One of the propaganda lines peddled by jihadist groups is that they are abolishing the colonial boundaries drawn by Britain and France after the First World War, which created Iraq and Syria. The villains in this story are two Orientalist diplomats, Sir Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot, who divided up the territory of the Ottoman Empire in the now notorious Sykes-Picot agreement.
The purpose of this agreement was not to promote the development of the Arabs. Far from it. Its goal was to divide the territory into spheres of influence in order to prevent Britain and France fighting over the spoils of the Ottoman Empire.
With each passing month the fat lines on the map drawn by Sykes and Picot are getting more media coverage. The Islamic State – the Sunni Muslim jihadist group formerly known as the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq or ISIL – has shocked the world by sweeping into northern Iraq and capturing the city of Mosul, is at the forefront.
In a new video titled The end of Sykes-Picot, an English-speaking jihadist proclaims the abolition of the border between Iraq and Syria and promises to remove all frontiers in the region to turn it into one expansive caliphate.
As anyone who has crossed through the desert wasteland between the populated centres of Iraq and Syria knows, the border is a virtual affair, long ignored by tribes, smugglers and jihadists. But in the mindset of the Islamic State it is the original sin of the modern Arab world. The camera records a lonely Iraqi police station being blown up. The jihadist presenter extols the amount of “ghanima” (booty) his men have seized in the form of border police vehicles. The natural reaction is to ask why all the fuss about a patch of uninhabited desert?
The historic focus on the Sykes-Picot colonial diktat is comforting for many constituencies. It absolves Arab political elites of responsibility for failing to make a success of modern nation states, it distracts blame from Britain and America for the catastrophic legacy of their 2003 invasion of Iraq and it provides a simple justification for a pan-Islamic caliphate to replace European-style nation states and the failed doctrine of Arab nationalism.
But were the borders laid down by Sykes and Picot really the cause of today’s mayhem? Simple geography decrees that Iraq and Syria are separate entities. When the Arab world emerged from under the boot of the Ottomans, they would inevitably have ended up as separate states.
The borders were in general based on Ottoman administrative divisions. Despite ruling for hundreds of years, the Ottomans did not know what to do with the patch of desert now “liberated” by the Islamic State. Known in the 19th century as the Sanjak (a second-tier district) of Zor, it was originally attached to Baghdad and then reassigned to Aleppo. The name Syria – eschewed by the Salafis as an imposed colonial label – was used by the Turks for the province around Damascus in response to growing national feeling at the end of the 19th century. It is not an invention of Sykes and Picot.
Far from nurturing the Syrian state, the French tried their best to continue the Ottoman policy of divide and rule by splitting the territory into mini-states, including one for the Druze in the south and one on the coast for the Alawites, the heterodox sect to which the ruling Assad family belong and which supplied the “special troops” the French used to impose their control of the territory.
Syrian nationalist pressure forced the French to combine most of these zones into a Syrian state in 1925, though they managed to keep the “Alawite state” separate until 1937. So Syria, for all its weaknesses as a nation state, has an honourable history of struggle against colonial rule which commands loyalty among its citizens.
The jihadists abhor any form of nationalism, but that is no reason to swallow their propaganda. Yezid Sayigh, an expert on the region now with the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut, believes that while the battle fronts in Syria and Iraq are connected, the struggle for power in each country is domestic. The tribes in Syria who profess allegiance to the Islamic State do it to gain advantage over their local rivals, he says. The tribes in western Iraq who have joined forces with the jihadists ultimately want to improve their position with the Baghdad government. In the long term, jobs are more important than booty.
The conflicts in both countries are different but one thing unites them: disaffection at the failure of rulers to share power and wealth. In Syria, it was one family taking all the proceeds of privatisation at a time of terrible drought. In Iraq, it was the prime minister, Nouri Al Maliki, provoking a fight with the Sunni minority in order to solidify Shia opinion behind him. Rampant sectarianism is the result, but this is not the origin.
Writing about the Kurds of northern Iraq on these pages yesterday, my colleague Michael Young asked: “As Iraq fractures, is this the start of regional collapse?” The Iraqi Kurds, driven by a national, not a sectarian identity, and with their own supplies of oil, are all but lost to Iraq. Their formal separation from Iraq is a real possibility, perhaps only a matter of time.
But for the Arabs of Iraq and Syria, the solution is not so clear. Do the Sunnis and Shia want to repeat the bloodbath of Indian partition in 1947? Hardly.
They will have to find some kind of accommodation within existing borders but one which ensures the minority cannot be tyrannised by the majority. And as for Syria, will it be divided into France’s Druze and Alawite states? Unthinkable. However hard to believe at the moment, these peoples must find a way to live together. The lines on the map drawn by Sykes and Picot have more life in them the jihadists would have us believe.
Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs
On Twitter: @aphilps