The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a 1916 secret treaty between the United Kingdom and France, with the assent of Russia and Italy, defining their mutually agreed spheres of influence and control in an anticipated partition of the Ottoman Empire. Negotiated chiefly between British diplomat Mark Sykes and French diplomat Francois Georges-Picot, who initialled an agreed memorandum on 3 January 1916 and whose governments ratified it in May 1916, the agreement divided the Ottoman provinces outside the Arabian Peninsula into British and French zones of control, allocating Britain what is today southern Israel, Jordan and southern Iraq, and France southeastern Turkey, the Kurdistan region, Syria and Lebanon. Made public by the Bolsheviks in 1917, the agreement is widely seen as a turning point in Western and Arab relations, since Arabs viewed it as a betrayal of British promises of Arab independence made in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence, and its legacy has left lasting resentment among Arabs and Kurds alike.
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