The Manchester Guardian publishes the 1916 secret Sykes-Picot Agreement between the United Kingdom and France.
The SykesPicot Agreement () was a 1916 secret treaty between the United Kingdom and France, with assent from the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy, to define their mutually agreed spheres of influence and control in an eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire.
The agreement was based on the premise that the Triple Entente would achieve success in defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I and formed part of a series of secret agreements contemplating its partition. The primary negotiations leading to the agreement took place between 23 November 1915 and 3 January 1916, on which date the British and French diplomats, Mark Sykes and Franois Georges-Picot, initialled an agreed memorandum. The agreement was ratified by their respective governments on 9 and 16 May 1916.The agreement effectively divided the Ottoman provinces outside the Arabian Peninsula into areas of British and French control and influence. The British- and French-controlled countries were divided by the SykesPicot line. The agreement allocated to the UK control of what is today southern Israel and Palestine, Jordan and southern Iraq, and an additional small area that included the ports of Haifa and Acre to allow access to the Mediterranean. France was to control southeastern Turkey, Kurdistan Region, Syria and Lebanon.As a result of the included SazonovPalologue Agreement, Russia was to get Western Armenia in addition to Constantinople and the Turkish Straits already promised under the 1915 Constantinople Agreement. Italy assented to the agreement in 1917 via the Agreement of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne and received southern Anatolia. The Palestine region, with a smaller area than the later Mandatory Palestine, was to fall under an "international administration".
The agreement was initially used directly as the basis for the 1918 AngloFrench Modus Vivendi, which provided a framework for the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration in the Levant. More broadly it was to lead, indirectly, to the subsequent partitioning of the Ottoman Empire following Ottoman defeat in 1918. Shortly after the war, the French ceded Palestine and Mosul to the British. Mandates in the Levant and Mesopotamia were assigned at the April 1920 San Remo conference following the SykesPicot framework; the British Mandate for Palestine ran until 1948, the British Mandate for Mesopotamia was to be replaced by a similar treaty with Mandatory Iraq, and the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon lasted until 1946. The Anatolian parts of the agreement were assigned by the August 1920 Treaty of Svres; however, these ambitions were thwarted by the 191923 Turkish War of Independence and the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne.
The agreement is seen by many as a turning point in Western and Arab relations. It reneged upon the UK's promises to Arabs regarding a national Arab homeland in the area of Greater Syria in exchange for supporting the British against the Ottoman Empire. The agreement, along with others, was made public by the Bolsheviks in Moscow on 23 November 1917 and repeated in The Manchester Guardian on 26 November 1917, such that "the British were embarrassed, the Arabs dismayed and the Turks delighted". The agreement's legacy has led to much resentment in the region, among Arabs in particular but also among Kurds who were denied an independent state.
The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, The Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of The Guardian free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for The Guardian the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders. It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK.The editor-in-chief Katharine Viner succeeded Alan Rusbridger in 2015. Since 2018, the paper's main newsprint sections have been published in tabloid format. As of July 2021, its print edition had a daily circulation of 105,134. The newspaper has an online edition, TheGuardian.com, as well as two international websites, Guardian Australia (founded in 2013) and Guardian US (founded in 2011). The paper's readership is generally on the mainstream left of British political opinion, and the term "Guardian reader" is used to imply a stereotype of liberal, left-wing or "politically correct" views. Frequent typographical errors during the age of manual typesetting led Private Eye magazine to dub the paper the "Grauniad" in the 1960s, a nickname still used occasionally by the editors for self-mockery.In an Ipsos MORI research poll in September 2018 designed to interrogate the public's trust of specific titles online, The Guardian scored highest for digital-content news, with 84% of readers agreeing that they "trust what [they] see in it". A December 2018 report of a poll by the Publishers Audience Measurement Company (PAMCo) stated that the paper's print edition was found to be the most trusted in the UK in the period from October 2017 to September 2018. It was also reported to be the most-read of the UK's "quality newsbrands", including digital editions; other "quality" brands included The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, and the i. While The Guardian's print circulation is in decline, the report indicated that news from The Guardian, including that reported online, reaches more than 23 million UK adults each month.Chief among the notable "scoops" obtained by the paper was the 2011 News International phone-hacking scandal—and in particular the hacking of the murdered English teenager Milly Dowler's phone. The investigation led to the closure of the News of the World, the UK's best-selling Sunday newspaper and one of the highest-circulation newspapers in history. In June 2013, The Guardian broke news of the secret collection by the Obama administration of Verizon telephone records, and subsequently revealed the existence of the surveillance program PRISM after knowledge of it was leaked to the paper by the whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. In 2016, The Guardian led an investigation into the Panama Papers, exposing then–Prime Minister David Cameron's links to offshore bank accounts. It has been named "newspaper of the year" four times at the annual British Press Awards: most recently in 2014, for its reporting on government surveillance.