Sykes-Picot Agreement

In 1915 and 1916 the British diplomat Mark Sykes and the French diplomat Francois Georges-Picot negotiate a secret deal for dividing the Ottoman Empire's Arab lands after World War I. Russia consents, and the agreement is concluded in May 1916. Britain would control the area from Baghdad to the Mediterranean port of Haifa, roughly modern southern Iraq and Jordan. France would hold Syria's coast, Lebanon and southern Anatolia, and Palestine would be under an international administration.¹²

The Ottomans had entered the war on Germany's side in 1914, and the Allies expected to win and to divide the spoils. The same British government had promised the Arab leader Sharif Hussein of Mecca independence for the Arabs if he rose against the Ottomans, in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915 and 1916, and the Arab Revolt followed in June 1916. Sykes-Picot was kept secret until the Bolsheviks, after taking power in Russia in 1917, published the Allied treaties, which embarrassed Britain and enraged Arabs.¹⁴

The final settlement departed from the plan. After 1920 the League of Nations mandates gave Britain Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan and France Syria and Lebanon, and oil-rich Mosul went to Iraq rather than France. The agreement still came to stand for a colonial map drawn without regard for the people who lived there. Historians note that the modern borders were set by the post-war settlements, not by this document, but the phrase remains a symbol of the era in Middle East politics.¹³⁵