On 30 October 1918, towards the end of World War I, the Sharifian Army led by Emir Faisal, backed by the British Army, captured Damascus from the Ottomans as part of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The war ended less than a month after the Sharifian–British conquest of Damascus. In correspondences between the Sharifian leadership in Mecca and Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Cairo, the latter promised to support the establishment of a Sharifian kingdom in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire in return for launching a revolt against the Ottomans. However, the British and French governments secretly made previous arrangements regarding the division of the Ottomans' Arab provinces between themselves in the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement.