Sykes-Picot Agreement
The secret 1916 deal in which Britain and France divided up the Ottoman Arab provinces, years before they had conquered any of them.
In May 1916, while the Ottoman Empire was still fighting and still held every province in question, Britain and France exchanged letters agreeing how they would divide its Arab territories after the war. The negotiators were Sir Mark Sykes, a Yorkshire baronet and amateur expert on the East, and Francois Georges-Picot, a French diplomat from a family of colonial enthusiasts. Russia was consulted and promised Istanbul, the Straits, and eastern Anatolia. Italy was added in 1917.
The map split the region five ways. France took direct control of the Syrian and Lebanese coast and Cilicia, marked in blue. Britain took southern Mesopotamia around Basra and Baghdad, plus the ports of Haifa and Acre, marked in red. Two large interior zones, A in the north for France and B in the south for Britain, were to contain an Arab state or group of states under their respective influence, with first claim on advisers and loans. Palestine, wanted by everyone, was assigned to some unspecified international administration.
Three promises that did not match
Sykes-Picot was one of at least three incompatible British commitments. In letters written in 1915 and 1916, the British high commissioner in Cairo had encouraged Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, to revolt in exchange for support for Arab independence, in wording deliberately vague about Syria and Palestine. In November 1917 the Balfour Declaration promised a national home for the Jewish people in the same Palestine that Sykes-Picot had internationalized and that Hussein believed had been promised to him.
The secret did not hold. When the Bolsheviks took power in November 1917 they found the tsarist copies of the Allied secret treaties in the foreign ministry files and published them to expose the war aims of the imperial powers. The texts reached Ottoman officials, who passed them to the Arabs then fighting alongside the British. Within a year of being written, Sykes-Picot was a byword for European double-dealing.
What actually happened to the map
Here the popular story goes wrong. Sykes-Picot did not draw the borders of the modern Middle East. Its scheme was overtaken almost at once. Russia dropped out of the war. Mosul, assigned to France, was handed to Britain in a private conversation between Lloyd George and Clemenceau in December 1918, because by then everyone knew there was oil under it. Palestine went to Britain rather than to any international body. The promised Arab state never appeared: when Faisal declared a kingdom in Damascus in 1920 the French removed him by force, and the British gave him Iraq instead.
The borders that exist today came out of the San Remo conference in 1920, the League of Nations mandates issued in 1922, and the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, with plenty of adjustment afterward. What Sykes-Picot left behind was not the lines but the practice: two European governments deciding the political shape of a region in secret, according to their own rivalry, and creating states whose borders suited imperial convenience rather than any local community.
That is why the name is still used as an accusation. When ISIS bulldozed the border berm between Iraq and Syria in June 2014, it filmed the moment and called the video The End of Sykes-Picot. The agreement had not drawn that border and had been legally dead for ninety years. It is still the shorthand for the idea that the region's map was made in Europe.