The eight Gulf countries: Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain. In Saudi Arabia and Oman, non-citizen residents are about 40% of the population, compared to an average of more than 70% across the other four kingdoms

Table of contents

1. Basic information
2. Birth year trends in Israel’s targeted leaders since 2023
3. Birth year trends in Iran in general
4. Fertility rate discrepancy in Iran vs neighbouring countries
5. Deportation of Afghan migrants
6. Terror attacks in Iran
7. Oil
8. Inland and upland, Iranian cities vs neighbouring countries’
9. Turkey
10. Many additional notes

1.

Less than two years after 9-11, the US occupied Baghdad and disbanded Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led Ba’ath party. This empowered Iraq’s Shia Arab majority and Kurdish minority groups, swinging the Gulf region’s balance of power towards Shia Iran.

Now, less than two years after the Oct. 7th attacks, this balance has been swung back, away from Iran. But it has not been swung back just to Sunni Arab governments. Iran’s allies in Syria have been overthrown and Lebanon’s Shia Hezbollah badly weakened, but Iraq, where the majority of Gulf Arabs live, is still mostly Shia-led, as it has been since 2003. Iraq remains internally fractious, but it is also producing more oil now than at any prior time in its history.

Turkey, meanwhile, is seeing two of its historical rivals, Russia and Iran, weakened in wars. This has allowed it to spread its influence and military activity into countries like Syria and Iraq. Presumably, Turkey might become Israel or the Saudis’ next great concern.

This chart should be taken with a large grain of salt, for a number of reasons. First, because the available statistics for sub-national groups often range widely and may be inaccurate. Estimates for Iraq’s Shia population range from 50-70% of Iraq’s total population, and it’s not certain that even this range is correct. Second, because there aren’t always sharp dividing lines between groups. In Iran, for example, the large Azeri Turkic minority is well-integrated into the Persian mainstream, and intermarriage between the two groups is common. (Supreme Leader Khamenei has mixed Azeri-Persian parentage). The significance of the region’s Sunni-Shia divide, similarly, although very real, is often overstated. Third, there are often important differences existing within groups. For example, Iraqi Kurds are usually listed as a single group, but they speak at least two main Kurdish languages that are not generally thought to be mutually intelligible with one another.*

To partially sum up the charts above: within the eight Gulf countries, Arabs are a plurality of the total population, but they do not greatly outnumber Persians, and they are divided somewhat equally between Iraq and the Gulf kingdoms, and between Shia Arabs (mainly in Iraq) and Sunnis (in Iraq as well as the Gulf kingdoms). Both the Azeris and Kurds are large minorities in and around the Gulf countries. Azeris in Iran for instance likely outnumber Arab citizens in Saudi Arabia. In national terms, Iran has a plurality of the Gulf countries’ population and a majority of its citizens. Iran also has a large majority of the Gulf’s Shia population:

Shia Muslims outnumber Sunnis more than 2-to-1 within the Gulf region (not including the Gulf Arab monarchies’ foreign resident population, though many migrant workers in those countries are Sunni), but in the Middle East as a whole the reverse may be true. Shia are only an estimated 10-13% of the world’s Muslims. Only Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and India are home to 10+ million Shia; only Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Lebanon, and Bahrain have majority or plurality Shia populations. Iran, which only started becoming Shia on a large scale in the 1500s, is home to between ½ and ⅓ of all Shia. In Saudi Arabia, the oil-rich Eastern Province bordering the Gulf had a Shia majority until fairly recently.

Iran and Turkey have more mature populations than countries like Egypt or Iraq, where large segments of the population are children. An estimated 69.8% of Iran’s population is between 15-65 years old. That is the highest in the world among major countries: the 22 countries that rank ahead of Iran in this regard have a combined population that is smaller than Iran’s own. Iran has the 16th largest working-age population in the world, but because it has extremely low female employment, it has only the 24th largest workforce.

In most countries, fertility rates and female labour force participation are negatively correlated. In Afghanistan for example women tend to have lots of children but do not usually participate in the labour force, whereas in the European Union most women are in the labour force but do not have many children. There are two main exceptions to this pattern: the Islamic Republic of Iran, where women neither participate in the labour force (at least, not officially) nor have many children, and certain countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, where most women participate in the labour force and yet still have large numbers of children. (In Israel, Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women also have high labour force participation and large numbers of children). This might suggest that Iran could experience a rapid increase in its female labour force participation.

Currently, with fewer than one-sixth of Iran’s working-age women in the labour force (13% according to the World Bank), Iran’s female labour force participation rate is higher only than those of countries like Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iraq. It is far behind Saudi Arabia*, Pakistan, or Turkey, where rates are around 35%.

*In Saudi Arabia, although female participation has risen from an estimated 20% in 2015 to 35% today, working-age men outnumber working-age women by about 1.8-to-1, due to the country’s millions of foreign workers, most of whom are male. So in spite of Saudi Arabia’s newly much higher female labour force participation rate relative to Iran’s, its total workforce remains not so much less male-skewed than Iran’s.

This chart shows estimated reserves, not current production. In terms of current production, Saudi Arabia produces more than 2.5 times as much oil as Iran. Iran, Iraq, and the UAE all produce roughly the same amount of oil as one another. Iran produces more than twice as much natural gas as Saudi Arabia, but both are dwarfed by the gas production of the US and Russia. Qatar is the second largest gas producer in the Gulf. Other Arab states, even Algeria and Libya, produce far less energy than those in the Gulf. Only Bahrain and Oman are not major energy producers (though even then, they are per capita).

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2.

Nearly all of the leaders in Iran who were targeted and killed by Israel during its recent 12-day-war were born in the early 1960s. Partly this is because they were in their early sixties when they were killed, and had therefore reached the age where they were in charge of the country’s military and intelligence organizations*. But it is also because Iranians born in the early 1960s first reached military age when the Iran-Iraq War began in 1980, and rose through the ranks during those eight years of fighting. This was the case for a large majority of the recently killed Iranian leaders listed in the chart below.

