Partition is a dirty word in the Middle East. For decades, it has meant colonial and post-colonial meddling in internal affairs. Partition is associated, justly or not, with the Balfour declaration, the Sykes-Picot agreement (which theoretically divided the region between Britain and France, but was never formally carried out), and the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the unhealed wounds that date from that time in Gaza and the West Bank.

Partition, many locals say, by people far away: this is the reason why the region has had so much warfare, so much civil strife. Those preaching partition never have our interests in mind.

In 1919, after the treaties that concluded the First World War, the borders of the Middle East and the Near East were redrawn. League of Nations mandates in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq were created and administered by the European colonial powers under the authority of a new international body. Modern Turkey was created and its borders were revised – first under the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, which ended the Ottoman Empire; and again in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, after war between Turkey and Greece, which gave Turkey control of the Bosphorus Strait and ended all Greek claims to Turkey’s south.

But the partitioning was not done yet. Hatay Province, now a part of southern Turkey, was governed by French mandatory Syria until 1939. It was briefly independent as Hatay State, before joining Turkey by the end of that year, where it remains.

The independence of Israel in 1948 has never been satisfactorily settled according to Palestinians and those Zionists who believe in a Greater Israel, which encompasses both banks of the River Jordan, the Gaza Strip, and much of modern Egypt. Meanwhile, Israel has occupied the Golan Heights, internationally recognised by almost everyone except the United States as part of Syria, since the 1967 Six Day War.

During the Libyan civil war in 2011, it appeared for some time as if the country was split neatly in two between the remnants of the regime of Muammar Gaddafi and the rebel groups opposed to them. The rebel capital was Benghazi; Gaddafi’s was Tripoli; and although fighting would rage along the motorways that traverse the country’s Mediterranean coast – the towns of Brega and Ras Lanuf were taken and retaken multiple times by each side – for months, the frontlines appeared steady.

Eager partitionists set to work with their maps and coloured pencils. Many of them decided to resurrect the former national identities of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, two colonies which were merged to make up most of Italian Libya under Benito Mussolini. Yet before the enthusiasts of partition had made their case fully, the deadlock was broken. Libya’s rebels moved along the coastline and through the deserts from the south-east, taking Tripoli in October 2011 before converging on Sirte, the tribal homeland of Gaddafi.

After the fall of Gaddafi, Libya entered a new civil war, almost exactly on the proposed lines of partition, with one faction backed by Turkey and Qatar and the other backed by the United Arab Emirates and Russia. De facto partition has not calmed Libya’s civil conflict. It has not prevented Khalifa Haftar, leader of the Libyan National Army, waging a consistent and so far unsuccessful campaign to conquer the rest of the country. Partitions never work, but that does not matter to their advocates.

Syria was not immune from talk of partition during the course of its decade and a half long civil war. In Washington in 2014 and 2015, when the war against the Islamic State (ISIS) was at a critical stage, several different teams, from rival countries and rival think-tanks, toured the capital pitching various schemes for dividing Syria and Iraq (where ISIS was also present in force) into fresh parts. As the Islamic State drew support and recruits from across the world, as its soldiers terrorised and extorted the millions who lived under its rule, as its fighters enslaved women from the Yezidi minority and seemed on the brink of exterminating the Yezidi population of Sinjar, demographic entrepreneurs were walking the Congressional and White House corridors, doing their best to advocate not for their favoured countries, as in traditional lobbying, but instead their favourite ethnic, tribal or political group.

Perhaps the Kurdistan Region (KRI) of western Iraq might be given independence? Perhaps the Sunni tribal areas of Iraq, too? Or possibly a new Jazeera Plan (jazeera means island and refers to the north-east of Syria) might be adopted, with the United States underwriting a series of competing enclaves within Syria – independent of both the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic State – with its air power and special forces?

One group decisively won that tussle: the Syrian Kurdish group represented politically by the Democratic Union Party (PYD), and militarily by the People’s Protection Units (YPG). They subscribed to the ideology of democratic confederalism as theorised by the leaders of the Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a group that is designated as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

A small minority of the Syrian population, these Kurdish groups and their military were given American support in rebranding as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), possessing some token non-Kurdish fighters and commanders, but with the exact same leadership cadres as led the earlier organisations remaining in firm control.

It was this force that supplied the foot soldiers for the American and Global Coalition war against the Islamic State. They would retake Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto Syrian capital, and occupy this Sunni Arab-majority city for many years. They would occupy provincial capitals in Syria’s north and east. And even while the Islamic State seethed in Syria’s eastern desert, and the Assad regime remained in Damascus and Aleppo, it was believed by US officials that only the SDF could – or should – rule the east of the country with its oil industry and control of the Syrian-Iraqi borderlands.

This de facto partition did not go well. For years, as violence continued, Syria was split into three parts: the Assad regime, those rebel and Islamist groups opposed to the regime (increasingly courted and under the sway of Turkey), and the US-backed SDF (whom Turkey believed to be a terrorist group akin to ISIS). All the while, Islamic State slipped through the cracks of this dysfunctional system. The conflict was effectively frozen for five years between a failed regime offensive in 2019 and the sudden collapse of the Assad system in late 2024, placing the majority of the country now under the control of the rebel groups and Islamist militias who made up the pre-offensive armed opposition. De facto partition had once again failed.

That did not mean the dream of it was abandoned. New plans to partition Syria emerged instantly. The SDF refused to join the new government and its military. When Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the PKK, called for its forces to disarm, the SDF claimed that it was not the PKK and was also not in Turkey, and so did not need to disarm. It claims that the SDF deserves to govern all of Syria’s oil-producing regions in the north-east.

Israel, meanwhile, has its own plan to divide and rule Syria. After launching pre-emptive strikes, destroying the Syrian navy, and attacking many former Assad regime buildings, it has occupied the remainder of the Golan Heights and threatened to move on Damascus. In the last month, it has extended its occupation of parts of Damascus Governorate, claiming to defend and to speak on behalf of Syria’s Druze. A map has circulated with SDF and Israeli control unifying to create corridors the entire length of Syria’s southern and eastern borders, reminiscent of the straight lines that European colonial powers were condemned for drawing in Africa. Meanwhile, some Alawis, who live mostly on the Syrian coastline in the west, claim they ought to arm themselves and build their own antonymous homeland along the littoral.

Recent outbreaks of violence originated in an Iranian-sponsored uprising on the coast. Over the past few days, this uprising was largely defeated by government forces, but marred by savage retributory violence meted out by militias not under the control of Damascus. The lesson of this recent violence is that Syria will either have a unitary state with a monopoly on violence, or it will have the threat of bloodshed. Partition along ethnic lines is not in Syria’s interest. This is why so many of Syria’s neighbours, who hope to see the country destroyed, wish for partition — legal or illegal, by means fair or foul. They are not alone in this regard: the surviving members of ISIS, and groups affiliated with Turkey and Iran, also have plans to divide Syria into smaller, warring parts.

As is traditional in the imperial capital of the United States, diplomats and lobbyists are wandering corridors selling partition, armed with some insane maps detailing how Syria ought to be carved up. Partitions never work. They are at best arbitrary and their enforcement is always a question of violence deployed asymmetrically and more often than not with sadism. And yet for leaders, for nations, who wish to destabilise their neighbours, partition is potent tool. ‘It is for their own good, after all,’ the partitioners say. ‘For such people cannot be trusted, cannot be permitted, to rule themselves. It is for their own good.’