Mosul question

During the negotiations for the Treaty of Lausanne, the Turkish side argued that the Kurds and Turks were not “racially separable“, and that the Arabs constituted only a minority of the population.

[1] The British responded that the Kurds were of Indo-European and the Turks of Ural-Altaic origin, and on the 4 February 1923, the parties decided that the Mosul Question would be excluded from the Lausanne Treaty negotiations.

The League of Nations Council appointed an investigative commission that recommended that Iraq should retain Mosul, and Turkey reluctantly assented to the decision by signing the Frontier Treaty of 1926 with the Iraqi government.

Iraq agreed to give to Turkey 10 percent of the royalty that was soon expected to flow from the Turkish Petroleum Company to the Iraqi government with the 75-year concession signed on March 14, 1925 between the two.

In 1916, the United Kingdom and France signed the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement, which effectively partitioned the Ottoman Empire into areas of British and French control and spheres of influence.

[5] Three weeks after World War I ended, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau abandoned France's claim to Mosul and ceded control of all of northern Mesopotamia to Britain, following a private discussion on December 1, 1918.

In return, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George promised Clemenceau a significant share of any oil discovered in British-controlled Mosul, possibly as much as 50 percent.

[12] To reach a resolution on the conflicting claims over Mosul, the League of Nations was called on to send a factfinding commission to determine the rightful owner.

The Secretary of the War Cabinet, Maurice Hankey, had already decided before the commission's work was completed that Britain needed to have control over the whole area because of its oil concerns for the Royal Navy.

Faisal ibn Hussein, the Hashemite ruler who had become the king of the newly created state of Iraq by the British in 1921, also wanted to claim the Mosul vilayet as his.

[15] Prior to the League of Nations decision, Faisal had continually petitioned the British government to give control of Mosul to him so that he could succeed in his aim of unification.

Ismet Pasha insisted that the population of Turks in Mosul exceeded that of Arabs, although the British dismissed this argument and asserted that those Turkmen speak a different variant of Turkish.

[19] Also, because of those problems, the administration of Mosul was entrusted to Palace and notable favorites, and the high officials' careers were usually determined by tribal issues within their states.