The history of Syria

Syria lies at the northern end of the Fertile Crescent, between the Mediterranean, the Anatolian mountains, the Arabian desert and the Euphrates, and some of the world's earliest farming villages and cities grew up on its land. For three thousand years it was fought over by the empires of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Persia, Greece and Rome, and in the seventh century its capital Damascus became the seat of the first great Islamic dynasty. After four centuries of Ottoman rule and a quarter-century of French mandate, the modern state became independent in 1946, then fell under Ba'athist military rule and from 1970 the Assad family. An uprising in 2011 turned into one of the deadliest wars of the century, which ended with the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 and a transition that is still unfolding.

Stone tools show that early humans passed through Syria hundreds of thousands of years ago, and in 1993 Japanese and Syrian archaeologists found the skeleton of a Neanderthal child in Dederiyeh Cave near Aleppo. At the end of the last Ice Age, Natufian hunter-gatherers along the Euphrates began to live in permanent villages, and sites such as Tell Abu Hureyra and Mureybet record the shift to cultivating cereals and herding animals that historians call the Neolithic Revolution. By around 8000 BCE these villages were farming communities with rectangular mud-brick houses, and over the following millennia pottery, copper working and long-distance trade in obsidian spread through the region.

Cities arose in Syria in the third millennium BCE, influenced by but distinct from Sumer in southern Mesopotamia. The greatest was Ebla, south of Aleppo, whose palace archive of some 17,000 clay tablets, discovered in the 1970s, revealed a powerful state that traded with Mesopotamia and Egypt around 2500 to 2300 BCE. Mari on the Euphrates was another great centre. Ebla was sacked, probably by Sargon of Akkad or his grandson Naram-Sin, and later rebuilt. In the early second millennium Amorite dynasties ruled much of Syria, among them the kingdom of Yamhad centred on Aleppo, until Mari was destroyed by Hammurabi of Babylonia around 1760 BCE.

In the late Bronze Age Syria was the battleground of empires. The Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni dominated the north until it was broken by the Hittites, who contested the south with the New Kingdom of Egypt. In 1274 BCE Ramesses II and the Hittite king Muwatalli II fought the Battle of Kadesh on the Orontes, after which the two powers eventually made one of the earliest recorded peace treaties. On the coast the port city of Ugarit traded across the Mediterranean and developed one of the first alphabets, written in cuneiform signs. Ugarit was destroyed around 1185 BCE during the Late Bronze Age collapse.

After the collapse, Aramean peoples founded kingdoms across inland Syria, the most powerful being Aram-Damascus, while the coastal cities of Phoenicia such as Arwad traded and founded colonies across the Mediterranean. The Aramaic language spread so widely that it became the common tongue of the Near East for a thousand years, and a form of it is still spoken in the village of Maaloula. From the ninth century BCE Assyria pushed west, and in 732 BCE Tiglath-Pileser III captured Damascus and deported much of its population. When Assyria fell, Syria passed to the Neo-Babylonian empire of Nebuchadnezzar II.

In 539 BCE Cyrus the Great took Babylon, and Syria became part of the Achaemenid Empire as the province "Beyond the River", with the Phoenician cities providing much of the Persian navy. Alexander the Great defeated Darius III at Issus in 333 BCE and conquered the region. After his death it became the heart of the Seleucid Empire, whose kings founded Antioch, Apamea, Laodicea and other Greek cities and fought a series of wars with the Ptolemies of Egypt. Greek culture spread among the urban elite during the Hellenistic period, while the countryside remained largely Aramaic-speaking.

In 64 BCE Pompey ended the decaying Seleucid kingdom and made Syria a province of Rome; under the Roman Empire Antioch became one of the largest cities in the Mediterranean world. Syria guarded the frontier with the Parthian Empire and later the Sasanian Empire, and Syrians rose high in Rome itself: Julia Domna of Emesa, modern Homs, married the emperor Septimius Severus, and Philip the Arab, born in southern Syria, became emperor in 244. The caravan city of Palmyra grew rich on desert trade, and in the crisis of the third century its queen Zenobia seized Egypt and much of Anatolia before the emperor Aurelian defeated her in 272.

Christianity spread early in Syria. Paul the Apostle was converted on the road to Damascus, and the followers of Jesus were first called Christians in Antioch, now in Turkey. Under the Byzantine Empire Syria was a land of churches, monasteries and ascetics such as Simeon Stylites, but also of bitter disputes over the nature of Christ that left many Syrian Christians estranged from Constantinople. The Persians occupied the region from the 610s until 628, and the long war left both empires exhausted.

