Sykes-Picot Agreement

• In 1916, Britain, France, and Russia had finalized a secret agreement to partition the Ottoman Empire upon its eventual defeat.
• The agreement is also known as the “Asia Minor Agreement,”.
• The agreement was negotiated by the British negotiator Sir Mark Sykes and his French counterpart, the diplomat François Georges-Picot and named as the Sykes-Picot/ accord after them.
• The agreement divided the Levant and Mesopotamia between Britain and France, along an east-west “line in the sand” from the Mediterranean to the western border of Persia.
• Russia was to receive a large swath of eastern Anatolia (Anatolia, also known as Asia Minor, is a large peninsula in Western Asia and the westernmost protrusion of the Asian continent)
• According to the Sykes-Picot map
  • the northern Galilee would go to France
  • the ports at Haifa and Acre would be allotted to Britain
  • the center of the country, including Jerusalem and Jaffa, was to come under “an international administration

Criticism of the Agreement

• This secret arrangement conflicted with the pledges already given by the British to the Husayn ibn Ali, sharif of Mecca, during the Husayn-McMohan Correspondence (1915-16).
• The correspondence promised the protection of Arab lands but the Sykes-Picot agreement nullified this.
• The agreement is cited as having created “artificial” borders in the Middle East, “without any regard to ethnic or sectarian characteristics, which has resulted in endless conflict.
• Many consider this to be the cause of current conflict in the Middle East.

Extra Information

Levant This is the region at the “crossroads of western Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, and northeast Africa”, and the “northwest of the Arabian plate”.

Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is a region of Western Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent.