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And Iraq continues to hold together, albeit shakily and with the Kurdish north practicing some autonomy from Baghdad. In Syria, both the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and the opposition continue to aspire to a unitary state rather than a much mooted break-up into mini states to better reflect the country’s sectarian demographics. Yet, despite ISIS’s bold promise and the collapse of governance in several states in the Arab world, including Yemen and Libya, the borders themselves remain surprisingly durable. “This is not the first border we will break, we will break other borders,” an ISIS gunman said in the video. A video of the operation was entitled “the end of Sykes-Picot.” In June 2014, the self-declared Islamic State (IS) bulldozed through an earth berm marking the border between Iraq and Syria. 6 summer hearings wrap up: What did we learn? The conflicts roiling the region, particularly those in Syria and Iraq, have thrown into question whether the post-World War I nation-states can survive or whether new entities will emerge from the turmoil in the years ahead. The Middle East today is undergoing its greatest political and social upheaval since the agreement negotiated by Sykes and the French statesman Francois George Picot was signed 100 years ago this week. That blunt proposal to divide the Middle East into British and French spheres of influence was the seed that would lead a few years later to the birth of the modern Middle East and with it decades of political turmoil, wars, sectarian bloodletting, socioeconomic disparities, and the interminable Arab-Israel conflict. ”īritain, he said, would retain control of the territory to the south of the line, while the French would have Greater Syria north of the line. Standing before Britain’s top leaders, Sir Mark Sykes slashed his finger across his map of the region and, according to James Barr’s book “A Line in the Sand,” said, “I should like to draw a line from the ‘e’ in Acre to the ‘k’ in Kirkuk. One December morning in 1915, with World War I not yet 18 months old, a young diplomat stalked into the offices of the British prime minister in London, carrying with him a map and a bold plan for the future of the Middle East once the allies had defeated Germany and the Ottoman Empire.
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