Beyond Sykes–Picot: How the Modern Middle East Was Actually Mapped

Few documents are invoked as often, or understood as loosely, as the Sykes–Picot Agreement. For more than a century it has served as shorthand for everything that went wrong in the modern Middle East: arbitrary borders, imperial betrayal, artificial states. When the self-styled Islamic State bulldozed a sand berm on the Syria–Iraq frontier in 2014, it released a video announcing “the end of Sykes–Picot.” The phrase needed no explanation.

Yet the borders of today’s Middle East are, for the most part, not the lines agreed in 1916. They were produced over the following decade and more — through war, bargaining, local resistance, League of Nations arbitration and a great deal of improvisation. Understanding that longer process is not pedantry. It changes how we explain the region’s instability, and whom we hold responsible for it.

What the agreement actually said#

Negotiated by the British diplomat Sir Mark Sykes and his French counterpart François Georges-Picot, with Russian assent, the agreement was concluded in May 1916 while the war against the Ottoman Empire was still very much undecided. It was a plan for partition in the event of victory, not a map of states.

The agreement divided the Ottoman Arab lands into five kinds of territory:

1. A blue zone of direct French control, covering coastal Syria and Lebanon and extending into south-eastern Anatolia.
2. A red zone of direct British control in lower Mesopotamia, around Baghdad and Basra.
3. Area A, a French sphere of influence in the Syrian interior — including Damascus, Homs, Hama, Aleppo and, notably, Mosul.
4. Area B, a British sphere of influence stretching from the Sinai frontier across to Kirkuk.
5. A brown zone under international administration in Palestine.

Within Areas A and B, the text anticipated “an Arab State or a Confederation of Arab States” under the protection of the respective power. The agreement, in other words, was about spheres of influence and privileged commercial and administrative rights. Its most famous line — the diagonal boundary between the French and British spheres — ran through open desert and corresponded to no later frontier.

I should like to draw a line from the “e” in Acre to the last “k” in Kirkuk.

— Mark Sykes, briefing the British War Committee, December 1915

Sykes’s remark is quoted endlessly as proof of imperial arrogance, and it is that. But it also illustrates the point: the line he proposed was a rough division of influence, sketched before anyone knew how the war would end.¹

A plan overtaken by events#

Almost immediately, the agreement began to unravel. It sat uneasily alongside Britain’s wartime correspondence with Sharif Husayn of Mecca (1915–16), which had encouraged an Arab revolt with promises of independence, and alongside the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. That same month, the Bolsheviks published the secret treaties of the Tsarist government, including Sykes–Picot, to embarrass the Allies.²

By the war’s end, the balance of forces bore little resemblance to 1916. British and imperial troops, not French ones, had conquered Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia. In December 1918, Lloyd George and Clemenceau reached an informal understanding in London: France would give up its claim to Mosul and to an internationalised Palestine, both of which would fall to Britain. The single most consequential revision — Mosul, with its oil prospects, moving from the French to the British sphere — was made before the peace conference had even opened.³

From zones to mandates#

The San Remo conference of April 1920 converted the wartime understandings into League of Nations mandates: Syria and Lebanon for France; Mesopotamia and Palestine, the latter soon including Transjordan, for Britain. Within months French forces had defeated the short-lived Arab Kingdom of Syria at Maysalun in July 1920 and expelled its king, Faisal. At the Cairo Conference of March 1921, Britain installed Faisal as king of Iraq instead, and recognised his brother Abdullah in Transjordan.

None of these outcomes followed from the 1916 map. They followed from military facts, the costs of occupation — a major revolt in Iraq in 1920 had been expensive to suppress — and the search for local rulers who could make indirect rule affordable.

How the borders were really drawn#

The actual frontiers emerged piecemeal, and many took years to settle. A selection:

Two things stand out. First, the process was long: the Syria–Iraq border was still being surveyed and adjusted into the 1930s, and the Saudi frontiers with Yemen, Oman and the Gulf states were settled only decades later. Second, the process involved many more actors than two European diplomats. Turkish nationalists who had won their war of independence, tribal leaders whose grazing rights had to be accommodated, Ibn Saud’s expanding state in Najd, and the League of Nations all shaped the outcome.

The Mosul question#

The fate of Mosul is instructive. Turkey claimed the province at Lausanne; Britain insisted it belonged to Iraq. The question went to the League of Nations, whose commission of inquiry visited the region, consulted local opinion and — in a decision confirmed in 1926 — awarded the province to Iraq, subject to conditions on the treatment of the Kurdish population. It was an imperfect process shaped by British power. But it was a process, conducted partly on the ground, and it produced a border quite different from anything in 1916.

Why the myth persists#

If Sykes–Picot did not draw the modern map, why has it become the symbol of it? Three reasons suggest themselves.

• It is a genuine symbol of bad faith. The agreement was secret, it contradicted promises made to Arab leaders, and it reveals how the powers thought about the region. As a moral symbol, it is apt.
• It offers a single, nameable culprit. A story with two diplomats and a map is easier to tell than a decade of conferences, surveys and tribal negotiations.
• It serves political purposes. Pan-Arab nationalists, Islamist movements and outside commentators have all found it useful to cast existing states as illegitimate impositions — for very different ends.

What the longer story changes#

Taking the longer view has analytical consequences. The “artificial borders” thesis implies that the region’s states were doomed from the outset and that its conflicts flow from cartography. But almost all borders everywhere are, in some sense, artificial; Africa and Latin America are full of straight lines drawn by outsiders. The Middle East’s crises since the 1950s — coups, civil wars, sectarian mobilisation — are better explained by how power was organised within those borders: by exclusionary regimes, by the politics of oil rent, by foreign intervention, and by the militarisation of politics during the Cold War.

The irony is that the most durable legacy of the post-war settlement is the state system itself. Despite a century of challenges, including the Islamic State’s spectacular attempt to erase the Syria–Iraq frontier, the borders of the 1920s have proved remarkably resilient. Explaining that resilience is at least as important as lamenting the lines.

Conclusion#

Sykes–Picot deserves its place in the history of the Middle East as a record of imperial ambition and duplicity. It is a poor guide to how the region was mapped, and a poorer guide still to why its states have struggled. The borders were drawn over years, by many hands, through negotiation, coercion and chance. Recognising that complexity is the first step toward a more accurate — and more useful — account of the region’s politics.