Iraq Crisis Prelude to ‘Perfect Storm’ of Civil Disorder, Warns British Security Expert

LONDON - July 15, 2014 - PRLog -- The Islamist insurgency in Iraq could signal the accelerated unravelling of the geopolitical order in the Middle East and North Africa, according to renowned investigative journalist and international security scholar Dr Nafeez Ahmed. A combination of political repression, failed economic models, young disenfranchised populations and escalating resource scarcity due to energy, food and water crises are contributing to what he calls a “new age of unrest.”

In a recent Guardian article, Ahmed argues that increasing episodes of civil unrest in far apart locations from Brazil to Ukraine to Thailand, are symptoms of an accelerating “global riot epidemic” due to the end of cheap oil and intensifying climate disasters.

“The new age of expensive fossil fuels and climate emergencies is undermining the most important resource of all for human survival – cheap food,” said Ahmed, who writes for The Guardian on the geopolitics of energy, economics and the environment. “People are looking for a scapegoat for their problems. Sometimes they take to the streets. Other times, opportunists recruit them to their causes. National security agencies are preparing for when these trends hit western homelands.”

Ahmed, who has contributed to two major terrorism investigations in the US and UK (the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquiry) explores the dangers of an all-powerful national security state in his debut novel ZERO POINT, due out on 18th August from Curiosity Quills Press. ZERO POINT explores how US and British defence planning for the impact of climate change, energy crises and economic instability is undermining democracy and criminalising activists while fuelling terrorism.

In a series of Guardian exclusives this summer, Ahmed exposed how the Pentagon and UK Ministry of Defence use social science to develop tools to track anti-capitalist activism, political dissent and public opposition to fossil fuels. His exclusive reporting has also included revelations on the link between NSA mass surveillance, environmental crisis, and political activism; and how US-UK covert operations and foreign policies have empowered Gulf state-backed jihadists, fanning the flames of Middle East unrest from Iraq to Egypt to Syria.

In March 2014, Ahmed made global headlines with his exclusive report on a NASA-funded model of the risks of civilisational collapse which identified how widening economic inequalities and looming resource shortages due to ecological stress could precipitate a collapse of global industrial civilisation.

Ahmed’s novel, ZERO POINT, is a science fiction thriller inspired by true events. Ahmed draws on his first-hand experience as a journalist, scholar, and government adviser to weave a plausible action-packed story of the dangers of an all-powerful national security state in the age of converging environmental and economic crises. His story anticipated the collapse of the Iraqi state and the rise of an al-Qaeda insurgency there, and is based in a near future world in which Britain and the United States intervene to put down this insurgency, with dramatic unforeseen consequences abroad and at home.

Check out the ZERO POINT website and trailer at zro.pt. For press inquiries please contact Nikki Tetreault on nikki@curiosityquills.com or (802) 735-8115