From the ashes of war, a new geopolitical map is emerging. From Aden to Anbar, the last multi-confessional vestiges of the Ottoman Empire are transmuting into a patchwork of little irredentist entities, which in some ways make Israel feel rather at home.
To keep out the influx of Arab Iraqis, their Kurdish compatriots erected a 2.5-meter high barricade replete with deep trenches like a Maginot Line along the southern frontier of their Kurdistan Regional Government. Arab Iraqis arriving by air received a one-week travel visa, lest they turn Kurdistan once again into a polyglot land. Over-stayers were warned on their mobile phones of the fines they risked if they failed to depart. The area traded its own oil and gas, sometimes with Israel, and American forces conducted joint operations with Kurdish peshmerga forces, sometimes bypassing the authorities in Baghdad.
In Syria, the Assad regime increasingly retrenched into its Alawite base. Sunni rebel-held areas reopened informal supply lines with the Arabian Peninsula, reinforcing ties fostered by generations of inter-marriage between the Shammar and Azeza Bedouin tribes straddling the Saudi border. In the Orontes Valley, the mixed cities of Hama and Homs nervously watched as mortar fire tore apart their multi-faith world.
From its two cities of Raqqa and Mosul, IS’s caliphate, too, acquired staying power, erasing old frontiers to create a new entity holding sway over a third of Syria and a third of Iraq. Despite more than a year of American-led coalition bombing and some 11,000 airstrikes by October 2015, IS remained amongst the more economically stable parts of the region. Much like an earlier manifestation of Salafi rule, that of the Al Sauds’ in Nejd, they protected the roads in their territory from marauding tribesmen and stamped out extortion. Christians who remained paid the jizya in exchange for basic protection. The sale of oil, IS’s main source of income, netted revenues of over $500 million a year. A year of bombardment was estimated to have killed some 15,000 IS fighters, but their numbers had been more than replenished by a continued influx from abroad and the introduction of conscription within, furnishing IS with a combined force of between 70,000 and 100,000 men.
The urban middle class who still had the means to pay people-smugglers fled to Europe, emptying the region of the educated, cosmopolitan constituency that despaired of ever again recovering the pluralism in which they had been raised. Christians and minorities received preferential treatment when making official applications for immigration, but Muslims too found copious back routes into Europe. They could be found huddled in the basement car parks of tourist resorts of southwestern Turkey, waiting their turn for passage to the Greek islands. A daytrip cost Europeans $17. They paid smugglers $800 a head. The risks were great—more than 3,000 drowned in the Mediterranean in 2015. Some spoke of babies thrown overboard to stop their crying when Greece’s coast guard patrols approached to escape detection; others of smugglers who fleeced their passengers before abandoning boat.
But the risks of staying were greater. The region they left behind was unrecognizable, dominated by rural warlords who had captured the cities and turned schools into barracks. Those stuck in the squalor of Jordan’s and Syria’s camps found scant respite. Banned from work, refugees had to choose between seeing their daughters prostitute themselves or returning home to IS for the $100 it paid its fighters a month.
A century earlier, the collapse of the Ottoman order had prompted seven million Turks to flee Europe, and cast millions more Christians out of Anatolia. The collapse of Middle Eastern nation-states was propelling even larger numbers on the move. In similar ways to the western flank of the former Ottoman Empire two decades earlier, the eastern flank was Balkanizing. In place of the ideal of the nation state, a mosaic of xenophobic, chauvinistic, self-obsessed sects ruled patches of land whose frontiers had been gerrymandered to give minorities a semblance of majority rule.
But whereas the Balkans had the advantage of integrating into an umbrella organization, the European Union, to dilute tensions, the Middle East’s confessional states have no supra-sectarian institution to appeal to. Bereft of an over-arching structure, the new confessional entities seem set to fortify their defenses, clamor for the rights of their co-religionists who remained beyond their borders, and collide along the new fault lines. The latest attempt to reorganize the bygone Ottoman Empire looks set to be no more harmonious than the last.