For a region that nurtured the cradle of civilization between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the modern state of Iraq is still young and changing.

Iraq was carved out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire following World War I by a British administration largely focused on protecting its access to a much larger Indian colony and its growing thirst for newly discovered oil reserves. It was a process that has left its imprint on the politics and ethnic quarrels that have wracked the country ever since.

In the growing conflagration that was World War I, Britain realized Germany had convinced the ailing Ottoman Empire to take its side. The British responded by declaring war on the Ottomans on Nov. 5, 1914 and landed a small army near Kuwait the next day.

The forces took control of the oil fields that the British would use to supply their naval forces in the Indian Ocean and then began a march toward Basra.

The decision to seize the oil fields was a purely military one, but the British move toward Basra and then Baghdad, to in effect conquer Mesopotamia, has been questioned ever since.

Historian and author William Polk contends, "In diplomatic papers passed between London and Delhi in the years before the war, the threat of what was then called 'Pan-Islamism' figured prominently. The Allies -- Britain, France and Russia -- dominated huge Muslim populations in Africa and Asia. Each feared that its subject Muslims might try to drive them out."

The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire was also the Caliph of the Islamic faith. A decision by him to declare a jihad against the United Kingdom could cause a revolt far from the battlefields of Europe and Iraq. The British hoped a swift military victory would make the threat of a Muslim uprising dissipate. They plunged into the heart of Iraq moving swiftly toward Baghdad.

A Turkish counterattack pinned British forces in Kut, a city 100 miles southeast of the modern capital, from December 1915 until they surrendered in April 1916. The British military responded by flooding the region with more forces even as the diplomats were tying the kingdom to the political future of the region.

Although the military campaign was faltering in Iraq, Britain was already planning to rule Iraq once the war was over.

Under the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, France and Britain carved up most of the Ottoman territory into spheres of influence, with Britain retaining direct control over most of modern Iraq and having indirect control over the rest of the area, with the exception of Mosul and Kirkuk, which would operate under French control.

The deal would drive both colonial nations' policies in the Middle East following World War I and essentially draw the future border between Syria (under French control) and Iraq (under Britain).

Within a year of the defeat at Kut, British troops had turned the tide in the area, taking control of Baghdad and other key areas. By the end of World War I, most of what would become Iraq was under British, French, or Arab control.

The 1919 Paris peace accord and the Sanremo conference a year later settled control of the Middle East largely along the lines outlined in the Sykes-Picot deal, but also encouraged the occupying nations to develop locally autonomous governments in the areas they controlled.

For British authorities charged with organizing the new state of Iraq, the challenge appeared daunting. According to one of the first administrators of the post-war region, Col. Arnold Wilson, some 75 percent of the area was tribal with no tradition of adhering to any central government. Additionally, the former Ottoman officials and military leaders that would likely rule the new state were Sunni in an area overwhelmingly Shiite.

"A fundamental problem, as Wilson saw it, was that almost 2 million Shiite Muslims in Mesopotamia would not accept domination by [the Sunni], yet 'no form of government has yet been envisaged, which does not involve Sunni domination,'" David Fromkin wrote in "A Peace to End All Peace."

Frustrated by the lack of progress made by the British toward promised self-rule, Iraqi religious and political leaders grew angrier and protests broke out throughout the region in the late spring and early summer of 1920. The British moved to quash the growing unrest, arresting scores of tribal and religious leaders. The decision provoked a full-scale revolt, with Iraqi militias and bandits launching waves of attacks against the often scattered British outposts.

The rebellion was not universal, but in the cities of Najaf and Karbala the uprising was serious and bloody. It would take thousands of British forces four months to fully quell the violence. In the end, some 6,000 Iraqis and 500 British and Indian troops were dead.

For the citizens of the emerging nation, the 1920 uprising stood as one of the few unifying events. As the Library of Congress concluded, "Ath Thawra al Iraqiyya al Kubra, or The Great Iraqi Revolution (as the 1920 rebellion is called), was a watershed event in contemporary Iraqi history. For the first time, Sunnis and Shias, tribes and cities, were brought together in a common effort."

