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THERE IS NO AL-SHAM
Foreign Policy Magazine
June 18 2014
Militants in Iraq and Syria are trying to re-create a nation that
never existed.
BY Nick Danforth, a doctoral candidate in Turkish history at Georgetown
University. He writes about Middle Eastern history, politics, and
maps at midafternoonmap.com.
Over the past few years, as Syria has dissolved into warring fiefdoms
and Iraq has struggled to emerge from its disastrous civil war,
American commentators have listed the many failings of the Sykes-Picot
Agreement, upon which the Middle East's state system was based. The
1916 arrangement divided the Ottoman Empire's dominions in the
Arab world into British and French "zones of influence," laying the
foundation for the region's modern borders. The intense criticism of
Sykes-Picot has provoked a backlash of sorts, as some analysts have
suggested that piling blame on the agreement has distracted from what
has really ailed the Middle East in the post-colonial period.
After capturing Mosul, Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham
(ISIS) announced "the beginning of the end of the Sykes Picot
agreement," as the Guardian put it. The arrival of better-armed critics
of the agreement seemed to herald a fundamental transformation of
the Middle East's borders -- but behind ISIS's recent success lie a
number of ironies inherent in both the group's rhetoric and our own
assumptions about the Middle East.
For all the imagination with which we've mentally remapped the region,
we remain strangely wedded to the notion that political upheaval
could reveal a new, more authentic set of Middle Eastern borders --
based on ethnic and sectarian divisions, perhaps, or the re-emergence
of some pre-imperialist geography. But recent developments suggest
that if things do change dramatically, force and chance will play
a greater role in determining what happens next than demography,
geography, or history.
Consider the moniker "Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham." Both Iraq
and al-Sham are place names with their own historical and political
cachet, but it's telling that ISIS's leadership couldn't come up with
a single geographical term to describe its current area of operations.
Al-Sham -- which has sometimes been translated as Syria, though
perhaps "Greater Syria" or "the Levant" gives a clearer sense of the
geography -- was most recently the name of an Ottoman province based
in Damascus. Iraq, by contrast, was a geographical term that came
into its own with the arrival of the British in the 1920s.
Operating on the sound logic of opportunism, ISIS is claiming to
unite two regions that even the first opponents of the European
mandate system were content to treat as separate.
Operating on the sound logic of opportunism, ISIS is claiming to
unite two regions that even the first opponents of the European
mandate system were content to treat as separate. In the immediate
aftermath of World War I, some of the earliest Arab nationalists came
together in defense of a state covering the entire Levant. When Faisal,
champion of the Arab revolt and later king of Iraq, proclaimed in
1920 a short-lived Arab Kingdom based in Damascus, he imagined its
territory stretching from the Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey to
the Sinai Peninsula, but not east into Iraq.
The fate of subsequent plans to bring together Iraq and Syria is also
telling. After World War II, the Hashemite rulers of Jordan and Iraq
expressed interest in various schemes for uniting the region. Syria's
leaders, unsurprisingly, thought that they would lose out in this
arrangement, which came to naught anyway when Iraq's army ousted its
Hashemite king, alleging among other things that he was a British
puppet.
Subsequently, the rise of secular-socialist Baath parties in both
Iraq and Syria seemed to offer grounds for unification -- but power
politics and the intricacies of Baathist ideology almost immediately
created a newfound hostility between Damascus and Baghdad.
Syria's attempt to unite with Egypt under the banner of Arab
nationalism was no more successful.
ISIS, which now finds itself allied with Sunni Baathists in Iraq while
fighting to the death against Alawite Baathists in Syria, is no more
likely to triumph over regional particularism than the regimes that
came before it. Instead, the most enduring link between Iraq and Syria
today might be the millions of refugees who, over the past decade, have
crossed and recrossed the border fleeing violence in both directions.
Dreams of transnational unification aside, one of the most striking
historical precedents for the area ISIS controlled before last week
was the far older division between the settled and nomadic parts of
the Middle East. A fascinating Ottoman map from World War I describes
as "Syrian" the inhabitants of the western agricultural region that
includes all of Syria's major cities, while those living farther east
in the desert are "Arabs." British geography texts from the same period
show the same division, in this case between settled "Ottomans" and
wandering Arabs who lived in the empty space between Iraq and Syria.
As a result, the territory separating Iraq and Syria was never of
much importance to the creators of the Sykes-Picot system. At its
southern end, this border crosses a stretch of desert that Ottoman and
Western cartographers often left blank. The relatively more populous
stretch of the border that ISIS's new pseudo-state straddles made up
the Ottoman province of Deir ez-Zor, best known today as the place
Ottoman Armenians were sent to die of thirst in 1915.
