The deeply held enmity and distrust between the Persian Shi’ite hierarchy of Iraq and the Sunni Arab Saudi royal family has raged for centuries. In 1979 when the Arab shah of Iran was overthrown, Ayatollah Khomeini actually declared that Sunni believers were not truly Muslims and demanded the overthrow of the al-Saud family. That conflict continues today with Iran funding and supplying the rebel forces attempting to usurp Yemen, on Saudi Arabia’s southern border, while Iran moves inexorably forward in its alliance with its fellow Shia believers in Iraq.
The potential for a nuclear confrontation along the Persian Gulf remains high. Iran continues its development of nuclear power—many believe for the purpose of creating nuclear weapons. And high-ranking US intelligence officials believe Saudi Arabia did in fact finance much of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, pouring millions of dollars into its development. The intelligence community also believes there exists an agreement for Pakistan to provide nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia when called for.
In the summer of 2014, the Islamic terrorist army called ISIS controlled more than thirty-four thousand square miles in Syria and Iraq, from the Mediterranean coast to south of Baghdad. The major Iraqi cities of Mosul, Fallujah, and Tikrit were overrun, including key oil refineries and military bases. The Iraqi army was in retreat and disarray. The world expected another offensive thrust from ISIS that could imperil the capital of Baghdad itself. And in late July 2014, ISIS executioners began beheading captives and broadcasting the ghastly videos. It appeared the entire Middle East was at risk of being ravaged by ISIS.
For more than forty years, since 1979, the United States and other countries have frozen Iranian assets in their banks, in retaliation for when fifty-two Americans were taken hostage and held in Tehran for 444 days. Twenty to thirty billion dollars have been frozen in banks worldwide, including approximately two billion dollars in US banks. By 2014, two billion dollars would be earning about one hundred million dollars per year in interest.
The question of accrued interest on those frozen funds and how much interest is owed to Iran continues to be a bone of contention. When four hundred million dollars was returned to Iran by the Obama Administration in January 2016—money the Iranians paid prior to 1979 for US military aircraft that were never delivered—the United States also sent Iran a payment of 1.3 billion dollars in accrued interest. The money to pay that accrued interest came from the US Department of the Treasury’s Judgment Fund, which pays judgments, or compromise settlements of lawsuits, against the government. In 2016, two US senators wrote in Time magazine:
The Judgment Fund is a little-known account used to pay certain court judgments and settlements against the federal government. Each year, billions of dollars are disbursed from it, yet the fund does not fall under the annual appropriations process. Because of this, the Treasury Department has no binding reporting requirements, and these funds are paid out with scant scrutiny. The executive branch decides what, if any, information is made available to the public.
Essentially, the Judgment Fund is an unlimited supply of money provided to the federal government to cover its own liability.
The descriptions of the last-days theology of the world’s three great religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are accurate. All three religions trace their roots back to Abraham and claim to be part (though different parts) of the Abrahamic covenant that God established with humanity. And each religion waits for a climactic time in history, birthed in peace, when the long-awaited One (either the Messiah, Jesus’s second coming, or the Mahdi) will be revealed. While the Jewish Messiah will usher in an eternal time of peace for a world united into one confederation, both Christian and Islamic end times anticipate an ultimate and definitive armed conflict, followed by a “final judgement” of the good and the evil.
Over the course of nearly twenty-five hundred years, the fertile crescent of the Middle East—from modern Turkey into the Tigris and Euphrates valleys in Iraq, down the Jordan valley of Palestine, and across the top of Egypt and the Nile Delta—was but a portion of three vast, evolving, and competing empires: the Persian, the Muslim Arab, and the Ottoman Empires. One of the fundamental beliefs of Islam is, in fact, that once an Islamic group or nation rules any portion of the earth, it rules that portion forever. Even though the Persians gradually converted to the Islamic faith only in the mid-seventh century, following the Muslim Arab invasion of Persia, if those empires were resurrected today, each would claim the same slice of the earth.
Opened in 1955, the Incirlik Air Base—located seven miles east of downtown Adana, Turkey, but still within the city limits—includes NATO’s largest nuclear weapons storage facility.
With one ten-thousand-foot runway and fifty-seven hardened aircraft shelters, Incirlik is the most strategically important base in NATO’s Southern Region. At one time, the base had over five thousand NATO personnel stationed on its three thousand acres, in addition to two thousand family members. Adana, with a population of over one million, is the fourth largest city in Turkey.
NATO has operated a nuclear sharing program since the mid-1950s. Since 2009, NATO has stationed US nuclear weapons in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, and Turkey. While the United States and NATO maintain a “neither confirm nor deny” posture toward the numbers of its nuclear distribution, the Hoover Institute reported that the United States currently deploys somewhere between 150 and 240 air-delivered nuclear weapons (B61 gravity bombs). It is estimated that twenty-five percent of those weapons are stationed at the Incirlik Air Base in eastern Turkey, with most sources placing fifty B61 nuclear bombs at Incirlik. The B61 is a variable-yield nuclear weapon with an explosive yield of 0.3 to 340 kilotons. The “Little Boy” atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 had a yield of 15 kilotons.
Other Notes: The exteriors of St. Archangel Michael Monastery, constructed in 1894 over the ruins of a Byzantine fortress and overlooking the old port of Jaffa, are portrayed accurately. The interiors are a product of the writer’s imagination.
The Royal Air Force airbase at Akrotiri, on the southern coast of Cyprus, is administered by Britain as sovereign overseas territory. The airbase, now partially used by NATO air forces, was for a time home base for American U-2 spy plane missions over the USSR.
Unicode is a universally accepted computer coding language first implemented in 1987.
The possibility of water wars in the Middle East remains strong. Since 1975, Turkey’s dams have cut water flow to Iraq by eighty percent and to Syria by forty percent. Work on a pipeline between Turkey and Israel was suspended in 2010 after an Israeli raid on six civilian ships trying to run the Gaza Blockade resulted in the deaths of nine Turkish nationals.
The Kurdish people, native to the mountainous regions of eastern Turkey, northern Syria, and northwest Iraq, are the largest people group in the world without their own nation.
Other than the basic facts and associated research listed above, the rest of Ottoman Dominion is the result of the author’s imagination. Any errors of fact are a result of that imagination.
REVISIT THE BEGINNING OF MULLANEY’S HEROIC SAGA
“A simply riveting action/adventure suspense thriller of a novel by an author with an impressive flair for originality and the kind of deftly scripted narrative storytelling style that holds the reader’s attention from beginning to end…. Especially and unreservedly recommended.”
—Midwest Book Review
Empires of Armageddon Book Two
“A fantastic combination of thriller, historical conspiracy, biblical prophecy, and Middle Eastern complexity—and you’re never sure where the line is drawn between fact and fiction.”
—Ian Acheson, author of Angelguard
IS THE ARK OF THE COVENANT HOPE FOR HUMANITY—OR A WEAPON FOR ITS ULTIMATE DESTRUCTION?
Don’t miss Terry Brennan’s award-winning Jerusalem Prophecies series—another epic suspense trek through dangers torn straight from the headlines. Available wherever books are sold!
Terry Brennan, Ottoman Dominion
Ottoman Dominion Page 33
