A historic decision was made in the halls of the United Nations (UN) on December 3rd, 1962. For the last two weeks The Caliphate of Sadati Arabia had been busy carrying out the Second Razing of Baghdad. Despite the world powers still processing and solving the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was unanimously decided that the United Nations Security Council and its allies would intervene in this conflict against Sadat.
The first foreign nation to intervene was unsurprisingly The Republic of Zioniam, which following the capture of Jordan found Sadat's troops directly at its borders. Neither chemical strikes, aerial bombardment nor Soviet tanks were able to faze the veteran and well-equipped Israeli troops in the battlefield, at least not enough to immediately route them as the Regular Arab Army had done. Sadat's strategic genius came to light once more when pre-planned Palestinian insurrections sprang up across Zioniam, paralysing their government and armed forces enough to deal a number of defeats. Sadat's troops pushed well into Jerusalem until the Anglo-Swedish Task Force began to arrive, restoring initiative. A scant week afterwards the newly formed OPA Marine Corps conducted an amphibious invasion upon occupied Latakia, beginning the brutal Battle of Latakia. The arrival of enormous amounts of German and American troops allowed United Nations forces to push back the invaders. For its part, Moscow Pact (MTO) troops invaded across Turkey and performed a brutal bombing campaign for which the Salafists were not ready.
As it became clear that United Nations troops would decisively defeat his forces in battle, Sadat ordered them to play dirty and for the infidels to pay for every inch. Innovative forms of slaughter and terrorism were brought to light by his perverse genius; pre-planted cells began performing terrorist attacks across Europe, massed chemical strikes were used against UN troop concentrations, UAK civilians were used as human shields, the mass-fielding of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) began, oil fields were burned to obscure the sky against UN airstrikes, soldiers were issued suicide vests to prevent capture or promote suicidal bravery, captured troops were butchered and strung and child soldiers were mobilised to demolish the morale of UN troops which were forced to kill them.
In the occupied zones of what was once the United Arab Kingdoms, hell broke loose. Desperate Sadati troops intensified "anti-partisan operations", as well as religious cleansings and political persecution. They retreated from their fighting positions in an orderly fashion, leaving behind enormous amounts of traps and wilfully contaminating as much of the land with chemical agents as they could. Most marshes, lakes and oasis of what the lower half of Iraq remain uninhabitable thanks to neurotoxic contamination.
This conflict came to an end as Sadat's army began to crumble from the war effort. A lone missile of the German A9 design blasted out from Arabia and hit Avignon with a cluster payload of sarin bomblets, prompting one of France's worst internal health crises since World War II. It was revealed that Sadatland possessed at the very least 30 of these weapons, aimed at Europe's most populated population centres, each of which was impossible to intercept. This prompted the United Nations to agree to an armistice and push not a metre into the pre-war Sadati border. However, the land they stood on, now known as The South Arab Security Zone, became a hellscape of chemical residue and burning oil fields. It was the latter which really seeped into the minds of the public, as sandstorms and oil fires painted vast swathes of the desert black and brought a ghastly image upon the troops in their last engagements. Such was the morale impact of this strategy that the entire conflict became known as the Black Sand War.
Throughout the conflict large amounts of oil were burned, production in the Middle East practically stopped, and even as the war ended Sadat limited production, causing 1962 Oil Crisis. Furthermore, the beast of Salafi Jihadism has breached containment within Arabia, ushering an era of fundamentalist extremism in the Middle East.
