I recently read an interesting article on countries unlikely to survive due to the artificiality of their borders. Several countries were mentioned but three stood out namely, Iraq, Syria and Libya.

In the last two centuries Africa and the Middle East were carved up by European colonial powers, such as France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Great Britain.

Tribes and groups of indigenous peoples, thousands of years old and with no cultural link were pulled apart or lumped together with no thought other than profit and how they would look on a map.

Iraq and Syria were created after the end of the First World War in 1918 by France and Britain and groups such as the Kurds, Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims were forced to live together whether they wanted to or not.

Libya formerly consisted of three separate regions called, Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan. In the early 20^th century Italy invaded North Africa and arbitrarily lumped the three regions together to form the new nation.

None of the peoples in any of those three countries wanted nationhood and until recently all were held together by brutal dictators, Saddam in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria. The first two were removed by Western action and the last, Syria, is in turmoil as Assad desperately clings on to power with Russian backing.

What a mess.