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Until the 1940s, Gaziantep was just Antep— or Ayntab, to its Arab citizens. In this lively town of Armenians, Arabs, Kurds, and Turks, old families of money or military rank clashed with, married, and befriended new entrepreneurs working with textiles, agricultural produce, and— with the arrival of the 1800s— retail and rail. The diversity of the city, however, only tossed it into further chaos when the First Turkish Civil War arrived. As the Ottoman government collapsed, Republican-aligned parties established a shaky administration with the help of local militias and defectors from the Unitarian-aligned national army. Meanwhile, remnants of Mehmed V’s security services joined local criminals to form rival gangs of “Armenian-hunters” and “Kurdsbanes,” set apart from other armed movements by their intense dedication to the monarchy and their tendency to blame its fall on the minorities that the security services had terrorized since the 1890s. The arrival of the Union’s forces heralded a sort of peace, but Antep would never be the same. Most of the Armenian community, disgusted with their neighbors, wished to leave— and the Union, mindful of its agreements with the Armenian republic, allowed them to do so. Antep’s upper class also would have liked to leave, but those who did not flee before the Blue Banners closed in had only the rural labor camps to look forward to. A government composed of lower-level Turkish bureaucrats, soldiers, and middle-class professionals assumed responsibility for Antep for the next three decades, implementing Constantinople’s directives with a degree of obedience that the Ottomans might have loved to see in the headstrong elites of their era.

This obedience paused abruptly in 1941. The Union had given most Turks literacy in their native language and in Unitarian, and so very few could ignore the illicitly-circulated reports of defeat and devastation in Belgrade, in Adrianople, and finally in Kubilay. And even the illiterate could see how pitiful the situation of the Union had become when the national government marched into Antep, tossing the mayor out of his office so the now-powerless Tevfik Rüştü Aras could move in. In April, the Union’s last capital became its grave. Three days of siege ended with one night of hunting down any members of the “deep state” left in the city. Lieutenant Sefa Armağan, leader of the victorious Renewal Movement (Hareket-i Yenileme), renamed the city Gaziantep (“Heroic Antep”) for the role its people played in taking down the Union’s last lines of defense from the inside.

The Constitution of 1941 clarified the parliamentary and republican nature of the state, which invested legislative powers in a Meclis ("Assembly") and executive powers in a Democrat and his cabinet of ministers. Although Yenileme, transformed into a political party after 1942, would soon crowd out all representatives of opposing ideologies in the Meclis and Democrat Sefa Armağan, aided by his allies in the military, would assume sweeping and typically extralegal powers, the East Turkish government remained committed, in some important ways, to reversing the effects of the Union on Turkish society. Though the Meclis kept the name of “manat” for East Turkey’s new currency and the Turkish Latin script devised by the Unitarians, the 1943 land ownership law that it promulgated clarified that land ownership could be based on adverse occupation. The law provided the basis for the breakup of the Union’s collective latifundias and the distribution of land to its tillers, and also gave squatter and refugee settlements the right to continue existing as long as they obeyed the laws of municipality, province, and nation. At a stroke, East Turkey had begun the breakdown of state-run agriculture and intra-urban sectors, the two most visible features of the Union’s control over its people and their movements.

Meanwhile, the National Auditing Service (Milli Denetleme Hizmet) promised similar shake-ups in the government and economy. Despite the gradual privatization of agriculture, the state held onto its ownership of the country’s industrial and mining enterprises, which had inherited all the inefficiency and wastefulness of the late Union. The MDH, cobbled together from a mix of the Union’s inspectorial and police agencies and staffed by young, educated, and eager recruits, started sending teams of agents to every factory and mine in the country as early as 1944. The scope of the investigations these cadres carried out covered almost every aspect of the organizations they studied, from supply chains to workplace culture. The management of the state-owned companies, who had grown accustomed to governing their assets like private fiefs, attempted to resist the MDH wherever possible, but, as the instructors in the agency’s training centers reminded their students, “The first rule of this business is: Don’t let anyone push you around.” Despite its hunger for information, the MDH was not a secret police. The inspectors in its employ had only the authority that the state granted them in its audit recommendations, and they had no powers of punishment. Instead, they focused almost solely on collecting information and processing it into reports and briefs— but information can be powerful. Negligent or corrupt managers and workers might find themselves in court, with a recently-compiled MDH report used against them as evidence by state prosecutors. By contrast, managers who committed themselves to efficiency and paid their employees fairly could expect help from the MDH’s planning departments, which suggested ways to increase organizational success and deal with risks and problems. This relative harmlessness and commitment to accountability let the MDH avoid blame for the later excesses of other departments of the state.

