The Middle East's Century of Conflict: How Sykes-Picot Shaped Modern Warfare

The Middle East has been synonymous with warfare and instability for nearly a century. Since the turn of the 21st century alone, major conflicts have engulfed Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Yemen. These wars have claimed millions of lives, displaced millions more, and cost trillions of dollars. But why is this region so prone to conflict? To understand the root causes, we need to look back just over 100 years to see how the modern borders of the Middle East were drawn - and why they have led to endless wars ever since.

The Ottoman Empire's Decline

For centuries, the Turkish Ottoman Empire dominated the Middle East, enforcing its rule across a vast territory spanning from Hungary to Yemen. The Empire encompassed dozens of ethnicities, languages, and religions. While it had internal regions, the Ottomans ruthlessly suppressed any expressions of nationalism or separatism in the name of imperial stability.

By the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire had entered a long period of decline. The rising British Empire grew increasingly interested in the strategically important Middle East, which stood between Britain and its prized colony of India. To safeguard shipping routes, Britain began acquiring protectorates across the region, starting with the modern United Arab Emirates in 1820 and expanding to southern Yemen, Bahrain, and Egypt.

The completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 made Egypt particularly valuable to the British. Owned by British and French shareholders, the canal provided the quickest route between Britain and India. To ensure continued access, Britain forced Egypt to become a protectorate in 1882. The British also established protectorates over Oman and Kuwait.

World War I and the Sykes-Picot Agreement

Alarmed by increasing British influence in the region, the Ottoman Empire joined World War I on the side of Germany in 1914. In response, Britain and France decided the centuries-old Ottoman Empire would have to be destroyed. But what would take its place?

In 1916, British diplomat Mark Sykes and French diplomat François Georges-Picot negotiated a secret agreement to divide the Ottoman lands between their empires after the war. The Sykes-Picot Agreement laid out the following divisions:

• Direct British colonial rule over much of modern Iraq
• A British sphere of influence over Jordan and southern Iraq
• Direct French colonial rule over coastal Syria and Lebanon
• A French sphere of influence over northern Iraq and inner Syria
• An international administration for Palestine

Critically, these new political lines paid little attention to the complex ethnic, linguistic, and religious demographics of the region. Instead, they were loosely based on old Ottoman provincial boundaries, which themselves disregarded ethnic and religious divisions. This sowed the seeds for many future conflicts.

Competing Promises and the Discovery of Oil

The terms of Sykes-Picot were further complicated by other wartime promises made by the British:

• To encourage an Arab revolt against Ottoman rule, Britain promised to support the creation of a unified Arab state after the war.
• The 1917 Balfour Declaration promised British support for "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine.
• Britain sought to secure access to Middle Eastern oil, which was just beginning to be discovered.

The first major oil discovery in the Arab world came in Iraq in 1927, after borders had already been drawn. Oil was found in Kuwait in 1938, followed by discoveries in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the UAE. The locations of these oil reserves would ensure generations of conflict:

• In Iraq, oil was found in Kurdish and Shia Arab regions, but little in Sunni Arab areas.
• Iran's oil was concentrated in its Arab-majority Khuzestan province.
• Kuwait's small territory held oil reserves nearly equal to all of Iraq's.
• Saudi Arabia's oil was mostly in its Shia-minority Eastern Province.
• Syria's oil was found in Kurdish and Sunni Arab areas, not in Alawite regions.

With nearly half the world's known oil supply scattered across this complex mosaic of competing identities, outside powers like Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States would remain deeply invested in the region.

The Creation of Israel

In the wake of the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees fled to British-controlled Palestine. As Britain prepared to withdraw in 1947, the newly-formed United Nations released a partition plan dividing the territory between a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international zone around Jerusalem.

Most Jewish groups accepted the plan, but it was rejected by Arab groups as unfair. Despite Arabs outnumbering Jews more than 2-to-1 in Palestine at the time, the UN plan allocated 62% of the land to the Jewish state and only 38% to the Arab state.

Fighting escalated, and as the British withdrew in 1948, the State of Israel declared independence. This sparked the first Arab-Israeli War, with a coalition of Arab states attacking the new Jewish state. Israel emerged victorious, controlling all the land allocated to it by the UN plus 60% of the proposed Arab state's territory. Jordan occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem, while Egypt took control of Gaza.

No independent Palestinian state emerged. Around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were exiled or became refugees, many fleeing to Lebanon. This event, known to Palestinians as the Nakba ("catastrophe"), would alter Lebanon's demographics and contribute to that country's future civil war.

Arab Nationalism and Nasser's Egypt

The Arab defeat in 1948 gave rise to Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. A secular Arab nationalist, Nasser dreamed of unifying all Arab lands into a single superstate that could defeat Israel and challenge Western influence. He came to power in 1954 and railed against not just Israel and the US, but also against Arab monarchies like Saudi Arabia which were developing closer ties to America.

In 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, prompting Britain, France, and Israel to invade Egypt. But with both US and Soviet support, Egypt emerged victorious, catapulting Nasser to hero status across much of the Arab world.

