1. United States Involvement in the Middle East

2. Iraq-Iran War First Persian Gulf War Iraq invaded__________in _________________ following a long history of border disputes and fears of Shia insurgency among Iraq's long-suppressed Shia majority influenced by the Iranian Revolution. For the next _________________ years the war came at a great cost in lives and economic damage - a half a million Iraqi and _____________ soldiers as well as civilians are believed to have died in the war with many more injured and wounded.

3. Persian Gulf War-Operation Desert Storm  Iraq invaded ___________________Claimed Kuwait was stealing oil  money owed to other countries for previous Iran-Iraq War.  Saddam _________________thought no one would stop him

4. (Operation Desert Storm) Iraq invaded _______________in August of_____________, under the direction of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi army took control of Kuwait in a very short amount of time. The United nations responded to the Iraqi invasion by demanding that Iraq withdraw its troops from______________. The United nations asked other countries to cut off trade to Iraq (Embargo) in an attempt to force them to withdraw, that attempt __________________. The United States and thirty other countries formed a coalition and began sending military troops into Saudi Arabia over the next few_______________.

5. The united Nations set a date for_____________ to leave ________________, Iraq rejected the date and refused to leave. The ____________ and their allies began attacking Iraq through the use of air power then by a ground assault. After a devastating battle resulting in many Iraqi deaths, the Iraqi’s were driven _______________ of Kuwait.

6. Afghanistan  On September 11, _____________, Al-Qaeda attacked two targets in the U.S. Al-Qaeda is a group of Islamic terrorists that were largely based in Afghanistan. They hijacked____________________ airplanes and intentionally crashed two of them into the World Trade Center in new York. The third plane was crashed into the _____________ in Virginia and the fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania in route to its target, the White House in Washington, D.C. The terrorist attacks on that day killed nearly ____________________ people.

7.  Osama bin__________________ was blamed for the attacks, U.S. President George ________called on other countries to help wage a war on terrorism to crush al-Qaeda. In October 2001, U.S., British, and Canadian forces ______________ Afghanistan in search of bin Laden and to destroy al-Qaeda and their allies the Taliban (Operation Enduring Freedom). Although bin Laden was never found the grip of the Taliban and al-Qaeda on Afghanistan was___________. The U.S. let forces still struggle to control portions of the ______________.

8. The Iraq War (Operation Iraqi Freedom)  Saddam Hussein was still______________________ Iraq at the time of the Afghanistan invasion. Officials in the U.S government feared connections between Hussein and al-Qaeda and the allegations that Iraq was building Weapons of Mass Destruction (___________) in the form of Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical weapons. The United Nations sent inspectors to Iraq to check for WMD’s however Iraq failed to allow them to complete their inspections. In response the U.S. Congress passed an Iraq _____________ Resolution that authorized the president to go forward with a war in____________.

9. In March______________, the U.S. began bombing targets in the capital of Baghdad. British, Australian, Polish, and _____________________ soldiers invaded Iraq and defeated the Iraqi army. Saddam Hussein was__________________, put on trial for crimes against humanity by the Iraqi’s.

10. Weapons of ____________Destruction were never found in _______________. It is difficult to determine how many Iraqis have died since the invasion, but as of 2007, more than 500,000 Iraqis may have died according to one study. Many deaths are due to sectarian violence. Over 4,000 American ________________ have been killed and over 20,000 have been wounded in Iraq thus far.

11. Why is the U.S. interested in the M.E.? ____________ ___________Terrorists Spread _________________

12. Al-Qaeda The group is wanted by the United States for its September 11,__________, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as a host of lesser_________________. To escape the post-9/11 U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda’s central leadership is believed to have fled eastward into________________, securing a safe haven in loosely governed areas there.

13. What is al-Qaeda? Al-Qaeda seeks to rid Muslim countries of what it sees as the influence of the West and replace their _________________ with fundamentalist Islamic regimes. After Al-Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks on_______________, the United States launched a war in Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda’s bases there and overthrow the Taliban, the country’s ______________ fundamentalist rulers who harbored bin Laden and his________________. “Al-Qaeda” is Arabic for “The Base.”

14. What are al-Qaeda’s origins? Al-Qaeda grew out of the opposition to the 1979 Soviet ________________of Afghanistan. In the 1980s, bin Laden and the Palestinian religious scholar Abdullah Azzam, recruited, ________________, and financed thousands of foreign mujahadeen, or holy warriors, from more than fifty countries. Bin Laden wanted these fighters to continue the “__________ war" beyond Afghanistan. He formed al-Qaeda around 1988.