The most significant war-time treaty to be implemented in the Middle East was the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement (Map 7), where Britain and France drew up a plan to partition between them most of the remaining Ottoman possessions, i.e. Syria and Lebanon to France, and Mesopotamia and Palestine to Britain*. As a result, following war’s end, Britain and France took control of their respective previously agreed territories in the Middle East. These annexations subsequently were legitimized as mandates by the newly formed League of Nations: i.e. the 1923 French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, and the 1923 British Mandate for Palestine. British control of Mesopotamia was formalized by the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1922, which also established the Kingdom of Iraq.
(Taken from Turkish War of Independence – Wars of the 20th Century – Vol. 3)
The Allies also had drawn up a partition plan for Anatolia, the Turkish heartland of the Ottoman Empire. In this plan, Constantinople and the Turkish Straits were designated as a neutral zone under joint Allied administrations, with separate British, French, and Italian zones of occupations. Southwest Anatolia was allocated to Italy, the southeast (centered on Cilicia) to France, and a section of the northeast to Armenia. Greece, a late-comer in World War I on the Allied side, was promised the historic Hellenic region around Smyrna, as well as Eastern Thrace.
With these proposed changes, a much smaller Ottoman state would consist of central Anatolia up to the Black Sea, but no coastal outlet in the Mediterranean Sea. The Allies subsequently incorporated these stipulations in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres (Map 8), an agreement aimed at legitimizing their annexations/occupations of Ottoman territories.
Background On October 30, 1918, the Ottoman Empire ended its involvement in World War I by signing the Armistice of Mudros. During the war, the Ottoman government had fought as one of the Central Powers (in alliance with Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria), but in 1917 and 1918, it suffered many devastating defeats. Then with the failure of the Germans’ 1918 “Spring Offensive” in Western Europe, the Anatolian heartland of the Ottoman Empire became vulnerable to an invasion, forcing Ottoman capitulation.
The victorious Allied Powers in Europe (Britain, France, and Italy) took steps to carry out their many secret pre-war and war-time agreements regarding the disposition of the Ottoman Empire. Another Allied power, Russia, also was a party to some of these agreements, but it had been forced out of the war in 1914 and consequently was not involved in the post-war negotiations.
As a first measure and provided by the terms of surrender, the French and British naval fleets seized control of the Turkish Straits (Dardanelles and Bosporus) on November 12-13, 1913, and landed troops in Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire’s capital.
During World War I, British
forces gained possession of much of the Ottoman Empire’s colonies in the Middle
East, collectively called “Greater Syria”, a vast territory covering Mesopotamia (Iraq), the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, and Palestine. When the war ended, most of the Arabian
Peninsula gained independence under British sponsorship, including the Kingdom of Yemen
and later the Kingdom of Nejd and Hejaz, the precursor of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
* The agreement also allocated Constantinople, the Turkish Straits, and sections of the Ottoman Empire’s northeast region to the Russian Empire; the overthrow of the Russian monarchy in the 1917 “February Revolution” and the formation of the Soviet government later that year nullified this provision of the treaty