There are signs and warnings from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as well as the Syrian opposition that Syria may be moving toward partition.
Talk of partition had begun a few months after the outbreak of the war in Syria, as many analysts tried to rewrite Levantine history. They argued that the independent states in the region had been created a hundred years ago by the West during and after World War I, and that a century later, the West is trying to take the region in the opposite direction. Along these lines, they said that between 1915 and 1916, the West had wanted to break up the anti-Western Ottoman Empire and create modern states within its boundaries. After 2013, however, the trend will be to deliver those “failed states” to neo-Ottoman dominance, since Turkey is now allied with the West and will protect its interests.
