Many political scientists and historians consider the First World War as an imperialist war carving up the Ottoman State. During the war, three allied imperialist states –Great Britain, France and Russia– secretly negotiated an agreement to invade the Ottoman territories in the Middle East, since the Ottoman State was the main target of the war.
Exactly one century ago, on May 16, 1916, the French and the British signed a clandestine agreement (the Sykes-Picot), which disintegrated the Ottoman State and created the modern artificial states of the Middle East. This agreement is the main source of today’s quagmire in the Middle East and almost all regional conflicts that have continued since then. The British and the French, intentionally, did not take the demand of regional peoples and the realities of the region into consideration. Not only did they divide the Ottoman State, the only power dominating the region, but they also separated and alienated all ethnic groups such as Arabs, Turks and Kurds living in the region.
[Politics Today, May 17, 2016]
