(NOTE: This article is the second in a series of long-form, deep-dive investigations into the development of Islamic political thought during the 20th and 21st centuries. If you haven’t read the first, it may be worth your while doing so before continuing. You can find it here. The aim is to dig into these developments so that we can be much better equipped to face up to the reality of the struggle with Islamist dreams of world domination. We will, of course, get to ISIS and Al-Qaida eventually, but the first few episodes will explore earlier developments that directly fed into their rise. You may want to get a hot drink before tackling the pieces in this series, but hopefully it will be more than worth your valuable time! Also, please do not hesitate to let me know what you think of these articles)
It certainly made for great television. Masked men in black, using an excavator to demolish a border post between Syria and Iraq. This June 2014 action, orchestrated by the Islamic State (ISIS), was presented as destroying something much bigger than border markers. According to an ISIS spokesman this was nothing less than the ‘end of Sykes-Picot’. To which many non-Arabs probably responded with: “Sykes who!?”
Anyone even vaguely aware of the history of colonialism will be very familiar with the notion that ‘lines drawn on a map’ can have outsized consequences on the ground. In terms of the Arab world the Sykes-Picot Agreement, signed on 16 May 1916, was the moment when some of the most consequential lines in the sand were drawn. The two gentlemen after whom the agreement was named were Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot, representing the British and French governments respectively. They were tasked by their governments to work out the fate of the Ottoman territories after World War I.
As we saw in the previous article in the series, the Ottomans chose badly in terms of who to ally themselves with during the war. This choice eventually led to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the Caliphate. However, by mid-1916 it was not at all clear that the British-French led alliance would emerge victorious from the Great War. So, at the very least you have to admire the chutzpah of these powers to start the process of dividing the spoils of war while the outcome was still in the balance.
It is important to understand that the Ottoman Empire controlled territories that reached way beyond the borders of the modern state of Turkey. So as Sykes and Picot sat down to their negotiations, they were making decisions that would ultimately affect most of the Middle East because the negotiations involved all Ottoman provinces outside the Arabic Peninsula. Sykes and Picot ultimately drew a line that would separate areas of British and French influence and control.
The deal gave the British control of what is now southern Israel and Palestine, Jordan, and southern Iraq, as well as a tiny territory that contained the ports of Haifa and Acre for Mediterranean access. South-eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon were to be under French authority. The famous (in the Arab world at least) Sykes-Picot line starts at the Mediterranean on the coast of Israel and extends all the way into Iraq, with territories to the north of the line in the French sphere of influence and those to the south in the British sphere. As an aside, for complicated reasons that I’m not going to go into here, the current border between Iraq and Syria does not follow the Sykes-Picot line, so ISIS fired up their bulldozers at a spot several hundred kilometres from the line they claimed to be eradicating!