THE DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES OF THE SYKES-PICOT AGREEMENT - Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria need to be rearranged

By: Joseph Puder

Friday, January 3, 2025

The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement divided the Middle East, specifically the former possessions of the Ottoman Empire, into an illogical mix of people into states that never existed.  The maps drawn by the two colonial allies, Britian and France, primarily served their economic interests, albeit, for the French in Lebanon and the British in the Holy Land, there were cultural and religious sensibilities as well. 

The maps created an incongruous mess of the Middle East region.  For example, in Iraq, the British were seeking control of the oil in Basra (southern Iraq along the Persian Gulf), a predominantly Arab Shiite-Muslim region despite the fact that in Kirkuk, today’s northern Iraq, that region is made up of mostly non-Arab Kurdish Sunni Muslim region.

Britain, then the Mandatory power in Iraq, installed the Sunni-Muslim Hashemite, King Feisal, who was later deposed and murdered. Repeated coup d’états subsequently brought nothing but misery for Iraqis and tragic consequences that extend to the present.

Saddam Hussein’s regime (Sunni-led amid a majority Shiite population from 1979-2003) was responsible for the murder of thousands of Kurds and Shiites. Soon after the US invaded Iraq in 2003, this artificial country saw renewed sectarian terror between Sunni-Arabs and Shiite-Arabs. 

The French Mandate brought Syria and Lebanon under its rule.  The French, having been the historical protectors of the Christians in Lebanon, sought to separate it from Syria, and create a Christian majority ruled country. In time, however, the Muslim population created parity, and in recent decades the Shiites have become the largest group in Lebanon’s confessional structure. The conflicts between the Shiite and Sunnis Muslims and the Christians continue to exist – against the backdrop of history - with the Palestinian Sunnis having precipitated the civil war in Lebanon that lasted from 1975-1989.  Although Taif Agreement supposedly ended the civil war, it left the Shiite terrorist militia group, Hezbollah, intact and was the only group that hadn’t been disarmed.  Lebanon, much like Iraq and Syria is now a failed state.

Syria was another contrived state. It included a majority of Sunni-Arabs with a large minority of Kurds in northeastern Syria, Alawis (an offshoot of Shiite Islam) predominating in northwestern Syria, Druze in Southwestern Syria, and a large concentration of Christians who should have been joined to the Christians in Lebanon.

Sykes-Picot created yet another artificial state in the form of the Hashemite Emirate of Jordan (later to be elevated to Kingdom of Jordan), a territory torn out of the Balfour Declaration that allocated both banks of the Jordan River to the Jewish homeland. The British did this in 1922 to provide a territory for Abdullah, whose father Hussein was the Sharif of Mecca, and a descendent of the Prophet Mohammad. Abdullah would become the king of Jordan, while his brother, Feisal, would reign in Iraq.  These two positions were payback to the Hashemites for the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans.  The Jewish Legion, which fought fiercely as part of the British army and helped retake Palestine from the Ottoman Turks, was not similarly rewarded.

Britain, the mandatory power in Palestine was another failure.  Despite the heavy handedness of the British towards the Palestinian Jews, the courage and determination of the Jews, among them Holocaust survivors, was successful in securing their historical homeland known today as the State of Israel. Israeli statehood turned out to be the only success story derived from the mandates held by the British.  The Mandate for Palestine, in spite of the British, spawned a democratic Israel. The only stable state that upholds the civilized norms of human and civil rights, religious freedom, and a successful economy.

As we approach 2025, with chaos in Syria and Lebanon (seemingly a failed state), and both states in ruins due to wars and terror, it is time to reorganize the region along fair, just, and democratic lines that will provide cohesion, fraternity, and peace, by giving the minorities their rights of self-determination.

The Lebanese constitution was based on a Christian majority, and with the addition of the Christian communities in north Lebanon all the way to Tartus on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, Christians might once again restore their dominant position in Lebanon and end the terror and destruction Hezbollah has brought upon Lebanon. With western investments in a terrorist free Lebanon, Beirut could once again become the Paris of the Middle East.

There are more than 40 million Kurds in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, and their regions are contiguous. The Kurds yearn for and deserve self-determination as a people with the same language, culture, and religious traditions. Northern Iraq and northeastern Syria comprise a natural and organic state, and the US, the UN, and the EU should endorse it wholeheartedly. Given a choice in an open and fair referendum, the oppressed Kurds in Iran and Turkey would wish to join a Kurdish state, and that will then bring final justice to the Kurdish people.

The 54-year long Alawite Assad regimes (Hafez and Bashar) elevated the Alawite minority based in northwestern Syria to power.  The killing of hundreds of thousands of Syrians, mostly Sunnis, by the Assads, has created a thirst for revenge on the part of the new Sunni Islamist/jihadist regime led by Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) and its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani (Ahmed al-Sharaa). HTS rule puts the Alawites in potential peril, and they may well seek protection by separating themselves from the Syrian state.

The Druze, much like the Alawites are considered by the Sunni Jihadists to be infidels, of sorts. The Druze have kept to themselves for more than a millennium, secure in their mountain redoubt, in southwestern Syria, and with the distinct name of “Jabal Druze.”  The Druze also fear the Sunni jihadist and, as their region borders the Israeli Golan Heights, they would like their own independent state under Israeli protection. 

The Syria that we have known has been a repressive and unstable state. It is high time to return to the Wilsonian principles of self-determination.  The 12th of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points Declaration stated that “The people of the Middle East should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity for autonomous development.” This affirms the need for the Kurds, Christians, Alawites, and Druze to have their separate domains.