Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

DAMN & BORDERATION!
How Isis thrives in a borderless world as it erases lines in the sand drawn
by the west 100 years ago by France and Britain (Sykes-Picot)
ROBERT FISK 12 MAY 2016: The Independent
The peoples of the Middle East have suffered this past century from the
theatre of dictatorships and cardboard institutions created by the west
Early in 2014, Isis released one of its first videos. Largely unseen in
Europe, it had neither the slick, cutting-edge professionalism of its later
execution tapes nor the haunting “nasheed” music that accompanies
most of its propaganda. Instead, a hand-held camera showed a
bulldozer pushing down a rampart of sand that had marked the border
between Iraq and Syria. As the machine destroyed the dirt revetment, the
camera panned down to a handwritten poster lying in the sand. “End of
Sykes-Picot”, it said.
5
Like many hundreds of thousands of Arabs in the Middle East, for whom
Sykes-Picot was an almost cancerous expression, I watched this early Isis
video in Beirut. The bloody repercussions of the borders that the British
and French diplomats, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, drew in
secret during the First World War – originally giving Syria, Mount Lebanon
and northern Iraq to the French, and Palestine, Transjordan and the rest
June 2016