Prior to the centenary of Sykes-Picot in 2016, the media[109] and scientists[110] generated strong interest in the long-term effects of the agreement. The agreement is often cited as “artificial” borders in the Middle East, “without regard to ethnic or sectarian characteristics, which has led to endless conflicts.” [111] The question of the extent to which Sykes-Picot has really marked the borders of the modern Middle East is controversial. [112] [113] It could be said that the belief in a narrative, that all the evils of the region can be attributed to this one act of great infamy of power, which unites their present protagonists. As they watch the current unrest in their region, secular nationalists, democrats, autocrats, jihadists, Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites can at least agree on Sykes-Picot`s fault. “After the dinner on October 6, 1918, David Lloyd George began to whisper about how he would `cut` Turkey,” Barr writes in A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the struggle that shaped the Middle East. In April 1920, the San Remo conference distributed Class A mandates on Syria to France and Iraq and Palestine to Britain. The same conference ratified an oil agreement reached at a London conference on 12 February, based on a slightly different version of the Long Berenger agreement, previously signed on 21 December in London. Following the Sazonov Paleologist Agreement, Russia should also benefit from Western Armenia alongside Constantinople and the Turkish Strait, already promised under the 1915 Constantinople Agreement. [8] Italy was closed to the Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne Convention in 1917 and received South Anatolia. [8] The Palestinian region, whose territory is smaller than later compulsory Palestine, should be under “international administration.” In Syria, the death toll is several times higher, the sectarian and ethnic divide is at least as deep as in Iraq. The test in both countries is not just the search for a way to create more viable states than the different formulations attempted since the introduction of the Sykes-Picot process.
It is also the will of the rally audience in the current environment. After the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914, the Allies – Britain, France and Russia – had much discussion about the future of the Ottoman Empire, which is now fighting on the side of Germany and the central powers, and its vast area in the Middle East, Arabia and southern Europe. In March 1915, Britain signed a secret agreement with Russia, whose plans for the territory of the Empire had prompted the Turks to join Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914. Under its terms, Russia would annex the Ottoman capital, Constantinople, and retain control of the Dardanelles (the extremely important strait that connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean) and the Gallipoli Peninsula, the target of a major Allied military invasion, which began in April 1915.
