Skip to main content

← Iran

Breaking Up Iran: "Sykes-Picot 2026"

If Iran is the obstacle to Greater Israel, what is supposed to happen to Iran? The answer that keeps appearing, in Israeli media, from former Israeli officials, and from American voices, is not annexation. It is breakup: an Iran split into ethnic pieces, too weak ever to stand in the way again. This is the same fate strategists described for Iraq and Syria decades ago. This page gathers what has been said.

Background for the reader: Iran is a nation of many peoples. Persians are the largest group, but there are also large Azerbaijani (Azeri) Turkish, Kurdish, Arab, Baluchi, and other communities, many of them living near Iran's borders. Sykes-Picot is the 1916 secret agreement in which Britain and France divided the Ottoman Middle East and drew the borders of Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.

"Time to redraw the Middle East map"​

On 3 March 2026, days after the United States and Israel launched the second war on Iran, the Israeli commentator Meir Swissa published an article on Ynet, the website of Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest newspaper, titled "Sykes-Picot 2026: time to redraw the Middle East map." As summarized by Middle East Eye on 7 March 2026, he argued that a fall of the Iranian regime could produce ethnic and tribal fragmentation among Iran's Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis (as cited by Mansur Peixoto on X, 23 March 2026). Netanyahu himself had used the same reference point after Syria fell: "Something tectonic has happened here, an earthquake that hasn't happened in the 100 years since the Sykes-Picot Agreement" (as quoted by Kit Klarenberg).

"Regime and state collapse"​

Daniel Levy, who advised Israeli prime ministers and negotiated for Israel before becoming a critic, said in April 2026: "Israel wants to be surrounded by failed, fragmenting, or co-opted states. Its goal in Iran is regime and state collapse, not regime change" (thread with the clip, 25 April 2026). Israeli reserve colonel Udi Evental described the 2026 operation as "intended to eliminate the threat entirely through regime change in Iran and the dismantling of Iran's missile arsenal," goals which, he wrote, require "either eternal war or endless rounds of attrition" (Udi Evental on X, 25 April 2026).

"The map of Iran will probably not look the same"​

President Trump said in March 2026 that the map of Iran "will probably not look the same after the war" (r/islamichistory, 8 March 2026).

Azerbaijan and the north​

Retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a former adviser to the Secretary of Defense, wrote in June 2025 of a plan involving Baku, Jerusalem, and Washington for a "Greater Azerbaijan" that would take in northern Iran around Tabriz, the capital of Iran's Azeri region, and noted the Iranian opposition group MEK's alignment with regime-change efforts (Douglas Macgregor on X, 30 June 2025). Former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant listed Azerbaijan among Israel's key partners in September 2026, noting that "Azerbaijan sits on the far side of Iran" (Yoav Gallant, The Rod Martin Report, 10 September 2026).

A "Second Israel" for the Kurds​

The Iranian-born writer Akbar Ganji argued in January 2026 that "Israel now attacks Iran to realize the 'Greater Israel' and 'Second Israel' project in the Middle East (through the partition of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran to create a Kurdish state), and also to partition Iran into several smaller countries" (Akbar Ganji on X, 15 January 2026). In 2011 the researcher Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya wrote that "The partitioning of Iran, Turkey, Somalia, and Pakistan also all fall into line" with the older plans for the region (as quoted by Sulagta on X, 12 September 2025).

Why this matters to Americans​

Breaking up a nation of 90 million is not a quick operation. Evental's phrase, "eternal war," is the honest description. Retired Colonel Macgregor warned in the same essay that the June 2025 war would "resume when the Israeli and U.S. Forces have replenished their stocks of missiles," and it did, in February 2026 (Douglas Macgregor on X, 30 June 2025). An "eternal war" to dismantle Iran is the war for which, as other sections of this investigation document, Israeli voices want American soldiers on the ground and American lawmakers are building draft machinery.

Evidence rating: STRONG that Israeli and allied voices see the breakup of Iran as the goal that follows the war.

Status: Meir Swissa, Benjamin Netanyahu, Daniel Levy, Udi Evental, Donald Trump, Douglas Macgregor, Yoav Gallant, Akbar Ganji, and Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya are alive.

Sources​

Research captures: twitter/t28__v327.md, twitter/t28__v330.md, twitter/t28__v333.md, twitter/t28__v334.md, twitter/t28__v336.md

Last Updated: 2026-09-26

Last updated on