A similar dynamic likely existed within Hezbollah, which was influenced by the Iranian Revolution and was officially founded in 1982, the year of the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990):

This chart includes seventeen Iranians (all killed since 2024, except for Qasem Soleimani, who the US assassinated in 2020), ten Hezbollah leaders, and three Hamas leaders (Yahya Sinwar, Mohammad Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh). There are an additional 20 Iranians listed below whose birth years I could not find. Of the 30 on this chart whose birth years were available, more than half were born in 1960, 1961, or 1962, and more than three-quarters were born between 1958-1964. These are only the prominent targeted figures in Iran I was able to find from news reports (and I included all the names I could find, regardless of their birth year). There might be many more that I missed, which could either negate or further emphasize this pattern. Iran claims there were approximately 1000 deaths of Iranians from Israeli strikes; Lebanon claims approximately 4000 deaths of civilians or Hezbollah members since Oct. 7th, 2023.

Even the youngest leaders on this list came of age during the Iran-Iraq War. Abbas Nilforoushan, for example, an Iranian officer who died in Lebanon in 2024 in the same Israeli airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, was born in 1966, making him the second youngest listed below. Yet he still joined Iran’s paramilitary Basij at 14 years oldwhen the Iran-Iraq war began, and was an officer by its end. Similarly, Khamenei’s eldest sons, born in 1965 and 1969, both served in the war.

*Source for ‘other officers killed in 2025 war’, whose birth years I could not find: https://southfront.press/iranian-media-names-30-generals-killed-by-israel/

*Mohsen Fakhrizadeh Mahabadi, a nuclear physicist born in 1961 and thought to have been the chief of Iran’s nuclear program, was assassinated in November 2020 by way of a remote-controlled or autonomous satellite-operated roadside gun and bomb, presumably by Israel’s Mossad

*Imad Mughniyeh, the number two man in Hezbollah, was killed less recently than the others on this list: in 2008. Mughniyeh, Sinwar, and Haniyeh were all born in 1962. So too were four or five of the six Hezbollah leaders killed during the same week as Hassan Nasrallah (who was born in 1960). Mughniyeh was 21 years old in 1983 when he planned the Beirut marine barracks and US embassy bombings, for which the CIA or Mossad later assassinated him. Haniyeh, head of Hamas’ political bureau, was assassinated by Israel in Tehran in 2024, on the day Iran’s new president was being sworn in.

Not every recent Iranian leader fought in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, even if they were of age. Ebrahim Raisi, for example, Iran’s president who died in a helicopter crash last year, was born in 1960, but served as a young provincial prosecutor and then deputy prosecutor in Tehran during the war, rather than on the frontlines. During the last year of the war, according to Wikipedia, “Raisi was part of the Tehran branch of what has been called the “1988 Iran death commission“. Under the direction of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini, thousands of Iranian political prisoners were executed by these commissions”, many of whom were members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran”.

Khamenei, by contrast, was already in his forties during the Iran-Iraq War (as was Saddam Hussein), during which time he served as Iran’s president. He is now, at 86 years old, the same age as his predecessor Khomeini when Khomeini died in 1989, soon after the war ended. Khamenei has been Supreme Leader for 36 years, the longest in power of any current leader of a major country. But he is still a year short of the Shah’s 37 year rule prior to the Shah’s abdication in 1979.

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3.

While most of the Iranians targeted by Israel were born around the early 1960s, coming of age during the Iranian Revolution and war with Iraq, much of Iran’s population today was born between the late 1970s and early 1990s, with no direct experience fighting in any wars. These Iranians now represent the bulk of the country’s adult population, as a result of the drop in Iran’s fertility rate a generation ago, from approximately 6.5 children per woman in 1982 (higher than in any country in the world today) to 1.9 children per woman by 2002.

Source: the World Bank; Iran’s fall in fertility in the 1980s and 1990s was roughly as fast as China’s in the 1960s and 1970s (before the one-child policy began in 1979). Iran’s population structure today has similarities to that of China during the late 2000s, with its largest cohort in early middle age.

The graph below, from the World Bank, is of the ‘age dependency ratio‘, the ratio between a country’s working age population (defined as 15-65 years old) and its dependents (defined as anyone under 15 or over 65 years old). As recently as 1990 Iran had a dependency ratio as high as the average among “low-income” countries. Because of Iran’s rapidly falling birth rate, its dependency ratio has since dropped below the average among low-, medium-, and high-income countries.

Many Iranians, currently between 30-45 or 30-50 years old, may be entering the most productive economic periods of their lives – if politics allow them to realize their potential. This generation is also well-educated: according to an article by Stefan Trines, “In just a few decades, Iran has transformed from a society with low participation in tertiary education into an exceptionally highly educated one. Between 1999 and 2015 alone, Iran’s tertiary gross enrollment more than tripled from 19.13 percent to 71.9 percent.

Iran’s smaller echo boom generation, born in the 2010s (and peaking around 2017, before declining sharply again), will also come of age during the next decade. As a result Iran will likely have more college-age young adults by the 2030s than it has today, or than it has had at any time since the early 2010s.

At the risk of putting far too much stock into this sort of demographic determinism: a rebound in the size of the student population could perhaps become politically significant. It might not be entirely coincidental for example that the eldest of Iran’s largest generation reached college-age around the time of the 1999 student protests, or that this generation was between about 15-35 years old during the Green Movement a decade later. Even in 2019*, when rising food and gasoline prices following cuts to government subsidies triggered a protest movement, or in 2022-2023 during the Mahsa Amini protests, this largest generation was still relatively young, with the youngest of them in their late twenties.

