Sykes–Picot Agreement

During the First World War, Britain and France secretly agreed how they would share out the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire if the Allies won. The arrangement takes its name from the two diplomats who drafted it, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, who initialled a joint memorandum on 3 January 1916; the two governments confirmed it in letters of 9 and 16 May 1916, with Russian and later Italian assent. Never fully implemented, it nonetheless shaped the post-war division of the region and remains a byword in Arab political memory.

From 1915 the Allies made a series of secret bargains about Ottoman territory. Russia was promised Constantinople and the Straits, and Italy was offered gains in Anatolia. At the same time the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, was corresponding with Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca. In ten letters exchanged between July 1915 and March 1916, Britain undertook to recognise Arab independence after the war in return for an Arab rising against the Ottomans, which became the Arab Revolt. The boundaries were left vague, especially in the north-west, where McMahon excluded areas of Syria lying west of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo.

France, which claimed a historic position in Syria, sent Picot to London. Talks with a British committee began on 23 November 1915 and stalled over Mosul and Lebanon until Sykes took over the negotiations at the end of December. Within days the two men had a compromise. The Mosul province was split at the Little Zab river, and Palestine was set aside for an international administration to be agreed with Russia, the other Allies and the Sharif. The British cabinet accepted in February 1916 on condition that Arab cooperation was secured and the four Syrian towns went to the Arabs. Russia agreed in April in return for Western Armenia.

The agreement carved the Ottoman lands outside the Arabian Peninsula into British and French areas of control and influence, separated by what became known as the Sykes–Picot line. In modern terms, Britain's share covered what is now southern Iraq, Jordan and southern Israel, along with the ports of Haifa and Acre for access to the Mediterranean. France's covered Syria, Lebanon, south-eastern Turkey and the Kurdish north of Iraq. The area reserved for an Arab state would have British and French advisers, and a reduced Palestine was to be under international administration.

After the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks published the secret treaties in November 1917, and the Manchester Guardian reprinted the text on 26 November. The disclosure embarrassed the Allies and deepened Arab distrust, coming weeks after the Balfour Declaration. Many sources hold that the agreement conflicted with the promises made to Hussein; British officials later argued that Palestine had been excluded from those promises, an interpretation Arab leaders rejected. President Woodrow Wilson, who opposed secret diplomacy, and the new language of self-determination further undermined its standing.

The war's end changed the picture. In December 1918 Clemenceau privately conceded Mosul and Palestine to Lloyd George. Arab and British troops entered Damascus in October 1918, and in March 1920 a Syrian congress declared Faisal, Hussein's son, head of an independent Syria. But the San Remo conference in April 1920 assigned mandates broadly following the 1916 framework: Syria and Lebanon to France, Palestine and Mesopotamia to Britain. The Anatolian provisions passed into the Treaty of Sèvres but were overturned by the Turkish War of Independence and the Treaty of Lausanne.

The agreement left lasting resentment in the region, among Arabs above all but also among Kurds, who were denied a state of their own. It is often blamed for drawing "artificial" borders, though historians dispute how far it actually determined the modern frontiers. In 2014 the militant group ISIL claimed that undoing it was among the aims of its insurgency.

Our 1914 map shows the Ottoman provinces before the war, and the 1920 and 1930 maps show the British and French mandates, including Syria, that emerged in their place.