Mandate for Mesopotamia
proposed League of Nations Mandate
The Mandate for Mesopotamia (Arabic: الانتداب على بلاد ما بين النهرين, romanized: al-Intidāb ʿalā Bilād mā bayn an-Nahrayn) was a proposed League of Nations mandate to cover Ottoman Iraq. The mandate would have been entrusted to the United Kingdom but was superseded by the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1922, an agreement between the British and the Iraqis with some similarities to the proposed mandate. On paper, the mandate lasted from 1920 to 1932.
History
The proposed mandate was awarded on 25 April 1920 in Italy at the San Remo Conference in accordance with the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement, but the mandate not yet documented or defined. It was to be a Class A mandate under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. A draft mandate document was prepared by the British Colonial Office in June 1920 and submitted in draft form to the League of Nations in December 1920.
Immediately after the end of the First World War, Sir Arnold Wilson, the future High Commissioner to Iraq, recommended the annexation of Mesopotamia to British India "as a colony of India and the Indians, such as the government of India administer it and gradually cultivate its vast plains, and settle the warrior Punjab races in it".
In a memorandum written on 22 April 1918, High Commissioner Sir Percy Cox listed the social groups that the British should support: the Jewish community in Baghdad, the notables in Baghdad and Basara, the rich land-owning Arabs and Jews and the Shaikhs of the sedentary tribes. Mosul was added to the region of British influence after the 1918 Clemenceau–Lloyd George Agreement.
The proposed mandate faced certain difficulties to be established.
“Mandate for Mesopotamia” enters the record as proposed League of Nations Mandate. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mandate, Mesopotamia and proposed can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16824470. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1922, 1920, 1932 and 1916.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mandate for Mesopotamia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.