english text 179 (such as the case of the Houthis in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia is engaging in military intervention, driving the Houthis to seek support from Iran: another self-fulfilling prophecy). Turkey is seeking a strategic solution that will weaken ISIS without strengthening the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), with which it is immersed in a long, violent conflict. Qatar supports the Syrian Islamist opposition – especially the Muslim Brotherhood – whereas Saudi Arabia, which detests the Muslim Brotherhood, supports the jihadist movements that are fighting against Bashar al-Assad and that want to undermine Shiite domination in the government of Iraq in favour of the marginalised Sunnis (such as Jabhat al-Nusra). In fact, Saudi Arabia groups ISIS with other actors in the region whom it considers to be a threat (mixing Sunnis and Shiites together). Thus the condemnation and Islamic delegitimation of ISIS that its Council of Senior Scholars proclaimed in Riyadh also included Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iraqi Shiite militias. However, in view of the longstanding financing and support that Saudi Arabia has given to Salafi movements with an extremist interpretation of Islam, it is now faced not only with the radical overspill of ISIS but also with the problem of controlling radical imams whose discourse is close to that of ISIS. However, despite the common idea that Iran is the only regional power with direct influence in Iraq through the Shiite parties that govern in Baghdad, the truth is that sectarian fragmentation and the multiplication of actors on the Iraqi political scene have also opened the doors to the influence of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. In reality, the malfunctions and destructuring of the Iraqi state are also reflected in the anomalous way in which it carries out its external policy, which does not serve national interests but is used by the many state and non-state actors to strengthen their position in the internal politics of the country. Similarly, the Iraqi Kurds use the arms that reach them from the West not so much to defend Iraq as to pursue their own agenda of independence, and they combat ISIS in accordance with their own territorial and oil interests (taking advantage of the situation to impose their control on Kirkuk and the disputed territories following the retreat of the Iraqi armed forces from ISIS). In reality, all this geopolitical and strategic chaos is subtly creating another subconflict in relation to the Kurdish question, and it is not hard to imagine that in the near future it will emerge. The problem is that, although ISIS has catalysed a kind of regional and international cooperation, beneath the surface all those involved are separated by profound divisions and interests and the differences concerning the regional stability that should prevail are both ideological and geopolitical, and this last factor means that a political solution for the problem is almost unattainable. Last but not least, the young Palestinians who have been forgotten are rising once again to recall the lack of attention suffered by their endless human and territorial dispossession, and what were stones in 1987 are now knives, for they are aware that it is only when there are Israeli victims that eyes are turned towards their part of the world. However, as the Israeli journalist Amira Hass pointed out in the newspaper Haaretz, “Palestinians are fighting for their lives; Israel is fighting for the occupation.” But that political reckoning would be only fragmentary if one did not take into account the new human disasters that it brings. Condoleezza Rice, former US Secretary of State, spoke of a “constructive chaos” in 2005 to justify the fright induced by American intervention in the region, announcing the democratic future to which it would lead. Ten years later, the chaos has spread territorially and politically, and the populations are the victims of that “constructive” myth. Deaths apart, given that counts of Arab civilian victims do not generally arouse interest in statistics, over half the refugees in the world are concentrated in the region that the United Nations calls MENA (Middle East and North Africa), which tells us something about the intensity of the dispossession and suffering that the region is accumulating. Until relatively recently, the great majority of all that immense quantity of people living in very precarious humanitarian conditions were Palestinians. This situation originated in 1948, when the creation of the state of Israel brought about the expulsion and forced flight of eight hundred thousand Palestinians who were living in the land that then became the new Jewish state. That was the manifest expression of the inevitable tragedy that began to move closer in that region when the USSR and the whole Western world took the decision to create a political state consisting of Jewish colonisers brought in from outside without wishing to accept that it would inescapably affect the future of the autochthonous inhabitants that populated the Palestinian territories and that it would inaugurate the longest and most complex conflict in history. In 1950 the United Nations created a special agency to attend to the minimum humanitarian needs of that entire population of excluded, stateless people, the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency). There are more than five million of them now, distributed between Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. At present it is possible to find up to four generations living in the refugee camps. A unique case in the history of conflicts. They are the historical refugees who are constantly forgotten in information, politics and international relations. They are the dark side of the representation of the longest conflict in contemporary history, which the international community has never been able to resolve, even though that means condemning an enormous number of people to a marginal subsistence, without dignity and without a future; and the number continues to increase demographically, giving birth to new generations living in camps or in unhealthy ghettos with an utter lack of hope. The implosion of Iraq and Syria in the Middle East has spread misfortune to a frightening number. In Iraq, at
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