Mark Sykes

Mark Sykes was a British Conservative politician, traveller and diplomatic adviser whose experience in the Ottoman Middle East made him influential in British wartime planning. He served in Parliament and worked closely with officials shaping policy toward Arab and Ottoman territories during the First World War.

Sykes is best remembered for negotiating the secret 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement with the French diplomat François Georges-Picot, which proposed spheres of influence in Ottoman Arab lands. He later became involved in British policy toward Zionism and died during the influenza pandemic in 1919.

Ian Rutledge’s Enemy on the Euphrates brings figures including Arnold Wilson, Gertrude Bell, T. E. Lawrence, Mark Sykes and Winston Churchill into the same political story, showing how direct occupation gave way to a British-backed Iraqi monarchy. Rutledge also traces the use of Indian troops, aircraft, armoured trains and river gunboats against the insurgency and explains how the settlement imposed after the First World War influenced the later Iraqi state.