Historically, none of the countries in the ME look the way the lines are drawn now - largely arbitrarily to suit the needs of colonial powers that needed to sort things out quickly, and divide the spoils, following WW1 and the collapse of the 'Sick Man of Europe': the Ottoman Empire.
How the Curse of Sykes-Picot Still Haunts the Middle East
“Hundreds of thousands have been killed because of Sykes-Picot and all the problems it created,” Nawzad Hadi Mawlood, the governor of Iraq’s Erbil Province, told me when I saw him this spring. “It changed the course of history—and nature.”
May 16th will mark the agreement’s hundredth anniversary, amid questions over whether its borders can survive the region’s current furies. “The system in place for the past one hundred years has collapsed,” Barham Salih, a former deputy prime minister of Iraq, declared at the
Sulaimani Forum, in Iraqi Kurdistan, in March. “It’s not clear what new system will take its place.”
A century after the Sykes-Picot Agreement carved up the Ottoman Empire, it is still the root cause of much of the region’s strife.
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