Syria

• 1. Introduction

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  Syria sits at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, a country whose name carries the echo of an ancient empire it was never quite part of. The word "Syria" itself is a Greek corruption of "Assyria" - a northern Mesopotamian civilization whose reach was so vast that the Greeks eventually used the same label for the Aramean peoples of the Levant, hundreds of miles to the west. That confusion has never fully resolved itself. Today the Syrian Arab Republic covers 185,180 square kilometers, is home to roughly 26 million people, and comprises 14 governorates. Damascus is its capital and largest city. What makes Syria so difficult to understand is also what makes it so worth understanding: it is a place where the oldest human settlements on earth sit alongside one of the most destructive civil conflicts of the 21st century. Stone towers at Tell Qaramel have been dated to 10,650 BC, making them among the oldest known structures of their kind. The country where agriculture first took hold, where the world's earliest known alphabet was developed, and where the Apostle Paul was converted on the road to Damascus, spent the final decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century under a hereditary dictatorship - before that dictatorship collapsed in a single week in December 2024. How does a place with that depth of history arrive at that kind of ending? And what comes after?

• 2. The World's First Alphabet

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  Ugarit arose around 1800 BC, close to what is now the city of Latakia on Syria's Mediterranean coast. The city gave its name to the Ugaritic language, a Semitic tongue loosely related to the Canaanite languages - and it produced what scholars consider the world's earliest known alphabet. Before Ugarit, writing systems depended on hundreds of symbols. The Ugaritic alphabet changed that, creating a compact set of characters that could be learned and used by ordinary people, not just professional scribes. The Ugaritic kingdom survived for centuries until the marauding Indo-European Sea Peoples destroyed it in the 12th century BC, during what historians call the Late Bronze Age collapse. Before Ugarit, the region's oldest recorded indigenous civilization was the Kingdom of Ebla, founded around 3500 BC near present-day Idlib in northern Syria. Ebla built its wealth through trade with the Mesopotamian states of Sumer, Assyria, and Akkad, and maintained contact with Egypt - a fact confirmed by gifts from Pharaohs found during excavations. One of the earliest written texts from Syria is a trading agreement between Ebla's Vizier Ibrium and a kingdom called Abarsal, dated to around 2300 BC. Scholars consider the Eblaite language to be among the oldest known written Semitic languages after Akkadian. The ancient cities of Aleppo and Damascus are among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Yamhad, the ancient name for Aleppo, was described in the tablets of Mari as the mightiest state in the Near East, with more vassals than Hammurabi of Babylon himself.

• 3. Empires Through Damascus

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  Palmyra, a rich Aramaic-speaking kingdom in northern Syria, rose to extraordinary power in the 2nd century AD under Roman rule. The city sat astride the Silk Road and became one of the wealthiest in the entire Roman Empire. In the late 3rd century, the Palmyrene king Odaenathus defeated the Persian emperor Shapur I and took control of the entirety of the Roman East. His widow and successor, Zenobia, then established the Palmyrene Empire, briefly conquering Egypt, Syria, Palestine, much of Asia Minor, Judah, and Lebanon, before Rome brought the empire under control in 273. Syria produced emperors for Rome as well. Julia Domna, from the Syrian city of Emesa - modern-day Homs - became empress of Rome as wife of Emperor Septimius Severus. Her great-nephews, also Arabs from Syria, became emperors in turn: Elagabalus first, then his cousin Alexander Severus. Philip the Arab, born in Roman Arabia, ruled the empire from 244 to 249. In the mid-7th century, the Umayyad dynasty placed the capital of their expanding caliphate in Damascus. Arabic was made the official language under Umayyad rule, replacing Greek and Aramaic. When the Umayyad dynasty was overthrown in 750 by the Abbasids, the capital moved to Baghdad - but Damascus remained a city of immense religious and commercial weight. It became the major staging point for Mecca, drawing pilgrims from across the Islamic world and accumulating a sacred character that outlasted any individual ruler. The Aramaic language that preceded Arabic proved remarkably durable; an inscription in Aramaic written by a Palmyrene emigrant has been found as far away as Hadrian's Wall in Roman Britain.

• 4. Ottoman Centuries

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  In 1516, the Ottoman Empire invaded and incorporated Syria, beginning a rule that would last for roughly four centuries. The Ottoman system organized each ethno-religious community as a millet - a recognized unit with its own religious leaders who administered personal status laws and certain civil functions. Arab Shia Muslims, Arab Sunni Muslims, Syriac Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Maronite Christians, Assyrian Christians, Armenians, Kurds, and Jews all held this status. The arrangement produced what one account describes as peaceful coexistence, though it was coexistence within a rigid hierarchy. The Ottoman grip loosened during World War I. Two Allied diplomats - Frenchman François Georges-Picot and Briton Mark Sykes - secretly negotiated the post-war division of the Ottoman Empire in 1916. Their agreement drew borders that would define the modern Middle East. The discovery of oil near Mosul just before the war ended led to yet another negotiation in 1918, as France ceded that region to British influence - which would become Iraq. The fate of the intermediate province of Zor was left unclear, and its occupation by Arab nationalists resulted in its attachment to Syria. That border was recognized internationally when Syria became a League of Nations mandate in 1920 and has not changed since. During World War I, the Ottomans and their allies also carried out genocide against indigenous Christian peoples. Deir ez-Zor in Ottoman Syria was the final destination of the death marches of the Armenian and Assyrian genocides.