Though the Union had never been wholly successful in its attempts to eliminate religious practice, it did preside over the closure of many mosques, the decimation of the religious establishment, and the loss of interest in organized religion among large segments of the population. The religious revival that followed the fall of the Union was accordingly facilitated not just by the native men of faith in East Turkey but through the participation of foreigners, and especially foreigners from Egypt and Tripolitania’s Muhajir [1] population. In 1947, an imam from the remnants of the Britannian Sudan arrived in Adana, bearing a letter addressed to Armağan from a certain “Selim Osmanoğlu.” Written in somewhat antiquated Turkish with the old Arabic script, the letter congratulated the Democrat on his valor and wisdom, and asked that he continue his service to the Turkish people by encouraging their moral and spiritual renewal. Though this was certainly a meaningful gesture and not soon forgotten, the East Turkish state required little urging on this front. Kept afloat by the donations of the public, some of the larger mosques also began to receive state funding as early as 1945. The churches of the Assyrians, however, were somewhat less fortunate. While Gaziantep was not wholly hostile to the Assyrians, it granted them no more privileges than it absolutely needed to. Measures like the creation of the Nineveh Vilayet, which covered many of the Assyrian-majority regions of southeastern Turkey to the north and west of the Arabian city of Mosul [2], were primarily meant to drive a wedge between the Assyrians and the Kurds.

As the 1940s progressed, however, it soon became apparent that Gaziantep faced trouble not just in the lands of former Kurdistan— now referred to simply as “Southeastern Turkey”— but also in the north, which was resentful of the south’s success. “The south”— defined here as the lands around Gaziantep, Adana, Antioch, and Konya— was East Turkey’s heartland, and held much demographic, economic, and political power. Northern generals and Meclis members, loyal to the Yenileme movement but aware of their home provinces’ sense of being neglected and peripheral, increased their collective power by voting as a bloc on matters which concerned the north. This bloc, later labeled Yenileme-Sivas in reference to the northern city that many of its members hailed from, prefigured the emergence of other factions within the Yenileme movement. The preference for intra-party factions over opposing parties as methods of expressing dissent or seeking change has led later scholars to consider East Turkey a prime example of “Functionalist Republicanism [3].”

The common characteristic of Functionalist states (a category which also includes Krajina under Alexei Rykovsky, Russia under Yevgeniy Vetlugin, and Japan under Izuku Midoriya) is that the state views itself as having some sort of “function” or duty which it must uphold in all cases. These duties typically revolve around protecting some set of national ideals, which are usually determined by the state’s founder. The states themselves tend to have some democratic features, like an elected legislature and relatively independent lower-level courts, but are dominated by a powerful head of government. These leaders tend to be powerful figures who augment their not-inconsiderable public popularity with mild personality cults and whose powers bear few concrete constraints. Another duty assumed by Functionalist states is the right to influence the economy through state-owned enterprises and investments in the private sector. After some discussion as to whether the early Second Republic of Lithuania counted as a Functionalist state due to the domination of its politics by the White Shroud, the consensus came to be that a Functionalist state is not simply a democracy where one party is powerful, but a form of quasi-democratic government in which the dominance of one group of actors or set of ideals is present on an institutional level.

Though critics from “true republican” states tended to (somewhat justifiably) dismiss it as “barracks republicanism,” Functionalism generally proved to be a resilient mode of statecraft that inspired copycats. One such copycat was the Moroccan Fajr Party. Though Abdelcarim Alxarif’s Nahda Party had once been masters of a Lithuanian-backed shadow government of guerrilla armies and phosphate shipments in the lawless south of Portuguese Marrocos, Lisbon’s crackdown on slavery in their colonies and the fall of the Lithuanian Revivalist government both marked the end of its prominence. Many party members were lost to Portuguese police raids. Others left of their own accord, disgusted by the extent of Alxarif’s politically-motivated profiteering and warlordism, and the consequences it had for the Haratin, whom Alxarif’s Hassaniya allies had once held as slaves. The remaining portion of the party fell under the leadership of Camal Chahine, who, advised by the aging Simão Abergel, renamed the party Fajr (“Dawn”) and rebranded it as a movement for independence, republicanism, faith, and social justice… that never wholly left its authoritarian and ultranationalist past behind. Despite this, however, it remained the largest of contemporary Morocco’s four major political movements. Whether Lisbon chose to meet the Moroccan political parties at the negotiating table or on the battlefield, Fajr was all but assured a role in future events.

