WI: A better partition of the Ottoman Empire

kernals12

Banned
The way the Ottoman Empire was broken up after WWI is a well known debacle. The resulting maps gave no consideration for religious or ethnic lines and are widely blamed for the instability in today's Middle East. So, I'm going to try and fix it.
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Let's start with the Kurds, who are currently split between 4 different countries and have been agitating for independence for decades. With the exception of those in Iran, we should provide them with their own independent nation.
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Now for Iraq, the Sunni Arab parts should be given to Saudi Arabia with the Shia parts being put under British administration until independence.
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Finally Syria. We should have the Alawites maintain their autonomy and have it become independence after the French leave.
 
The Kurds have never been a unified polity and speak 4 different dialects with varying degrees of intelligibility. Historically the Kurds were a whole bunch of little statelets. Plus Kurdistan is so mountainous that it's hard to have an organized centralized polity (unlike flat Iraq outside of Kurdistan which is fairly easy to integrate into one authority).

Clumping Sunni Iraqis with Saudi Arabia makes no sense. They speak different dialects of Arabic for one. Upper Mesopotamia is more urban than Saudi Arabia too and they really don't have much in common. Plus Saudi is Wahabi whereas Sunni Iraq isn't.

Dividing Syria up into those various components is iffy. Lebanon itself is something of a mess and the Jabal al-Druze state is basically a mountain fortress without too much going on for it economically. Damascus is sort of an island unto itself there, and Alawite is more religiously mixed than you'd think. Plus Damascus state in particular is plenty mixed religiously when you look at the population.


The issue following WW1 wasn't that the British and French didn't draw good lines. The issue is that there really aren't good lines to be drawn. Iraq is we know it today is hardly unprecedented as a polity - the Mamluks of Baghdad basically ruled that area as one unit from 1704 to 1831. The Ottomans administered Damascus, Jabal al-Druze, and Transjordan as one unit (Syria Vilayet) and everything from Latakia to Haifa as Beirut Vilayet. The eastern chunk of that Aleppo state was it's own province (Sanjak of Zor). However there's also a historical concept of Upper Mesopotamia which comprises the eastern half of Aleppo Vilayet and the northwest of Iraq - basically the vast open flat low-density mostly-sunni lands that ISIS pretty quickly occupied that also has a lot of Shamar tribe members (the guys who got kicked out of Najd after the Sauds took over).


Plus the Turks until 1926 kept their claim on the Mosul Vilayet. There's a good chunk of Turks outside of Turkey, particularly in northern Iraq and northern Syria.




But yeah, anywhere you draw the lines things are going to be messy. You may as well just have an Arab Kingdom with Britain and France holding on to Alexandretta, Alawite, Lebanon, and Palestine.
 
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