Borders in the Wrong Places: A key element of the Islamic State’s success

The Islamic State (IS) is not a nationalist entity; it wants a Caliphate that will incorporate all the world.  The Islamic State recognises no national boundaries and intends to unite humanity under Islam.  In professing and promoting a religious identity they are in many ways antithetical to any nationalist identity.  This being said, it still appears to me that IS’s success in Syria and Iraq has been another one of history’s many examples of what happens when you put national borders in the wrong places.

The territory that IS has managed to conquer in Syria and Iraq corresponds in broad outline to what would make a sensible nation state.  The area that they now control (with the addition of Tikrit and the regions that they have only recently been pushed out of) fairly accurately corresponds with the areas of Iraq and Syria that are inhabited by Sunni Muslim Arabs.  The areas of Iraq and Syria that IS has been unable to make significant gains in are the areas inhabited by Kurds, Alawites, Druze, and Shia Arabs.  Consequently the border of IS territory has essentially stabilised along a line which would make a sensible border between a Sunni Arab nation and the neighbouring national groups which surround them.

The leaders and evangelists of the Islamic State believe in a religious identity which subsumes all nationalist identity but the shape of their territory suggests that the general population of that area of the Middle East are still strongly attracted to an ethnic/nationalist identity.  The Sunni Arabs of both Iraq and Syria have been existing in states where they have been ruled over by other ethnic groups.  It is not extraordinary therefore to surmise that part of the appeal of the IS for the people within its territory is that it has finally united all of the area’s Sunni Arabs in one cohesive, self-governing and powerful state.

Perhaps the easiest way to defeat the Islamic State ideologues would be for the international community, led by America, to simply abandon the formal borders of Iraq and Syria as they were drawn by the French and British during their colonial occupation and promise the Sunni Arabs their own nation state with borders that correspond to the demographic reality.  Perhaps then many of the Sunni Arabs of Iraq and Syria would stop supporting the aggressive and extremist IS and the region could look forward to a greater degree of peace and stability.