Who is Sykes-Picot Agreement?

The Sykes-Picot Agreement is like a secret map that two big friends drew to decide how they would share a big toy.

Imagine you and your best friend have a huge box of crayons, but there's only one box. You both want it, so you sit down and draw a map on paper, this is the Sykes-Picot Agreement. It shows which parts of the box each of you will get when you finally split it up.

In real life, the two friends were Britain and France, and the big toy was the Ottoman Empire, a huge country that covered many places like modern-day Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and more. They didn’t want to fight over the whole thing, so they made this secret plan.

When the big box of crayons (the Ottoman Empire) was eventually split up, Britain and France gave pieces of it to their allies, like giving you a few crayons and your friend some others. That’s how countries like Iraq and Lebanon came into being.

The map they drew became a real-life guide for how the country would be divided, just like how you might use a map to divide up candies with friends.