2 The making of the modern Middle East
In 2014, fresh from their rapid gains across Syria and northern Iraq, members of the so-called Islamic State group (Daesh) triumphantly bulldozed a manufactured sand fortification that marked the border in a sparsely populated stretch of desert between Iraq and Syria. This was not just a symbolic gesture marking the unification of their territorial gains, but also a repudiation of nearly a century old ‘artificial’ boundary created by the then-imperial powers of France and the United Kingdom (UK).
Three years later, having played a major role in successfully pushing back Daesh, authorities in the Kurdish-controlled autonomous region of northern Iraq held a referendum in which more than 90 per cent of voters declared their wish to secede from Iraq. In both these cases, it looked for a moment that we might be getting our latest additions to the political map of the world in a region long mired in conflict, albeit in two very different guises. Though sworn enemies on the battlefield and ideologically, Daesh and the Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq did have one thing in common: a desire to put right the perceived injustice of borders drawn in faraway European capitals. The chief culprit was the colonial-era Sykes–Picot agreement, drawn up between France and the UK in 1916. Daesh’s leader, Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi, warned, ‘This blessed advance will not stop until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes-Picot conspiracy’ (Wright, 2016); while Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani, claimed, ‘The fact is that Sykes-Picot has failed, it's over’ (Muir, 2016). However, the status quo of Iraqi sovereignty and its territorial integrity remained intact.
