Syria's borders in relation to late Ottoman provinces

Crude mapmaking and hundred year echoes

I was reading Seda Altuğ’s essay “The Turkish-Syrian Border and Politics of Difference in Turkey and Syria (1921–1939)” in the anthology Syria: Borders, Boundaries, and the State and wanted to see what the contemporary Syrian border looked like over the late Ottoman vilayet borders. What resulted is these two crudely drawn maps I made using slightly different pre-World War maps of the empire available on Wikipedia. I decided to use both as the first one has clearly topographically detail but doesn’t include rivers, while the other highlights the Khabour and the Balikh and their tributaries, as well as shows the Sajour north of Manbij.

“Turkey in Asia (Asia Minor) and Transcaucasia,” Keith Johnston's General Atlas, Oct. 1911. (source)

“Turkey in Asia,” The New Encyclopedic Atlas and Gazetteer of the World, P.F. Collier and Son, 1909. (source)

One can see that northern Syria encompasses the southern half of the Aleppo vilayet (including the Alexandretta Sanjak until the French ceded it to Turkey in 1939), essentially all of the Zour vilayet outside of the Tektek mountains between Urfa and Mardin and some of the Euphrates river valley southeast of Abu Kamal, as well as the plains of southern Diyarbekir vilayet.

Mountains east of Cizre (Jezire Ibn Omar on each map) and the post-2016 Turkish border wall seen from the northeastern tip of Syria/southeastern Diyarbekir vilayet

It’s also worth pointing out that the two biggest cities in Syria’s al-Hasakah province - al-Hasakah and al-Qamishli - were not founded until the Mandate period. Al-Hasakah city grew around a French military outpost (built on top of an Arab, later Ottoman fort built on top of a Byzantine cathedral built on top of Assyrian ruins) located near “Tell Kokab” as seen on the first map.

1927 map of Hasakah city

1930 aerial photo of al-Hasakah city with the French military base in the foreground

Jebel Kawkab is a volcano located within the regime-controlled pocket northeast of al-Hasakah city.

Jebel Kawkab (source)

Al-Qamishli was built in the 1920s, largely by Assyrian (and Armenian) genocide survivors across the train tracks/border from the city of Nusaybin (Nisibin on the maps above), also around a French military outpost.

1926 photo of Nusaybin and the French military outpost

The article by Seda Altuğ largely concerns the relationship between the delineation of the Syrian-Turkish border and Turkish ethno-nationalist state formation and its othering of non-Turkish minorities residing on both sides of the border. While I hope to delve more into this incredibly important history and its continued resonance in future works here I did want to highlight one section of the article:

[A] substantial issue that saturated the interstate correspondences blurring the distinction between the domestic and international is the treatment of the (political) rebels (şaki). In every Border Commission Meeting, the lists with names of the rebels (politics or otherwise) residing in Syria and asked by the Turkish authorities from the French to be deported to Turkey grow longer and reach up to tens of pages. The Turkish party demands their strict surveillance and removal of these individuals or groups 50 kilometres away from the border zone. Turkish border authorities condemn the French for abandoning the assigned tasks such as the removal of the rebels and ignoring the strict surveillance of the border zone. In an official meeting between the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Bekir Sami Bey and his French counterpart, Sami Bey argued that the Turco-Syrian frontier is composed of two segments: the western segment, which extends from Payas to the Euphrates, and the eastern segment, which extends from Tell ‘Abyad to the Tigris: “The western part is a sensitive region for the French and they need the collaborative support of the Turks especially in order to fight the çetes in Kilis; whereas the eastern part is sensitive for the Turks due to the Kurdish movement”.

While I typically find such comparisons hackneyed and simplistic, it is interest to read that last line while thinking of Turkish policy with regards to the Syrian Civil War. In the 1920s Turkey maintained a policy of supporting northern Syrian anti-French activity (referred to in part here with the word ‘çetes’ or gangs) of varying scales of intensity, less out of pure irredentism than as a cheap geopolitical bargaining chip. Meanwhile Armenian and Kurdish refugees and political dissidents from modern day Turkey settled (or were forced) in Syria, which served as springboard for anti-state activity such as the 1925 Sheikh Said rebellion (see Nelida Fuccaro’s essay “Kurds and Kurdish Nationalism in Mandatory Syria” for more on the political intermingling of the two communities).

This west vs. east geographical division does somewhat map onto Turkish policy post-2011: funding anti-state militants in the northwest of Syria while maintaining immense interest in Kurdish activities to the east. This deserves (much) further unpacking but it seems to me that such echoing one hundred years later is a product of both continued contradictions within Turkey’s approach to nationality and diversity and continued legitimacy issues of the Syrian state.