What occurred after the Fall of the Ottoman Empire?
The Ottoman Empire was totally defeated in WW1 and most of its territories in the Middle East were divided between Britain and France according to the Sykes/Picot agreement and under the mandate of the League of Nations. Britain got Iraq, Transjordan (later Jordan) and Palestine; France got Syria and Lebanon The states along the Persian Gulf, the Yemen and Saudi Arabia were allowed some sort of independence except for Aden which was a British colony. The boundaries for the new states were drawn up by civil servants in London and Paris taking no account of tribal or religious differences which have always been a factor in the political instability of the area.
The Ottoman Empire finally expired at the end of WW1, although the last Caliph/Emperor had been overthrown some years before the outbreak of the war. For much of the preceding two centuries it had lost territory, especially in the Balkans, as Russia supported many of the ethnic majorities in these areas.(Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia to name a few) At the close of WW1 the various areas of the Empire were carved up by the League of Nations and handed out as mandates primarily to the British and French :i.e France got Syria, Great Britain ,Iraq. In Turkey itself much of the Western side of Turkey was handed to Greece, this later resulted in a war between the two states which Turkey emerged as the victor. Before this event the British and French occupied the country, and installed a pro allied Government which was eventually overthrown by the nationalist movement of Ataturk and which created the modern Turkey of today!
