The modern Middle East, a region defined by fractured nations, intractable conflicts, and deeply rooted resentments, was not born of ancient animosities but forged in the crucible of World War I. Its foundational document is not a declaration of independence, but a secret wartime agreement sketched out by two imperial bureaucrats. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 stands as a masterclass in colonial arrogance, a pact that betrayed promises, ignored the aspirations of millions, and drew lines on a map that have bled for over a century. It was the moment the fate of the Arab world was decided not in Mecca or Damascus, but in the backrooms of London and Paris. This is the story of that agreement, the web of contradictory promises that surrounded it, and the violent, unstable world it created.

The Sick Man’s Demise: The Scramble for the Orient

By the early 20th century, the Ottoman Empire, once a sprawling power that stretched from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf, was known as the “Sick Man of Europe.” For decades, European powers had circled its decaying domains, wrestling with the “Eastern Question”—the diplomatic puzzle of how to manage the empire’s inevitable collapse without upsetting the delicate European balance of power. With the Ottoman Empire’s entry into World War I on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914, the question was no longer theoretical. The scramble for the Orient had begun. Britain, France, and Russia, the main Entente powers, saw a historic opportunity to dismantle their old rival and absorb its territories into their own spheres of influence.

The Imperial Cartographers: Drawing a Line in the Sand

To manage their competing ambitions, Britain and France appointed two men to carve up the Ottoman corpse. Sir Mark Sykes was a British aristocrat and adventurer with a romantic, if condescending, fascination with the Orient. François Georges-Picot was a professional French diplomat, fiercely protective of France’s historical claims in the Levant. Meeting in secret between late 1915 and the spring of 1916, they negotiated the Asia Minor Agreement, now universally known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

It was a purely imperial calculation. With a grease pencil on a map, they drew a line from the “e” in Acre to the last “k” in Kirkuk. The territory north of this line (modern Syria and Lebanon) would be under French control or influence. The territory to the south (modern Iraq and Jordan) would be British. Palestine was to be placed under international administration. The agreement had nothing to do with ethnic, religious, or tribal realities on the ground; it was designed solely to partition the spoils of war between two colonial powers.

A Web of Contradictory Promises

The fatal flaw of the Sykes-Picot Agreement was that it was a secret built upon a foundation of public lies. Even as Sykes and Picot were drawing their line, Britain was making two other, mutually exclusive promises to court wartime allies.

Promises in the Desert: The Arab Revolt
To weaken the Ottoman war effort, Britain sought to incite a revolt within the empire’s Arab territories. Through a series of letters between 1915 and 1916 known as the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, promised Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, that Britain would support the creation of a vast, independent Arab kingdom in exchange for the Arabs rising up against their Turkish rulers. Inspired by this promise, the Arab Revolt began in 1916, playing a crucial role in the Allied victory. The Arabs believed they were fighting for their freedom; in reality, their future had already been partitioned.

The Third Promise: The Balfour Declaration
In 1917, Britain made a third, overlapping promise. Seeking to secure the support of the global Jewish community and gain a strategic foothold in a post-war Palestine, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued a public declaration. In 67 carefully chosen words, it stated that the British government viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” This promise to the Zionist movement directly contradicted the promise of an independent Arab state that would have included Palestine, creating the foundational conflict that continues to this day.

The Bolshevik Leak: A Secret Exposed

The elaborate edifice of British double-dealing came crashing down in November 1917. Following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the new communist government, led by Lenin and Trotsky, sought to expose the cynical, imperialist nature of the war. They opened the old tsarist archives and published the secret treaties they found, including the full text of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The leak was a diplomatic bombshell. It revealed to the world—and most devastatingly, to the Arabs who were actively fighting alongside the British—that their patrons intended not to liberate them, but to colonize them. The trust was shattered, and a deep-seated sense of betrayal took root.

