The Issues Of External And Internal Security In Iran

In the last 500 years, the borders of Persia have remained pretty much as they are now, losing some regions in the Caucasus and Central Asia. This is due to the presence of natural barriers. The borders of the country are constituted by a coast in the South, the Caspian Sea in the North, and mountain chains on all other sides. The center of Iran is largely uninhabitable. The Zagros Mountains in the West are inhabited by many non-Persian ethnicities, like Kurds and Azeris. Kurds are Sunni and they also live in Iraq and Turkey, and have a strong national identity. Foreign powers have always used the Kurdish people to raise independentist tensions in the region. Turkey and Iraq are separated from Iran by the Zagros Mountains. Mesopotamia’s territory, being between two rivers, is flat, while the Zagros Mountains historically were the border with Persia. The Tigris and the Euphrates unite to form the Shatt al-Arab waterway in Iran. Khuzestan’s population is constituted by Arabs, not Persians, and therefore this area is vulnerable to separatism, as the attack of September 22 has shown.

The Azeris live in the Alborz Mountains in the North. They are the largest ethnicity after Persians in Iran, numbering around 25 million of the total 74 million in the country. The independent Republic of Azerbaijan is just to the northwest of Iran. The Azeris were divided by the Russians and the Persians in the 1800s, and separatism has been a constant concern for Iran since the creation of the Republic of Azerbaijan: public schooling does not teach the Azeri language and the campaign to encourage Azeris to assimilate to the rest of Iranians has been quite successful (Khamenei is Azeri), but at the same time has given rise to independentist sentiments.

Buffer areas against Russia and Pakistan are the desert in Turkmenistan and the rest of the Alborz Mountains, where the Baluchi ethnic group lives. They are also Sunni and there have always been Baluch separatist movements. The barren central area of Iran is also the region that is inhabited by actual Persians To the south, Iran borders the Persian Gulf. Iran has never been a naval superpower, and Bandar Abbas is the only real harbor, located on the Strait of Hormuz. As already mentioned, this is a very strategic region for the oil trade.

As for the economy, even though Iran has a large amount of oil and it ranks as the 18th largest economy, its GDP per capita only ranks 97 in the world. Since the fertility boom in the 1960s, Iran has faced a huge unmet demand for food, schooling, housing, and employment. But the underdevelopment of the energy industry also has to do with the sanctions. An equally important reason is the geography: a lot of Iran's oil is located in mountainous areas, and this makes it more expensive to transport it and profit from it. That's why Tehran has always wanted to get its hands on the Saudi oil market. For all these reason the Iranians remain largely a poor people.

Persia has been invaded and conquered several times, and most of these conquests came from the Northeast (from Central Asian powers), or from the West (from Greeks, Arabs, Ottomans, and the British). But fighting in Iran's western front, i.e. the Zagros Mountains, is very difficult even in modern times, and this was learned well by Saddam’s troops in the 1980s. In general Iran’s biggest weakness is internal, since almost 50% of Iran's population is non-Persian, and many groups are discriminated for their ethnicity and religion.