![]() A political map of the region from 1930 looks nearly identical to one from 2013. Until now, the post-Ottoman order, fashioned by wartime exigency, imperialist ambitions, and ignorance of local identities, has survived a century of independence, revolution, and war. Long-repressed identities have reemerged, challenging the unity of many Muslim states and blurring once-solid geopolitical lines. The wrath of the misnamed “Arab Spring” has exposed the sectarian nature of the region. The doodles of Daraa, however, have unwittingly shaken a different, more expansive “regime” altogether: The century-old, European-created Middle Eastern political order. Twenty-eight months later, their goal remains elusive. Their graffiti was so threatening that the Daraa Fifteen, as they became known, were arrested, beaten, and denailed-a medieval form of torture-by the regime. Like their brethren in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the schoolchildren had a bleak but limited goal: To end the 43-year rule of the totalitarian Assad regime. On March 6, 2011, fifteen Syrian fourth-graders in the southern border town of Daraa scribbled, “the people want to bring down the regime” on the walls of their school, echoing slogans shouted across the Arab world for two months. They are gone, but the map remains, along with a shameful irony: While Europeans found a better way to set their own borders, the states they carved out of the Ottoman Empire continue to burn and self-destruct. A century ago, European powers redrew the lines of the Levant according to their own needs.
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