From Treaty to Mandate: Legalizing Colonial Rule

After the war, the victorious Allied powers convened at a series of conferences to formalize the new world order. At the San Remo Conference in 1920, the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement was laundered into a form of international law. Instead of “colonies,” the territories would be called “Mandates,” granted by the new League of NationsLeague of Nations Full Description:The first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. Its spectacular failure to prevent the aggression of the Axis powers provided the negative blueprint for the United Nations, influencing the decision to prioritize enforcement power over pure idealism. The League of Nations was the precursor to the UN, established after the First World War. Founded on the principle of collective security, it relied on moral persuasion and unanimous voting. It ultimately collapsed because it lacked an armed force and, crucially, the United States never joined, rendering it toothless in the face of expansionist empires. Critical Perspective:The shadow of the League looms over the UN. The founders of the UN viewed the League as “too democratic” and ineffective because it treated all nations as relatively equal. Consequently, the UN was designed specifically to correct this “error” by empowering the Great Powers (via the Security Council) to police the world, effectively sacrificing sovereign equality for the sake of stability.
Read more. France was given the Mandate for Syria and Lebanon; Britain received the Mandates for Palestine and Iraq. It was a thin legal veil for a classic imperial land grab, granting the European powers the authority to govern these territories until they were deemed “ready” for self-rule.

Fabricating Nations: The Reality on the Ground

The implementation of the Mandates was a brutal process of creating artificial states that served imperial interests.

Churchill’s Invention: The Iraqi State
In 1921, the British Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill, convened the Cairo Conference to settle the “mess” in the Middle East. With a group of imperial experts known as the “Forty Thieves,” he fabricated the modern state of Iraq. Three disparate Ottoman provinces—the Sunni center around Baghdad, the Shia south around Basra, and the Kurdish north around Mosul—were crudely stitched together. To rule this volatile new entity, Churchill installed Faisal, the son of Sharif Hussein, as king, partially fulfilling the promise to the Arabs while ensuring a client monarch was on the throne to protect British oil interests.

Dividing Greater Syria
France was equally ruthless in its Mandate. To secure its power and break Arab nationalism, it implemented a classic “divide and ruleDivide and Rule Full Description:A colonial strategy of governance aimed at maintaining power by creating or exploiting divisions among subject populations. In India, this involved institutionalizing religious differences in the census, electorates, and army recruitment to prevent a unified anti-colonial front. Divide and Rule describes the British policy of playing different communities against one another. By introducing separate electorates (where Muslims voted only for Muslims and Hindus for Hindus), the colonial state ensured that politicians had to appeal to narrow religious identities rather than broad national interests. Critical Perspective:This policy did not merely exploit existing tensions; it manufactured them. Before British rule, identities were fluid and overlapping. The colonial state’s obsession with categorization “froze” these identities into rigid, antagonistic blocs. Partition can be seen as the logical endpoint of this administrative strategy—the ultimate success of a policy designed to make unity impossible.
Read more” strategy in “Greater Syria.” It carved out the state of Lebanon, enlarging the historical Christian heartland of Mount Lebanon with the addition of Muslim-majority coastal cities and the Bekaa Valley. This created a state with a built-in sectarian fragility, ensuring that France would always be seen as the necessary protector of the Christian minority.

The Nation That Never Was: The Kurdish Tragedy

The post-war settlement was as much about erasing nations as creating them. The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, the initial peace treaty with the defeated Ottoman Empire, included provisions for an independent Armenian state and an autonomous Kurdistan. For the first time, Kurdish national aspirations were recognized on the world stage. But this promise was swiftly broken. A Turkish nationalist uprising led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk successfully fought off Allied forces and established the modern Republic of Turkey. The Allies were forced back to the negotiating table, and the resulting 1923 Treaty of Lausanne made no mention of Kurdistan or Armenia. The Kurdish people were left divided between the new states of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, their promised nation erased from the map—a direct and painful legacy of the great powers’ cartography.