For now, though, Iran has few 15-30 year olds, as the millennials and GenXers are 30+ and their kids are still kids. Iran’s youth unemployment has been falling from its peak of 29% in 2016 (after the 2000s oil price boom ended in 2015, and as many Iranian millennials were competing with one another upon entering the workforce), but it is still high, at 22.8% according to the World Bank. By comparison, it is 15% in Turkey, in spite of the fact that Turkish women participate in the workforce at more than double the rate of Iranian women.

*According to Wikipedia, “the 2019 uprising, as well as the wider Iranian Democracy Movement in general, differed from earlier protests in 2009 in not being limited to students and large cities, and in the speed, severity and higher death toll of the government crackdown, which crushed the uprising in three days, although protests flared up periodically in the months after.” The number of deaths that occurred as a result of the government’s crackdown against the protesters is contested, but it is commonly estimated to be between 300-1500. If true, this would be a vastly higher figure than even that of the Green Movement protests in 2009, when an estimated 72 people were killed over the course of seven months.

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4.

The drop in Iran’s fertility rate stands out even more when viewed alongside some of its next-door neighbours, where, apart from Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, fertility rates remain higher than almost anywhere outside of Sub-Saharan Africa. Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan especially have high fertility rates; the discrepancy between these countries and Iran is among the highest that exists between any neighbouring states in the world:

In Afghanistan, women have approximately three more children than Iranian women have on average. The only higher discrepancies that exist between neighbouring countries are in Africa (where Mediterranean states like Algeria directly border Saharan states like Niger) or between China and Afghanistan (which share only a narrow, Himalayan border with one another). But whereas China’s population mostly lives far away from its higher-fertility neighbours in Central Asia and South Asia, many Iranians live close to those regions, making the discrepancy in fertility between Iran and its neighbours even starker. Pakistan for example already has a vastly larger population than Iran, even as its fertility rate remains more than twice as high as Iran’s.

Total fertility rate, Wikipedia. The closest comparison to Iran in this regard is Saudi Arabia, which has a significantly lower fertility rate than its more populous neighbours Yemen, Iraq, and (across the Red Sea) Sudan.

Iran and Afghanistan last had the same fertility rate in 1963, according to the World Bank, when both were still monarchies (the Shah’s White Revolution had just begun) and both had an estimated 7.3 children per woman on average. If current fertility patterns don’t change too much, a generation from now there might be more people who can speak Persian in Afghanistan and Tajikistan than in Iran itself. This could, perhaps, lead to further migration pressures:

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5.

The other news in Iran this year has been the deportation of nearly one million Afghan refugees and migrant workers, which had been taking place in the months before Israel and America’s airstrikes and has reportedly intensified since. A similar process has been occurring in Pakistan.

According to Hessam Habibi Doroh, a researcher at Khayrion, “The Afghan migrant community in Iran is estimated at 5-8 million individuals, which amounts to roughly 5.5-8.7% of the total population of c. 92 million. About 2.7 million of these 5-8 million individuals are registered, a bit less than half. Factors such as shared cultural ties, language and the Shi’a identity of the Hazara community, coupled with a relatively open 900-km border, have historically facilitated Afghan migration, while Iran has also tended to function as a transit hub for Afghan migration to Turkey and Europe…Iranian authorities intensified their rhetoric against undocumented Afghan migrants with calls for tougher migration policies and facilitation of forced returns. This sentiment also resonated in political discourse with high-ranking officials such as Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf advocating for the construction of a border wall and the closure of Iran’s eastern border, a stance that became a central issue in the 2024 presidential campaign.”

According to the New York Times: “Since March, when Iranian authorities ordered undocumented residents to leave the country, about 800,000 Afghans have poured across the border, Babar Baloch, a spokesman for the United Nations’ refugee agency, said on Monday. Almost 600,000 of them have been forced out since June 1.

During and since the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June, Iranian officials have repeatedly cast suspicion on Afghans as possible spies for Israel, amplifying longstanding rumors and tensions…Iran has ranked as the world’s biggest host country for refugees, with nearly 3.5 million according to the United Nations, primarily people who fled decades of war and violence in Afghanistan. Aid groups estimate that in reality, the Afghan population in Iran is much larger — including about two million refugees who are undocumented — and Iran’s patience with them appears to have run out.”

According to the Diplomat, “Iran is not acting alone. Since late 2023, Pakistan has intensified its deportation campaign against Afghan nationals. In April alone, more than 135,000 Afghans left Pakistan, followed by approximately 67,000 in May. Pakistan’s “Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan” targets undocumented migrants, including long-term resident Afghans and those awaiting resettlement…Turkiye [too] has continued to operate removal centers and conduct charter deportation flights to Kabul throughout 2024. In parallel, it has continued pushbacks along its eastern border with Iran, where Afghan migrants attempting to enter Turkish territory are being systematically forced back.”

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6.

The Afghan refugee issue has also been tied to terrorism concerns within Iran, and perhaps has cynically been used by Iran’s government to deflect from domestic political opposition.

Last year the deadliest terror attack in the Islamic Republic’s history occurred. According to Wikipedia, “On 3 January 2024, a commemorative ceremony marking the assassination of Qasem Soleimani at his grave in Kerman, a city in south-eastern Iran, was attacked by two bomb explosions. The attacks killed at least 95 people. The Iranian government declared the bombings a terrorist attack, the deadliest such incident in the country since the Cinema Rex attack of 1978. On the following day, the Islamic State, a Sunni extremist group, claimed responsibility….According to Reuters, the United States Intelligence Community concluded that the attack was perpetrated by the Afghanistan branch of the Islamic State, Islamic State – Khorasan Province.”

