There was always the complex question of the Syria-Iraq border. Separation between Syria and the mostly Christian Lebanese lands came later. The vilayet of Damascus was cut in half: France got the north, the Brits got the south. Palestine was separated from Cham (the “Levant”), to be internationalized. France got the Syrian-Lebanese littoral, and later the vilayets of Maras and Mosul (today in Iraq). Then the Europeans, profiting from World War I, intervened. Nineteenth century Ottoman Syria was the epitome of cosmopolitanism. The vilayets did not define the extremely complex Syrian identity: for instance, Armenians were the majority in the vilayet of Maras, Kurds in Diyarbakir – both now part of Turkey in southern Anatolia – and the vilayets of Aleppo and Damascus were both Sunni Arab. Let’s start in the 19 thcentury when Syria consisted of six vilayets - Ottoman provinces - without counting Mount Lebanon, which had a special status since 1861 to the benefit of Maronite Christians and Jerusalem, which was a sanjak (administrative division) of Istanbul.
EMPIRE TOTAL WAR CIVIL WAR MOD ZOR SERIES
It began with an intuition I felt last month at the tri-border point of Lebanon, Syria and Occupied Palestine followed by a subsequent series of conversations in Beirut with first-class Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian, Russian, French and Italian analysts all resting on my travels in Syria since the 1990s with a mix of selected bibliography in French available at Antoine’s in Beirut thrown in. Yet that hardly begins to tell the whole story.Īllow me to briefly sketch in broad historical strokes how we got here. Syria may be the biggest defeat for the CIA since Vietnam.
And Syria will eventually regain control of the entire northeast.” Russia prevents a war escalation and keeps the Russia-Iran-Turkey peace process alive. Turkey has the guarantee – by the Russians – that the Syrian Army will be in control of the Turkish-Syrian border.
performs a face saving withdrawal, which Trump can sell as avoiding a conflict with NATO ally Turkey. I’ve tried to summarize it in a single paragraph this way: What is happening in Syria, following yet another Russia-brokered deal, is a massive geopolitical game-changer.
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