stratfor | Events in Iraq
over the past week were perhaps best crystallized in a series of photos
produced by the jihadist group the Islamic State in Iraq and the
Levant. Sensationally called The Destruction of Sykes-Picot, the pictures confirmed the group's intent to upend nearly a century of history in the Middle East.
In a series of pictures set to a purring jihadist chant, the mouth of
a bulldozer is shown bursting through an earthen berm forming Iraq's
northern border with Syria. Keffiyeh-wrapped rebels, drained by the hot
sun, peer around the edges of the barrier to observe the results of
their work. The breach they carved was just wide enough for the
U.S.-made, Iraqi army-owned and now jihadist-purloined Humvees to pass
through in single file. While a charter outlining an antiquated
interpretation of Sharia was being disseminated in Mosul,
#SykesPicotOver trended on jihadist Twitter feeds. From the point of
view of Iraq's jihadist celebrities, the 1916 borders drawn in secret by
British and French imperialists represented by Sir Mark Sykes and
Francois Georges-Picot to divide up Mesopotamia are not only irrelevant,
they are destructible.
Today, the most ardent defenders of those colonial borders sit in
Baghdad, Damascus, Ankara, Tehran and Riyadh while the Europeans and
Americans, already fatigued by a decade of war in this part of the
world, are desperately trying to sit this crisis out. The burden is on
the regional players to prevent a jihadist mini-emirate from forming,
and beneath that common purpose lies ample room for intrigue.