Another terror attack – a shooting at the Shah Geragh shrine in Shiraz, in which 13-15 people were killed – occurred on the same day that protests were taking place across the country to commemorate 40 days since the death of Mahsa Amini, in 2022.

According to Kyle Orton, “It’s unclear if the attack was related to the protests. Protests swept through the Islamic Republic following the death of [Amini], the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who died in police custody after being taken to a “re-education center” for apparently not wearing her hijab properly. It was not that much of a stretch to believe the regime was complicit in such a cynical action. The regime then put out blatant disinformation, blaming the protesters for the attack and trying to implicate Azerbaijan, among other things. This attempt to use the attack to depict peaceful protesters as terrorists directed from outside—exactly as Bashar Asad had—to justify a violent crackdown only furthered the suspicions that the regime had some role in bringing about the attack.”

Earlier in 2022, “a stabbing attack took place at the Imam Reza Shrine in Mashhad, killing two Shia clerics and wounding a third. The perpetrator, identified as foreign national Abdullatif Moradi, a 21-year-old ethnic Uzbek illegal immigrant from Afghanistan, was immediately arrested along with six others accused of assisting him.”

Now of course there has also been the concern that the Israelis, Americans, or Gulf monarchies might have recruited spies or collaborators from minority populations, including Afghans. According to Amwaj media, “Since Israel’s June 13 surprise attack, and continuing after the ceasefire declared on June 24, Iranian authorities have launched a campaign to shore up domestic security. Iran has detained over 700 individuals accused of links to Israel’s Mossad spy agency or collaborating with other hostile states. The crackdown has entailed arrests in border provinces with large minority populations… In the southeastern Sistan-Baluchestan Province [on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan], mainly home to the Baluch minority, security forces have killed two suspects and arrested over 50 individuals accused of “terrorist” activities linked to foreign adversaries…Afghan migrants, Iran’s largest immigrant group numbering in the millions, have been swept up in the crackdown with alarming speed. State media have aired confessions of Afghans allegedly involved in espionage and sabotage, prompting the expedited expulsion of members of the community.”

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7.

Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq are currently three of the top six oil producers (with the US, Russia, and Canada), the first time they have all been in the top six since the late 1980s (before the First Gulf War) and 1970s (before the Iranian Revolution). The Saudi-Emirati-Kuwaiti alliance continues to lead Gulf production. The wider US alliance, including Canada and the Gulf Arab monarchies, dominates current production.

Oil production, US and Mideast countries (ex. North Africa) in twh, select years; Our World in Data

• In 1933, Iran dominated Mideast oil production, but was far smaller than US oil production
• By 1946, Iran still produced a majority of Mideast oil, but not by much; US production continued to dominate
• In 1953, the year of the coup against Mossadegh following the nationalization of Iranian oil, Kuwait was the leading oil producer in the Mideast
• In 1965, the US remained far ahead, but the Sunni-led states (which included both the Gulf Arab monarchies and Ba’athist Iraq), if taken as a whole, were catching up to it
• In 1978, just before Iran’s revolution, Saudi Arabia was the leading oil producer in the region, and the Sunni-led Gulf states as a whole were well ahead of US production
• In 1985, during the Iran-Iraq war and at the end of the first long oil boom (1973-1985), the Saudis cut back their oil production (by nearly two-thirds from 1980, when prices were at their peak), but Saudi production nevertheless remained higher than Iran’s
• In 1991, oil production crashed in Iraq and Kuwait during the First Gulf War, while prices and Saudi oil production rose
• In 2002, just before the US invaded Iraq and the second long oil boom (2003-2015) began, Saudi Arabia was leading the world in oil production, and the Sunni-led Gulf states as a whole were producing far more oil than anywhere else
• In 2011, the start of the Syrian Civil War, the Saudis remained the leaders in oil production, but the Shia-led states, which now (since 2003) included Iraq, overtook the US
• In 2023, as a result of a massive boom in US shale oil production, the US produced more oil than any other country. The Saudis remain the next largest producers, but the Shia-led countries – Iran and, to a large extent, Iraq – have continued to close the gap with the Sunni states, producing about half as much as them as a result of Iraq’s rising production.
  
  

(This graph does not include the US, Russia, or Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading oil producers)

Source: Wikipedia, from the year 2020 (1399 in Iran’s calendar). Apart from Tehran, the capital and largest province by far (approximately 13.5 million inhabitants in 2020), the largest GDP contributor is the Gulf province, Khuzestan (with 4-5 million people, perhaps 30-50 percent of whom are Arabs, the rest split between other minorities and Persians). The next largest, Bushehr (pop. 1-2 million) is also on the Gulf.

Iraq has (roughly speaking) more than 4/5ths of the Mesopotamian region’s population, but less than half of its oil reserves, and only a sliver of its coastline on the Gulf. It has therefore sometimes been an Iraqi aspiration to expand its current territory—not just for Saddam Hussein, who began the Iran-Iraq War by invading and laying claim to Khuzestan, then annexed Kuwait two years after the war’s end–but also for several previous Iraqi governments, going back to the Hashemite kingdom of Iraq upon its creation in 1932.

In 1980, a few months before the Iran-Iraq war began, a six-day siege of Iran’s embassy in London was carried out by Iranian Arabs – trained and organized, allegedly, by Iraq – to publicize their demand of sovereignty for Khuzestan. (This occurred during the same time that American hostages were being held in the US embassy in Iran. The famous, failed Delta Force-CIA rescue attempt in Iran ordered by Jimmy Carter had taken place only ten days before the successful SAS raid to end the standoff at Iran’s London embassy).

Also in 1980, the father of Iraq’s current Prime Minister, Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani, was executed by the Iraqi government along with several other members of his family, for being a member of the Shia Dawa party. Mohammed was nine or ten years old at the time. He later participated in the 1991 Shia and Kurdish uprisings against Saddam Hussein’s government, following Iraq’s loss in the First Gulf War in Kuwait.

