazdi were consigned to irrelevance, with occasional official harassment. Ghotbzadeh was not so lucky: he ended up before a firing squad. MEK had read the situation and tried to fight, but its closeness to Khomeini’s infrastructure was its downfall: despite some terrorist spectaculars against the Khomeinist leadership, half of MEK’s troops had defected to the IRGC almost immediately after the Revolution,11 and it was simply too weak to resist. By mid-1981, MEK’s leader, Masud Rajavi, had fled for his life. Then came the turn of the Left, which had abandoned its principles to ally with the Islamists when it seemed to promise a road to power. At least they got to go last. The Fedayeen and Tudeh were taken apart in 1982-83, their lack of vision holding to the end. Factions of each sided with Khomeini in eradicating the others: the hope was to save themselves; the result was to leave them defenceless when the Imam came for them.

Having prevailed over Montazeri’s proposal that the PLO should be involved in the IRGC in an ongoing capacity, Chamran led the Guardians to war against the Iranian Kurdish rebels in the summer of 1979 and batted the hornet’s nest by saying “he detected the same tactics [from the Kurds] as in the anti-Amal operations of the Lebanese and Palestinian Left”, Chehabi and Mneimneh report. Montazeri’s wing of the Islamists and the Left accused Chamran of being a MOSSAD and CIA agent, a potentially lethal charge at the time. He survived it, partly because Montazeri fell from favour. Montazeri defied Khomeini by going to Libya for the celebration of Qaddafi’s decade in power on 1 September 1979 and Montazeri then started calling Foreign Minister Yazdi and Prime Minister Bazargan “Zionist” agents, jumping the gun on the Imam’s move against the LMI. Because of these political missteps, Montazeri was sidelined and the cooling of Iran’s relations with Libya confirmed, both sources of immense satisfaction to Chamran, who blamed Qaddafi (reasonably) for Al-Sadr’s presumed murder, with (again) no inkling of Khomeini’s role.

Chamran was named Minister of Defence in late September 1979 and was the only official to keep his position when Bazargan’s LMI-led government fell in November after the seizure of the U.S. Embassy. Chamran’s position as defence supremo would bed down and once Saddam invaded Iran in September 1980 his stature rose further. Chamran was killed at the front in Khuzestan on 21 June 1981. His great antagonist Montazeri would not long outlive him: Montazeri was killed exactly a week later in the massive bombing in Tehran that wiped out much of the leadership of Khomeini’s Islamic Republican Party (IRP). The bombing was the last gasp of MEK by the Islamic Republic’s account. Rajavi went in exile a month later alongside Banisadr, the last man standing of the LMI-associated faction. Banisadr had been president from February 1980 until the day before Chamran died, when he was removed by the Imam for making the mistake of thinking being head of government entitled him to independent views on policy. Interestingly, in the impeachment “process” by which Khomeini deposed Banisadr, the only person to defend Banisadr was Montazeri’s father, a premonition of where his relationship with the Imam would end up.

ISLAMIC REVOLUTION IN LEBANON

The slightly odd circumstances surrounding Chamran’s death, and the fact it occurred simultaneous with both the final sweep of the LMI-linked cadre in the Revolution and the Khomeinist offensive against Amal manifesting, have led some to wonder if those who eliminated Chamran’s old friend Al-Sadr had a hand in it. Such theories hinge on the idea that Chamran was a “pro-Amal” holdout in the Iranian revolutionary regime, thus would have been despondent that “the consolidation of hardliner rule in [Iran in] the summer of 1981 cut [Amal] off from conceivable sources of Iranian patronage”, as Chehabi and Mneimneh write (p. 269), which in turn restricted Amal’s reach and left elements of the Shi’i population, notably in Dahiya, looking for new protectors. The dynamics and causality appear to have been quite otherwise, though.

The question about Chamran’s life to which nobody seems to have an answer—Chehabi and Mneimneh do not even attempt one—is when Chamran went over to Khomeini, but he clearly did go over to Khomeini. Thus, when the authors note that Chamran was elected to Amal’s leadership council in April 1980, at which time he was also serving as Defence Minister of Iran, he was Khomeini’s man in Amal, rather than Amal’s man in Tehran. There is every appearance that Chamran used his position in Amal, as an ideological-military instructor while in Lebanon and then as patron in Iran, to consciously spread Khomeinism within Amal’s ranks, which was the key to Amal’s diminishment at the Khomeinists’ hands.

