A train travelling in a desolate landscape. Jagged mountains rise on either side, the terrain barren, and thinly populated. The railway is cutting through dry valleys where human settlements are sparse and distances between towns stretch for miles. Suddenly, a loud blast blows away the tracks, bringing the train to a grinding halt. The railway line, laid for the purpose of connectivity and intended to facilitate the flow of prosperity, has suddenly become a theatre of massacre and insurgency.
One may quickly recall the events of the Jaffar Express hijacking that took place around this time a year ago. But what I am referring to first is not exactly this, rather a striking historical parallel from a century earlier in the region of Transjordan, Palestine, and the Hejaz. The First World War was raging, and European colonial powers had their eyes on the Middle East, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. Besides direct fighting with Ottoman military forces, freedom movements had been instigated amongst the Arabs, with the Ottomans portrayed as occupiers. Ironically, in essence it was a single officer – a single intelligent officer only – who had literally herded the simple Arab folk to act for the greater good of the Europeans. In 1917, attacks on the Hejaz Railway were conceived and planned by T. E. Lawrence and carried out by Arab fighters under the banner of the Arab Revolt. The rebels adopted a strategy of repeated sabotage of railway lines and attacks on trains transporting troops and supplies. Explosives were planted along isolated stretches of track, trains were derailed, and Ottoman repair teams were ambushed in remote desert locations.
Attacks on trains were central to what later became associated with the so-called Lawrence of Arabia playbook. The railway, which served as the Ottoman Empire’s logistical lifeline from Damascus to Madinah al-Munawwarah, became the ideal target. By repeatedly disrupting the railway, insurgents forced the Ottomans to divert manpower to guard and repair infrastructure rather than projecting power across the region. Within a year, the Ottomans were defeated in a struggle that was paid for by locals as a quest for their freedom, but in the wider canvas it squarely served the strategic agenda of external powers.
Yet even as these trains were attacked in the deserts of Arabia, the political future of the region had already been decided elsewhere in the form of the Sykes–Picot Agreement. This agreement carved borders to create ‘spheres of influence’ for foreign powers with little regard for local identities, tribal distributions, or historical patterns of settlement. The consequences endured far beyond the moment of their drafting: as observed by Tim Marshall in his book ‘Prisoners of Geography’, those lines drawn in ink are still being paid for in blood by the peoples who inhabit those landscapes a century later. Viewed against the continuing suffering across Palestine, Israel, Syria, and Lebanon, one is compelled to ask what lasting benefit the struggle ultimately delivered to those in whose name it was fought, and who in fact secured the strategic advantages and resources that followed.
This pattern is hardly new, particularly in regions endowed with strategic resources. As observed by Joyce P. Kaufman in her book on ‘A Concise History of U.S. Foreign Policy’, major power foreign policy often follows recurring patterns shaped by enduring beliefs, institutional habits, and strategic assumptions. Seen through this perspective, the two trains separated by a century appear less as isolated episodes and more as manifestations of a familiar geopolitical logic in which local resentments are cultivated and amplified to advance the strategic interests of external powers. A comparable argument is advanced by John Perkins in ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man’, where influence in strategically important and resource rich regions is described as often exercised indirectly, through the shaping of local political and economic dynamics in ways that ultimately benefit powerful states and institutions rather than the populations in whose name development or liberation is pursued. Viewed in this broader context, the parallels between the two trains become clearer: separated by a century, they nonetheless reflect the persistence of a geopolitical template in which external interests intersect with, and often intensify, local grievances.
Grievances and conflicting interests are nothing uncommon among peoples, wherever they live. But in the post-Westphalian order, a government’s concern stops at its own borders. Beyond them, populations are instruments—used or discarded as strategic calculations dictate – whether we like it or not.
So, when I see bombs tearing innocent schoolchildren apart in the Middle East – in Gaza, in Damascus, or in Lebanon – I find myself thinking of the Ottomans who once ruled these lands, built railways to bind distant provinces, and made efforts to provide security to the very people who are now caught between occupation, fragmentation, and internal strife. Were those Ottomans better for the local Arabs, or worse? I do not know. But the lesson from history clearly tells causes are raised, struggles are fought, and demands are eventually settled. But when the dust clears, it is not the strategists or the sponsors who remain amid the wreckage. Whether insurgency takes an alignment to the enemies in immediate East or to the one far off West; at the end, it will always be the ordinary people living along the tracks, their resources being plundered, who must continue to bear the consequences of decisions made far beyond the landscapes they call home.
Extrapolating from the tale of the two trains — the Ottoman one, ambushed in desert a century ago to the one of Pakistan, hijacked in Balochistan last year — and to the Israeli bombs tearing schoolchildren apart today – it is difficult not to sense that the same strategic playbook associated with Lawrence of Arabia continues to be followed: The actors may change and the geography may be different, but the method appears familiar. And if that is indeed the case, one is compelled to ask: when the slogans fade and the demands of one side or the other are eventually met, will peace and prosperity finally reach the people who simply live where the tracks run through, or will their fate resemble that of so many communities across the Middle East who have been waiting for it for more than a century?
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