![]() The conclusion of the war introduced additional political upheaval to the region. Credit: The National Archives (United Kingdom). Map of Sykes–Picot Agreement showing Eastern Turkey in Asia. As the memory of the war evolved decades later, people began to describe it as a great war of suffering-the safarbarlik, or mobilization-in which barefoot soldiers crossed cities, deserts, whole regions away from their homes, and millions of civilians faced starvation, disease, relocation, and levels of misery so profound and so lasting that their memory was passed on from one generation to the other. She wrote, “I have seen, I have gone through, a land full of aching hearts and torturing remembrances” (1). Famine shadowed families and took many lives. In the villages, not a man was to be seen because so many had died or been conscripted. In an episode about her travels by train through villages from Anatolia to Homs during the Great War, she remarked on a haunting sense of misery. The title of my book, A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War (Harvard University Press, 2014), which I spoke on recently at the Washington History Seminar, comes from a line in the journal of a Turkish feminist, Halidé Edib. The social, economic, and psychological effects were deep and devastating. In this way, the experience of World War I in the Middle East is perhaps more akin to the experience of World War II in Europe. The losses in the Middle East were staggering: the war not only ravaged the land and decimated armies, it destroyed whole societies and economies. Historians have covered the destruction caused by the First World War in Europe extensively, but many in the West do not realize the level of destruction and upheaval it caused in the Middle East. ![]() The history of the Great War helps us to understand how the violent past is responsible for the current turmoil in the Middle East. ![]()
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