The tactic of crippling former allies from the inside out was not new. As mentioned, shortly after the Revolution, the IRGC—that part of the PLO-trained Khomeinist apparatus that moved to Iran—had, under Chamran’s rather close administration, annexed the chunk of MEK that had covertly turned to Khomeinism. The stay-behind part of the Khomeinist apparatus in Lebanon, which would overtly declare its existence in 1985 as “Hizballah”,12 repeated the same trick, consuming parts of its former PLO host, including from Force 17,13 and assimilating elements of the other network from Amal.

The groundwork for the move against Amal was quite extensive. There were those in Amal won for Khomeinism by Chamran’s ideological instruction. The late March/early April 1980 dissolution of the “Iraqi” Khomeinist Dawa Party and Amal’s apparent absorption of the Dawa cadres was really more like mass-infiltration.14 Then there was the onset of the inevitable direct clashes between Amal and the PLO in the spring of 1981, which weakened Amal militarily and, crucially, politically. Fighting the Palestinians was deeply unpopular and could so easily be cast as making Amal “Israeli agents”—even to its own members. In these ways, the Khomeinist foothold in Amal was reinforced and expanded. The June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and Berri joining the national “Salvation Council” furnished the pretext for open schism. Later that month, a protégé of Chamran’s, Husayn al-Musawi, denounced Berri as a traitor and led a mass defection to create “the Islamic Amal”, a splinter duly folded into Hizballah. By the late 1980s, the Amal remnant would also be effectively subordinated to Hizballah.15

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FOOTNOTES

Read the article over at UnHerd.

Since the United States, supported by Israel, launched the military operation—or “limited combat operation” or intervention or war, as you prefer—against the Islamic Revolution that rules Iran on 28 February, the intended purpose has been rather difficult to pin down.

THE U.S. MESSAGING

President Donald Trump, in his first remarks hours after Operation EPIC FURY began, said the mullahs had “attempted to rebuild their nuclear program [after the June 2025 American-Israeli operation] and continue developing long-range missiles” that threaten Europe, American troops around the world, and “could soon reach the American homeland”. The U.S. would, therefore, “destroy their missiles”, “raze” Tehran’s missile program “to the ground”, and enforce the U.S. policy that Iran “not obtain a nuclear weapon”, as well as “annihilate” the Iranian Navy and ensure the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) could “no longer destabilise the region”.

While Trump did not exactly say regime change was a war aim, he concluded his speech by telling the IRGC, the regular army (Artesh), and the Iranian police, “lay down your weapons” or face “certain death”, and told the Iranian people, “The hour of your freedom is at hand. … When we are finished, take over your government. … This is the moment for action; do not let it pass.”

To give a flavour of U.S. messaging since then:

• Trump on 1 March, speaking after it was confirmed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (“a wretched and vile man”) and most of his military commanders were dead, said the U.S. had “very strong objectives”, but decided not to bore us with what they are. The nearest Trump came to defining objectives was saying that the “massive operation” was to “ensure security”, and alluding to the “dire threat” posed by a regime that raises “terrorist armies” possessing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, which the U.S. is not going to permit.

• Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said on 2 March: “This is not a so-called regime-change war … This is not Iraq. This is not endless. … This operation [has] a clear, devastating, decisive mission: destroy the missile threat, destroy the navy, no nukes. … [There will be] no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise”.

• Trump on 2 March said, “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground”, though the U.S. “probably” would not need them for this mission, whatever that is. Trump at least offered the assurance: “We’re right on schedule”.

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio on 2 March professed himself baffled by “what the confusion is” over the administration’s “very clear goal”: “The United States is conducting an operation to eliminate the threat of Iran’s short-range ballistic missiles and the threat posed by their navy”. In terms of the timing, Rubio said, “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action”, which “would precipitate an attack against American forces”, so Trump “made the very wise decision” to go in “pre-emptively” to avoid casualties. Rubio also said “orders had been delegated down to the field commanders” because of the imminence of an Iranian attack, so the operation began “automatically”.

