Two diplomats carved up the Ottoman Middle East in six days of secret talks
Over roughly six days at the end of 1915, Mark Sykes of Britain and François Georges-Picot of France met almost daily and left no record of what they said. On 3 January 1916 they initialled a memorandum dividing Ottoman lands between their countries, while Britain was promising Arab independence in parallel letters.
The deal assumed the Allies would defeat the Ottoman Empire in World War I, and it was one of several secret wartime bargains about the spoils. Russia had already claimed Constantinople and the Straits in March 1915, and the Treaty of London in April 1915 reserved a slice of southern Anatolia for Italy. Russia and Italy later endorsed the Anglo-French plan, with Italy's consent coming in 1917.
Formal negotiations began on 23 November 1915, when Picot told a British committee chaired by Sir Arthur Nicolson that France wanted a sweep of territory from Cilicia eastwards to Mosul. A second meeting on 21 December also stalled. After Sykes took over on 28 December the two men compromised: they split the Mosul district at the Little Zab river, France taking Mosul and Erbil and Britain Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah, and they placed Palestine under an international administration. Britain was to control areas now in southern Iraq and Jordan, plus the ports of Haifa and Acre for a foothold on the Mediterranean.
At the same moment, Sir Henry McMahon, Britain's High Commissioner in Egypt, was exchanging ten letters between July 1915 and March 1916 with Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, promising to recognise Arab independence if the Sharif rose against the Ottomans. McMahon warned London that Arabs deeply resented the idea of French rule over any Arab land.
After the Ottoman defeat in 1918 the plan shaped an Anglo-French arrangement for occupied territory and, less directly, the later partition; France soon handed Palestine and Mosul to Britain. Many Arabs regarded the agreement as a betrayal of McMahon's promises, and it is widely seen as a turning point in relations between the West and the Arab world. The British later argued that Palestine had never been included in the area pledged for Arab rule.
Source: Sykes–Picot Agreement