The effect on the British population, still reeling from the devastation wrought by World War I, was also profound. Within weeks of the uprising, British popular support appeared to largely evaporate for involvement in the area called Iraq.

The London Times wrote in August 1920, "how much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavor to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?"

What the revolt truly triggered was a deep-seated feeling within the British government that it should limit as much as possible its role in running Iraq. A 1999 Arab interpretation of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire spelled an even more prescient assessment of not only the British and Hashemite experience in Iraq, but also the American experience 80 years later.

"Torn by ethnic, social and religious schisms, with the dominant Arab population hopelessly polarized between the Shiite and the Sunni communities, each further split into rival clans -- and with the Kurdish population of the north implacably opposed to Arab domination yet deeply fragmented along tribal lines -- Mesopotamia held little appeal for foreign occupiers," Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh concluded in their book "Empires of the Sand."

For the British, who in the wake of the First World War were focused on limiting the areas in which its war-weary troops and battle-depleted budget extended, the idea of staying in Iraq indeed soured.

They turned to someone they hoped had the popular support and Islamic credentials to come into Iraq to govern -- Prince Faisal, son of Ali Hussain, the sharif of Mecca, and the leader of the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottomans during the War.

In 1921, the British crowned Faisal the first king of Iraq and made his brother Abdullah king of Jordan. Many analysts have said the Hashemite monarchy begun by Faisal and which would govern Iraq until a military coup in 1958, was flawed from the start.

"Despite his Islamic and pan-Arab credentials, Faisal was not an Iraqi, and, no matter how effectively he ruled, Iraqis saw the monarchy as a British creation. The continuing inability of the government to gain the confidence of the people fueled political instability well into the 1970s," according to the Library of Congress' Country Studies report on Iraq.

But in 1921, the British were satisfied with an Iraqi government headed by the Sunni Faisal and run largely by former Ottoman officials who were also Sunni. The issue Wilson had seen of Shia unrest was never dealt with, and European involvement began to wane in the region.

The selection of Faisal and the hastily arranged plebiscite among Iraqis that gave the new king the stated support of 96 percent of the population set up the basic government, but the map of Iraq was still not complete.

In the northern province centered around the city of Mosul, oil had sparked a tug-of-war between Britain and Turkey over who would control the area and its newly discovered natural resources.

Under the Sykes-Picot deal the region was supposed to be controlled by the French, but the British maneuvered it away from them by promising the French government 25 percent of the oil revenues from the region. Now the British had to get it away from the new Turkish government, which also laid claim to it.

After lengthy negotiations, the Turks agreed to let the League of Nations settle the matter, and in 1925 the body ruled that Mosul, with its predominantly Kurdish population, was part of Iraq.

The League ruled that the Kurds should be given a level of autonomy to govern their own affairs.

"Many Kurds were encouraged by the fact that the commission had listened to their fears about domination both by the Turkish and Iraqi governments," Charles Tripp wrote in "A History of Iraq." "They had avoided reoccupation by Turkey, but were apprehensive about what they could expect from an Arab government in Baghdad."

The League deal also ensured British control of the fledgling nation's oil reserves through the UK-dominated Iraqi Petroleum Company. Under the deal that built the IPC, the Iraqi government received a small fraction of the revenues from the oil, with the bulk going to a consortium of British, French and American companies.

The agreement lit another long-burning fuse that would lead to future instability in the region, according to historian and author William Polk.

"As younger Iraqis were becoming better educated and were increasingly in contact with European and American sources of information, they began to be aware of the enormous importance of oil to their future. They came to believe that in oil policy as in other affairs, their government was corrupt and even traitorous," Polk wrote in "Understanding Iraq."

But with the Mosul deal completed and the Faisal government in charge, the British agreed to grant Iraq full independence in 1932. Iraq joined the League of Nations and emerged as a new nation -- yet one with numerous deep rifts within it.

The new Iraq had what many within the country viewed as a foreign king, the Kurds in the north still strove for independence, the Shiites in the central and southern region still chafed under a minority Sunni rule. This nation, cobbled together by the League of Nations and the Colonial Office in London, now faced its own future.

-- By Lee Banville, Online NewsHour