• Trump on 3 March said he had reached the conclusion after negotiating with the “lunatics” that rule Iran that “they were going to attack first”, so he gave the order to initiate hostilities and called on the Israelis to join in, indeed, “I might have forced their hand.”

• Rubio on 3 March said: “Iran is run by lunatics, religious fanatic lunatics … The President made the decision to … take away their missiles, take away their navy, take away their drones … so that they can never have a nuclear weapon.”

• Hegseth on 4 March said, “America is winning decisively, devastatingly and without mercy”, and General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, clarified that this meant destruction of nuclear-weapons sites, missiles, and the IRGC Navy.

• Hegseth on 5 March said there had been “no expansion in our objectives” and that they were “actually simplifying”. There were references to “these objectives” and “clear objectives”: it remained hazy what they are. The targeting of the IRGC Navy and Iranian officials responsible for ordering attacks on civilian demonstrators were mentioned.

• Trump on 6 March said “unconditional surrender” was the only acceptable outcome.

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WHAT TO MAKE OF ALL THIS

Rubio’s 2 March remark about Israel’s role will be taken by those prone to seeing tentacular Jewish influence behind world events as vindication, and Trump’s direct contradiction of Rubio the next day will hardly matter to those who believe the Zionist Elders are capable of plotting global domination and then losing the blueprint. On planet earth, the importance of this episode was underlining the administration’s flailing public diplomacy: it tried a talking point and swiftly withdrew it when the negative feedback poured in.

If one exercises the “heroic flexibility” the late Khamenei recommended in another context, it is just about possible to synthesise the administration’s messaging into a half-way coherent story of military action triggered by ominous developments in the Iranian nuclear-weapons and ballistic missile programs, and some kind of imminent attack being planned, with the consequent mission being the destruction of both programs, necessitating the suppression of air defences and the eradication of the IRGC Navy to protect American forces and prevent moves to close the Strait of Hormuz that would damage the world economy. Confining the Islamic Revolution within Iran’s borders or eliminating it entirely appear to be what one might call Schrödinger’s objectives, or aspirations.

To start with the narrative about why now. Trump’s claim that Clerical Iran has “attempted to rebuild their nuclear program” since Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER—a maidenly codename next to the Team America designation of the current round—is narrowly true. The Islamic Revolution will never cease its ambition to acquire at least a latent nuclear-weapons capacity,1 and these intentions are very important. With such regimes, the only ultimate solution is their removal. The question before us, however, is whether, eight months on from the last intervention, the Iranian regime had reconstituted its atomic resources and gotten so close to the nuclear-weapons threshold that another intervention was immediately necessary? All available evidence is that the answer is “no”.

David Albright, one of the few nuclear-weapons experts to avoid compromising his analytical integrity for the sake of politics in the Obama years, emphasises, because of his experience, Tehran’s intentions as a permanent threat, but the evidence of the Islamic Republic’s activities since June 2025 does not point to an imminent threat. There have been “salvaging operations and potentially rebuilding” on the weaponisation side since MIDNIGHT HAMMER, but it is “minimal”, says Albright. The devastation to the centrifuges means “you have a program that no longer really exists”, Albright continues, and while there are “remnants”, especially uncertainty over the quantity of enriched uranium, plus presumable hidden sites, the primary danger from them at the present time comes if security at (what’s left of) Iran’s nuclear facilities evaporates amid a regime collapse.

Notably, too, there have not yet been any airstrikes on Iranian nuclear-weapons sites. As a general military proposition, that is not necessarily surprising: those targets are more complicated and time is needed for intelligence-gathering to ensure no fallout and so on. The anti-nuclear strikes are likely to come in a later phase of the operation and some sites are probably off-limits altogether, like the Bushehr reactor, which was untouched last time in conformity with U.S. and Israeli assurances to Russia. If the clerical regime was on a crash course to build “The Bomb”, though, one can imagine a campaign that handled that emergency first.

