Skip to content
Curated category

Countries in West Asia

  • Saudi ArabiaSaudi Arabia is the only country on Earth with a coastline along both the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf. It covers roughly 2,150,000 square kilometers, the…
  • KuwaitKuwait sits at the head of the Persian Gulf, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have built their delta for thousands of years.
  • JordanJordan sits at a crossroads few countries can claim: the meeting point of Asia, Africa, and Europe, bordered by Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and…
  • AbkhaziaAbkhazia covers 8,665 square kilometres on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, yet most of the world does not recognise it exists as a country.
  • Georgia (country)Georgia sits at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and West Asia, a country of 3.9 million people whose language bears no relation to any other language family…
  • South OssetiaSouth Ossetia sits in a narrow fold of the Caucasus Mountains, covering just 3,900 square kilometres and home to just over 56,500 people.
  • SyriaSyria sits at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, a country whose name carries the echo of an ancient empire it was never quite part of.
  • QatarQatar is a country smaller than Connecticut that holds the world's third-largest natural gas reserves, and for a stretch in the early 2010s it was ranked the…
  • AzerbaijanAzerbaijan sits at a crossroads so ancient and contested that even its name carries the echoes of a Persian satrap from the age of Alexander the Great.
  • United Arab EmiratesThe United Arab Emirates sits at the eastern end of the Arabian Peninsula, a place where stone tools from 130,000 years ago share the same soil as the…
  • IraqIraq sits at the very point where human civilization first took hold. Between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a region the ancients called Mesopotamia, the…
  • IsraelThe Merneptah Stele, an ancient Egyptian monument dated to the late 13th century BCE, bears the earliest known archaeological reference to Israel as a…
  • IranIran sits on one of the world's oldest continuous major civilizations, and the people of present-day Iran were first unified under the Medes in the 7th…
  • EgyptEgypt covers the northeast corner of Africa and the southwest corner of Asia, joined by the Sinai Peninsula. Over 107 million people live there, making it…
  • TurkeyTurkey, officially the Republic of Türkiye, is home to over 86 million people. Its capital, Ankara, sits inland on the high central plateau, while Istanbul…