Has attracted several extremist groups who are looking for a safe haven, most notable is Al Qaeda; standards of education and living remain by far the lowest on the peninsula and women's rights are meager; the Arab Spring brought political change in 2012 when a new government was elected, ending 33 years of corruption and authoritarianism
Large areas virtually uninhabited; land is persistently dry; streams flow after sporadic rainstorms and may not return for years; large areas barren of vegetation; 40 percent of world's proven oil reserves are here; land divided among ancestral tribal groups; site of religious pilgrimages; camel caravans
In response to centuries of discrimination and persecution in Europe and Russia, in the late nineteenth century, a small group of European Jews, began to purchase land in a part of the Ottoman Empire known at the time as Palestine; most sellers were wealthy non-Palestinian Arabs and Ottoman Turks living outside of Palestine. These absentee landowners had leased their lands for many years to Palestinian tenant farmers and herders or granted them the right to use the land freely; such rights were negated by the sales to Zionists
Site of 2 main cities, Cairo with 16 million people and one of the most densely populated cities in Earth and Alexandria on the Mediterranean has 4.5 million people; faces a crisis of clean water availability and the threat of waterborne disease and pollution exacerbated by recycling car batteries sent from Europe that releases lead into the air, 30 times higher than world health standards
Home to three civil wars and classified as a failed state meaning that the government has lost control and is no longer able to defend its citizens from armed uprisings; from 1983 to present a north-south civil war claimed 2 million lives and forced 4 million to abandon their homes, leaving many thousands of orphaned children who were forced to become soldiers for one side or the other; these wars fought over the imposition of shari'a and control over South Sudan's modest oil reserves led to South Sudan's independence
Especially militant islamists
The split between ________ who comprise 85 percent of the world community of Islam, and Shi'ite who live primarily in Iran but also in southern Iraq, Syria, and southern Lebanon, dates from shortly after the death of Muhammad, when divisions arose over who should succeed the Prophet and have the right to interpret the Qur'an for all Muslims. This division continues today. The original disagreements have been exacerbated by countless local disputes over land, resources, and philosophies intensified after the U.S. invasion in 2003 over which group should control political power and fossil fuel.
Beginning in the 1200s, nomadic Turkic herders from Central Asia began to converge in western Anatolia (Turkey) where they eventually forged the ____________, which became the most influential Islamic empire the world has ever known. By the 1200s, the Ottomans had become Muslim, and 1400s defeated the Christian Byzantine Empire, centered in Constantinople and renamed it Istanbul, and soon controlled most of the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, southeastern and central Europe, and by 1600s parts of coastal North Africa from the Arabs. Today, Islam still dominates huge areas from Morocco to western China, and northern South Asia and Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia in Southeast Asia
Traditionally, control of the land was divided among several ancestral tribal groups led by patriarchal leaders called ________ who were based in desert oasis towns and upland mountains bordering the Red Sea, ruling nomadic herders who followed seasonal paths or poor farmers who settled where rainfall or groundwater supported crops. They and those they governed earned added income by trading with camel caravans or providing lodging and sustenance to those on religious pilgrimages to Makkah
One of the five Pillars of Muslim practice; a pilgrimage at least once in a lifetime to the Islamic holy places especially to Al-Heram and Makkah (Mecca) during the twelfth month of the Islamic calendar
In 1987, the Palestinians mounted the first of two prolonged upsirings, known as the ________, characterized by escalating violence. The first ran until 1993, when the Oslo Peace Accords provided that Israel withdraw from parts of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and that the Palestinian Authority be the entity that would enable Palestinians to govern themselves in their own state. The second intifada began in 2000 and continues into the present, primarily fueled by the expansion of Israeli settlements-in breach of the Oslo Accords-into Palestinian territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights; both sides have suffered substantial trauma and casualties.
Receives the most rainfall of any country in the region; headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the mountains of the Kurdish southeast; straddles the Bosporus Straits; over 250 US based companies including Coca-Cola and IBM
"the place of the sunset"; the western part of North Africa; portrayed in old American movies with Berber camel caravans transporting exotic goods across the Sahara from Timbuktu to Tripoli; Barbary Coast pirates; and Field Marshall Rommel; the countries stretch along the coast from Western Sahara through Libya; three of which are baked by the Atlas Mountains that trigger enough rainfall in this arid region for export-oriented agriculture and a modest ski industry in winter
The oil price rise in 1973 was made possible by the founding of a group of producers strong enough to control production and set prices for products
Where is my puzzle?