By the 1940s, East Turkey was confident enough in its internal cohesion to begin looking outwards. Relations with West Turkey were, understandably, quite poor. The two Turkeys almost came to blows in 1949, when armed militias affiliated with the East Turks attempted to take over the Western section of Eskisehir, a city which had been cut in half by the inter-Turkish border. The Western army, however, quickly proved that its German trainers had not wasted their efforts. Eager to defuse the “Eskisehir Crisis” before it spiraled out of control, delegates from Constantinople and Gaziantep agreed to re-establish the status quo ante— and departed each other’s presence just as quickly, for neither East nor West desired permanent diplomatic relations with the other. The East Turks’ bonds with Armenia had always possessed a curious warmth, and both countries soon expanded their ties with Krajina and Volga Russia (who had little reason to hate the formerly-Unitarian Turks and every reason to love the oil of Kurdistan’s fields). Trade with the Slavic nations was a boon to East Turkey for several reasons, including the fact that it brought economic benefits to the northern coast. Every tanker that departed from Trabzon or Samsun helped lessen the gap between north and the economically and politically dominant south. East Turkey’s relationship with the Sublime State of Shirvan, however, was not so productive. Shirvan had lent the briefly-independent Kurdish republic support, and then granted asylum to its exiled leadership. By entering the competitive oil market, East Turkey became Shirvan’s economic rival. In the fires of the Georgian Civil War, rivalry soon matured into full-blown enmity.


The nails of the short-lived Safavid dynasty left long scars on the Ottomans’ faces, but by 1619 the aspiring Shia empire had collapsed completely. Constantinople’s then-new sphere of influence in the Caucasus extended from the Caspian Sea to the Black, but its power, though unrivaled, was never absolute. The Ottomans did not eliminate or replace local elites, but co-opted them. The disparate principalities and kingdoms of Georgia continued to be ruled by descendants of the Bagrationi family, although these dynasts bore the Ottoman title of vali (“governor”) in addition to their other honors. The traditional dominance of Turkic khans— or shahs, in Shirvan’s case— over Armenia and the Azeri lands continued under similar arrangements with the Ottomans.

The Volgaks nibbled at the edges of this structure with their conquest of Derbent and the lands along the Terek River in the early 1700s, but the Lithuanians tore into it. The forty-year conquest of Circassia was grueling, but it was complete— at its end, the power of the highland chiefs had been broke, and Russian peasants set up homesteads along the Kuban River. While the Kuban contributed handsomely to Lithuania agricultural yields for over another century, Hadji Hayder Hassan’s campaign of resistance took away Lithuania’s appetite for annexation and convinced it to pry the Ottomans’ fingers off the Caucasus through more indirect means.


The Ottoman government of the 1800s proved more like a crescent moon than its rulers might have liked— its power waxed and waned, and with each shift came a tidal wave of changes in the dynamics of provincial politics. The holders of generations-old grudges almost never failed to take advantage of weakness or distraction in the Ottoman center to settle their scores. In 1836, while Constantinople was preoccupied with the First Greek War of Independence, the Georgian kingdom of Imereti was under siege. Prince Levan, the head of a rival line of the ruling Bagrationi dynasty, stormed the royal palace in an attempt to seize the kingdom for himself. Though part of the royal household— including King Solomon II— escaped Levan’s Khevsur warriors (a gift to the ambitious young prince from the neighboring kingdom of Kartli), those who stayed behind to help defend the palace weren’t so lucky. Solomon’s eldest son Vakhtang was killed while resisting arrest. Levan’s men considered killing Vakhtang’s fourteen-year-old brother Vakhusht as well, but hesitated upon learning that Vakhtang’s son Giorgi had escaped with the king. Killing Vakhusht would therefore offer little benefit (Solomon’s line would still survive through Giorgi) and might turn the population of Kutaisi, the capital of Imereti, against the coup. Instead, Levan had the boy castrated.