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8.

Cities in Iran, the Middle East, and nearby regions; circle size indicates population size. Most of Tehran is between approximately 1100-1600 metres above sea level, as are Iran’s other largest cities. No other cities of Tehran’s size are similar to it in both distance above sea level and distance inland. (There are however a few major cities, like Addis Ababa, that are even higher up and further inland). The elevation mitigates summer heat and increases precipitation. For example, whereas Baghdad–which compared to Tehran is a similar distance inland, but is only 35 metres above sea level–suffers average daily highs of 45 degrees C in its hottest month, and has nightly lows of 4 C in its coldest month, Tehran has average highs of 33-36 C in its hottest month, but nightly lows of -1 in its coldest. And whereas Baghdad gets ~6 inches of rain on average during the year, Tehran gets ~9-17 inches of precipitation (including snow) on average. The ring of mountains surrounding Tehran has however contributed to its having extreme air pollution.

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9.

With Russia fighting in Ukraine and Iran and its allies weakened by Israel, Turkey has been able to increase its influence in the region. Turkey’s main rival, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), began disarming itself this summer after forty years of guerilla warfare. In 2023, Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan invaded the contested territory of Nagorno Karabakh, causing nearly the entire population of the territory to flee to Armenia. Turkey also mended ties with Egypt in 2023, which had been strained for a decade after the overthrow of President Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, who had been supported by Erdogan’s AKP. Now Turkey and Egypt are on the same sides in Sudan’s civil war (which began in 2023; the UAE has been backing the other side), and, after having taken opposite sides in Libya’s, have been working together to broker a Libyan unity government. And of course, Syria’s Assad government was finally defeated in December 2024, by Turkish-backed forces, who are currently fighting Syrian Kurdish groups.

*These figures include non-citizen residents in the Gulf countries, but do not include the non-citizen Palestinian populations in the West Bank and Gaza – approximately 5.3 million people – as part of Israel’s population. The UAE’s label on this chart is obscured by Israel’s, as they have about the same GDP and population size as one another. Turkey has the highest GDP of all Muslim-majority countries, ranking just ahead of Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.

If Russia or Iran continue to weaken, Turkey’s relationships with Israel or Saudi Arabia might worsen. There have been some signs of this already, including this month’s Israeli strikes in the capital of Qatar, Turkey’s primary ally in the Gulf. (When the Saudis and Emiratis blockaded Qatar in 2017, Turkey supported the Qataris). One day before the airstrike in Qatar, Israel attacked multiple sites in Syria, allegedly targeting Turkish missiles and air defense systems in Homs. And in July, in response to fighting between Bedouin and Druze groups in Syria (the latter supported by Israeli Druze, who serve in the Israeli military) Israel carried out strikes in Damascus, hitting the Syrian Presidential Palace and General Staff headquarters, offices of the new government supported by Turkey.

There has been a lot of speculation that Israel will attempt to assassinate Hamas officials in Turkey, if not with airstrikes then by other means, whether covert or – like the Saudis, when they killed Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018 – blatant. According to Israel’s Shin Bet, Hamas operatives based in Turkey organized a plot to assassinate Israel’s extremist cabinet minister Itamar Ben Gvir, which was foiled several weeks ago.

“‘After Lebanon, Israel’s next target will be our homeland,’ Erdoğan stated at the opening session of parliament on 1 October 2024”. In March 2025, during the Eid al-Fitr holiday at the end of Ramadan, Erdogan said “‘We see and we know what’s happening in Palestine. May Allah damn Zionist Israel.” (That was two weeks after the start of massacres in Syria by Sunnis of Allawites, in which allegedly 1000-2000 Allawites were killed, the first such event for the new Syrian government which was unable or unwilling to stop them. According to an article in New Lines, “The Alawis in Jableh, a Sunni-majority town, were set upon by HTS’s Unit 400 and the Othman Brigade, another elite HTS outfit, the SNA’s Sultan Suleiman Shah and Hamza Division, and the Uyghur jihadists of the Turkistan Islamic Party —all units publicly loyal to the Syrian Ministry of Defense. At least seventy-seven Alawis were killed”. Othman and Suleiman Shah are named for the Ottoman Empire’s founder and and his grandfather, respectively). Later, during the war between Israel and Iran in June 2025, Erdogan announced plans to build out Turkey’s supply of ballistic missiles to “deterrent level”.

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When the US removed Saddam Hussein’s government after 9-11, it intensified Iran’s conflicts with Israel and Saudi Arabia. Now, similarly, if the US and its allies are able to continue weakening Iran and Russia, or perhaps even succeed in flipping Iran back into an ally against Russia (as it was pre-1979), it might lead to future conflicts with Turkey.

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10. Many Additional Notes

*Azerbaijanis, by contrast, do share a mutually intelligible language with most of Turkey’s population and with the large Turkic minorities in both Iran and Iraq, but have their own country and so are usually considered to be their own separate group. Similarly, Persian in Iran is thought to be basically mutually intelligible with Tajik in Tajikistan and with Dari, one of Afghanistan’s main languages. Finally, some groups are more similar to one another than others even when their languages aren’t mutually intelligible. Persian and Kurdish for instance are considered part of the same family of languages, unlike Arabic or Turkish. Arguably, Persian is significantly more similar to Kurdish than, for example, French is to Spanish.

• Khamenei was the Islamic Republic’s third president, before becoming Supreme Leader after Khomeini’s death. His predecessor as president, Mohammad-Ali Rajai, was assassinated in 1981, allegedly by the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK). Rajai’s assasination took place two weeks after a bombing that killed over seventy Iranian officials, including the Chief Justice, Mohammad Beheshti, thought to be the regime’s second highest ranking leader behind Khomeini. The day before the bombing, Khamenei had been badly injured in an assassination attempt. And five days before that, the Islamic Republic’s first president, Abdolhassan Banisadr, was impeached, charged with treason, and fled the country. He died of old age in France in 2021.
  
