State borders in the Middle East have been in flux for
millennia, with the strongest ruler of the day vying for control over fertile
land, trade routes, and major water sources. Today, the region is populated
with many countries whose modern-day borders were arbitrarily delineated by the
British-French Sykes-Picot Agreement, whose peoples have been in a constant
struggle to reclaim what they believe is rightfully their land. Much of a
state’s validity comes from being able to show that they have the oldest claim
to the region, so what happens when a people’s physical life, when their
physical history is deleted?
What happens when a city is blown to smithereens
by explosive charges, as with mosques and churches in Mosul, instead of falling
to salvageable ruins? What happens when an entire people is removed from their
ancestral homeland, fleeing to a neighboring country, leaving no trace of their
existence in the former land? Or, in the grand scheme of political and
strategic interests, is the individual human story irrelevant?