Shortly after this, the putschists sent emissaries to Constantinople, pledging Levan’s loyalty to the Porte and asking that he be formally invested as vali of Imereti. However, these envoys were intercepted and arrested by the remnants of Solomon’s Imeretian army, which soon joined a larger Ottoman army under Ahmet Pasha in restoring order in the Georgian lands. Before the end of the year, the king of Kartli was deposed as punishment for his aid to Levan’s Rebellion, and Solomon elevated to vali of Kartli in his place. Imereti, which was still roiled by open disputes between pro- and anti-Levan factions, was placed under the military governorship of Ahmet Pasha. Rather than join his father in Kartli, however, Vakhusht joined the Ottoman army, and distinguished himself in various campaigns against the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula’s interior. After assisting in the 1849 subjugation of Kuwait, a small Gulf emirate whose ruling dynasty had attempted to submit themselves to French protection, Vakhusht was rewarded with the kingship of his own native Imereti. The beleaguered and aging Ahmet Pasha, who did his job dutifully but never quite enjoyed it, was all too happy to hand the reins to the Georgian prince and spend the rest of his life on his family estate in the Thracian countryside.

Vakhusht’s sense of duty to the Ottoman Empire, if it existed at all, evaporated the moment he returned to Georgian soil. From this point onward, Vakhusht and his father Solomon worked together closely to increase their own power at the expense of those who would threaten it. Claiming that Ottoman troops lacked respect for local customs, the Georgian kings convinced the Porte to scale down its presence in their kingdoms. The property of Levan’s family members and other rival lines was confiscated, and Vakhusht used the remaining profits to hire a corps of Khevsur, Svan, and Circassian mercenaries. The death of Solomon in 1855 and the inheritance of his lands by Vakhusht created a united Kingdom of Imereti-Kartli, which signed an alliance with the rulers of Shirvan, an Azeri vassal of the Ottomans. Things came to a head when, in 1872, Vakhusht occupied Telavi, the capital of the eastern Georgian kingdom of Kakheti, after the spillover from a succession dispute threatened to damage the nearby Alaverdi Cathedral. The Ottomans demanded that Vakhusht withdraw his troops and allow Constantinople to decide the matter of the succession, but to no avail. Vakhusht was confident in his country’s geography and Shirvan’s support, and planned to dig in his heels until the true bearer of victory arrived. That “bearer of victory” was the Lithuanian consul in Constantinople, who in 1876 presented the Ottomans with a simple demand that they “cease all aggression in the Georgian lands… lest the good Sultan lose as much territory in Europe as his brother has taken from him in Africa.” The declaration came on the heels of the Rome Conference and the Cairo Affair, which both shook the foundations of Ottoman power to its very roots. The Porte knew that it could not hope to win by fighting, so it turned to negotiating tables in neutral Italy as a way to mitigate its losses. The Treaty of Taranto, signed in 1880, maintained theoretical Ottoman sovereignty over Georgia but recognized Imereti-Kartli’s right to maintain economic and political relations with Lithuania and to name the vali of Kakheti. It also recognized Vakhusht’s 1874 annexation of Guria, which gave the increasingly united Georgian state a coastline. Despite requests from the eastern nobility to move the royal capital to Tbilisi, Vakhusht remained in Kutaisi, the traditional capital of Imereti. He had recently approved a Lithuanian plan to build a great “Transcaucasian Highway” from the north side of the Caucasus that would lead up the Terek River, through the peaks of the mountain range, down through the valley of the Aragvi River, and from there to Tbilisi. While certainly interested in the opportunities for trade allowed by such an undertaking, the new King was reluctant to place his government (and himself) within such easy reach of the increasingly domineering Lithuanians.

“Vakhusht the Eunuch King” continues to be regarded as an exemplary Georgian, who sired no children but became the Father of the Nation. However, at the time of his death in 1891, the work of complete Georgian unification was still unfinished. It was left to his nephew and successor Giorgi to demand greater concessions from the Ottomans and to finally receive recognition of Imereti-Kartli’s control of all the Black Sea principalities and northern Samtskhe from the Union in 1915. The name “Kingdom of Georgia” was formally adopted in 1917, though the capital remained in Kutaisi.


