Syria

The territory of present-day Syria contains some of the oldest continuously inhabited sites in the world, and its written history begins in the third millennium BCE with the city-states of Ebla, Mari, and Ugarit, which served as commercial and literary centers linking Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Mediterranean. Successive imperial powers absorbed the region in turn, including the Akkadian, Egyptian, Hittite, Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Achaemenid Persian empires. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BCE, the area became the heartland of the Seleucid kingdom, with Antioch as one of the great cities of the Hellenistic world, before passing to Roman control in 64 BCE and remaining a wealthy province of Rome and then Byzantium for nearly seven centuries.

The Arab Muslim conquest of the 630s transformed Syria decisively, and from 661 to 750 Damascus served as the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate, the first hereditary Islamic dynasty and at its height the largest empire the world had yet seen. After the Abbasid revolution shifted political power eastward to Baghdad, Syria passed through Fatimid, Seljuk, and Crusader contests, was reunified under Saladin and the Ayyubids in the late twelfth century, and then formed a core province of the Mamluk sultanate based in Cairo. In 1516 the Ottoman sultan Selim I defeated the Mamluks at Marj Dabiq, and Syria remained an Ottoman territory for four centuries, administered through provinces centered on Damascus, Aleppo, and Tripoli.

Ottoman rule ended during the First World War, when Arab and Allied forces took Damascus in 1918. A short-lived Arab Kingdom of Syria under Faisal I was dissolved in 1920 after the French victory at Maysalun, and the League of Nations placed the territory under a French Mandate, which separated Lebanon and gradually reorganized the remaining areas into a single Syrian state. After years of nationalist agitation and a wartime Allied occupation, Syria became fully independent on 17 April 1946 with the withdrawal of the last French troops, a date still observed as Evacuation Day.

The early republic was unstable, marked by a series of military coups beginning in 1949 and a brief union with Egypt as the United Arab Republic from 1958 to 1961. The Baath Party seized power in 1963, and within that movement Hafez al-Assad consolidated control through the Corrective Movement of 1970, establishing a centralized presidential system that he led until his death in 2000. He was succeeded by his son Bashar al-Assad. Syria fought wars with Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973, lost the Golan Heights in 1967, and maintained a long military presence in Lebanon from 1976 until 2005.

Peaceful protests in March 2011 escalated into a prolonged civil war involving multiple domestic factions, jihadist organizations including the Islamic State, and foreign powers such as Russia, Iran, Turkey, and the United States. After years of stalemate, a rapid offensive by opposition forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham captured Damascus in December 2024, ending more than half a century of Baath Party rule as Bashar al-Assad fled the country. A transitional administration under Ahmad al-Sharaa was installed and, in early 2025, formally constituted as the Syrian Arab Republic under an interim constitution, governing as a unitary presidential republic pending elections and the drafting of a permanent basic law.