War for the Nile

The War for the Nile was a conflict that lasted between 1950 and 1952 in which the Kingdom of Egypt and the Sudan declared war on the Kingdom of Italy. The war began after Italy began construction of the Vittorio Emanuele II Dam on the Blue Nile in Italian East Africa which was considered to be an existential threat to Egypt.
Both Egypt and Italy desired a successful war - where Italy had been humiliated by their failure to easily win the Greco-Italian War many years earlier, while Egypt had very recently been humiliated in the First Palestinian War where, though they didn't officially join the war, they had sent an expeditionary force that was easily beaten by Jewish forces.
== Prelude ==
=== Vittorio Emanuele II Dam ===
Since the 1920's, there had been considerations to build a dam along the Blue Nile, initially by the British and then by Italy following the conquest of Ethiopia. The ability to generate a large amount of electricity through the dam, as well as trying to encourage the local populace to cease their insurgency against the Italian colonial authorities pushed the Italians to move ahead with the construction of the dam.
Knowing they would encounter Egyptian resistance to such a move, the Italians sought to take advantage of the distraction caused by the First Palestinian War to begin construction of the dam.
=== First Palestinian War ===
The region of Transjordan and Palestine had been under Saudi Arabian control since 1942 when the United Kingdom ceded the region to House Saud in a plan formulated by St John Philby. The idea had been to strengthen House Saud against the Hashemite dynasty who controlled Iraq and Transjordan, while also relieving Britain of any responsibility over an area where religious and ethnic conflicts were causing a rapidly deteriorating situation between Muslim Arabs and Jews. 
Though initially Saudi Arabia did little to effect the Jews living in the Palestine region, as more terrorist incidents were carried out by the Jewish Irgun who desire a free Jewish state in the region, the Saud's started to enact harsher policies against Jews which only escalated the issue. Despite some attempts by the British to mediate the issue, they had washed their hands of the region for this very reason and thus saw little to gain, especially when their focus was on the movement of their own Jewish population to Guyana.
Category:Wars
Category:Conflicts
Category:Conflicts involving Italy
Category:Conflicts involving Egypt