How the First World War shaped the borders of the Middle East

Baghdad October 23, 1918. After four gruelling, disastrous years the Allies and the Ottoman Empire are still at war in Mesopotamia and the Levant, but only just.

The exhausted Ottoman army is in tatters. A month earlier it suffered more than 25,000 casualties at a single, disastrous battle at Megiddo in Palestine – the site of the Biblical Armageddon – an action that paved the way for the subsequent capture of Baalbek and Damascus.

The ancient city of Homs had fallen to allied forces on October 16 and now, British imperial and French troops under General Sir Edmund Allenby and Arab irregulars led by Colonel T E Lawrence are preparing for the final assault on the ancient city of Aleppo, a trophy whose capture will deliver the Syrian campaign’s coup de grace.

As this military endgame unfolds, time and territory are suddenly more important than ever, especially for the British who, despite earlier agreements with their allies, have their own designs on the region and the future shape of power politics throughout the Middle East. Though nominally still allies, it is now Britain and France, not the Allies and the Ottomans, who are really vying for supremacy throughout the territories that were to become Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Northern Iraq.

Conventional wisdom has it that the next century of Middle East history was set in train by the Sykes-Picot line of 1916 (the secret agreement between the Britain and France to carve up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire between them). But that ignores the vast amount of territory acquired by military force in the following, final two years of the war, which radically redrew the map again. So perhaps it is the armistice of November 11, 2018, that we really should mark as the