Eighty-five years later, in a 2002 interview with The New Statesman, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw observed "A lot of the problems we are having to deal with now, I have to deal with now, are a consequence of our colonial past. ... The Balfour Declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis—again, an interesting history for us but not an entirely honorable one."
In 2014 Shaykh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani al-Shami, spokesperson for ISIL, described the establishment of the caliphate as "a dream that lives in the depths of every Muslim believer" and "the abandoned obligation of the era”, while ISIL stated: "The legality of all emirates, groups, states and organizations becomes null by the expansion of the khilafah's [caliphate's] authority and arrival of its troops to their areas." ISIL thus rejects the political divisions established by Western powers at the end of World War I in the Sykes–Picot Agreement as it absorbs territory in Syria and Iraq.
The dismantling of the Empire and the colonial and post-colonial practices of both France and Britain created many of today's trouble spots. Administrative areas were created which paid scant regard to the makeup of the indigenous peoples; as often as not merging different tribes, cultures, languages and religion into a single political unit. Power would often be given to a minority group within the new state who would take over the military and political reins and form an elite within the country, often educated, trained and supplied by their ex-colonial masters on whom they had to rely to retain control.
Whether civil war in Syria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Israeli shells falling on schools and hospitals in Gaza, Al Shabaab in Somalia or the threat of nuclear terror from North Korea' there is an unavoidable link to the events precipitated by a bullet from the gun of 19 year old Gavrilo Princip in 1914 and a malign chain of evil still poisoning the world today. The real death rate from World War I is not only horrifying but continuing today in 2014.
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