I'm Mr Sykes.

What about Jerry Sykes?

Jerry Sykes sure can fight.

Old JB Sykes helping somebody.

Jerry Sykes is fighting Danny Hawkins!

They've been looking for Jerry Sykes.

Reverend Sykes, are you going upstairs?

What was between you and Jerry Sykes?

Can't do business that way, Mr Sykes.

That's what's left of the Sykes boy.

Mr. Sykes is an English civil servant.

To top it, Jerry Sykes takes a powder.

Morning, Mr Sykes. What can I do for you?

That Jerry Sykes, he's a natural drag, you know?

You know that Jerry Sykes? Strictly a sticky hicky.

You know of anybody had a grudge against Jerry Sykes?

Folks say Jerry Sykes owed him quite a bit of money.

Thou art in love with Purity Sykes and even betrothed to her.

They tell me young Sykes ain't been seen since the dance Saturday.

There's no reason to kick the dog. She didn't kill Jerry Sykes.

What would you say if I told you Daniel killed Jerry Sykes?

Seems young Sykes helped himself to around 2, 000 out of Pappy's cash box.

Like cos his old man was JB Sykes he had more rights than other guys.

Mr. Sykes and Monsieur Picot met, and they agreed that after the war France and England should share the Turkish Empire.

This ancient fracture, papered over by Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges Picot 97 years ago in their secret agreement, has now swallowed Syria, with Assad portrayed as some sort of Alawite ogre. Many Western diplomats appear to be of the same superficial cast of mind as Sykes and Picot, believing that Assad s fall from power would remove Syria from the Iran Hezbollah Hamas axis.

The de facto dismemberment of both countries central state authorities gave rise to a totally new player the Islamic State, which has announced the establishment of a caliphate straddling Iraq and Syria, totally disregarding the old Sykes Picot arrangement.

For example, there are the constant reminders that external powers most notably, the United Kingdom and France established the existing borders. Resistance against the so called Sykes Picot order nurtured the founding myths of many states and political movements in the region.

Indeed, the partial withdrawal of the US implies that the end of the enforced stability of the old Middle East will not spare the Sykes Picot borders. Developments in Syria and Iraq already suggest as much, and the future of Lebanon and Jordan has become increasingly uncertain.

The similarities with the views of the Islamic State are glaring. In a video produced after the battle for the Mosul Dam in August, the group called for the end of Sykes Picot, and proclaimed the need to redraw the Western imposed political map of the Middle East.

Yet we are now witnessing its disintegration, because the Sykes Picot design always implied a strong external hegemonic power (or two) able and willing to maintain stability by channeling (or suppressing) the region s numerous conflicts. Great Britain and France, the first hegemonic powers, were succeeded by the US and the Soviet Union and, finally, by the US alone.

Now, with Obama s decision to send arms as well, his red line in Syria the use of chemical weapons could well create a legacy as damaging to the region as that of the Sykes Picot line in the sand proved to be. To arm the rebel groups is, perhaps inevitably, also to arm their terrorist and mercenary allies.

Unlike Lebanon during its 15 year civil war, no regional power today would be able to contain Syria s war within its borders. As a result, it is much more likely that Syria s disintegration would call the entire post World War I (or post Ottoman) Middle Eastern state system also called the Sykes Picot system into question.

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of World War I, the great powers of the day, Britain and France, carved out successor states in order to ensure their control over the Middle East s oil, geopolitics, and transit routes to Asia. Their cynicism reflected, for example, in the Sykes Picot Agreement nbsp established a lasting pattern of destructive outside meddling.

Most international borders in the Middle East and North Africa were drawn by imperial powers Britain, France, and Italy either after World War I and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire (the Sykes Picot agreements), or, as in Libya and Sudan, earlier. But in no case did these borders correspond with local popular will, or with ethnic or historical boundaries.

A couple of weeks later, Erdoğan himself unleashed a furious anti Western diatribe at Istanbul s Marmara University. In his speech, nbsp he compared the West s interference in the Middle East today with the British officer Lawrence of Arabia s involvement in the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans during World War I, and blasted the nbsp Sykes Picot Agreement, which has since defined the Middle East s political map.

No such hope currently exists for the Middle East, whose contemporary political borders were largely established by Britain and France during WWI, when the diplomats Mark Sykes and François Georges Picot negotiated the division of the Ottoman Empire. Likewise, the creation of Israel harks back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, whereby the subsequent British mandatory power in Palestine supported the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people.

America s misadventure in Iraq, its exhaustion as a world power, and its unwillingness to maintain its previous level of commitment to the region have rendered the Sykes Picot structure untenable, because no other external force for order is available. The resulting vacuum has been filled by various currents of political Islam, terrorism, protest movements, uprisings, secession attempts by national or religious minorities, and aspiring regional hegemons (Iran and Saudi Arabia).

The contemporary map of the Middle East was drawn by the victorious Western imperial powers, Great Britain and France, during and after WWI. While the war was still raging, they signed an agreement drafted by the diplomats Sir Mark Sykes and François George Picot, which delineated their respective spheres of influence across the Levant an agreement that entirely disregarded the region s history, ethnic and religious traditions and affiliations, and the will of local populations.

The Middle East named for its geographic position between Europe and East Asia was under Ottoman rule for 400 years before the Allied powers, after defeating the Ottomans in World War I, partitioned the region into distinct political units that, under the Sykes Picot Agreement, fell within spheres of influence carved out by the United Kingdom and France. But, in response to these new divisions, an Arab awakening shaped by pan Arabism and support for Palestine was occurring.

NEW DELHI As the West begins to gear up for the centenary of the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the Middle East is being convulsed as never before by the legacy of the Ottoman Empire s breakup. Look no farther than Syria, where one part of that legacy the Sykes Picot Agreement, which divided the Levant into British and French spheres of influence even while the Great War still raged is coming to a brutally violent end.