In May 1916, two men sat in London and divided the Middle East between themselves. Mark Sykes was a British diplomat. François Georges-Picot was French. Neither had spent meaningful time in the region. Neither spoke Arabic fluently. Neither consulted a single Arab leader. They drew lines on a map based on colonial interest, railway routes, and the competing ambitions of two empires — and those lines became the borders of the modern Middle East.
A century later, nearly every major conflict in the region traces some part of its root back to that afternoon in London. Understanding why requires understanding not just what Sykes and Picot did, but the web of contradictory promises Britain made to three different parties in the same two-year window — promises that could never all be kept, and weren't.
The Ottoman Collapse
To understand Sykes-Picot, you have to understand what was being divided. The Ottoman Empire had controlled the Arab world for four centuries. By 1914 it was visibly dying — the "sick man of Europe," stripped of most of its European territories, economically dependent on foreign creditors, held together by an increasingly authoritarian central government. When the Ottomans entered World War I on the German side in November 1914, Britain saw an opportunity: break up the empire, divide the pieces, and secure British strategic interests across the region.
Those interests were specific. Britain needed to protect the Suez Canal — the lifeline to India. It needed to secure the Persian Gulf oil fields that were becoming strategically vital. It needed to prevent France from dominating territory that sat between British Egypt and British India. And it needed Arab support to open a southern front against the Ottomans. All of these interests pulled in different directions. Satisfying them all required making promises Britain had no intention of keeping simultaneously.
Three Promises, One Land
Between 1915 and 1917, Britain made three separate and largely contradictory commitments about the future of the Arab territories.
The Hussein-McMahon Correspondence (1915-1916): Sharif Hussein of Mecca agreed to launch an Arab revolt against the Ottomans in exchange for British support for an independent Arab state across most of the Arab world. The British high commissioner in Egypt wrote letters confirming British support — deliberately vague on specific boundaries, but understood by Hussein to include Syria, Palestine, and the Arabian Peninsula.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916): Simultaneously and secretly, Sykes and Picot were carving the same territory into British and French spheres of influence. France would get Syria and Lebanon. Britain would get Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine. The agreement was kept hidden from Hussein. The Arab state he had been promised would not exist.
The Balfour Declaration (1917): One year later, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote a letter stating that Britain viewed "with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." Palestine — already promised to the Arabs, already assigned to British control in Sykes-Picot — was now also promised as a homeland for Jewish people.
Three promises. One territory. No possibility of keeping all three.
The Lines Themselves
The Sykes-Picot map was an act of extraordinary geopolitical arrogance. The borders paid no attention to the ethnic, religious, tribal, or linguistic communities that actually lived in the region. Iraq was created by combining three Ottoman provinces with no natural coherence: a Shia Arab south, a Sunni Arab center, and a Kurdish north. They were bundled together because Britain wanted Mosul's oil. Syria was drawn to include communities that had never governed together. Lebanon was carved out specifically to create a Christian-majority state friendly to France.
The Kurdish people — somewhere between 25 and 35 million of them across the region — received nothing. The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres had briefly promised them a state. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne did not. The Kurds were divided between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, where they remain today — the world's largest ethnic group without a state of their own.
The Arab Revolt's Betrayal
Sharif Hussein launched his revolt in June 1916, as promised. Arab fighters, coordinated by British officers including T.E. Lawrence, fought northward through the Hejaz toward Damascus. Lawrence knew about Sykes-Picot. He knew the revolt was being used. When Arab forces entered Damascus in October 1918, Hussein's son Faisal briefly established an Arab government in Syria. It lasted two years. In 1920, France sent troops, defeated Faisal's forces, and took control of Syria exactly as Sykes-Picot had specified.
The betrayal of the Arab Revolt poisoned Arab-Western relations for a generation. It is still cited, a century later, as the foundational act of Western bad faith in the region.
What the Lines Produced
The specific borders Sykes and Picot drew created the structural conditions for nearly every major conflict that followed. Iraq's forced combination of Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish communities created permanent instability. The Islamic State, which declared a caliphate straddling the Iraq-Syria border in 2014, was explicitly a rejection of the Sykes-Picot borders. Syria's civil war was in significant part a revolt by the Sunni majority against Alawite minority rule — a sectarian configuration that French mandatory policy helped create. Palestine's contradictions have produced a conflict lasting over 75 years. Kurdistan remains the world's largest unresolved national question.
The Bottom Line
Sykes-Picot matters not because it was uniquely evil but because of the specific contradictions it created and the specific promises it betrayed. Britain promised the Arabs independence and delivered colonialism. It promised the Jews a homeland in territory already inhabited and already promised to someone else. It drew borders that contained communities designed to conflict with each other and called them countries.
The men who drew those lines are long dead. But the lines remain. And the people living inside them are still paying the price for an afternoon's work in a London office a century ago.