Free Enemy on the Euphrates by Ian Rutledge Page A

that Mosul and its oil remained firmly in the grasp of the British Empire when the war ended.
    By the time of the fourth meeting of the committee on 17 April, the rest of its members had become duly impressed by Sykes’s seemingly comprehensive knowledge of Turkey-in-Asia, its peoples, geography and resources. No doubt interspersing his detailed factual observations with amusing anecdotes based on his travels, Sykes began to introduce his own schemes for dividing up the conquered Ottoman Empire. The first of these called for the Allies to partition all but Turkish Anatolia among themselves with Russia receiving a northern, France a central and Britain a southern part of the Asian provinces. As an alternative he proposed keeping the area ‘nominally independent but under effective European Control’ within Allied ‘zones of political and commercial interest’. Both of these schemes – ‘partition’ and ‘zones of interest’ – would involve the construction of a British-controlled railway stretching over a thousand miles from a new British Mediterranean port, probably at Haifa in Palestine, to the Euphrates. However, the Foreign Office, under Sir Edward Grey, a high temple of self-regarding moral rectitude, worried that the discussion might be developing along far too imperialistic lines. So the committee found itself unable to reach a consensus on either of Sykes’s proposals.
    At the next meeting, a month later, Sykes came up with yet another scheme for ensuring that Britain’s ‘desiderata’ in Asiatic Turkey were achieved. After the Turks were defeated, their Asian territories should be ‘devolved’ into five historical and ethnographical ayalets: Anatolia,Armenia, Syria, Palestine and Iraq. In theory these ayalets would remain provinces owing formal allegiance to a reformed – and much weakened – Ottoman Empire. In practice they would enjoy considerable powers of self-determination, albeit guided by foreign ‘advisors’. In the event it was this scheme which the committee decided to recommend in its report published on 25 June 1915.
    The report began by first considering the ‘direct partition’ option and, reflecting the discussion during the committee’s first three meetings, it stressed that if partition were to take place, oil would be a major determining factor in deciding the territories Britain would wish to acquire. The report stated:
    Acquisition of Baghdad would guard the chain of oil wells along the Turko-Persian frontier, in the development of which the British Government has an interest. And oil makes it commercially desirable for us to carry our control on to Mosul in the vicinity of which are valuable wells, possession of which by another would be prejudicial to our own interests. 14
    The problem with outright partition, however, was that achieving it might involve prolonging the war in the East as well as changing its character: no longer would Britain be able to claim that the war was merely against the German-dominated clique in Istanbul. And there would inevitably be problems with Britain’s allies as to precisely which parts of Turkey-in-Asia would be allocated to which nation. Specifying particular ‘zones of interest’ would be preferable to partition, but might still raise some of the same problems. In the end the committee decided to recommend Sykes’s scheme of ‘devolution’. Its principal advantage was its flexibility and the fact that in the longer term it could be just as advantageous to Britain as the alternatives.
    According to the ‘devolution’ scheme, while a reformed Ottoman government, probably based in the Anatolian ayalet, would be responsible for foreign affairs, the higher courts of justice and certain types of taxation, the individual ayalets would have extensive powers devolved to them: responsibility for agriculture and irrigation, the lowercourts of justice, education, roads, the command of regional militia and police and, crucially from the oil