The rebuilding of Iran’s missile program does seem to have been faster. In the first days of the war, Tehran hit nine countries with missiles—Israel, all six Gulf States, Jordan, Cyprus—and fired at Turkey. The ostensible target in most cases was a U.S. base and six American servicemen have been killed, with eighteen wounded. That said, this has now virtually stopped, a result certainly of the U.S. and Israel quickly destroying the launchers, but also it seems because of depleted Iranian missile stockpiles. At a minimum, it should induce some scepticism about the higher (generally Israeli-sourced) estimates in circulation of the Islamic Republic’s current missile arsenal and potential production capacity. The notion of Iranian missiles threatening the U.S. “homeland” any time soon is fanciful.

As to the idea of an imminent Iranian attack on the U.S. forces in the Middle East, there is simply no evidence for this, and the Pentagon reportedly acknowledged as much to Congress in a closed-door briefing after the operation began.

* * * *

What, then, motivated Trump to do this? It is all speculation until we get the memoirs, or a press leak, but the political situation Trump got himself into after telling Iranians on 13 January to continue protesting because “HELP IS ON ITS WAY” [all-caps original] seems likely to be part of it. This was days after the clerical regime slaughtered Iranians en masse.2 That Trump then entered into nuclear negotiations with the Iranian regime—which “executed” prisoners Trump claimed to have saved—disheartened Iranians and fuelled media criticism on the “TACO” (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) theme that is known to enrage him. There are few principles Trump is wedded to in any reliable sense, but saving his personal face is one of them.

Trump once spoke of a two- or three-day operation; his most recent comments indicated more like four weeks. There is nothing inherently wrong with this: it is a sign of the silliness of the times that the phrase “endless war” exists as a criticism. If a State has objectives it is worth going to war over, achieving them takes as long as it takes, and the enemy gets a vote. The problem, of course, is when the political leadership has chosen war as a messaging strategy, with objectives that are, if not quite non-existent, ill-defined and/or unstable, and there is every reason to believe that has happened here.

To give an example. Earlier this week, after reports that the CIA was arming Iranian Kurdish militants based in Iraqi Kurdistan,3 and that they were preparing to invade Iran, Trump declared: “I think it’s wonderful that they want to do that, I’d be all for it.” The support of Iranians for the U.S.-Israeli operation so far, even from those personally impacted by the bombing, is remarkable among such a deeply patriotic population. Trump’s embrace of actors Iranians see as separatists was, therefore, quite shocking. If there was anything that could change Iranian opinion it would be a perception that the Islamic Republic is defending the country’s territorial integrity and the U.S.-Israeli operation threatens it. Someone seems to have gotten in Trump’s ear about this and yesterday he said, “I don’t want the Kurds to go into Iran.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a still more pointed and detailed statement last night publicly repudiating any intentions to divide Iran.

It was the right outcome in the end, but it is an alarming indicator all the same. It is not as if, after all, the Kurdish groups could have made much difference to the military balance inside Iran, but their deployment backed by the U.S. and Israel would have had devastating political consequences. It should not have taken several days for a point as basic as this to be understood. It suggests there has been insufficient planning, and that the source of the problem is confused directives from the political leadership that is casting around for tactical options without the constraint of any overarching strategic framework.

A similar indication is given in the reporting that Trump is considering sending “a small contingent” of U.S. ground troops into Iran. What for is, once again, opaque, but securing uranium stockpiles would seem to be one purpose. It is not encouraging that this decision is being made midstream in a war where concerns about the nuclear-weapons program are the most consistent element of the messaging.

A terrorist wearing clothes with an Islamic Republic flag shot up a bar in Texas hours after the EPIC FURY operation began, a criminal gang which is a known cut-out for the IRGC has thrown an IED at the U.S. Embassy in Norway, and IRGC spy-terrorists have been arrested in Britain, Azerbaijan, and Qatar this week while planning attacks, against Jews in the former two. It is unclear how much preparation Trump made for the Islamic Revolution retaliating like this, and if any consequences will be visited on the regime for this behaviour.

Meanwhile, the surprise about the efficacy of the Iranian Shahed drones, after seeing them in action for four years as part of Russia’s war on Ukraine, is perhaps the strangest element so far. On the plus side, it has publicised how extensively Ukraine is already contributing to NATO and the security of other Western friends. It makes it ever-more absurd to deny Ukraine formal membership in the Alliance.

