Secret 1916 agreement between Britain and France, with Russian assent, to divide the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire into spheres of control after an Allied victory — a French northern zone, a British southern zone, and an international Palestine. Negotiated by Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, it contradicted British wartime encouragement of Arab independence. When the Bolsheviks published it in 1917, it became a symbol of Western betrayal and the colonial origins of the modern Middle East. Scholars caution that the popular claim it drew today's borders is a significant oversimplification.
In November 1917, the new Bolshevik government in Russia began publishing the secret treaties it found in the imperial archives. Among them was a deal that two diplomats, one British and one French, had negotiated in May 1916. On a map of the Ottoman Arab lands, a line ran from the Mediterranean coast toward the hills of northern Iraq, dividing the spoils of an empire that had not yet fallen. Britain had been encouraging Arabs to revolt against the Ottomans with hints of independence. Now the Arabs could read what their ally had really promised the French. A century later, when fighters bulldozed a border post between Iraq and Syria, they announced they were destroying that line. The agreement had become a symbol far larger than the modest document it actually was.