The end of the Great European War changed the landscape in a very literal sense. The new nations of Crimea and Circassia emerged from the former Empire of Lithuania, and established close links. For decades, one of Circassia’s most productive and advanced economic ventures was the bottling and sale of tens of thousands of gallons of fresh water from the Kuban River and streams and hot springs in the mountains to Crimea’s increasingly large and thirsty population. Shirvan diversified its oil-based economy by annexing the Ottoman Empire’s Azeri provinces, which were (and still are) home to tillable plains, abundant timberland, salt mines, and centers of silk and cotton textile production. Georgia, for a time, seemed capable of joining in the general atmosphere of prosperity, but generally failed to live up to its potential. Internally, the kingdom was an unruly mess of disparate regions with conflicting laws and near-feudal administrations. The memory of the Eunuch King endured, but the modernizing reforms that he and King Giorgi attempted to push through the antiquated government were somewhat less successful. In places like Svaneti and Khevsureti, Kutaisi’s authority over the locals essentially stemmed from the ritual homage paid by local chieftains to the Georgian kings during their coronations.

The system teetered, and Colonel Mikheil Kobiashvili was the man to tip it over. At the time of the crass and blustering officer’s meteoric rise to the apex of Georgian politics, King Giorgi had been dead for four years and a regency council governed the nation in the name of the boy-king Solomon III. Taking advantage of popular discontent with the regency council’s inability to deal with the economic depression of the 1930s, Kobiashvili engineered the overthrow of the regency council and finally the overthrow of the monarchy itself in 1934. The new Georgian Republic featured Kobiashvili as its first Democrat and Georgian Orthodox Christianity as its official religion, which assuaged the politically-powerful Church establishment’s concerns over its role in a kingless future. The Republic endured the next decade with relatively little trouble but in 1947 Kobiashvili had some kind of falling-out with Ioseb Arveladze, his Deputy Democrat. Though the exact nature of the disagreement is unclear, what is known is that Arveladze was a pillar of Georgian stability, and his exit brought the roof down on the Republic’s head. By 1948, the Georgian Civil War was in full swing, and Arveladze reigned over most of east-central Georgia from his provisional capital in Tbilisi. Before the end of the year, Democrat Hagop Hovhannisyan of the Armenian Republic declared his support for Kobiashvili, beginning the first of many foreign interventions. Within months, Shirvan and Circassia had declared for Arveladze.

The greatest tragedy of the Georgian Civil War is perhaps that it remained inconclusive for so long. Kobiashvili initially commanded the advantage, but lost it due to, among other things, attempting to personally command troops at the First Siege of Tbilisi. Meanwhile, Arveladze was never able to follow up on his occasional victories. Though he received monetary and military support from Shirvan, Circassia was barely involved in the war— it was instead focused on the struggle between Crimea and Krajina. In the end, it was the arrival of the East Turks which turned the tide in Kobiashvili’s favor, but even this was mostly unintended. East Turkey only envisioned a limited intervention, but in a fit of paranoia Arveladze secretly promised to cede Abkhazia to Circassia in exchange for increased assistance. When the news broke, Arveladze was doomed. Tbilisi was captured from its demoralized rebel defenders in 1950, and only the intervention of Volga Russia saved Arveladze’s life. The Slavic nation, acting on behalf of the the other two Bogatyrs, encouraged the Georgian factions and their foreign backers to come to terms. The Astrakhan Talks, which began in 1952, included East Turkey, Armenia, Shirvan, and representatives from both sides of a Civil War which had claimed 223,000 lives and whose atrocities were transcribed in sound recordings and film reels. Arveladze and his supporters were granted asylum by the Volgaks, who also promised reconstruction aid for the restored government of Kobiashvili. The Volgaks certainly did not like the undemocratic Democrat, but Vostovsk recognized that only he had even the slightest chance of bringing lasting peace to Georgia… and giving Volgak businessmen the privilege of developing Georgia’s rich copper and manganese mines.

Since the Great European War, Shirvan’s foreign policy had always involved punching above its rather insignificant weight. Though it was one of the richest states in the region, its low population and small size left it in need of friends who would guarantee its security. After the accession of Shah Farrukh II in 1946, who had formerly headed Shirvan’s Strategic Operations Office (Strateji Əməliyyatlar Ofisi), the Shirvani state seemed to come to a realization: while having other nations be friendly to Shirvan is good, having other nations be dependent on it is better still. The reign of Shah Farrukh is characterized by aggressive attempts at what would later be called “new imperialism,” in which proxy wars and trade deals replace conquests and protectorates. In 1950, as retaliation for East Turkey’s establishment of economic links with Krajina, Shirvan consented to the formation of the Kurdish Liberation Front. Headed by Mustafa Salih, the former Democrat of the Republic of Kurdistan, the KLF was initially created to police the Kurdish refugee camps along the Shirvani shore of Lake Urmia, but “volunteer” units in Kurdish garb were soon found in the hills of Georgia, fighting in Ioseb Arveladze’s rebel army. Arveladze himself was something of a stooge— in addition to signing away Abkhazia to Circassia, he also promised to coordinate with Baku on connecting Shirvani infrastructure to the Transcaucasian Highway, while denying similar privileges to Armenia. Arveladze’s defeat in the Georgian Civil War set back Baku’s plans somewhat. The restored Georgian government had the backing of Armenia, East Turkey, and the Bogatyrs— who had all enjoyed rather friendly relations with each other since the conclusion of the Astrakhan Talks— so Shirvan could do little about Kobiashvili’s provocative remarks on the need for a referendum to determine the future of the Armenian-majority Karabakh region. Seeking not to worsen the situation by openly supporting the Bogatyrs’ enemies, Shirvan also distanced itself from Crimea and Circassia.

