After the armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, the victorious Allies redrew the maps of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East to replace these fallen empires. Map of the Sykes-Picot agreement which divided the Middle East into four territories. Americans have no idea where their oil comes from, in one chart, A map of the world's most and least religiously diverse countries, This very funny map shows what Vladimir Putin really thinks of Europe. The British, however, still retained the right to station troops there. The Suez Canal changed everything. Iran is most associated with the Persians the largest ethnic group and the progenitors of the ancient Persian empires but it's much more diverse than that. These three maps (click the expand icon to see the third) show how those 1948 borders became what they are today. There may be a similar effect happening in Syria, which is majority Sunni Muslim but has large minorities of Christians, Druze, Shia, and a Shia sect known as Alawites whose members include Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and much of his government. The settlements make peace harder, which is sometimes the point: for Palestinians to have a state, the settlers will either to have to be removed en masse, or Palestinians would have to give up some of their land. Israel-Iran tensions, which have edged near war in recent years, are one of the biggest and most potentially dangerous things happening right now in a part of the world that has plenty of danger already. views 1,930,344 updated Independence and Decolonization, Middle East In the decades immediately following the conclusion of World War II, European formal empires in the Middle East began to unravel. Czechoslovakia split peaceably into two countries, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. The aim, Barr explains using the words of one of the combatants, was to score as many times as possible, before the final whistle blows.. Turkish nationalism emerged successful out of the turmoil of World War I and its settlement, realizing its goal of the creation of a Turkish national state predicated on the existence of a linguistically based Turkish ethnic community. Today, many argue that a century of untold violence and instabilityculminating in ISISs brutal attempt to erase Middle Eastern bordersmight have been avoided if only each of the regions peoples had achieved independence after World War I. White and red show where there are lots of connections: rich countries like Israel and the United Arab Emirates, but also parts of Egypt and Iran and Turkey, the populations of which are increasingly wired, to tremendous political consequence. The British, who already held a protectorate over Egypt, were given the mandates for Palestine and Iraq. If this map does not depress you about the prospects of the Afghan War, not much will. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, lights right up: its modestly sized population is remarkably wired. For the University of Oxfords Professor Eugene Rogan, the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and the end of the war in 1918 may be hugely symbolic moments for the people of the region, but historically they have to be understood as part of a broader series of events that resulted in its fateful partition. You'll notice right away that the Middle East makes up just a fraction of the world's total Muslim population. Ignoring the terms of both the armistice and the Sykes-Picot agreement, the British pushed on in the face of vehement Ottoman protests, not just to Mosul, which they entered on November 1, but to take control of the whole wheat- and oil-rich vilayet, which was secured by November 14. There are few grimmer symbols for the devastation of the Iraq War than what it did to Baghdad's once-diverse neighborhoods. And for what its worth, neither a subdivided Syria nor a union between Syria and Mesopotamia were outcomes that many locals campaigned for when King and Crane came to visit. And the real answer is, I think, that it does exist but is only one among the many dividing lines that criss-cross Europe and it may not be the most . This struggle looks an awful lot like a regional cold war, with proxy battles in Syria and elsewhere. They're fighting both the rebels and the government. Mithraism was completely replaced with Christianity, which became the Roman Empire's official religion, after a few centuries. Copyright 2023 Web Solutions LLC. These colonies were converted into League of Nations Mandates and split between the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and South Africa. The Syrian Civil War is a multi-sided conflict between several different groups. Many countries, shown in green, still do not recognize Israel as a legitimate state. Since late 2012, the sectarian civil war has ramped back up, in Baghdad and nationwide. The sacred law of Islam was replaced by a European law code; polygamy was banned and civil marriage required; the Western calendar was introduced; and the building of new mosques and repair of old ones were discouraged. The green is what was left for Palestinians. The Ottoman Empire reached its peak. Now pretend it's the 1800s and you are a British colonial officer named Mortimer Durand, and it's your job to negotiate the border between the British Indian Raj and the quasi-independent nation of Afghanistan. The map on the bottom shows tweets: lots of dots mean lots of tweets from that area. Jan De Jong / Foundation for Middle East Peace. The city of Mosul and its surrounding administrative region, or vilayet, operated as the breadbasket of the larger economic region, which also contained the vilayets of Baghdad and Basra, known to the Ottomans as Al Iraq. and its Licensors