  Iran’s prime minister was also killed in the same assassination that killed Iran’s president in 1981, eleven months into the Iran-Iraq war. He was succeeded by Mir-Houssein Mousavi, who served as prime minister for the remainder of the war, during the same years that Khamenei was president. Mousavi was Khamenei’s first cousin once removed, but they were often rivals. When Khamenei took over Khomeini’s role as Supreme Leader in 1989, Mousavi was pushed out of politics for several years and there has been no Iranian prime minister since. (The first prime minister appointed during the Iranian Revolution, Shapour Bakhtiar, was assassinated in exile near Paris soon afterwards, in 1991). Mousavi has been under house arrest since 2011.
  
• The other leader from Khamenei’s generation is former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (who died in his swimming pool in 2017 at 82 years old; then-president Rouhani ordered an investigation into the death, while Rafsanjani’s family claims he was poisoned). Mousavi, after serving as prime minister from 1981-1989, ran against Ahmadinejad for president in 2009. He is now considered a leader of the Green Movement, which was prompted by protests following that election. Mousavi’s nephew was shot and killed during those protests. Rafsanjani was president from 1989-1997, succeeding Khamenei in that role; he later lost the 2005 presidential election to Ahmadinejad. A year before his death, Rafsanjani attempted to run again for president, but was banned from doing so on the pretense that he was too old.
  
  For what it’s worth, both Khamenei (in part) and Mousavi are Azeri Turks, as is Iran’s new president (following Ebrahim Raisi’s death), Masoud Pezeshkian. (According to Alex Vatanka,at least one CIA report during the Iran-Iraq War wrongly overemphasized Iran’s ethnic divisions by assuming the existence of a Soviet-leaning “Azeri faction”, led by Khamenei and including Mousavi and others).
  
• *In the US military, for example, all eight members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were born in the 1960s. (Secretary of Defense Hegseth by contrast was born in 1980). Most however are at least a few years younger than Iran’s military leaders. And the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, is the second youngest of the joint chiefs, born in 1968. (The youngest is head of the Space Force, Chance Saltzman, born in 1969 a month before the moon landing).
  
• Because it repelled the initial Iraqi invasion, most Iranian casualties during the war were soldiers (including child soldiers) rather than civilians. One exception to this was the “war of the cities”, when “10,000–11,000 civilians died as a result of the aerial bombardment of Iranian cities with the majority of those deaths occurring in the final year of the war”, according to Wikipedia. Another exception, also in 1988 around the end of the war, was the mass execution of Iranian political prisoners, mainly members of the People’s Mujahadedin, who were fighting on Iraq’s side at that point in the war, or of the Soviet-aligned Tudeh party. The executions were ordered by Khomeini, and are thought to have killed somewhere between 2800 and 30,000 people that year.
  
  1988 was also the start of the “chain murders” in Iran, in which more than 80 intellectuals and dissidents were covertly murdered between 1988-1998, “by a variety of means such as car crashes, stabbings, shootings in staged robberies, and injections with potassium to simulate a heart attack”, which only came to light in 1998.
  
  In Iraq too, 1988 was a year in which the state is thought to have killed tens of thousands of its own citizens, in Iraqi Kurdistan with the Anfal campaign and the use of chemical weapons. Iraq also used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and civilians in the final years of the war.
  
• In July 1987, an estimated 400 people died during a riot at the Haj in Mecca between Shia Iranian and Sunni pilgrims, one of the low points for Iran-Saudi relations.
  
• After being invaded at the start of the Iran-Iraq War, by the middle of 1982 Iran regained nearly all the territory it had lost. (In the spring of 1982, Khamenei stated that Khomeini should be the Supreme Leader of Iran and Iraq). Soon after, in Lebanon, a number of key events occurred that pertain to the ongoing conflicts involving Iran and other countries in the region. These include the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the assassination of incoming Lebanese president Bachir Gemayel and Sabra-Shatila massacres in the fall of 1982, the Beirut barracks bombings in 1983 and US embassy bombings in 1983 and 1984, and the 1983-1988 pro-Iran terror attacks on Kuwait.
  
• While Israel and Iran were increasingly becoming enemies in Lebanon at this time, their pre-1979 alliance remained partially intact in spite of Iran’s anti-Zionist rhetoric, support for the emergence of Hezbollah, affinity with Palestinian militants, and exodus of tens of thousands of Iranian Jews. In 1980 during the second week of the Iran-Iraq war, Israel helped Iran’s air force attack Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. In 1981 Israel carried out its own attack on Iraq, destroying the reactor. And during the mid-1980s Israel participated in the Iran-Contra affair, selling Iran weapons.
  
  After Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a common enemy of Iran and Israel, was weakened in the First Gulf War, relations between Israel and Iran worsened. In July 1994, a suicide truck bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires killed 85 people, the attack carried out by Hezbollah operatives. One day later a Hezbollah-suspected suicide bombing on a Panamanian airplane killed all 21 passengers, 12 of whom were Jews. A week after that – and one day after Israel and Jordan signed the Washington Declaration, in anticipation of their peace treaty in October 1994, which made Jordan the second Arab country to officially recognize Israel, after Egypt – the Israeli embassy in London was car-bombed, followed hours later by a similar car bomb exploded outside a Jewish community centre in London. Nobody was killed in the London bombings.
  
