![]() ![]() These are Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Syrian Arab Republic, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. These countries are located primarily in Western Asia, Egypt is in North Africa, and a part of Turkey lies in Southeast Europe. Middle East includes countries that share common factors like ethnic groups, geographic features, religious beliefs, and political history.Ī transcontinental region including parts of Eurasia and Africa, the Middle East includes countries that share common factors like ethnic groups, geographic features, religious beliefs, and political history.Sometimes, the definition of Middle East is extended to include the concept of the "Greater Middle East" that includes Afghanistan, the Comoros, Djibouti, Maghreb, Pakistan, Sudan, and Somalia.These are Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Syrian Arab Republic, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. But as it turned out, decisions made during the conflict and in the peace talks afterwards set the stage for both World War II and a century of chaos and war in the Middle East. Woodrow Wilson called World War I the war to end all war. ![]() And ISIS/ISIL, the so-called Islamic State, has vowed that one of its aims is reversing the effects of Sykes-Picot in their entirety. But it has long been a rallying cry for Arab nationalists. Sykes-Picot isn’t celebrated in Britain or France today, and many Americas may not know about it. So what about the people living where Sykes and Picot drew their lines in the sand? What did they want? That they were largely ignored has been the source of much misery since. Fitzgerald explains why France first claimed Mosul, with its oil (then all potential), only to cede it to Britain soon after the war ended in 1918: the French were initially thinking less about oil in Mosul than their long-time interests in what became Lebanon and Syria. The countries were allies against Germany, Austria, and the Ottomans, but they also had their own interests and colonial agendas. According to Khalidi, Sykes and Picot assumed they were formalizing the pre-existing European financial control of the region by inaugurating a new era of more direct political control.Įdward Peter Fitzgerald elucidates the competing British and French interests involved in the Levant (yet another European name for the region). An alliance with the Central Powers proved to be the old Empire’s final undoing, leading to its splintering at the end of the war. By the First World War, the Empire was propped up by European investments. The doddering Ottoman Empire had been described as “the sick man of Europe” since the 1850s. Khalidi argues that the agreement was prefigured by the already existing economic partition of the Ottoman Arab provinces. ![]() Out of Sykes-Picot came the outlines-indeed even some of the still-existing borders-of Palestine (later Israel), Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. This made their deal one of the last European colonial projects of the century whose second half saw the sometimes violent end of such missions. Sykes and Picot divided the Near East, as it was then known to Europeans, into British and French spheres of influence, with enough for the Russians to keep them happy. The Sykes-Picot deal was one of the last European colonial projects of the century. ![]()
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