Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the seventy-eighth emir of Mecca and the great-grandfather of Jordan’s King Hussein, came to power as the Ottomans were lurching toward collapse. After the Turks sided with Germany at the outset of World War I, Sharif Hussein began secret negotiations with Britain with the aim of instigating a rebellion seeking Arab independence. In 1916, he agreed to help Britain and the Allied powers drive against the Turks in exchange for a promise of future British recognition of the new Arab-Islamic nation. Four of the sharif’s sons—Ali, Faisal, Abdullah, and Zeid—would lead Arab armies in what became known as the Great Arab Revolt, at times fighting at the side of the British Army officer T. E. Lawrence, later immortalized by historians and filmmakers as Lawrence of Arabia. The Arabs were victorious, but Britain’s promises to Sharif Hussein expired even before the conflict ended. Britain and France preemptively divvied up the captured Ottoman lands into British and French protectorates under the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. After the war, the maps were redrawn to create entirely new states, including the kingdoms of Iraq and Syria and, on the narrow strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, a Jewish homeland that would later become Israel.