Nasser's influence spread. In 1958, Syria briefly joined with Egypt to form the United Arab Republic. Civil war erupted in North Yemen between monarchists and Nasser-style nationalists, turning into a proxy conflict. Saudi Arabia and other monarchies supported the Yemeni royalists, while Nasser sent troops to back the nationalists.

But in 1967, encouraged by Egyptian setbacks in Yemen, Israel launched a preemptive strike in what became the Six-Day War. Israel swiftly defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, occupying the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Syria's Golan Heights. The defeat was a crushing blow to Nasser and the Arab nationalist movement.

The 1973 War and Camp David Accords

Nasser's successor Anwar Sadat joined forces with Syria's Hafez al-Assad to attack Israel in 1973, aiming to reclaim lost territories. Though Israel again prevailed, the war paved the way for peace. In 1979, brokered by US President Jimmy Carter, Israel and Egypt signed the Camp David Accords. Israel agreed to withdraw from the Sinai in exchange for Egypt recognizing Israel's right to exist - the first Arab country to do so.

The peace deal was denounced by other Arab states. Egypt was expelled from the Arab League for a decade, and Sadat was assassinated by Islamist militants. Syria, under Assad's authoritarian Ba'athist regime, positioned itself as the new champion of the Palestinian cause.

Civil War in Lebanon

As more Palestinian refugees fled to Lebanon, that country's delicate sectarian balance tipped. Christians had dominated the government and generally aligned with the West, while Muslims sided with the Arab world. In 1975, these tensions exploded into a complex, multi-sided civil war that would last 15 years.

Syria invaded Lebanon in 1976, attempting to annex it based on French colonial-era borders. Israel also invaded to fight Palestinian forces and secure its northern border. This led to direct clashes between Israeli and Syrian forces in Lebanon. Israel's occupation lasted until 2000, while Syria's continued until 2005.

The Iranian Revolution

In 1979, a revolution in Iran toppled the US-aligned monarchy and replaced it with a theocratic regime led by Ayatollah Khomeini. This dramatically reshaped Middle East dynamics. The new Iranian government's Shia Islamist ideology envisioned uniting all Muslim lands under clerical rule. It openly sought to export its revolution, first to Shia-majority areas like Iraq, Lebanon, and Bahrain, then across the Islamic world.

This made Iran a bitter enemy of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab monarchies, as well as the United States - all of whom sought to contain the Islamic revolution. It also terrified Iraq's Saddam Hussein, who had recently seized power. Saddam and his ruling Ba'athist clique came from Iraq's Sunni minority and feared Iran's influence spreading to Iraq's Shia majority in the oil-rich south.

The Iran-Iraq War

Determined to crush the Iranian revolution before it could spread, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980. He invoked Arab nationalism and aimed to conquer Iran's oil-rich, Arab-majority Khuzestan province. Instead, the Iran-Iraq War turned into an eight-year apocalypse claiming half a million lives.

Desperate to keep Iraq as a buffer against Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia lent Saddam billions to sustain the war effort. This marked the start of the long-running Saudi-Iranian cold war. For Saudi Arabia, the stakes were existential. They feared that if Iran's revolution spread to Shia-majority Bahrain, it could then jump to the Shia-majority Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia - home to most of the kingdom's oil.

The Gulf War

After the Iran-Iraq War ended in stalemate in 1988, Saddam demanded Kuwait forgive Iraq's war debts. When Kuwait refused, Saddam invaded in 1990, annexing the country and doubling Iraq's oil reserves. As Iraqi forces massed on the Saudi border, it appeared Saddam might push further to seize Saudi oil fields.

This would have given Saddam control of nearly half the world's oil supply - enough to fuel his ambitions of unifying the Arab world and overturning the Sykes-Picot borders. To prevent this, the US assembled a massive coalition that swiftly ejected Iraq from Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War.

Afterward, the US stepped fully into the role of security guarantor for the Persian Gulf, aiming to keep the source of half the world's oil stable and accessible. The US Fifth Fleet was headquartered in Bahrain, while a major air base was established in Qatar.

The Rise of Sunni Islamism

The setbacks for secular Arab nationalism and growing US presence in the region gave rise to a new brand of Sunni Islamism to rival both Iran's Shia Islamism and secular Arab nationalism. This set the stage for organizations like Al-Qaeda, which sought to ignite a worldwide Islamist revolution to unite all Muslim lands under a new caliphate - finally erasing the Sykes-Picot borders.

This challenge evolved further with the rise of ISIS, an even more radical Sunni Islamist group. In 2014-2015, ISIS exploded onto the world stage, making rapid conquests across Iraq and Syria. They explicitly sought to destroy the border between those countries - a line drawn by Sykes and Picot a century earlier.

Conclusion

The borders drawn by European diplomats in 1916 have cast a long shadow over the Middle East. By disregarding ethnic, linguistic, and religious realities on the ground, the Sykes-Picot Agreement laid the groundwork for a century of conflict. The discovery of oil further raised the stakes, drawing in outside powers and fueling internal strife.

From Arab nationalists to Islamist extremists, many forces have sought to redraw the map of the Middle East over the past hundred years. Yet the basic outlines laid down by Sykes and Picot have proven remarkably durable. Understanding this history is crucial for grasping the roots of ongoing conflicts and the challenges of achieving lasting peace in this troubled region.

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