3. British map of the Mesopotamian oilfi elds (1914

Figure 3 Detailed map of the oilfi elds of Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), from the London Petroleum Review dated May 23, 1914, before the outbreak of the First World War. These oilfi elds became British as a result of the war.

victories against the weaker Turkish Empire. France had lost almost 1,500,000 soldiers and another 2,600,000 were badly wounded.

In November 1917, following the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, Lenin’s communists discovered among the documents of the czarist Foreign Ministry a secret document which they quickly made public. It was a plan of the great powers to carve up the entire Ottoman Empire after the war, and parcel out relevant parts to the victorious powers. The details had been worked out in February 1916, and were secretly ratifi ed by the relevant governments in May 1916. The world at large knew nothing of this secret wartime diplomacy.

From the British side, Sir Mark Sykes, an adviser on eastern affairs to Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, secretary of state for war, drafted the document. The document was designed to secure French acquiescence to a huge diversion of British manpower from the European theatre into the Middle East. To get that French concession, Sykes was authorized to offer French negotiator Georges Picot, former consul general in Beirut, valuable postwar concessions in the Arab portion of the Ottoman Empire.

France was to get effective control over what was called ‘Area A,’ encompassing Greater Syria (Syria and Lebanon), including the major inland towns of Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus, as well as the oil-rich Mosul to the northeast, including the oil concessions then held by Deutsche Bank in the Turkish Petroleum Gesellschaft. This French control paid nominal lip service to recognition of Arab ‘independence’ from Turkey, under a French ‘protectorate.’

Under the Sykes–Picot accord, Britain would control ‘Area B’ in the region to the southeast of the French region, from what today is Jordan, east to most of Iraq and Kuwait, including Basra and Baghdad. Further, Britain was to get the ports of Haifa and Acre, and the rights to build a railway from Haifa through the French zone to Baghdad and to use it for troop transport.

Italy had been promised a huge section of the mountainous coastline of Turkish Anatolia and the Dodecanese Islands, while czarist Russia was to receive the areas of Ottoman Armenia and Kurdistan, southwest of Jerevan.4

Out of these secret Sykes–Picot paragraphs, the British created the arbitrary divisions which largely exist through the present day, including the creation of Syria and Lebanon as French ‘protectorates,’ and Trans-Jordan, Palestine (Israel), Iraq and Kuwait as British entities. Persia, as we have seen, had been in effective British control since 1905, and Saudi Arabia was considered at that point unimportant to