• 5. The French Mandate

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  In 1920, a short-lived independent Kingdom of Syria was established under Faisal I of the Hashemite family, but his rule ended after just a few months following the Battle of Maysalun. French troops then occupied Syria after the San Remo conference assigned it to a French mandate under the League of Nations. The French approach to governing Syria was revealed in a candid exchange between General Gouraud and his secretary de Caix. Gouraud had two options: build a Syrian nation by smoothing over its internal divisions, or cultivate and maintain those divisions to justify continued French arbitration. De Caix stated plainly that only the second option interested him, and that is the path Gouraud chose. Resistance came quickly. In 1925, Sultan al-Atrash led an uprising that began in the Druze Mountain and spread to engulf all of Syria and parts of Lebanon. Al-Atrash won several battles against the French, notably the Battle of al-Kafr on the 21st of July 1925, the Battle of al-Mazraa on the 2nd and the 3rd of August 1925, and the battles of Salkhad, al-Musayfirah, and Sweida. France sent thousands of troops from Morocco and Senegal and eventually recaptured the major cities, though resistance continued until the spring of 1927. Al-Atrash was sentenced to death but escaped to Transjordan and was eventually pardoned, returning to Syria in 1937 after the signing of the Syrian-French Treaty. Syria and France negotiated a treaty of independence in September 1936, and Hashim al-Atassi became the first president elected under the modern Syrian republic - but the French Legislature refused to ratify the treaty and the independence it promised never came into force. French troops finally withdrew in April 1946, granting Syria de facto independence - though legal independence had technically existed since 1945, when the First Syrian Republic became a founding member of the United Nations.

• 6. The Ba'ath Decades

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  The coup of the 8th of March 1963 was engineered by members of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, led by Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar. From that seizure of power until the fall of the regime in 2024, the Ba'ath party ran Syria as a one-party state. Ba'athists took control of politics, education, culture, religion, and civil society through a powerful secret police apparatus known as the Mukhabarat. The 1963 coup marked what scholars describe as a "radical break" in modern Syrian history. Further coups in 1966 and 1970 shifted power within Ba'athist factions. The November 1970 coup - a bloodless military takeover known as the Corrective Movement - installed Hafez al-Assad as the strongman of government. Assad had been the Minister of Defense. He transformed a Ba'athist party state into a hereditary dictatorship, assigning Alawite loyalists to key posts throughout the military, intelligence services, and political establishment. A cult of personality around Assad and his family became a core feature of Ba'athist ideology. In January 1973, Hafez al-Assad implemented a new constitution that did not require the president to be a Muslim, triggering fierce demonstrations in Hama, Homs, and Aleppo organized by the Muslim Brotherhood and traditional religious scholars. The government survived an Islamist uprising between 1976 and 1982 through a series of repressions. The 1982 Hama massacre, in which more than 2,000 to between 25,000-40,000 people were killed by Ba'athist troops and allied paramilitaries, has been described as the single deadliest act of violence perpetrated by any Arab state against its own population in modern history. Assad died on the 10th of June 2000. His son Bashar took over, running unopposed in his election.

• 7. Civil War and Collapse

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  Public demonstrations across Syria began on the 26th of January 2011 as part of the wider Arab Spring. Protesters demanded Assad's resignation and an end to nearly five decades of Ba'ath Party rule. Beginning in spring 2011, the Syrian Army was deployed to suppress the uprising; witnesses reported that soldiers who refused to fire on civilians were summarily executed. By early autumn 2011, army defectors and civilians had begun forming fighting units under the banner of the Free Syrian Army. The conflict drew in outside powers rapidly. In 2014 and 2015, the Islamic State seized large parts of eastern Syria. A United States-led coalition launched airstrikes, providing support to the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces. In August 2016, Turkey launched an invasion of northern Syria. Iran and Russia intervened on behalf of the Assad government. By 2024, the civil war had resulted in more than 600,000 deaths, with pro-Assad forces causing more than 90% of civilian casualties. Over 7.6 million people were internally displaced and more than 5 million registered as refugees. More than 90% of the population was living in poverty. The end came quickly. On the 27th of November 2024, rebel forces led by the Islamist group Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham launched an offensive. They took Aleppo, then Hama on the 5th of December, then Homs on the 8th of December. That same day, opposition forces captured Damascus. The Assad family's 53-year rule ended. Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow, where he was granted asylum. On the 29th of January 2025, Ahmed al-Sharaa was appointed president for the transitional period, and on the 13th of March 2025 he signed an interim constitution covering a five-year transition. The 2025 hunger crisis that followed was described as Syria's most severe modern humanitarian emergency, pushing over 14 million people into food insecurity.