The Caucasus

It started with a "witty" comment regarding defining one's race: "I am an American," he said. "I am not a Caucasian. My ancestors were from Ireland, not the Caucasus."

This got me to thinking, just where are the Caucasus? This thought led to my reading 4 very good, different books on the region situated more or less between Iran and Russia, the Black and Caspian Seas. This is by far the most volatile, war-torn region in the European world, and quite possibly the whole damn thing.

The sparks were set nearly in antiquity, but the overreaching theme has been empire expansion. The turks kicked the Armenians out of what is today eastern Turkey. The Russians attempted to colonize the North Caucasus in the czarist era. But the real flames began with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without a centralized authority to settle cross-border disputes, or to clamp down on far outposts of their own nation, former Republics began to declare independence and fight their neighbors. This has led to one of the longest running insurgent wars in modern times. It is emblemized by Chechnya and Russia, but you can susbtitute either player with many others in region over the past 15+ years.

Kevin Sites, from Yahoo has been reporting on wars around the globe and is currently in the Caucasus. If you would like to read about some heartbreaking atrocities and at the same time enlighten yourself to some seriously underreported warfare, I suggest you check it out. He does a great job.