Arab armies sent by the Rashidun Caliphate entered Syria in the 630s, took Damascus in 635, and defeated the Byzantines decisively at the Yarmouk in 636. The governor of Syria, Muawiya, emerged from the first Muslim civil war as caliph in 661 and founded the Umayyad Caliphate, ruling from Damascus an empire that stretched within decades from Spain to Central Asia. The caliph al-Walid I built the Great Mosque of Damascus between about 705 and 715 on the site of a Christian basilica, and Arabic replaced Greek in the administration. Islam and the Arabic language gradually became those of the majority, while large Christian and Jewish communities remained.

In 750 the Abbasid Caliphate overthrew the Umayyads and moved the centre of power to Iraq, where it founded Baghdad; Syria became a province, though Harun al-Rashid made Raqqa on the Euphrates his residence for several years. As Abbasid power weakened, Syria was divided among local dynasties: the Hamdanids made Aleppo a brilliant court under Sayf al-Dawla in the tenth century, the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt ruled the south, and the Byzantines reconquered Antioch and raided deep into the country.

The Seljuk Empire took most of Syria in the 1070s, but its local rulers were divided when the First Crusade arrived. The Crusades created the Principality of Antioch and the County of Tripoli along the coast and in the north-west, with great castles such as Krak des Chevaliers. Muslim resistance was organised by Zengi of Mosul and his son Nur al-Din, who united Aleppo and Damascus, and then by Saladin, who founded the Ayyubid dynasty, retook Jerusalem in 1187 and died in Damascus in 1193.

In 1260 the Mongols of Hulagu, founder of the Ilkhanate, sacked Aleppo and occupied Damascus, but later that year the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt defeated them at the Battle of Ain Jalut and took control of Syria. The Mamluks expelled the last crusaders by 1291 and ruled for more than two centuries, building mosques, schools and markets in Damascus and Aleppo. In 1400 and 1401 Tamerlane sacked Aleppo and Damascus, massacring many inhabitants and carrying off craftsmen to Samarkand.

In 1516 the Ottoman sultan Selim I defeated the Mamluks at Marj Dabiq north of Aleppo, and Syria became part of the Ottoman Empire for four centuries. It was divided into provinces centred on Damascus, Aleppo and Tripoli, and later Sidon. Damascus was the gathering point for the annual pilgrim caravan to Mecca, and Aleppo was one of the great trading cities of the empire, with European consuls and merchants. Religious communities, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Alawites, Druze, the various Christian churches and Jews, largely ran their own personal and religious affairs.

From 1831 to 1840 Syria was occupied by Ibrahim Pasha, son of the ruler of Egypt, whose reforms were continued after the Ottomans returned under the Tanzimat. Rising tensions between communities led in 1860 to a civil war in Mount Lebanon and a massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus, which brought French military intervention. In the late nineteenth century an Arab literary and political revival took shape in Damascus and Beirut. During the First World War, the Ottoman governor Jamal Pasha executed Arab nationalists, and famine killed large numbers of people in the region. Armenian deportees from Anatolia were driven into the Syrian desert, where many thousands were massacred or died at camps around Deir ez-Zor. In 1916 Britain and France secretly agreed in the Sykes-Picot Agreement to divide the Arab provinces between them, while Britain encouraged an Arab revolt led by the Hashemite family.

Arab forces under Emir Faisal entered Damascus with the British in October 1918. In March 1920 a Syrian National Congress proclaimed Faisal king of an independent Syria, but the San Remo conference assigned Syria and Lebanon to France as a League of Nations mandate. French troops defeated the Syrian army at Maysalun on 24 July 1920 and expelled Faisal, who later became king of Iraq. France separated Lebanon as a distinct state and divided the rest of Syria into several units, including Alawite and Druze statelets.

The Great Syrian Revolt, begun by the Druze leader Sultan al-Atrash in 1925, spread across the country and was suppressed by 1927 after the French bombarded Damascus. Nationalists negotiated a treaty for independence in 1936 that the French parliament never ratified, and in 1939 France ceded the Sanjak of Alexandretta, now the province of Hatay, to Turkey, a transfer Syria long refused to accept. During the Second World War British and Free French forces took Syria from Vichy France in 1941. Independence was proclaimed and recognised, Syria joined the United Nations as a founding member in 1945, and after renewed French shelling of Damascus and British pressure the last French troops left on 17 April 1946, a date celebrated as Evacuation Day.

