What was sykes picot agreement

The agreement was originally used directly as the basis for the Anglo-French modus vivendi, which provided a framework for the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration in the Levant. More generally, it was to lead indirectly to the subsequent partition of the Ottoman Empire after the Ottoman defeat of Shortly after the war, French Palestine and Mosul ceded to the British. Warrants in the Levant and Mesopotamia were awarded at the San Remo conference in April , according to the Sykes-Picot framework; The British mandate for Palestine ran until , the British mandate for Mesopotamia was to be replaced by a similar treaty with compulsory Iraq, and the French mandate for Syria and Lebanon lasted until Physical destruction totals at least two hundred and fifty billion dollars, in a state the size of Washington.

And it increases every day. A century after Sykes-Picot, the dual crises have stripped away the veneer of statehood imposed by the Europeans and have exposed the emptiness underneath. Iraq was managed by Britain and Syria by France, with limited nation-nurturing, before both were granted independence. But both had weak public institutions, teeny civil societies, shady and iniquitous economies, and meaningless laws.

Both countries were wracked by coups and instability. Syria went through twenty coups, some failed but many successful, between and , an average of one a year, until the Assad dynasty assumed power—in another coup. Increasingly, the glue that held both countries together was repressive rule and fear.

After its eight-year intervention, however, Washington is not eager to again assume responsibility for the political aftermath. We have to define our interests very narrowly and focus very aggressively on achieving those interests. At the Sulaimani Forum, McGurk foreshadowed other dangers undermining prospects of reconstituting the Iraqi state.

He recounted an anecdote about an Iraqi leader urging a Yazidi not to focus on revenge after the ISIS slaughter of his people on the mountains of Sinjar, in The massacre, along with the enslavement of hundreds of Yazidi women, was the flashpoint that led to the original U. All I have left is my revenge.

In Syria, the death toll is many times higher, the sectarian and ethnic divide at least as deep as in Iraq. The test in both countries is not just finding a way to re-create states more viable than the various formulations attempted since the Sykes-Picot process was launched. You can hold. Some of the political alternatives may be just as problematic. The reconfiguration of either Iraq or Syria into new entities could be as complicated, and potentially as bloody, as the current wars.

The breakups of India, Yugoslavia, and Sudan spawned huge migrations, cycles of ethnic cleansing, and rival claims to resources and territory, which in turn sparked whole new conflicts, some still unresolved years later. Addressing a joint session of Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Great Britain. Middle East. Sign Up. Westward Expansion. Art, Literature, and Film History.

Cold War. Four, Britain created the Emirate of Transjordan in order to placate the unhappy Abdullah and subsequently detached it from Mandatory Palestine.

The Arab states created in this fashion — Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon — became part of a much larger system of Arab states, most of which had nothing to do with the Sykes Picot agreement. In retrospect, this chain of actions and events looms as an egregious manifestation of European colonialism at its worst.

Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon were historic and geographic terms, but the states that came to carry these names had limited relevance to realities on the ground. The creation of Greater Lebanon was a grave mistake that undermined the coherence and durability of the smaller Lebanese entity.

The imposition of a Sunni royal family on an Iraqi state with a Shiite Arab majority and a large Kurdish minority was a recipe for instability. The policy of divide and rule and cultivation of minority groups in Syria was a major obstacle to the emergence of a Syrian entity. It was a mistake not to use the large area on both sides of the Jordan to create a clear distinction between an Arab and a Jewish entity.

For their part, the Kurds remained without a homeland. These inauspicious beginnings were later exacerbated by the sway of pan-Arab nationalism, which contended that these were all Arab states. However, the quest to recognize the diversity of the Levant states and the need to accommodate this patchwork through the construction of pluralistic political systems lie at the root of the current turmoil.

At the time, the agreement was legally binding on Britain and France, albeit conditional on the Allies defeating the Ottomans. The fact that it was secret and did not necessarily take into account the wishes of the local populations did not, under international law, affect the binding nature of the agreement.