With the consent of Russia and Italy, envoys Sir Mark Sykes of Great Britain and François Georges-Picot of France secretly negotiated a plan for the breakup and sharing-out of Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire after the war, betraying the promise of total independence for the Arabs as a reward for helping the Allies. The agreement was disclosed in February 1918 by the Bolsheviks when they pillaged documents in the archives of the Russian Foreign Ministry during the October Revolution of 1917. Although it was contested, the Asia Minor Agreement was ratified by the League of Nations at the San Remo Conference of April 1920. Lebanon and Syria became French mandates, and Iraq, Transjordania, and Palestine were made British mandates. In 2014, the terrorist organization Daesh erased part of the border between Syria and Iraq and seized territory that had been divided between France and Britain after the Great War. After 100 years, the geopolitical architecture founded on the Sykes-Picot agreement seems to have shattered into pieces.