Subsequently, when the British and French carved up the region,
it was at least a decade before they bothered to properly demarcate
this border. The matter was seemingly of so little consequence that
the European powers left it up to a League of Nations commission. The
result, complete with thalwegs, trigonometric points, and boundary
stones, must have seemed particularly arbitrary to the tribes whose
territory spread across it -- but it also might not have mattered
that much. Throughout the colonial period, the tribes' transborder
grazing and watering practices continued unchanged.
In short, ISIS has so far succeeded not by remaking the state system
but by operating, like many guerrilla groups before it, from the
ungoverned areas between existing states.
In short, ISIS has so far succeeded not by remaking the state system
but by operating, like many guerrilla groups before it, from the
ungoverned areas between existing states.
The backlash provoked by ISIS's brutal tactics and rapid success also
reveals the limits of conceiving of the Middle East along ethnic and
sectarian lines. The group's religious extremism has alienated even
its most radical Sunni allies in the fight against Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad and has driven half a million Iraqis out of Mosul.
Syrians and Iraqis alike have deployed the language of nationalism
to denounce ISIS fighters as foreign interlopers in their territory,
while Iraqi Shiites are now all the more likely to see Iranian troops
on their soil as coreligionists instead of Persian invaders.
Indeed, ISIS has inspired an unprecedented degree of consensus between
Turks, Kurds, Iraqis, and Iranians on the need to defeat the jihadi
group. With ISIS taking 49 people hostage after overrunning Turkey's
consulate in Mosul, Turkish commentators reminded readers that their
prime minister's piety would not keep Turkey on the group's good side.
Violent chaos on Turkey's southern border has also been an added factor
behind the Turkish government's ongoing effort to make peace with the
country's Kurdish minority. Although agonizingly slow and beset with
false steps, this initiative has nonetheless brought Turkey closer
than ever before to ending decades of internal violence and securing
its territorial integrity.
At the same time, ISIS's rise has strengthened the hand of Iraq's
Kurds. The Kurdish Peshmerga has taken control of Kirkuk, but rather
than trigger a civil war with Iraq's central government -- as it
likely would have in the past -- Baghdad remains at least temporarily
dependent on the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)'s cooperation. Of
all the region's actors, the KRG now stands perhaps the best chance
of having its independence recognized.
Yes, this is a tribute to the power of Kurdish nationalism in
overcoming intra-Kurdish political differences. But it's also a tribute
to the KRG's pragmatism. For over a decade, it has built a functioning
state by, among other things, cooperating with Turkey instead of making
any effort to liberate what, in the Kurdish post-Sykes-Picot fantasy,
would be Northern Kurdistan.
The KRG's coming challenges, however, offer one more testament to
why redrawing borders along ethnic lines remains an ugly, impractical
business. If Kurdish forces hope to maintain a firm hold on Kirkuk,
they will have to show they can provide security for all the city's
inhabitants -- not just ethnic Kurds. Once again, the prevailing
approach to drawing the borders of modern states -- basing them on
ethnic identity or historical claims - will be shown to make little
sense. It's an old story: Try to figure out how to adjudicate between
proponents of Kurdistan and Greater Armenia, say, with reference to
these maximalist maps of Armenian- and Kurdish-inhabited territory
in Anatolia. (Too easy? Try it with Assyrian claims as well.)
Of course, the alternative of simply deferring to precedent and
affirming existing borders is often just as illogical. There are plenty
of excellent reasons for defending Ukraine's territorial integrity
against Russian aggression -- but it's still awkward that the country
took on its present shape when Joseph Stalin gave it a large chunk of
what was once Poland. Or consider Saddam Hussein's selectivity when he
justified his invasion of Kuwait by accusing the British of stealing it
from Iraq -- without ever thanking them for putting together the rest
of his country. More recently, efforts to determine the exact frontier
between Sudan and South Sudan stumbled when, after searching libraries
in Khartoum, Cairo, and London, no one could find any maps showing
in detail the provincial borders that the British drew a century ago.
Ironically, the most successful effort yet at eliminating outdated
borders drawn by 19th-century Europeans remains the European Union.
And that consensus only emerged from the belated realization that
a century of fighting over the continent's true borders hadn't done
anyone any good.
Sadly, the EU's gilded dysfunction remains more than the Middle East
can hope for in the near future. But the EU's fundamental insight
remains sound: If we are going to discuss the end of Sykes-Picot,
let's first recognize that -- no matter how little sense those borders
make -- none of the alternatives are intrinsically more sensible.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/06/17/there_is_no_al_sham_iraq_isis_syria_levant_maps
Foreign Policy Magazine
June 18 2014
Militants in Iraq and Syria are trying to re-create a nation that
never existed.
