Published: 12:27 AM, 10 April 2026
Theological factions and foreign intervention have made West Asia restless
West Asian conflicts are driven by a complex mix of geopolitical, religious factions and resource disputes, compounded by foreign intervention. Key factors include Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Turkey, engaging in proxy wars in Yemen, Syria and Iraq. The region faces ongoing instability, including the Israel-Palestine crisis and Iran War.
West Asia is traditionally the name given to the Fertile Crescent or Mesopotamia, the Levant, the Nile Delta and the adjacent regions of Iran, Arabia and Anatolia. Today, it covers the region from Egypt, Cyprus and Turkey in the west to Iran and the Persian Gulf in the East, and from Iran and Turkey in the north to Oman and Yemen in the south.
Western Asia was under the control of the Ottoman Empire since the 14th Century AD. The empire had a multicultural population varying in race, religion and culture. It wasn’t easy to govern such a population without any mishaps but the Ottomans implemented a successful administrative system that rewarded the meritorious and the loyal thus ensuring peace in the region. But this situation changed after the end of World War I.
Upon the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in the war, most of its former territory was divided among the victorious allied powers, chiefly Britain and France. Now that the Ottoman control over most of the land inhabited by Arabs had ended, the time had come for them self-govern these lands without or with limited foreign interference. The British made many such promises in this regard in exchange for Arab support against the Ottomans in World War I.
But none would be kept with the wishes of the Arab people. These two would stand out as the driving force of the animosity between the Western world and the Middle East along with being the cause of the resulting conflicts that would take place in the years to come – the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a 1916 unofficial treaty between the United Kingdom and France, with assent from the Russian Empire and Italy, to define their mutually agreed spheres of influence and control in an eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire.
The primary negotiations leading to the agreement occurred between 23 November 1915 and 3 January 1916, on which date the British and French diplomats, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, initiated an agreed memorandum.
The British- and French-controlled countries were divided by the Sykes-Picot line. The agreement allocated to Britain control of what is today southern Israel and Palestine, Jordan and southern Iraq, and an additional small area that included the ports of Haifa and Acre to allow access to the Mediterranean Sea.
