om India by sea rather than by land across Iraq and through Mosul. The city's fortunes revived with the discovery of oil in the area, from the late 1920s onward. It became a nexus for the movement of oil via truck and pipeline to both Turkey and Syria. Qyuarrah Refinery was built within about an hour's drive from the city and was used to process tar for road-building projects. It was damaged but not destroyed during the Iran�Iraq War. Mosul provides a key portion of the country's electrical needs via Mosul Dam and several neighboring thermal turbine facilities.
The opening of the University of Mosul in 1967 enabled the education of many in the city and surrounding areas, and it includes engineering and linguistics departments among its many other academic departments.
The region had been part of the Ottoman Empire from 1534 until the end of World War I in 1918. The possibility of dissolving this Empire became real with the Great War, since Germany was the ally of the Ottoman Empire. Secret agreements between the French and the British government (known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement) decided in 1916 to draw a straight line from the Jordan heights to Iran: where the northern zone (Syria, and later the upcoming Lebanon) would be under French influence, and the southern zone (Iraq, and later, after renegotiations in 1917, Palestine which included modern Jordan) would be under British influence. Mosul was in the northern zone, and would have become a Syrian city; but early discoveries of oil in the region just before the end of the war (1918), pushed the British government to yet another negotiation with the French; to include the region of Mosul into the southern zone (or the British zone). The border line that divides the two sides has not changed since 1918, but it has helped determine the boundaries of the modern Middle East for the coming century with the creation of different countries from the Ottoman Empire.
At the end of World War I in
