Map: The Middle East before and after WWI.
Posted on 02/03/2014 11:48:30 AM PST by sukhoi-30mki
World War I may have ended in 1918, but the violence it triggered in the Middle East still hasn't come to an end. Arbitrary borders drawn by self-interested imperial powers have left a legacy that the region has not been able to overcome.
Damascus, year three of the civil war: The 4th Division of the Syrian army has entrenched itself on Kassioun Mountain, the place where Cain is said to have slain his brother Abel. United Nations ballistics experts say the poison gas projectiles that landed in the Damascus suburbs of Muadamiya and Ain Tarma in the morning hours of Aug. 21, 2013 were fired from somewhere up on the mountain. Some 1,400 people died in the attack -- 1,400 of the more than 100,000 people who have lost their lives since the beginning of the conflict.
ANZEIGE Baghdad, in the former palace quarter behind the Assassin's Gate: Two years after the American withdrawal, Iraqis are once again in full control of the so-called Green Zone, located on a sharp bend in the Tigris River. It is the quarter of Baghdad where the Americans found refuge when the country they occupied devolved into murderous chaos. Currently, the situation is hardly any better. On the other side of the wall, in the red zone, death has once again become commonplace. There were over 8,200 fatalities last year.
Beirut, the capital of Lebanon that is so loved by all Arabs: The city has long been a focal point both of Arab life and of Arab strife. The devout v
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Map: The Middle East before and after WWI.
Better the muslims be divided and warring on each other than united and warring on us.
Yea, there centuries of their own borders were so peaceful.
It was a mess then, it’s a mess now, it will always be.
Poison gas launched to kill one’s own countrymen from the mountain where Cain slew Abel?
If that ain’t absolutely dripping with irony I don’t know what is.
CC
Exactly, borders don’t mean squat. Muslims war and murder. Diffferent borders wouldn’t change a thing they would still find an excuse to kill.
Very interesting article.
bfl
yep...God does not shed his grace on them.
Precisely.
Islam creates its own political instability and did so quite well on its own before European Colonial powers got involved.
Did they mention German failure to censure Turks for the Armenian and Greek holocausts while aiding the Ottomans?
“Yea, there centuries of their own borders were so peaceful.”
The Ottoman Turks beat the Arabs into line and kept relative peace there for centuries; it was much calmer than what followed.
“Did they mention German failure to censure Turks for the Armenian and Greek holocausts while aiding the Ottomans?”
Given that German officers served as advisors to the Turks in the war, to assist them against their common enemies (Russia, Serbia), I wouldn’t expect Germany to hold anything against the Turks; these empires were fighting for their very survival, and they knew it (not a justification, but an explanation). The Crimean War was a precursor to the fight between Russia and Turkey (in which the British and French oddly enough were allied with the Turks), and the Turks were losing their grip on the Balkans as well.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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In truth the writer remains only partially correct as to cause and affect in the places he discusses.
For instance, the area of present day Lebanon together with adjacent parts of present day Syria exoerienced the period of the Ottoman empire as just a break in the on-again off-again sectarian violence between Christians and Muslims and between different Muslim sects that spanned the entire historical era from the beginning of Islam up the Ottoman Empire. Frequently the groups fought and usually allied with or sought the assistance of some powerful outside power, to help impose a settlement to their liking, which always turned out to be a temporary condition. The unsettledness of the area, in terms of strife between the groups there was NOT a creation of World War I or it’s results.
And the “pan-Arab nationalism” ambitions of the Arab penninsula based Arab families were nothing more than the ambitions for how to secure Sunni domination as those taking Sunni leadership for themselves outside of Anatolia saw it. That sectarian ambition behind much of the “pan-Arab” nationalism is one reason why that ambition did not take hold in some of the “new” states in the region; not because of the artificial way in which those new states borders had been devised.
The author also mismisses by omission the long history of violence due to the Sunni-Shia divide, as an ongoing factor of locally internal and interstate instability in the Middle East. The Ottomans may have been able to prevent or quell any major civil disturbance arising due to the Sunni-Shia divide in any places in their empire. However, prior to the Ottomansm and since the Ottoman rule that divide was and has been a part of internal and cross border strife in many places in the Middle East, including much of the violence there now. It is not a relic of WWI or its aftermath. It is a relic of Islam itself.
Unfortunately, the Kurds, Christians and Jews are caught in the crossfire. The borders could not have been drawn up worse IMHO.
Interesting, and some points are valid, but:
1. The Germans look for any excuse, however indirect, to blame WWII on anything but their own culture. So WWI gets blamed a bit more than it should.
2. Muslims were fighting muslims long before this. Indeed, from the date their profit died (and really before) they have been fighting one another (and everyone else) for dominance.
the roots of WWII including the various genocides lie in the FRench revolution and the Polish partitions — the first created a poisonous nationalism (not a proud one but one that crushed minorities unlike the American revolution) and the second set up the stage for conflicts between Russia and Germany by obliterating a buffer state.
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