The British laid the groundwork, literally in sand, which guaranteed instability in the Middle East until today.
After the French had defeated an Arab army in July 1920 and consolidated their control of Syria under the terms of their League of Nations mandate, the British faced a serious revolt in the eastern part of their mandate then known as Mesopotamia (from Greek for between the two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates).
What the British called Mesopotamia was made up of three former Ottoman provinces or vilayets, Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, roughly corresponding to religious or ethnic divides, Shia, Sunni and Kurdish.
None of them accepted the idea of a British mandate. Instead they demanded self-determination as an Arab state as the British had promised in 1916, though the Kurds in the north wanted their own Kurdistan.
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Throughout 1920, Sunni and Shia inhabitants combined to offer strong resistance to the British. 100,000 British and Indian troops were dispatched to suppress the revolt. Distances were huge and much of the land trackless desert.
British troops march........