  Natalio Alberto Nisman, the special prosecutor in charge of the 1994 Buenos Aires Jewish community centre bombing investigation, was murdered in 2015, when the investigation was (even after two decades) still ongoing.“The 2013 signing of a memorandum of understanding with Iran to facilitate the investigation led to a breach between Nisman and President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner”, according to Wikipedia. “Nisman’s death was initially ruled a suicide by a group of forensic experts appointed by Argentina’s Supreme Court in 2015…In December 2017, Cristina Kirchner was indicted for treason by judge Claudio Bonadio. In March 2018, it was announced that she would be put on trial for an alleged cover-up of Iran’s role in the bombing… After analyzing the claims of the defendants in the case for the never-ratified Memorandum with Iran, on October 7, 2021, the Federal Oral Court 8 declared the case null and void”. On the 30th anniversary of the terror attack in 2024, new president Milei announced investigations would be reopened.
  
• In February 1994, the deadliest attack carried out by a Jewish terrorist since 1946 occurred, when Baruch Goldstein shot 29 Palestinians to death at Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, during the Jewish holiday of Purim. Iran responded, a few hours later, by executing Feyzollah Mekhubad, a Jewish resident of Tehran, who had been in prison since 1992 on charges of being a spy for Israel. (Purim, fittingly, is the holiday which retells a story of threatened Jews living in the Persian empire). Itamar Ben Gvir, an open admirer of Goldstein, has been Israel’s Minister of National Security since 2022.
  
  Goldstein’s attack was followed the next year by the assassination of prime minister Yitzchak Rabin, by another Jewish extremist who was against the Oslo Accords. Months after the assassination, Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister for the first time, narrowly defeating Shimon Peres who was running as Rabin’s successor. Peres had been set to defeat Netanyahu, but a series of Hamas attacks in March and April 1996, just before the election in May, helped lead to a slight victory for Netanyahu’s coalition over Peres’. This November will be 30 years since Rabin was assassinated. 2026, when Israel is set to have another election, will be 30 years since Netanyahu was first elected (though he will only have been in office for about 19 of those years).
  
  On March 4, 1996, on the eve of the second Purim after Goldstein’s massacre, a Hamas bomber blew himself up outside the Dizengoff shopping centre in Tel Aviv. “The attack was the fourth suicide bombing in Israel in nine days, bringing the death toll during that span to over 60….These operations were, in their scale, scope and sophistication, different and larger than any attacks of the past, and it has been alleged that both Syria and Iran had helped in their planning and financing.” Hamas carried them out in response to Israel’s assassination of chief bombmaker and commander Yahya Ayyash in January 1996”. They were led by Mohammed Deif, who was killed last year in an airstrike which, at least according to the Gaza ministry of health, killed 90+ Palestinians.
  
  The month before the 1996 elections, Israel also carried out a two-week military operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Operation Grapes of Wrath, in which an estimated 150-250 Lebanese were killed. Over 100 of those deaths occurred when Israel attacked a UN compound that was sheltering hundreds of Lebanese civilians, which Hezbollah fighters had retreated to during a fight with a commando unit led by Naftali Bennett. (Bennett was prime minister in 2021-2022, and may well become so again in 2026, representing religious Jews who are supportive of West Bank Jewish settlement and who resent ultra-Orthodox not serving in the military while their own kids serve in large numbers). Many similar incidents to the 1996 UN attack occurred during the current war in Gaza.
  
• In June 1996, the Khobar Towers truck bombing on the Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia, near the headquarters of oil giant Saudi Aramco, killed 19 US air force personnel and wounded hundreds of people from many countries. Iran was thought to be behind the attack, although it is not known for certain.
  
• In the late 1990s, a partial realignment of Iranian and American interests took place, as Sunni forces such as the Taliban and al Qaeda were on the rise, while Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was moving sharply away from its secularist Ba’athist roots towards its own brand of Sunni-led religious extremism. The Taliban conquered Herat in 1995 and Kabul in 1996, and then, after conquering Mazar-i-Sharif (Afghanistan’s fifth largest city) on August 8, 1998, killed 11 Iranians in an attack on Iran’s consulate, as well as thousands of Shia and Tajik (Persian)-speakers, nearly leading to a war between Iran and the Taliban. Coincidentally, one day earlier, al Qaeda carried out its first major attack, the US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans, and wounding over 4000. (This was also only a few weeks after the foiled 1998 World Cup Plot would have occurred). Two days before the embassy attacks – again, coincidentally – Iraq suspended cooperation with UN weapons inspectors. The US responded by passing the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and then by bombing Iraq at the end of the year. The US also, on August 20, tried to retaliate against al Qaeda, bombing the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and a camp in Afghanistan.
  
  Meanwhile, in the Iraqi Kurdish civil war (1994-1998), Iran switched sides in 1995, going from supporting the KDP, which was backed by Baghdad, to the PUK, which was favoured by the US. More generally, there was a thaw in relations, and quiet cooperation, between Iran and the US, until they became direct rivals of one another in post-Saddam Iraq and the Middle East at large after 2003. (The twin events of Aug 7-8, 1998 would have an echo three years later, when al Qaeda assassinated Afghanistan’s leading Tajik figure, Iran and India’s ally Ahmad Shah Massoud, two days before 9-11).
  
• From Alex Vatanka’s excellent book The Battle of the Ayatollah’s in Iran (which covers Iranian politics since 1979 through the lens of the relationship between Khamenei and Rafsanjani):

• In August 1988 the Iran-Iraq war finally ended. In February 1989, the day before the last Soviet troops left neighbouring Afghanistan in defeat, Khomeini issued his infamous fatwa against Salman Rushdie. (In 1990, The Satanic Verses’ Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed to death as a result. In 1993 its Norwegian publisher survived being shot. In 2022 Rushdie survived being stabbed). In June 1989, Khomeini died. Khamenei took over as Supreme Leader the next day. The same day that Khamenei took over, Attollah Byahmadi, an ex-colonel in the Shah’s intelligence service, was killed in Dubai, according to Radio Free Europe. Eleven days later, “Abdolrahman Qassemlou, leader of the largest of the Kurdish opposition groups, the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), and two associates are assassinated in Vienna”.