A Century of Conflict

The Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Mandate system it spawned created a legacy of profound instability. It installed unaccountable monarchs and colonial administrators over populations that had been promised freedom. It created states with artificial borders that ignored ethnic and sectarian realities, ensuring internal conflict. It betrayed the Arabs, sowed the seeds of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and left the Kurds stateless. The “line in the sand” drawn by two men in a secret room over a century ago remains a deep and festering wound on the body of the Middle East.

Timeline of Key Events

• 1915-1916: The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence takes place, promising British support for an independent Arab kingdom.
• May 1916: Britain and France conclude the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement to partition the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces.
• June 1916: The Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire begins.
• November 1917: The Balfour Declaration is issued, promising British support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
• November 1917: The Bolshevik government in Russia leaks the text of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, exposing the secret pact to the world.
• April 1920: The San Remo Conference formally allocates the Mandates for Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq to France and Britain.
• August 1920: The Treaty of Sèvres is signed, which includes provisions for an autonomous Kurdistan.
• March 1921: The Cairo Conference, led by Winston Churchill, establishes the borders of the British Mandate of Iraq and installs Faisal as king.
• July 1923: The Treaty of Lausanne is signed, superseding Sèvres and making no provision for a Kurdish state.

Glossary of Terms

• Arab Revolt: The uprising (1916-1918) by Arab forces under the command of Sharif Hussein of Mecca against the Ottoman Empire during World War I, encouraged by the British.
• Balfour Declaration: A 1917 public statement by the British government announcing support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
• Eastern Question: The diplomatic problem posed in the 19th and early 20th centuries by the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the scramble by European powers to control its former territories.
• Mandate System: A legal status for certain territories transferred from the control of one country to another following World War I, administered by a “mandatory” power on behalf of the League of Nations. It was widely seen as a form of neo-colonialism.
• McMahon-Hussein Correspondence: A series of letters exchanged during World War I in which the United Kingdom promised Sharif Hussein of Mecca an independent Arab state in exchange for revolting against the Ottomans.
• Sharif of Mecca: The traditional protector of the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Sharif Hussein bin Ali held this title and led the Arab Revolt.
• Sykes-Picot Agreement: A 1916 secret agreement between the United Kingdom and France, with the assent of the Russian Empire, defining their proposed spheres of influence and control in Southwestern Asia should the Triple Entente succeed in defeating the Ottoman Empire.
• ZionismZionism Full Description:A modern political ideology and nationalist movement that advocates for the establishment and maintenance of a Jewish state in Palestine. Critically, it is defined as a settler-colonial project that necessitates the systematic displacement, dispossession, and erasure of the indigenous Palestinian population to establish demographic and political supremacy. Zionism emerged in Europe not merely as a response to antisemitism, but as a colonial movement adopting the racial and imperial logic of the 19th century. It posited that Jewish safety could only be guaranteed through the creation of an ethno-state. Because the target territory was already inhabited, the ideology was fundamentally built on the “logic of elimination”—the requirement to transfer, expel, or subjugate the native Arab population to create an artificial majority. Critical Perspective:Structurally, Zionism functions as an exclusionary ideology. By defining the state exclusively as the expression of self-determination for Jewish people, it inherently renders indigenous Palestinians as demographic threats rather than citizens. Critics argue that this necessitates a permanent state of violence, apartheid, and military occupation, as the state must constantly police, cage, and destroy the native population to prevent them from reclaiming their land and rights. Further Reading The End of the British Mandate: Imperial Withdrawal and the Onset of War The UN Partition Plan of 1947: A Spark in a TinderboxThe 1948 War: Nakba and Independence Plan Dalet: A Blueprint for Conflict The Palestinian Nakba: A National Trauma Arab States’ Intervention and the Widening War The Palestinian Refugee Crisis The 1949 Armistice Agreements: A Frozen Conflict Israel’s Transformation: State-Building and Immigration The Arab World After 1948: Political Upheaval The Legacy of 1948: The Politics of Memory : A nationalist movement that emerged in the late 19th century supporting the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the historic Land of Israel.