Sykes–Picot Agreement  

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Prince Feisal : Well, General, I will leave you. Major Lawrence doubtless has reports to make upon my people and their weakness, and the need to keep them weak in the British interest... and the French interest too, of course. We must not forget the French now...

General Allenby : [indignantly] I've told you, sir, no such treaty exists.

Prince Feisal : Yes, General, you have lied most bravely, but not convincingly. I know this treaty does exist.

T. E. Lawrence : Treaty, sir?

Prince Feisal : He does it better than you, General. But then, of course, he is almost an Arab. [Faisal exits.]

Dryden: You really don’t know?

[...]

T. E. Lawrence: No. I can guess.

Allenby: Don’t guess. Tell him.

Dryden: ...Mr. Sykes and Mr. Picot met, and they agreed that after the war, France and England would share the Turkish Empire, including Arabia. They signed an agreement, not a treaty sir. An agreement to that effect.

--Lawrence of Arabia (film)

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The Sykes–Picot Agreement, officially known as the Asia Minor Agreement, was a secret agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and France, with the assent of Russia, defining their proposed spheres of influence and control in the Middle East should the Triple Entente succeed in defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The negotiation of the treaty occurred between November 1915 and March 1916. The agreement was concluded on 16 May 1916.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) claims one of the goals of its insurgency is to reverse the effects of the Sykes–Picot Agreement. "This is not the first border we will break, we will break other borders," a jihadist from the ISIL warned in a video titled The End of Sykes-Picot. ISIL's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in a July 2014 speech at the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, vowed that "this blessed advance will not stop until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes–Picot conspiracy". The Franco-German geographer Christophe Neff wrote that the geopolitical architecture founded by the Sykes–Picot Agreement disappeared in July 2014 and with it the relative protection of religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East. He claimed furthermore that Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in some way restructured the geopolitical structure of the Middle East in summer 2014, particularly in Syria and Iraq. Former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin presented a similar geopolitical analysis in an editorial contribution for the French newspaper Le Monde.

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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Sykes–Picot Agreement" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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