Forced to turn away from the west and north, Shah Farrukh pivoted southward.

After fleeing to Khiva, Ghiyasuddin Ali Asaf Khan had continued onward to Volga Russia. Residing there for the duration of the Lithuanian-Russian War, the former “Shah in Herat” traveled with his wife Shirin and son Bahram to Paris. He quickly became a celebrity among the French, but to the Persians in France he was something more. Many young Persian-French had never even seen their purported homeland— their parents had clawed their way past borders political and natural to escape the war engulfing it— but the Shah clearly had. His visits to the cultural center in Saint-Clement, a working-class suburb in which many Persian immigrants and refugees had settled and to which the Asaf Khan family generously donated, were typically received with enthusiasm. The formerly-royal family kept themselves financially afloat by collecting the royalties on sales of a printed, French-language version of the Asaf Khan Shahnameh. The original calligraphic version had been loaned to a French museum, “so that it may be kept ready for its return to its birthplace.”

The Rally for Persia, a political party of exiles headquartered in Hamburg and generally acknowledged to have the manpower necessary to claim to speak for most Persian republicans, originally sought to cut ties with the monarchists completely. Any compromises on the republican ideal, they argued, would be an insult to Ali Qayani’s memory. At the 1950 party congress in Hamburg, convened to select a new Chairman, a faction led by a certain Mansour Lavasani argued that if Qayani, the dictator-turned-martyr, had stood for any ideal, it was that of Persian nationhood and unity. The Persian movement for independence could never truly be national or united if it did not come to terms with the conservatives and Protectionists. Though Lavasani was passed over for the post of Chairman, his ideas remained influential. In 1953, delegates from most of the major political parties were invited by the Rally to Copenhagen, the capital of the small and neutral country of Denmark. The result of the Copenhagen Conference was the Government-in-Exile of the Iranian Nation (GEIN), whose Constitution specified Ghiyasuddin as the rightful Shah of Iran, but made the National Parliament, which contained representatives from most of the major overseas political movements, the paramount organ of legislative and executive power. A German observer of the Conference— and there were many— might have found this form of government familiar, but would surely have been shocked by what happened next. The newly-elected Chancellor Lavasani announced that, within the space of the year, the GEIN would respond to an invitation from East Turkish agents and move its offices to the city of Erbil.

By 1954, the various foreign affairs departments and general staffs of the Middle East knew that war was on the way. If Oceania and Turkestan were any indication, Lucknow was not interested in laying low and reintegrating into the post-Danubian world. When the final showdown between the Unitarians and the world came, it would end one of two ways. The Unitarians could win, and, having cowed the world, roll over the Middle East at their pleasure. Alternately, the Unitarians could lose, leaving the peoples clenched in the Blue fist to face very unpredictable fates. A puny non-superpower like East Turkey could do little about the former, but it could plan for a future involving the latter. Hosting the GEIN was a way for East Turkey to raise its international profile and strengthen ties with Arabia, which was generally supportive of the Persian exiles’ ambitions. Arabia would gladly have hosted the GEIN itself, but the large republic had only just surmounted a political crisis over the permanent location of its capital. (In the end, Arabia’s leaders agreed to move the government from the wartime provisional capital of Damascus to the railway nexus of Amman, which was connected to Arabia’s three major cultural zones— Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Peninsula— without quite being a part of any of them.) Placing the Persians in Erbil was also rather effective way for the East Turks to add a pro-Gaziantep element to the city’s population, which would help keep the anti-Gaziantep elements (read: the Kurds) down.

