Nathan Webster/Demotix. All rights reserved.
When the radical totalitarians of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—known to themselves as the Islamic State but usually labelled by the acronyms in English of ISIS or ISIL, and Daesh in Arabic—burst out of eastern Syria into north and central Iraq in the summer of 2014 they announced not just a new caliphate, but that they had “broken” Sykes-Picot, the secret Anglo-French pact of 1916 to carve up the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces and throw disparate religious and ethnic groups into European-style nation states. But Iraq and Syria, created by Britain and France after the First World War to serve their imperial interests, had already started coming apart before ISIS appeared on the scene.
The de facto partition of Iraq, a state shattered by the US-led invasion of 2003, was well under way. Syria, where the regime of Bashar al-Assad has been waging a pitiless war against its own people since the uprising against his tyranny in 2011, was already fragmenting along sectarian lines—not least because the Assads were cynically wielding a sectarian knife to bolster their ultimately self-fulfilling narrative that what they were facing from the very beginning was the terrorism of al-Qaeda.
