Chapter Eleven - Iraq, Syria, & Lebanon

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Iraq, Syria, & Lebanon

MANDATES, COUPS, AND the Ghost of Sykes-Picot

If you want to understand the modern Middle East, you have to go back to a secret handshake in 1916.

World War I was still raging. The Ottoman Empire was crumbling.
And Britain and France were already carving it up like vultures over a dying horse.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement was their private map —
an arrogant draft of future nations they planned to rule.

The idea was simple:
Draw straight lines.
Create new states.
Install friendly governments.
Reap the oil and influence.

The result?

Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon — nations that never asked to exist in their given shape.

Iraq is literally a British invention.

Three wildly different Ottoman provinces — Sunni Baghdad, Shi’a Basra, and Kurdish Mosul — were forced into a single kingdom under a foreign-backed Hashemite king.

It was never stable.

The British crushed revolts.
Oil deals were signed behind closed doors.
Sectarian tensions simmered.

The monarchy fell.
Coups followed.
Then came Saddam Hussein — a ruthless strongman who ran Iraq with fear, propaganda, and chemical weapons.

He invaded Iran. Then Kuwait.
Then got bombed by the U.S. — twice.

The 2003 American invasion toppled him… and shattered the state.
The borders stayed the same, but the country split internally:
Shi’a in power.
Sunnis marginalized.
Kurds carving out autonomy.
And in the chaos, ISIS emerged — erasing the lines entirely for a time.

Today, Iraq technically exists.
But it’s more like three uneasy countries in one tired shell.

Syria was a French experiment.

Created in the same Sykes-Picot carve-up.
Originally meant to be a French colony — with borders drawn to favor minority rulers over the Sunni majority.

After independence, it bounced through coups and chaos until landing on the Assads.

Hafez al-Assad ruled with an iron fist.
His son, Bashar, inherited the dictatorship and pretended to be modern — until 2011, when the Arab Spring lit Syria on fire.

Protests became civil war.
The war became a humanitarian collapse.

Iran backed Assad.
Russia joined in.
The U.S. armed rebels.
Turkey bombed the Kurds.
ISIS rose and fell.
Millions fled.

The map of Syria still technically exists.
But the territory is a jigsaw:
Regime zones. Rebel pockets. Kurdish regions. Turkish incursions. Foreign bases.

No border post in Syria means what it used to.
No part of the country is untouched by trauma.

Lebanon is the smallest and strangest of the three.

Also French-made — carved out of Greater Syria to protect a Christian elite.
But they didn’t plan for how small and dense the country was —
a pressure cooker of ethnic and religious diversity crammed between the Mediterranean and chaos.

Maronite Christians.
Sunni and Shi’a Muslims.
Druze. Armenians. Palestinians. Refugees.

The French handed power to the Maronites.
The rest never fully accepted it.

A 15-year civil war ripped the country apart from 1975–1990.
Militias ruled.
Foreign powers intervened.
Hezbollah emerged as both political party and state-within-a-state.

Today, Lebanon teeters constantly on collapse.

The economy imploded.
The currency died.
The government is barely functional.
Beirut exploded — literally.

The border still says "Lebanon."
But the real lines are inside: sectarian, economic, and psychological.

These three countries are held together with thread.
Not because they failed — but because they were set up to fail.

Drawn by outsiders.
Shaped by force.
And trapped in borders no one inside fully believes in.