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From a public-relations or propaganda perspective, avoiding unequivocal objectives is highly advantageous for the Trump administration: critics cannot call the Iran operation a failure because there are no agreed metrics by which that judgment can be made, and supporters can ascribe to it vast and subtle strategic designs. Of most immediate relevance to Trump, this ambiguity is helpful in managing the vexing question of whether this is one of those “regime change wars” he and his (strangely absent) Vice President, J.D. Vance, have spent years denouncing. While the Iranian regime still stands, the MAGA base is assured the war is not about toppling it; should it fall, the Leader can be credited with being “a fighter” who drew a line “after 47 years of Iranian belligerence” and American timidity, as Hegseth put it the other day.

Whether as a direct war aim, or a wished-for by-product, there can be little doubt regime change has been on Trump’s mind. Some of the targets struck, starting with the Rahbar, make no sense unless the intention is to at least test the possibility of destroying the regime, and Trump has said as much. In an interview on 1 March, Trump said: “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.” Just today, as Iran was selecting its new Supreme Leader,4 Trump said the new man is “going to have to get approval from us” and is “not going to last long” if he does not. It is open to doubt whether what has happened in Venezuela—removing the top personnel, yet leaving the system in place—qualifies as regime change, but the transformation of the country into an indirect American colony is a change. The plans for replicating the Venezuela scenario in Iran have apparently hit a snag as “most of the people we had in mind [to be the new ruler] are dead”, according to Trump. But that is the least of it.

A Venezuela scenario in Iran relies on the idea that the U.S. can keep killing the current leadership cadre until it reaches down to a layer of people, especially in the military, who are willing to come to terms with the U.S. and rule according to its key interests. The problem with this is that the Islamic Revolution is an ideological movement which from inception had hostility to the United States and the broader West as core elements. UANI’s Kasra Aarabi put it well: “The IRGC is a highly radicalised and indoctrinated force. So the idea of them switching sides … is unlikely.” The scale of what is required to neutralise the Revolution as a factor in Iranian life, and get to a point where people amenable to the U.S. are able to take power stably, given the vitality of the Revolution’s votaries and the depth of its ruling structure, amounts to a thoroughgoing regime change. In short, the Venezuela option does not exist in Iran, and the implications for the possibility of regime change are not positive.

The Islamic Revolution has only ruled in Yemen for a little over a decade and it has shown itself to be immensely durable, able to withstand internal challenges on multiple fronts and sustained external intervention. The Revolution has had nearly half-a-century to entrench in Iran, to infiltrate every sector of the society, raise three generations in its ideology, and recruit hundreds of thousands of armed men who believe God wants them to protect the rule of His viceregent on earth. It is not absolutely impossible that regime decapitation, damage to IRGC security nodes, the activities of Israel’s ground assets and agents, and internal Iranian rebellion combine just right to unravel the clerical regime.5 But, absent that black swan, it is most unlikely Trump can overthrow the Revolution in Iran with a month-long air campaign.

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Many have a normative opposition to interventions in the Middle East and/or to Trump, and in the circumstances it is understandable that many more will conclude this is a war launched on false premises, without any serious plan, and therefore cannot be supported. For Americans, there is the additional concern about what Trump will do with the additional powers and prestige that accrue to a President in wartime. These arguments might well persuade even Iran hawks, especially since the Islamic Republic is likely to survive this, and Trump could well botch things from the other direction by calling the operation off too soon, before Israel—which has some semblance of a plan—can work through all of its strike packages, as he did last June.

My own view is that one need not deny any of the problems with Trump’s Iran operation, nor try to rationalise this as being about more than it is—a thesis currently getting a workout is that this is a grand strategy move in the competition with Red China—to believe that what Trump has done is beneficial for the Western Alliance in three important ways.

First, Trump made a promise in the name of the United States to the people of Iran and, whether it was wise or not to have done so, once made it was morally and strategically vital for all of us that it was upheld. Now it has been. A lot of the people who ordered the massacres of Iranians, many of them long owed retribution for their crimes against us, have had their accounts settled.

Second, the clerical regime has been seriously degraded, and any steps towards weakening it should be welcomed. The physical disarmament and State debilitation has downsized Tehran’s ability to threaten the West and its regional allies for some time, and when the Islamic Republic restores its threat capacity to an unacceptable level the precedent is in place to deal with it. Which is the final and most important gain.

