Imagine a village near Mosul in 2018. The Islamic State has just been driven out. Children emerge from occupation to do the only thing that makes sense of the world: They play. But they are not playing soldiers. They are re-enacting history.
In Francis Alÿs’s film Sandlines, The Story of History, they draw lines in the dust, carving up an invisible empire. They act out British and French diplomats they have never seen, speaking words they do not understand, dividing lands they have never left. Then they stage the reign of the Islamic State: Black flags, beheadings, flight across borders their ancestors never drew. The bombs falling on their villages today were planted more than a century ago, in secret letters exchanged between men named Sykes and Picot.
Now those children are young adults. And in this war that erupted on February 28, 2026, they are watching their world unravel once more.
The map that never was
The Sykes-Picot Agreement was signed in May 1916, in the middle of a war that had nothing to do with the Arabs whose lands it divided.
Britain and France carved the Ottoman carcass before the beast had fallen. France would take today’s Syria and Lebanon. Britain would take Iraq, Jordan, Haifa, Acre. Palestine would be placed under “international administration” -- a phrase that became a wound that will not close.
The Arabs, who had been promised independence, discovered the betrayal when the Bolsheviks published the secret treaties.
For a century, those lines held, enforced by mandates, tanks, and client kings. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan were born as European inventions. Their borders cut through mountains, divided sects, separated tribes from grazing lands.
The Islamic State made destroying the Iraq-Syria border its central propaganda act, bulldozing the sand berm in 2014 and declaring the end of the colonial order. They failed, but the desire did not die.
In early March 2026, Israeli commentator Meir Swissa declared that the joint US-Israeli war against Iran would finish what the jihadists started.
Writing in Yedioth Ahronot, he called it “Sykes-Picot 2026” -- the moment when the 1916 map finally disintegrates. And in the three months since, voices in the Jerusalem Post have openly advocated for a “Trump-Netanyahu Agreement” to replace Sykes-Picot based on Israel’s security interests and biblical history.
But who draws the new map? And with what instruments?
The chessboard
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives argued that Eurasia is the central arena and whoever controls it controls the planet. He warned against a “Eurasian balancer” -- an alliance of Russia, China, and Iran -- that could challenge American primacy.
Now watch what happened. Joint US-Israeli strikes killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war. A forty-day mourning period began; his son Mojtaba has succeeded him. Tehran retaliated with missiles on Israel and US bases. While a shaky ceasefire now holds, the US has imposed a naval blockade, oil prices have hit four-year highs, and the Strait of Hormuz remains lethally contested.
From Brzezinski’s perspective, this is not chaos. It is the chessboard being cleared. Iran is the keystone of the Russia-China-Iran axis. Destroy its military power, sever its influence through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and the “Eurasian balancer” collapses before it fully forms. The White House posted on X alongside edited airstrike footage: “Locked in.”
Locked into a chess game where the pieces are nations and the board is soaked in blood -- and where the players forget the pieces are alive.
The view from below
Hamid Dabashi, the Iranian-American scholar, has spent decades excavating what the chess players refuse to see: The people being moved across the board have memories, grievances, and a capacity for resistance no strategist can calculate.
In After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization (2025), he dissects the “garrison state” -- a political entity that cannot survive without perpetual warfare, that defines itself through the violence it inflicts on others.
Israel, in this framework, is the sword of the West in the heart of the Arab world.
From this view, the current war is the logical extension of a colonial project that began with Sykes-Picot, continued through the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, and now reaches its bloody climax. Iran is not Iraq. It remembers Alexander, the Mongols, 1953. It will not break the way the strategists expect.
Tom Barrack, Trump’s special envoy, stated in August 2025 that Israel considers Sykes-Picot borders “meaningless” and has the “capacity or the desire” to take over Lebanon and Syria.
The UK and France, the original architects of Sykes-Picot, have sent additional fighter jets and destroyers to the Gulf, reviving what one analyst calls a “Sykes-Picot strategy” to protect energy interests.
The old maps are not simply dying; they are being fought over by the same colonial powers that drew them.
The apocalypse
But not everyone sees this as a chess match. Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian philosopher often labelled “Putin’s brain,” fuses Eurasianism with Orthodox mysticism. He believes Russia is the katechon -- the force holding back the Antichrist, which he identifies with the liberal West. The final battle is not political; it is metaphysical.
A 2025 academic study documents how Dugin’s ideas have found a receptive audience in Iran, precisely because they align with Shi‘i messianism -- the return of the Mahdi, the battle against the Dajjal.
When both sides believe they are acting out prophecy, there is no compromise, no negotiation, only the appointed end. Dugin declared in the first week of March that “WW3 has begun” and that Russia is “next.”
On the other side, American evangelical Christians, a core political base for the administration, see the war on Iran as prophecy fulfilled.
The chessboard and the apocalypse have merged.
The cognitive warfare -- as analysts have termed it -- is working. War becomes entertainment. The dead become numbers. The chessboard becomes a screen.
What comes after the lines are erased
The Sykes-Picot lines are being erased by bombs. An Israeli commentator sees a future of tribes and emirates. An American strategist sees a cleared chessboard. An Iranian scholar sees a civilization that has survived every conqueror for two millennia. Mystics on both sides see the final battle.
I do not know which vision prevails. But I know that the children in Alÿs’s film are now young adults, and they know the borders drawn in 1916 were never legitimate. They also know what comes next may be worse: Not states, but fragments; not peace, but permanent war.
There is a moment in Sandlines when the wind blows and the lines the children drew begin to fade. That is the truth about borders.
They are lines drawn in sand by people who will be dead in a century, enforced by soldiers who will be forgotten in two, obeyed by populations who had no voice in their creation. Then the wind blows, or the bombs fall, and the children draw new ones.
The question, for those of us in the Global South, is whether we will be allowed to draw our own lines -- or whether the same old hands will trace them for us once again. Asking this, in times like these, is the beginning of wisdom.
Zakir Kibria is a Bangladeshi writer, policy analyst and entrepreneur based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Views expressed are the writer’s own.