By Roger Owen
The surprising and in many ways shocking emergence of ISIS as one of the best trained, best financed, and most highly motivated and militarily effective fighting forces in the Arab east has led to much talk of an erasure of the old colonial-period Sykes-Picot boundary that artificially divided Syria and Iraq. But though there is an element of truth in this, the issue is much more complex and best viewed by looking at the origins of the modern state of Iraq from a more detailed historical perspective.
Note first that while...
