As 1916 drew to a close, the Asquith government, which was under increasing pressure and criticism mainly for its war, gave way on 6 December to David Lloyd George, who had criticized the war effort and replaced Kitchener as Secretary of War after his untimely death in June. Lloyd George had wanted to make the destruction of the Ottoman Empire a major British war objective, and two days after taking office, he told Robertson that he wanted a great victory, preferably the conquest of Jerusalem, to impress British public opinion. [59]:119-120 At that time, the FED was in defensive mode on a line at the eastern end of Sinai at El Arish and 15 miles from the borders of Ottoman Palestine. Lloyd George «immediately» consulted his war cabinet about «another campaign in Palestine when El Arish had been secured.» Lloyd George`s pressure (through the reserves of the Chief of Staff) led to the capture of Rafa and the arrival of British forces on the borders of the Ottoman Empire. [59]:47-49 The agreement thus helped shape the contours of modern nation-states in a region where there were none before. Since this is essentially an agreement between two colonialist powers outside the region, this would have devastating effects. The Russians renounced their territorial claims after the Bolshevik Revolution, and at the San Remo Conference, the French received the French mandate from Syria and the English the British mandate from Mesopotamia. The treaty of Sèvres that followed may have provided for a Kurdish area that was the subject of a referendum and a sanction by the League of Nations within a year of the treaty. However, the Turkish War of Independence led to the replacement of the treaty by the Treaty of Lausanne, which did not provide for a Kurdish state. After the end of the war as planned, the conditions were confirmed by the San Remo Conference of 1920 and ratified by the League of Nations in 1922.
Although Sykes-Picot had to draw new boundaries along sectarian lines, his simple straight lines also did not take into account the actual tribal and ethnic configurations in a deeply divided region. Sykes-Picot has influenced Arab-Western relations to this day. After the Constantinople Agreement, the French turned to the British to develop their mutual wishes, and the British created the De Bunsen Committee on 8 April 1915 to examine British options. [45] Zionism was not taken into account in the committee`s report presented in June 1915,[46] which concluded that in the event of partition or zones of influence, there should be a British sphere of influence that would include Palestine, while accepting that there were relevant French and Russian and Islamic interests in Jerusalem and the Holy Places. [47] [48] The cause of many of these clashes was unrealistic promises made by the British to each side; Promises directly related to the artificial shaping of the modern Middle East initiated by the Sykes-Picot agreement. In his doctoral dissertation, Gibson discusses the role oil played in British strategic thinking at the time, mentioning Mosoul-Vilayet as the largest potential oil field and the France agreement in 1918 to accept its inclusion in the Iraqi mandate (the Clemenceau Lloyd George Agreement) in exchange for «a share of british oil and support elsewhere.» [53] The agreement was based on the premise that the Triple Entente would successfully defeat the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and was part of a series of secret agreements that considered its division. The main negotiations that led to the agreement took place between November 23, 1915 and January 3, 1916, when British and French diplomats Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot initialed an agreed memorandum. [3] The Convention was ratified by their respective governments on 9 and 16 May 1916. [4] Hussein`s letter of 18 February 1916 called on McMahon for £50,000 in gold plus arms, ammunition and food, stating that Feisal was awaiting the arrival of «no less than 100,000 people» for the planned revolt, and McMahon`s reply of 10 March 1916 confirmed British approval of the requests and concluded the ten letters of correspondence.
In April and May, there were discussions initiated by Sykes on the merits of a meeting in which Picot and the Arabs participated to network the wishes of both sides. .