BY Nick Danforth, a doctoral candidate in Turkish history at Georgetown
University. He writes about Middle Eastern history, politics, and
maps at midafternoonmap.com.
Over the past few years, as Syria has dissolved into warring fiefdoms
and Iraq has struggled to emerge from its disastrous civil war,
American commentators have listed the many failings of the Sykes-Picot
Agreement, upon which the Middle East's state system was based. The
1916 arrangement divided the Ottoman Empire's dominions in the
Arab world into British and French "zones of influence," laying the
foundation for the region's modern borders. The intense criticism of
Sykes-Picot has provoked a backlash of sorts, as some analysts have
suggested that piling blame on the agreement has distracted from what
has really ailed the Middle East in the post-colonial period.
After capturing Mosul, Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham
(ISIS) announced "the beginning of the end of the Sykes Picot
agreement," as the Guardian put it. The arrival of better-armed critics
of the agreement seemed to herald a fundamental transformation of
the Middle East's borders -- but behind ISIS's recent success lie a
number of ironies inherent in both the group's rhetoric and our own
assumptions about the Middle East.
For all the imagination with which we've mentally remapped the region,
we remain strangely wedded to the notion that political upheaval
could reveal a new, more authentic set of Middle Eastern borders --
based on ethnic and sectarian divisions, perhaps, or the re-emergence
of some pre-imperialist geography. But recent developments suggest
that if things do change dramatically, force and chance will play
a greater role in determining what happens next than demography,
geography, or history.
Consider the moniker "Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham." Both Iraq
and al-Sham are place names with their own historical and political
cachet, but it's telling that ISIS's leadership couldn't come up with
a single geographical term to describe its current area of operations.
Al-Sham -- which has sometimes been translated as Syria, though
perhaps "Greater Syria" or "the Levant" gives a clearer sense of the
geography -- was most recently the name of an Ottoman province based
in Damascus. Iraq, by contrast, was a geographical term that came
into its own with the arrival of the British in the 1920s.
Operating on the sound logic of opportunism, ISIS is claiming to
unite two regions that even the first opponents of the European
mandate system were content to treat as separate.
Operating on the sound logic of opportunism, ISIS is claiming to
unite two regions that even the first opponents of the European
mandate system were content to treat as separate. In the immediate
aftermath of World War I, some of the earliest Arab nationalists came
together in defense of a state covering the entire Levant. When Faisal,
champion of the Arab revolt and later king of Iraq, proclaimed in
1920 a short-lived Arab Kingdom based in Damascus, he imagined its
territory stretching from the Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey to
the Sinai Peninsula, but not east into Iraq.
The fate of subsequent plans to bring together Iraq and Syria is also
telling. After World War II, the Hashemite rulers of Jordan and Iraq
expressed interest in various schemes for uniting the region. Syria's
leaders, unsurprisingly, thought that they would lose out in this
arrangement, which came to naught anyway when Iraq's army ousted its
Hashemite king, alleging among other things that he was a British
puppet.
Subsequently, the rise of secular-socialist Baath parties in both
Iraq and Syria seemed to offer grounds for unification -- but power
politics and the intricacies of Baathist ideology almost immediately
created a newfound hostility between Damascus and Baghdad.
Syria's attempt to unite with Egypt under the banner of Arab
nationalism was no more successful.
ISIS, which now finds itself allied with Sunni Baathists in Iraq while
fighting to the death against Alawite Baathists in Syria, is no more
likely to triumph over regional particularism than the regimes that
came before it. Instead, the most enduring link between Iraq and Syria
today might be the millions of refugees who, over the past decade, have
crossed and recrossed the border fleeing violence in both directions.
Dreams of transnational unification aside, one of the most striking
historical precedents for the area ISIS controlled before last week
was the far older division between the settled and nomadic parts of
the Middle East. A fascinating Ottoman map from World War I describes
as "Syrian" the inhabitants of the western agricultural region that
includes all of Syria's major cities, while those living farther east
in the desert are "Arabs." British geography texts from the same period
show the same division, in this case between settled "Ottomans" and
wandering Arabs who lived in the empty space between Iraq and Syria.
As a result, the territory separating Iraq and Syria was never of
much importance to the creators of the Sykes-Picot system. At its
southern end, this border crosses a stretch of desert that Ottoman and
Western cartographers often left blank. The relatively more populous
stretch of the border that ISIS's new pseudo-state straddles made up
the Ottoman province of Deir ez-Zor, best known today as the place
Ottoman Armenians were sent to die of thirst in 1915.
