Jordan's King Abdullah in Aqaba attending the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Great Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule. His great-grandfather Sharif Hussein, Lawrence of Arabia, all that stuff. It's a revolt that succeeded but then veered off in completely unintended directions: facilitating the emergence of Saudi Arabia, and via the creation of unstable monarchies in Iraq and Syria, opening the way for Baathism and a decades-long sequence of disastrous miscalculations, the latest of which unfolds in Syria today. Of course, it's a story that can't be told without reference to two World Wars and continued interventions of western countries in the Arab world. Like Easter 1916 in Dublin, an anniversary to be observed in mind of what came later.
Photo: Petra News Agency.
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