Ishval Civil War

Long before open war, the people of Ishval had repeatedly bristled against the central authority of Amestris, having been folded into a territory along the nation's southeastern edge near the Eastern Desert. An uneasy calm held despite religious and cultural friction until 1901, when a soldier gunned down an Ishvalan child. What looked like a tragic accident was in fact deliberate, the shooter being the homunculus Envy wearing a soldier's face. Fury swept the region, riots hardened into open rebellion, and the fighting swelled until the whole East Area of Amestris had become a battlefield.

Though the Amestrian forces vastly outnumbered them, the Ishvalans refused to fold. A steady flow of arms smuggled in from neighboring Aerugo, which wanted Amestris' southern frontier weakened for its own ends, kept the rebels supplied, and their skill at guerrilla fighting dragged the war into a grinding stalemate. Seven years in, in 1908, Führer King Bradley signed Order 3066, which unleashed the State Alchemists onto the front as living weapons. The shift was as decisive as it was monstrous, crushing the last resistance and branding the alchemists themselves with lasting infamy for the massacre they carried out.

The occupation left Ishval's people all but erased, the survivors driven from their homeland into slums and border ruins. Amestris bled too: whole squads fell, among them soldiers cut down by Scar, and the doctors Urey and Sara Rockbell, who treated the wounded on both sides, were killed. Resembool, birthplace of the Elric brothers, was bombed and its growth stunted for good.

The deepest wounds, though, were of the mind. Many alchemists handed back their certifications afterward. Tim Marcoh fled with his Philosopher's Stone research, sickened at the lives it had cost; Alex Louis Armstrong broke down over the innocents he had killed; Isaac McDougal was so unhinged by his own crimes that he later turned on the state. Roy Mustang and Riza Hawkeye carried heavy guilt of their own. The few who felt none, among them Fessler, Basque Grand, Solf J. Kimblee, and Giolio Comanche, each met their own ruin. One grim irony was the boom the war handed the automail trade, as amputees flooded in for prosthetics.

Only later does the full horror surface. This war, like every conflict in Amestris' past, was engineered to spill the blood needed for the Nationwide Transmutation Circle. Ishval marked the second-to-last point of the great outer design, with the north at Briggs the last, and the circle was set off roughly eight years after the guns fell silent.