Subsequently, when the British and French carved up the region,
it was at least a decade before they bothered to properly demarcate
this border. The matter was seemingly of so little consequence that
the European powers left it up to a League of Nations commission. The
result, complete with thalwegs, trigonometric points, and boundary
stones, must have seemed particularly arbitrary to the tribes whose
territory spread across it -- but it also might not have mattered
that much. Throughout the colonial period, the tribes' transborder
grazing and watering practices continued unchanged.
In short, ISIS has so far succeeded not by remaking the state system
but by operating, like many guerrilla groups before it, from the
ungoverned areas between existing states.
In short, ISIS has so far succeeded not by remaking the state system
but by operating, like many guerrilla groups before it, from the
ungoverned areas between existing states.
The backlash provoked by ISIS's brutal tactics and rapid success also
reveals the limits of conceiving of the Middle East along ethnic and
sectarian lines. The group's religious extremism has alienated even
its most radical Sunni allies in the fight against Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad and has driven half a million Iraqis out of Mosul.
Syrians and Iraqis alike have deployed the language of nationalism
to denounce ISIS fighters as foreign interlopers in their territory,
while Iraqi Shiites are now all the more likely to see Iranian troops
on their soil as coreligionists instead of Persian invaders.
Indeed, ISIS has inspired an unprecedented degree of consensus between
Turks, Kurds, Iraqis, and Iranians on the need to defeat the jihadi
group. With ISIS taking 49 people hostage after overrunning Turkey's
consulate in Mosul, Turkish commentators reminded readers that their
prime minister's piety would not keep Turkey on the group's good side.
Violent chaos on Turkey's southern border has also been an added factor
behind the Turkish government's ongoing effort to make peace with the
country's Kurdish minority. Although agonizingly slow and beset with
false steps, this initiative has nonetheless brought Turkey closer
than ever before to ending decades of internal violence and securing
its territorial integrity.
At the same time, ISIS's rise has strengthened the hand of Iraq's
Kurds. The Kurdish Peshmerga has taken control of Kirkuk, but rather
than trigger a civil war with Iraq's central government -- as it
likely would have in the past -- Baghdad remains at least temporarily
dependent on the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)'s cooperation. Of
all the region's actors, the KRG now stands perhaps the best chance
of having its independence recognized.
Yes, this is a tribute to the power of Kurdish nationalism in
overcoming intra-Kurdish political differences. But it's also a tribute
to the KRG's pragmatism. For over a decade, it has built a functioning
state by, among other things, cooperating with Turkey instead of making
any effort to liberate what, in the Kurdish post-Sykes-Picot fantasy,
would be Northern Kurdistan.
The KRG's coming challenges, however, offer one more testament to
why redrawing borders along ethnic lines remains an ugly, impractical
business. If Kurdish forces hope to maintain a firm hold on Kirkuk,
they will have to show they can provide security for all the city's
inhabitants -- not just ethnic Kurds. Once again, the prevailing
approach to drawing the borders of modern states -- basing them on
ethnic identity or historical claims - will be shown to make little
sense. It's an old story: Try to figure out how to adjudicate between
proponents of Kurdistan and Greater Armenia, say, with reference to
these maximalist maps of Armenian- and Kurdish-inhabited territory
in Anatolia. (Too easy? Try it with Assyrian claims as well.)
Of course, the alternative of simply deferring to precedent and
affirming existing borders is often just as illogical. There are plenty
of excellent reasons for defending Ukraine's territorial integrity
against Russian aggression -- but it's still awkward that the country
took on its present shape when Joseph Stalin gave it a large chunk of
what was once Poland. Or consider Saddam Hussein's selectivity when he
justified his invasion of Kuwait by accusing the British of stealing it
from Iraq -- without ever thanking them for putting together the rest
of his country. More recently, efforts to determine the exact frontier
between Sudan and South Sudan stumbled when, after searching libraries
in Khartoum, Cairo, and London, no one could find any maps showing
in detail the provincial borders that the British drew a century ago.
Ironically, the most successful effort yet at eliminating outdated
borders drawn by 19th-century Europeans remains the European Union.
And that consensus only emerged from the belated realization that
a century of fighting over the continent's true borders hadn't done
anyone any good.
Sadly, the EU's gilded dysfunction remains more than the Middle East
can hope for in the near future. But the EU's fundamental insight
remains sound: If we are going to discuss the end of Sykes-Picot,
let's first recognize that -- no matter how little sense those borders
make -- none of the alternatives are intrinsically more sensible.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/06/17/there_is_no_al_sham_iraq_isis_syria_levant_maps