The First World War: The origin of real Terrorism and the beginning of ongoing Oil War

by Yamin Zakaria

The cessation of hostilities was declared on the 11th hour, the 11th day of the 11th month on the Western Front, between the Allies of World War I (WWI) and Germany. Today, the nation commemorates the 2.5 Million dead with a two-minute silence, a war that took approximately 20 Million lives in total.

Despite the enormous loss, and after almost one hundred years, there is little reflection on the causes of this war, hardly any discussion on this point, and the lessons to be learnt from it. They say historians to date cannot agree on the causes. The history books in schools and colleges point to the assassination of Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire by the Serb nationalists as the trigger for WWI.

Nations did not mobilise their forces and wage costly wars due to the assassination of one man. The war was not one of good versus evil, tyranny versus freedom, but simply a struggle for material resources. It was a war over territory, colony, inflamed by nationalism and historical feuds. The war was simply a global clash of empires.

Once the war was triggered, the central powers (German Empire, Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire) on one side faced the Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia). This conflict was marked by the introduction of air raids and poison gas, a prelude to the birth of state-terrorism. In the early 1920s, the British used chemical weapons on the Kurds in Iraq, under the direction of Winston Churchill long before Saddam Hussein. During the next global war, these methods involving air raids, chemical weapons and explosives were developed and deployed on a larger scale on the civilian population. This is the origin of real terrorism.

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