Way back in one of our first Extra History series, on the beginning of World War I, we talked about how at the end of the war the victorious powers carved up the Middle East—men in drawing rooms deciding the fate of peoples they did not understand, and in some cases, lands they had never visited. This is the story of how that came to happen, a tale of revolts, secret treaties, betrayal, a struggle for homelands, and a British counterinsurgency operation in Iraq.