Following the Sazonov Paleologist Agreement, Russia should also benefit from Western Armenia alongside Constantinople and the Turkish Strait, already promised under the 1915 Constantinople Agreement. [8] Italy was closed to the Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne Convention in 1917 and received South Anatolia. [8] The Palestinian region, whose territory is smaller than later compulsory Palestine, should be under “international administration.” So why are commentators and others 100 years after the fact still focusing on the Sykes-Picot agreement? After all, it was not the first secret agreement that aspired to divide the Ottoman Empire among the allies; This would be the Constantinople Agreement of 1915. On 18 September Faisal met in London and the next day and 23 had long meetings with Lloyd George, who explained the memory aid and the British position. Lloyd George stated that he was “in the position of a man who had inherited two groups of commitments, those of King Hussein and those of the French,” Faisal noted that the agreement “seemed to be based on the 1916 agreement between the British and the French.” Clemenceau responded about Memory Aid, refusing to travel to Syria and saying that the case should be left to the French to directly manage Fayçal. The question of the extent to which Sykes-Picot remained in force at the time is controversial. As soon as the agreement was made public, Britain and France tried to limit the consequences. In 1918, the Anglo-French Declaration ordered the support of “indigenous governments and administrations in Syria and Mesopotamia.” The international mandate system, created by the League of Nations to regulate the ancient Ottoman territories, also replaced the agreement, although the contours of these mandates are roughly in line with those of Sykes-Picot. The agreement was concluded in secret, among other things, because it betrayed the promises already made by the British government hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca. During the war, the British, in trying to stoke an Arab rebellion against the Ottomans, sought Hussein`s support by agreeing to support with some reservations the creation of an independent Arab state.