As nuclear fire rained down upon Southern China, the rest of the world realized what the Middle East had known all along— namely, that the next great war against Unitarianism would decide the fate of the ideology and all who lived under it. By moving to Erbil, the GEIN hoped to be close to Persia itself, and respond rapidly to any events which unfolded there with manpower and resources from East Turkey and Arabia. Germania, which had little love for East Turkey and its machinations, disapproved, but there wasn’t much it could do. If only the monarchists or only the republicans had left for East Turkey, the EDC could simply cut the one loose and embrace the other. With both forces united under the GEIN, the German-led alliance had no recourse but to continue communicating with the GEIN through its Hamburg office and guide it away from Yenilemist influence at a later date.


Even as Shirvani paramilitary forces retreated from Georgia, troops of the regular army made their way across the Caspian to western Khiva. They remained present in the country for the duration of the Turkestani-Khivan War, helping Persian and Khivan militias erect defensive barriers along the Amu Darya while the Khivan government permanently left Khiva City (which was far too close to the border for comfort) for the former Ottoman fortress of Merv. Though some questioned the wisdom of spending more of Shirvan’s resources on seemingly military interventions, few actually voiced such concerns. Shirvan’s national languages, in which every citizen was expected to be literate, were Azeri and Persian. This not only contributed to a sense of Central Asian unity with Khiva, which was sealed by the foundation of a customs union between the two countries in 1954, but also a keen interest in the future of Persia.

After the end of the Turkestani-Khivan War, most Shirvani army personnel returned home, but a few remained behind in Merv. One such agent was Major Vaqif Sadıq, who had established contact with an intriguing organization. Major Sadıq had saved the life of its shadowy leader, a man who went by the alias of Murshid Jamal (“Jamal the Teacher/Guide”), during a savage firefight against Turkestani raiders in Khorasan. Over the next three years, Sadıq’s reports back to Shah Farrukh included more information on the Murshid’s organization. The Khivan government used it to help keep order in the Persian refugee camps in Khorasan and certain neighborhoods of the large city of Mashhad. It took up arms on behalf of the Khivans during the Turkestani-Khivan War, and received many lessons on conventional warfare. However, its members were also veritable experts in unconventional warfare— their forces had pursued a campaign of raids, sabotage, and surprise attacks against the Unitarian occupiers in Persia for around one and a half decades. If the Murshid was to be believed, the men and women sworn to him had achieved a prestige among the downtrodden Persians that the newborn and toothless exile government in East Turkey would not have for many years. All that his organization needed was support. Khivan support had sufficed so far, but the demands of the war and the relocation of its capital had stretched its resources thin. Shirvan, on the other hand, had continent-sized ambitions (during this time, the Strategic Operations Office drafted plans for hypothetical relief and reconstruction efforts in postwar Afghanistan and Baluchistan) and the funds to pursue them.

***

COPENHAGEN— Persian exile Rustam Rashti, aged 64, was discovered dead in his residence from multiple stab wounds on November 5, 1957. On his dining table, a plain-looking envelope was discovered by investigators. After thorough examinations which checked for poison as well as forensic evidence, the Copenhagen Police Department has reported to the Folkeblad that the letter within the envelope ran thus in Persian and French:
Not much is known about this obscure group, but according to Le Monde's 1955 interviews of Persian refugees in Paris...


[1] The term muhajir (مهاجر‎, "immigrant") is used to refer to the descendants of refugees from Unitarian or formerly Unitarian Muslim countries, who settled in Egypt and later in the Emirate of Tripolitania. In Tripolitania, their generally middle-to-high level of education has allowed them to constitute a sort of middle class of professionals, entrepreneurs, and officials. However, this also makes them an object of some resentment from native Tripolitanians, who appreciate the methods of statecraft, business, and cooking which the Muhajirs have brought to Tripolitania (and the assistance that they gave Emir Faisal in building the independent Tripolitanian state in the first place) but resent their monopolization of power.

[2] Mosul shows up as Turkish on my map, but that’s mostly due to the difficulty of aligning the AH map with Google Maps, which uses a different projection. In any case, it’s already canon that India’s “restored Union” client state captured Mosul from the Kurds during the Second Turkish Civil War. It seems reasonable to assume that control of the city passed to Arabia after that. Aleppo is also an Arabian city which, like Mosul, happens to be located very close to the border with East Turkey.

[3] Consider this term synonymous with “illiberal republicanism.”