So the Ottoman Empire was a thing and for a very long time. THere were a lot of subcultures within the empire, mostly divided along various the various Islamic factions, they were cultural regions with long standing informal boundaries, that group has historically been over there, this group has been over here, that other group has always been in that other place, we all believe some different things but we don’t need to interact with them.

Then WW1 happens, everyone gets involved with the fighting because of a huge cascade of treaties pulling more and more nations into the conflict, this included the Ottomans, who have a lot of oil reserves, which is needed for mechanized warfare. England and France join up and agree to take down the Ottoman Empire and carve it up so they have control over the oil and so the remnants of the empire don’t rise up. So they break the Ottomans, drew up lines on a map, split up and pushed together various cultural regions into unstable messes.

Those borders mostly stick around to the present day with a few more destabilizing changes after WW2, were basically dealing with the problems of a region with highly sought after natural resources, that was purposely made culturally unstable to exploit those resources.