Sykes–Picot Agreement

The agreement was based on the premise that the Triple Entente would achieve success in defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I and formed part of a series of secret agreements contemplating its partition. The primary negotiations leading to the agreement took place between 23 November 1915 and 3 January 1916, on which date the British and French diplomats, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, initialled an agreed memorandum.^[2][3] The agreement was ratified by their respective governments on 9 and 16 May 1916.^[4]


The agreement effectively divided the Ottoman provinces outside the Arabian Peninsula into areas of British and French control and influence. The British- and French-controlled countries were divided by the Sykes–Picot line.^[5] The agreement allocated to the UK control of what is today southern Israel and Palestine, Jordan and southern Iraq, and an additional small area that included the ports of Haifa and Acre to allow access to the Mediterranean.^[6][7][8] France was to control southeastern Turkey, the Kurdistan Region, Syria and Lebanon.^[8]


As a result of the included Sazonov–Paléologue Agreement, Russia was to get Western Armenia in addition to Constantinople and the Turkish Straits already promised under the 1915 Constantinople Agreement.^[8] Italy assented to the agreement in 1917 via the Agreement of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne and received southern Anatolia.^[8] The Palestine region, with a smaller area than the later Mandatory Palestine, was to fall under an "international administration".


The agreement was initially used directly as the basis for the 1918 Anglo–French Modus Vivendi, which provided a framework for the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration in the Levant. More broadly it was to lead, indirectly, to the subsequent partitioning of the Ottoman Empire following Ottoman defeat in 1918. Shortly after the war, the French ceded Palestine and Mosul to the British. Mandates in the Levant and Mesopotamia were assigned at the April 1920 San Remo conference following the Sykes–Picot framework; the British Mandate for Palestine ran until 1948, the British Mandate for Mesopotamia was to be replaced by a similar treaty with Mandatory Iraq, and the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon lasted until 1946. The Anatolian parts of the agreement were assigned by the August 1920 Treaty of Sèvres; however, these ambitions were thwarted by the 1919–23 Turkish War of Independence and the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne.


The agreement is seen by many as a turning point in Western and Arab relations. It reneged upon the UK's promises to Arabs^[9] regarding a national Arab homeland in the area of Greater Syria in exchange for supporting the British against the Ottoman Empire. The agreement, along with others, was made public by the Bolsheviks^[10] in Moscow on 23 November 1917 and repeated in The Manchester Guardian on 26 November 1917, such that "the British were embarrassed, the Arabs dismayed and the Turks delighted".^[11][12][13] The agreement's legacy has led to much resentment in the region, among Arabs in particular but also among Kurds who were denied an independent state.^{[14][15][16][17]}

Modern politics[edit]

Leading up to the centenary of Sykes–Picot in 2016, great interest was generated among the media^[113] and academia^[114] concerning the long-term effects of the agreement. The agreement is frequently cited as having created "artificial" borders in the Middle East, "without any regard to ethnic or sectarian characteristics, [which] has resulted in endless conflict."^[115] The extent to which Sykes–Picot actually shaped the borders of the modern Middle East is disputed.^[116][117]


The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) claimed one of the goals of its insurgency is to reverse the effects of the Sykes–Picot Agreement for the purpose of building a united Islamic State.^{[118][119][120]} "We don't recognise it and we will never recognise it. This is not the first border we will break, we will break other borders," a jihadist from the ISIL, Abu Safiyya,^[121] warned in a video titled End of Sykes–Picot.^[118] ISIL's former leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in a July 2014 speech at the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, vowed that "this blessed advance will not stop until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes–Picot conspiracy".^[122][123] Former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin presented a similar geopolitical analysis in an editorial contribution for the French newspaper Le Monde.^[124]