A Different Middle East

1919, at Paris the modern borders of the middle east were drawn. What if the province of Mosul stays part of the Syria and is given to the French not the British?

Every thing else stays the same but Syria is alot bigger and Iraq has now lost a very rich province, Discuss.
 
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Bump here is the border that I think they were talking about:
Mosul_Province_1897.png
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The old ottoman province of mosul was to go to france and syria.
 
Have you got a better map? One that shows the overall shape of the countries after your proposed changes? That ones too zoomed in.


:)
 
Iraq will also loose out on some of their richest oil fields. What will the french do with this wealth of oil?
 
Yeah, that map is better.....just! lol
Plus, the labels are v. good too.......


Damascus seems very far away from these oil fields you mention, perhaps infrastructure would be improved in an east/west direction.
I think what would be more interesting is what will happen when Syria inherits that 'wealth of oil'. It could make them a lot of money that could potentially be directed at the military. Thus any Arab-Israeli conflicts ITTL are going to be more in favour of the Arabs.
Wasn't there an instance in OTL where the Egyptians needed the Syrians to push that little harder to secure a victory?
If the conflict isn't butterflied away the oil wealth could give them that extra edge to defeat Israel?

P.S. When I say 'butterflied away', I didn't mean; the butter flew away!

The above line is a joke, its just a bad one...............i'm going now.


:)
 

ninebucks

Banned
Would the Kurds have a better chance to break their chains and be free if Mosul is Syrian??

Please, don't use such biased language, if you mean independent, say 'independent'. A Syrian Kurdistan could well be part of a prosperous democratic society, while an independent Kurdistan could well be governed by a vicious dictator - describing a nation as 'free' is bound to mislead.
 
There are more than just Kurds that live in the province. I think that if Damascus is able to form a secular and unethnic state after decolonization then the Kurds won't be that big of a deal. On that note I don't think the Baathists of Syria were as sectarian as the Baathists of Iraq.
 
AFAIK oil was discovered in the area in 1937 or such.

That would give the French some incentive to keep syria post WWII. So we might see a French colonial war in both Algeria and Syria.

But then the fall of France if it goes according to OTL will put Syria higher on the priority list of UK to secure the oilfields not being put to use for Nazi Germany. Perhaps an early Operation Exporter! If thats possible.

Of course sitting on the oil may give the Syrians an edge in the conflict with Isreal but I'm uncertain if it would that important - it might be used more in the internal squabbles among the Arab nations. But Syria would be able to buy more and better equipment from the Soviets.

With oil in the furthes corner of the land infrastructure would change in Syria and any Iraq-Iran war would be of much less importance due to a large part of the oil belonging to Syria. And Saddam would not have the change to be a bitch against the Kurds.

I'm not sure this situation would make it any better for the Kurds. Depends upon what the ruler in Damascus think about it.

But it would also keep traces into Turkey and Iran.

These are just thoughts - a lot of change would incur. Difficult to get an overview unless you dig into it.
 
Another thing I just thought of is Syrias nuclear programme, if they had natural oil reserves would the west be more suspicious of the Syrians true aims, like with Iran?


:)
 
Any ideas how sunni-shi'ia relations will develop? If Syria is still ruled by Alawis then you get two shi'ia countries back to back. How about Iraq? It would seem that Iraq is more Arab (less Kurds) and about evenly split between sunnis and shi'ias. Does this mean more or less stability?
 
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