The color-coded partition map and text provided that Britain ("B") would receive control over the red area, known today as Jordan, southern Iraq and Haifa in Israel; France ("A") would obtain the . In the first through third centuries A.D., a religion called Mithraism sometimes called a "mystery religion" for its emphasis on secret rites and clandestine worship spread from present-day Turkey or Armenia throughout the Roman Empire (at the time, most adherents believed it was from Persians in modern-day Iran, but this is probably wrong). That's part of why these two countries have sometimes seen themselves as a degree apart from the rest of the Arab world. Ottoman entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers led to Ottoman military defeat. Hitler used this as an excuse in 1938 to precipitate a crisis which eventually led to appeasement by Neville Chamberlain in the Munich Agreement of that year. Every other color shows a rebel group's area of control. Russia and Austria-Hungary gave up additional territory to Poland and Romania. Here are 40 maps crucial for understanding the Middle East its history, its present, and some of the most important stories in the region today. This map shows the larger minorities, which includes Arabs in the south, Kurds in the west, and Azeris in the north (Iran used to control all Azeri territory, but much of now belongs to the Azeri-majority country Azerbaijan). Coerced evictions and thousands of deaths effectively cleansed neighborhoods, to be mostly Shia (blue) or mostly Sunni (red). After spending three weeks interviewing religious and community leaders in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and southern Turkey, the two men and their team proposed that the Ottoman lands be divided as shown in the map above. The map on right shows what it looked like by 2007, after two awful years of Sunni-Shia killing: bombings (shown with red dots), death squads, and militias. A patrol in the hills during the The Battle of Megiddo in Palestine, 1918. So it's a three-way war now, as if it weren't already intractable enough. Called "the fertile crescent" because of its lush soil, the "crescent" of land mostly includes modern-day Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Israel-Palestine. In these nationalist movements the usual ingredientsWestern education, hatred of Westerners, desire to emulate Western technologywere mixed with adherence to Islam and a feeling of a common Arab identity. The orders from London were vague, but their infringement of the terms of the now infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement, which had been devised in 1916 as a way of dissipating potential Anglo-French tensions, was not in doubt. "But it wasn't until the 1920s that the terms of the peace had been drafted and where the final disposition of Ottoman lands was agreed by the victorious powers," says the author of, Sykes-Picot is history it should stay that way. One hundred years ago, on November 11, 1918, the guns fell silent in the First World War. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The secret SykesPicot Agreement of 1916 between England and France split the remaining Ottoman Empire between them. The axis of Britain's Middle Eastern empire stretched from the Suez Canal to the Persian Gulf. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson dispatched a theologian named Henry King and a plumbing-parts magnate named Charles Crane to sort out the Middle East. It continued expanding for about 500 years longer than the entire history of the Roman Empire ruling over most of the Middle East, North Africa, and southeastern Europe for centuries. The Arab Revolt, 1916-18 - New Zealand History It was probably the last great non-European empire until it began declining in the mid-1800s, collapsed after World War I, and had its former territory in the Middle East divided up by Western Europe. The San Remo meeting of Allied Powers in 1920 changed those boundaries again, producing the colonial compromise of the mandate system. The major fields were found in southwestern Persia, in the river valleys of Iraq, and along the Persian Gulf. Politics & History The Map That Created The Modern Middle East The Sykes-Picot remade the Middle East for British and French control. Lebanon is divided among large communities of Sunnis, Shias, Christians, and a faith known as Druze they're at peace now, but the country's horrific civil war from 1975 to 1990 divided them. Nine months later, in January 1918, President Wilson articulated Fourteen Points as the basis for negotiating a peace settlement. Four empires collapsed during World War I the German Empire, the Russian Empire, the Austria-Hungary Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. In this secret 1916 deal, Britain and France had agreed to divide the Ottoman Empire's Middle Eastern territories into their own zones of influence after the war. This is a rough political map of the world in 750 AD, at the height of the Omayyad Caliphate ("caliph" means the ruler of the global Islamic community). The war has displaced millions of Syrians into the rest of the Middle East and into parts of Europe, where they live in vast refugee camps that are major drains on already-scarce national resources. 1916 Britain and France conclude Sykes-Picot agreement On May 19, 1916, representatives of Great Britain and France secretly reach an accord, known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, by which most of. He writes about history, presidents and sports at https://www.parkspresidentsandparks.com/. N. P. Howard, of the University of Sheffield, says that a further quarter of a million more died from disease or starvation in the eight-month period following the conclusion of the conflict.