Third, Trump has decisively broken the taboo on using force against the Islamic Revolution inside Iran. In prior dealings with the regime—especially over the nuclear-weapons program—the threat of Western military action was mostly felt as a constraint on the West, enabling Tehran to control the diplomacy by threatening to walk away. In the future, that will not be the case.

It is somewhere between amusing and infuriating to see Trump and his supporters, conspiratorial anti-warriors on the Iran Question until so recently, justifying this operation by saying it is in effect self-defence because the Islamic Revolution has been at war with the civilised world for forty-seven years and is steeped in the blood of our people. It happens to be true, though. The Islamists swept to power in Iran in 1979 declaring war against the West and the State system safeguarded by the United States, manifested in the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the keeping of its staff as hostages for 444 days. The failures of Western policy towards Iran from that time onwards have always been the result of an excessive willingness for accommodation. That time has now surely passed. “This deal or war” is a much less persuasive sales pitch for accommodationism now Trump has exposed the Islamic Revolution as a ramshackle despotism that can do very little if the U.S. chooses the latter option.

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NOTES

Read the article over at The Telegraph.

Since 1979, the West has struggled to accept that the Iranian regime is not a normal government but the central node of a transnational Revolution—essentially an Islamic Soviet Union, with the same relentless drive for infiltration and political warfare.

It is this that explains why, while the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was celebrated inside Iran, a number of mosques and Islamic centres in Britain—which appear to be loyal to the Islamic Revolution’s ideology—have declared themselves to be in mourning.

The Al-Zahra Centre in Watford, for instance, announced that an event would be held on the evening of March 2 for “Remembering Our Father”, with a picture of Khamenei dominating the notice.

The advertised speaker was Sayed Hussain Makke, who has publicly expressed support for the Iranian regime and its proxy Hezbollah.

With this background, the people of Derbyshire were understandably alarmed when Makke turned up last year to run a “Spiritual Warrior” camp for young boys, and Australia banned Makke from entering as a national security threat.

In London, meanwhile, the Islamic Centre of England (ICE), located in the leafy suburb of Maida Vale, proclaimed in a poster its “deep sorrow and heartbreak” at Khamenei’s demise and started prayers to “mourn the martyrdom of the Imam of the Ummah (global Islamic community)” on Sunday.

This is hardly surprising: ICE was allegedly controlled by the Supreme Leader’s representative in Britain until recently. The Charity Commission ostensibly ended this situation in 2025 after a three-year investigation of ICE. But little has actually changed, testament yet again to the inadequacy of the Charity Commission.

The Ahlul-Bayt Islamic Society chapter at University College London, one of the country’s best universities, sent public “condolences for the martyrdom” of Khamenei and is holding a mourning event for “the fallen”, Khamenei and his senior officials, on Wednesday.

Ahlul-Bayt bills itself as a “non-governmental” organisation, but it has defended its actions by comparing Khamenei to the Pope and—this being 2026—offered “mental health” support to those dealing with this “unimaginable loss” by encouraging them to remember “this is not the end to resistance”.

On Wednesday, a candlelight vigil will be held for Khamenei, sponsored by the Islamic Centre of Manchester (ICM), which self-describes as “one of the oldest Iranian Islamic centres in the UK” and is widely believed, certainly by anti-regime Iranians, to be associated with the Iranian regime.

This is particularly worrying in an area where communal relations are already visibly fraying. The Gorton and Denton by-election last week was marked by blatant Islamic sectarianism, and late last year there was the Heaton Park synagogue attack and a subsequent planned attack against Jews that would have been one of the worst terrorist atrocities in British history if it was not thwarted.

Both were the work of Islamic State loyalists, but they were capitalising on a surge of anti-Semitism and Islamist self-confidence triggered by the Iranian-directed pogrom in Israel on October 7 2023, a symbiosis between the Islamic State and the Islamic Republic that is depressingly familiar.

Mosques and Islamic institutions supporting Islamist Iran are not, however, unique to Britain. The evil influence of the Islamic Republic can be seen as far away as Australia.

The religious nature of the Iranian Revolution has allowed it to exploit the liberal principle of freedom of religion—and Western neuroses about “Islamophobia”. It is long past time that this ceased. Western governments should shut down religious facilities that are being used for subversion by a foreign power.