The young republic was unstable. Syrian forces took part in the 1948 Arab war against the new state of Israel, and defeat helped trigger three military coups in 1949 alone. Fear of communist and Western influence during the Cold War led Syria into a union with Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser, the United Arab Republic, from 1958 to 1961, when Syrian officers broke it up. On 8 March 1963 officers of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party seized power, and a further coup in 1966 brought a radical military faction to the top.

In the Six-Day War of June 1967 Israel captured the Golan Heights. In November 1970 the defence minister, Hafez al-Assad, an air force officer from the Alawite minority, took power in what he called the Corrective Movement. He built a centralised state resting on the army, the Ba'ath Party and several intelligence agencies, and drew close to the Soviet Union. Syria and Egypt attacked Israel in October 1973 but failed to recover the Golan; Israel later applied its law to the territory in 1981, a step most of the international community regards as an illegal annexation. In 1976 Syrian troops entered Lebanon's civil war, and they remained there until 2005.

An Islamist insurgency led by the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1970s ended in February 1982, when the army besieged the city of Hama and killed many thousands of people, with estimates ranging from several thousand to as many as 40,000. Syria joined the US-led coalition against Iraq in 1991 and held peace talks with Israel in the 1990s that came close to agreement but failed.

Hafez al-Assad died in 2000 and was succeeded by his son Bashar. Hopes of reform in a short "Damascus Spring" were dashed within a year, though the economy was partly liberalised. After the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005, international pressure forced Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon.

In March 2011, as uprisings spread across the Arab world, protests broke out in Daraa after the arrest of teenagers for anti-government graffiti and spread across the country. Security forces met them with live fire and mass arrests, and by 2012 the country was in civil war. The armed opposition fragmented into many groups, from defected soldiers of the Free Syrian Army to Islamist and jihadist movements such as the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah sent fighters to support the government, while Turkey, Gulf states and Western countries backed various rebel groups. In August 2013 a sarin attack on the opposition-held Ghouta suburbs of Damascus killed hundreds of people; UN inspectors confirmed the use of sarin, and later UN and international inquiries blamed government forces for several chemical attacks, which the government denied.

In 2014 the Islamic State seized much of eastern Syria and declared a caliphate with its capital at Raqqa, committing mass atrocities including the enslavement and killing of Yazidis. A US-led coalition bombed it and backed the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which took Raqqa in 2017 and the group's last territory in 2019. In September 2015 Russia intervened with air power on Assad's side, and with Russian and Iranian help the government recaptured eastern Aleppo in December 2016 after a devastating siege. Turkey launched several incursions from 2016 against the Islamic State and Kurdish forces and established zones of control in the north. By 2020 the front lines had largely frozen, with the government holding most of the population, the SDF the north-east, Turkish-backed factions parts of the north and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which had grown out of Jabhat al-Nusra, the north-western province of Idlib. More than 600,000 people had been killed by 2024, the large majority of civilian deaths being attributed to pro-government forces, and more than 12 million people had been displaced inside or outside the country. Syria was readmitted to the Arab League in 2023.

On 27 November 2024 HTS and allied factions launched an offensive from Idlib. The government's army, weakened by economic collapse and with its Russian and Iranian allies distracted, crumbled: rebels took Aleppo within days, Hama on 5 December and Homs by 8 December, while local forces rose in the south. On 8 December 2024 opposition fighters entered Damascus, ending 53 years of Assad family rule, and Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow, where he was granted asylum. Thousands of prisoners were freed from the regime's prisons, and Israel moved troops into the UN buffer zone on the Golan and beyond and carried out widespread airstrikes on Syrian military sites.

The HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, previously known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, became the de facto head of state, and on 29 January 2025 he was named president for a transitional period. In March 2025 he signed a constitutional declaration providing for a five-year transition, and on 29 March a transitional government was sworn in. The same month, fighting with Assad loyalists on the coast was followed by killings of Alawite civilians, more than 1,500 according to a UK-based monitoring group. An agreement in March 2025 provided for the SDF to merge into the national army, but tensions continued, with deadly clashes in Aleppo in January 2026, and violence also involved Druze armed groups in the south and further Israeli military action. The United States, the United Kingdom and other countries lifted most sanctions, Kurdish was recognised as a national language in 2026, and a new People's Assembly, elected in October 2025, held its first session in July 2026. Syria remains deeply impoverished and divided after more than a decade of war, with millions of refugees still abroad.