History of the Middle East brought major protests, uprisings, and revolutions to several Middle Eastern countries, followed by prolonged civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. In 2014, a terrorist group and self-proclaimed caliphate calling itself the Islamic State made rapid territorial gains in western Iraq and eastern Syria, prompting international military intervention. At its peak, the group controlled an area containing an estimated 2.8 to 8 million people, 98% of which was lost by December 2017. By country: General: Works cited History of the Middle East Home to the Cradle of Civilization, the Middle East (usually interchangeable with the Near East) has seen
Origin of the Albanians that the Latin influence over Albanian is of Eastern Romance origin, rather than of Dalmatian origin, which would exclude Dalmatia as a place of origin. Adding to this the several hundred words in Romanian that are cognate only with Albanian cognates (see Eastern Romance substratum), these scholars assume that Romanians and Albanians lived in close proximity at one time. The area where this might have happened is the Morava Valley in eastern Serbia. Another argument in favor of a northern origin for the Albanian language is the relatively small number of words of Greek origin, mostly from Doric dialect, even