• The day of Khomeini’s death, June 3, 1989, was an eventful one at the end of the Cold War: “On June 3-4, 1989, the Chinese government violently suppressed protests in and around Tiananmen Square, Beijing, with military forces using live ammunition and tanks to clear the area. This event resulted in a death toll estimated to be in the hundreds or thousands, though the exact number is disputed and officially suppressed by China…On June 4, 1989, Poles had their first free elections [since 1938]. The Polish Solidarity opposition won a landslide, capturing all but one contested seats in both the upper and lower houses of the parliament. This victory led to the appointment of the first non-communist prime minister and a unity government where former political dissidents sat together with their former oppressors. In this powersharing pact the government moved forward to dismantle the Polish communist system and initiate a peaceful democratic transition well before the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the Soviet Union collapsed.”
  
• While the Iran-Iraq war was extremely deadly, it is possible it was much less deadly than has been thought. According to demographic analysis from Charles Kurzman, “the death toll from the Iran-Iraq war was far less than the scholarly estimates of 600,000 or 1,250,000. It may even have been lower than the government figures of 250,000 Iraqi fatalities and 155,000 Iranian fatalities”.

• By comparison, poor governance in Iran has also contributed to an enormously high death rate from traffic accidents, which have killed well over a million Iranians since the revolution. Iran has had one of the worst road death rates in the world, as a result of factors such as its rugged terrain, young population, cheap fuel, and use of motorbikes. Even this year, during just the 21-day holiday period around Nowruz (Persian New Year), over 800 Iranians were killed in over a million road accidents. That is an improvement – most years it has been over 1000. “Citing data from the ILMO, Etemad newspaper reported that around 20 years ago, the annual death toll from road accidents approached 28,000. Due to various interventions, this number was reduced to approximately 16,000 by 2020. However, the report noted that since 2021, traffic fatalities have been rising once more, now surpassing 20,000, a figure not seen since 2011, breaking a 12-year record.”
  Iran now has roughly the same number of road crash deaths per year as the entire European Union – though still only about half as many as the US. A large majority of the victims and perpetrators are men. Like Joe Biden, Iran’s new president lost his wife and child in a crash, in 1994.
  The large-scale deportations of Afghans from Iran have likely contributed to road deaths as well, on both sides of the border. In August 2025, “a passenger bus carrying deported migrants from Iran caught fire after it collided with a motorcycle and a fuel truck and veered off a road in Guzara District, Herat Province, Afghanistan, killing at least 79 people, including 19 children. It was one of the country’s deadliest road crashes of the decade”.
  The combination of poor governance, mountains, densely populated cities, and automobiles has also contributed to high death rates from air pollution, roughly estimated to be causing 10,000-50,000 Iranian deaths per year.
• In June 1990, “a devastating earthquake struck Iran, causing widespread destruction and claiming approximately 40,000 lives”. Cities like Tehran continue to face major earthquake risks.
• In August 1990, “Shapour Bakhtiar, the last Iranian prime minister before the 1979 revolution, was stabbed to death in his home in a suburb of Paris, France”. In 1992, “The attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires was a suicide bombing attack on the building of the Israeli embassy of Argentina, located in Buenos Aires. 29 civilians were killed in the attack and 242 additional civilians were injured. A group called Islamic Jihad Organization, which has been linked to Iran and possibly Hezbollah, claimed responsibility; their stated motive for the attack was Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayed Abbas al-Musawi in February 1992.”
  
  Also in 1992, “Iranian dissident and singer Fereydoun Farokhzad-Araghi was stabbed to death in his home in Bonn, Germany”, and, soon after, Iranian Kurdish leaders in Berlin were assassinated, allegedly on Khamenei’s orders. “Four people, three of whom are members of the KDPI, are assassinated in a restaurant in Berlin, Germany, where they were to attend a meeting of the Socialist International. Among the dead was Dr. Sadeq Sharafkandi, the man who succeeded Abdolrahman Qassemlou as the secretary general of the KDPI after the latter’s assassination three years earlier”.
  
  Attacks also took place within Iran in 1992, notably a series of bombings in Tehran that included an explosion near Khomeini’s enormous mausoleum (then still under construction), which killed five people. The People’s Mujahideen (MEK) were alleged to be behind the bombings. The mausoleum complex has been the site of several attacks since then, the largest of which was in 2017.
  
• Iran was involved in the wars in the Balkans from 1992-1995, supporting Muslim Bosniak forces. Iran did not, however, support the Muslim Chechens against Russia during the Chechen Wars (1994-1996 and 1999-2000), as Turkey and the Gulf Arab monarchies arguably did, to a certain extent.
  
• The partial thaw in Iranian relations with the West (and its Arab allies) in the late 1990s overlapped with the coming of age of Iran’s largest generation, those who were born just before or just after the Iranian revolution. This coincided with the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), and the student protests in 1999. Khatami is now 82 years old; in Jan 2025, “President Masoud Pezeshkian voiced his opposition to restrictions placed on the public appearances of former President Mohammad Khatami, the unofficial leader of the Reform Front”.
• From Alex Vatanka’s book:

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• Khamenei first became president on October 9, 1981, coincidentally three days after Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat was assassinated on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, for having made peace with Israel. Sadat had been a good friend of the Shah, who had died in Egypt the year before. The Oct 7th, 2023 attacks occurred one day after the Yom Kippur War’s 50th anniversary. And Israel did try to kill Khamenei in response, at least according to Israel’s defense minister.

I got carried away with this note section — it goes on for a while longer. So I’m moving the rest of the notes to a separate post: https://thegeographicinvestor.com/2026/01/06/iran-additional-additional-notes/

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