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A common
theme running through much of the leading commentary on the Syrian
crisis is the idea that the principal borders of the modern Middle East,
created by the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, are about to be
fundamentally altered if not erased completely. In mid-March, Turkish
Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu gave a university speech in which he
said that the political order in the Middle East created by the
Sykes-Picot Agreement was coming to an end. He envisioned Turkey's
influence returning to those areas which were once under its sovereignty
but were lost to the European colonial powers.
It seems
that everyone is talking about the end of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. In
mid-May, David Ignatius of The Washington Post warned the Russians that
they would suffer most from "the dissolution of the Sykes-Picot
boundaries in the Middle East." At the same time, Elliot Abrams, who
served as the deputy national security adviser under former U.S.
President George W. Bush wrote about "the unraveling" of the Sykes-Picot
agreement. Several weeks earlier, one of France's leading commentators
in the Middle East, Antoine Basbous, wrote in Le Figaro on April 21 that
the "artificial boundaries" established by Sykes-Picot were about to
receive their final blow from what he called "the Arab tsunami and its
aftershocks."
It is
difficult to exaggerate the importance of this change should it
transpire. In October 1916, during World War I, Sir Mark Sykes,
representing Britain, and Charles Francois Georges-Picot, representing
France, reached a secret understanding dividing the Asian territories of
the Ottoman Empire into spheres of influence that would be dominated by
both countries. When the League of Nations established mandates over
the former Ottoman territories that the allies subsequently captured,
the mandate for Syria and Lebanon went to France while the mandate for
Iraq went to Britain. These mandatory regimes in the years that followed
led to the empowerment of the Alawite minority over the Sunni majority
in Syria and the establishment of the domination of the Sunni minority
in Iraq over the Shiites.
The
Sykes-Picot Agreement also separated what would become British mandatory
Palestine, which had been known among its Arab residents prior to WWI
as Surya al-Janubiyya (Southern Syria) from French mandatory Syria to
its north. In 1916, Russia, still under the Czar, supported the
Sykes-Picot agreement in exchange for its territorial demands being
recognized by the British and the French in what became Turkey. Thus the
borders of at least five Middle Eastern states would eventually be
determined by the original Sykes-Picot Agreement.
Presently,
the Middle Eastern border that most observers are focusing on is the
600 kilometer (370 mile) border separating Syria from Iraq. On the
Syrian side, important newspapers, like the Financial Times, have been
writing this week about the "disintegration of Syria." Similarly, The
New York Times asserted that the Syrian state is "breaking up." It
suggested that at least three different Syrias are now emerging: one
loyal to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, another loyal
to the opposition, and a Kurdish Syria with ties to Northern Iraq and
Kurdish groups in Turkey.
Particularly
accelerating the demise of the Sykes-Picot borders are events on the
Iraqi side of the border. Incidents during the last year point in the
direction of the eventual breakup of the Iraqi state. This coming
September, a new pipeline carrying Kurdish oil through Turkey, will link
Iraqi Kurdistan to its Turkish market instead of to the rest of Iraq.
This development is seen in the West as the first step toward the
independence of Kurdistan. Indeed, the Kurds are cutting separate deals
with international oil companies and circumventing the central Iraqi
government in Baghdad. A spokesman for U.S. President Barack Obama's
National Security Council has stated on the record that the U.S. opposes
oil exports from any part of Iraq "without the appropriate approval of
the Iraqi federal government." Washington opposes Kurdish economic
initiatives that could lead to the dissolution of Iraq into at least
three states: Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni.
Kurdistan
may be ready to become independent. What about the rest? The Shiite
areas of Iraq south of Baghdad to the Kuwaiti border will be dominated
one way or another by Iran. But what will happen to the Sunni sectors of
Iraq, like the al-Anbar Province? In the last year, the Sunni Arab
tribes in Iraq that span the Syrian-Iraqi border have joined the war
against the Assad regime. Tribes like the Shammar, who migrated from the
Arabian Peninsula to the Jazira plain between the Tigris and Euphrates
Rivers in the 17th century, have been regularly crossing the
Iraqi-Syrian border back and forth for many years.
The
prospect that their Sunni cousins in Syria will eventually defeat the
Assad regime, or at least take over part of the Syrian state, has
energized the Sunni Arabs of Iraq, who felt previously that the 2003
Iraq War had led to the defeat of their Sunni-dominated regime under
Saddam Hussein and a victory for Iraq's Shiite majority. Now, they sense
they can take back their autonomy from Baghdad.
Former
U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker (serving between 2007 and 2009)
wrote in The Washington Post on May 1 that al-Qaida-Iraq has
re-established itself in areas in which it was defeated by U.S. and
Iraqi forces over the last five years. It should come as no surprise
that Crocker defines the leading jihadist force fighting Assad's army,
Jabhat al-Nusra, as a front group for al-Qaida in Iraq. In March, the
executions of eleven Syrian soldiers in a public square in the town of
al-Raqqa, inside northern Syria, were carried out under the flag of
Iraqi al-Qaida. The old Sykes-Picot border was clearly meaningless for
affiliates of al-Qaida. An Iraqi commentator noted that since 2011,
there have been religious calls for erasing the old Iraqi-Syrian border
and unifying the Sunni regions on both sides.
Should
the fragmentation of Syria combine with the Balkanization of Iraq, what
will the Middle East look like? The Sunni Arabs are the likely
candidates to look for mergers with their neighbors. If they are
politically dominated by the same branch of al-Qaida, then the emergence
of a new Afghanistan in the heart of the Arab world might be the
result. If more moderate forces among the Iraqi Sunnis emerge, then it
should not be ruled out that they might consider some federal ties with
their western Sunni neighbor, Jordan, which would give them an outlet to
the Red Sea.
But
however the political systems in Syria and Iraq evolve, it is clear
that the map of the Middle East is likely to be very different from the
map that the colonial powers fixed during World War I and which has
endured for roughly 97 years since British and French officials first
put it on paper. The only boundary in the Middle East that Western
diplomats have become rigidly obsessed with, despite the far more
profound changes that are occurring across the region, is not even
formally an international border under international law, but only an
armistice line from 1949 - what is inappropriately called the 1967
border. While a solution to this territorial dispute must be addressed,
the final borders drawn between Israel and it's neighbors will have to
take into account the current dramatic strategic shifts.
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