There Is No al-Sham
►http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/06/17/there_is_no_al_sham_iraq_isis_syria_levant_maps
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.
