The Dark History of Modern Syria

  From The Philosopher CXIIII No. 1 Spring 2026

Syria’s ancient city of Apamea, an important commercial centre in Hellenistic times

Syria: a tangled web of Arabism, Imperialism and Colonialism

Syria is a place where international politics, ideology, colonial legacy, religion, economics, and ordinary human survival all collide at once, which makes it both incredibly important and incredibly difficult to sum up succintly. Hence, this book demands quite a commitment from the reader.

A History of Modern Syria, Daniel Neep explains, seeks to explain the interplay between different global processes. Time and time again, he says, we see how developments in Syria are never determined by purely domestic factors but are shaped by the powerful forces responsible for restructuring international relations more generally.

“This formulation draws attention not only to the usual suspects of European colonialism, American imperialism and Soviet expansionism, but also to the seemingly impersonal economic currents that have produced alternating bouts of expansion and contraction, globalization and protectionism, from the nineteenth century to the twenty‐first.”

Often, Neep says, the history of Syria has been told as a story “primarily involving external actors, whether the colonial machinations of Britain or France, the geopolitical competition between the United States and Soviet Union, or intra‐Arab rivalries between Iraq and Egypt”. Neep promises, as much as possible,  to tell this story using sources written by Syrians. It is  a fine aspiration, but in fact, the book remains very much an external, historian’s overview.

At its heart, is the story of the polarization of the 1950s and early 1960s, as discontented radicals fought back, battling conservatives over economic policy and foreign affairs, and struggling for dominance over the government and armed forces. The radicals’ victory saw them launch new political experiments—including the bizarre political union with Egypt, much larger and not even a neighbour, a socialist project that ended in repression, authoritarianism and division.

This poltiical reality was then reinforced by Hafiz al‐Assad whose regime intensified its monopoly over power, starting and stopping economic and political reforms first launched in the late 1980s, frozen in the 1990s and thawed in the early 2000s under his son, Bashar al‐Assad, who, rather bizarrely, was plucked from a career as an eye doctor in London to carry on the family dynasty in 2000 - a role he carried out with great brutality.

However, Neep tries to look behind the personal histories to see the broader currents of economics that shape nations. He reminds us that Britain’s ideological commitment to free trade had a calamitous impact on the rest of the world, of how wheat was shipped out of Ireland, starving thousands; of how narcotics were exported to China, producing a generation of addicts and of how “territories were incorporated into Britain’s ‘informal empire’ through unfair terms of trade just as surely as if they had been conquered by military force”.

For centuries, Syria was part of the Ottoman Empire. It was during World War I, that the empire collapsed ushering in a period of colonial rule that ran roughly from 1918-1946. This was a time of, as Neep puts it, “guns, grain and gold”, mainly controlled by Britain, as tribal forces led by Sharif Husayn’s son Faysal swept out of Arabia, seizing control of Aqaba and Jerusalem in late 1917 and thereby clearing the advance of British troops entering Palestine from Egypt. 

Reinforced with defeated Ottoman officers and Arab prisoners‐of‐war who had been held in Egypt, Iraq and India, the Arab Revolt acted as a guerrilla force along the right flank of the British Army. Originally, the Revolt adopted the language of religion rather than Arabism, yet as victories propelled it northwards, the ranks of the Revolt swelled with Arab army officers and activists from Arab secret societies, not to mention local tribes who threw their lot in with the rebels. The ideas of Arabism usefully legitimised the extension into Syria of a political authority the centre of which lay in distant Arabia. … Shaykh Kamal al‐Qassab proclaimed the independence of Syria as “the cornerstone of independence for [all] the Arab countries.”

And indeed, the Syrian congress’s declaration of independence in March 1920 was an act of defiance. By claiming sovereignty over the entirety of Syria, including Mount Lebanon and Palestine, the Arab Kingdom explicitly rejected the plans for the region that Britain and France had set in motion. However, at this time, French strategic interests trumped the wishes of those who lived in the region. Thus, the decision to create Greater Lebanon followed no consultation with local leaders; its borders were based on a French military map drawn eighty years earlier. Similarly, the French high commissioner simply decreed the unification of Aleppo and Damascus into a single State of Syria. But then, as General Clément‐Grandcourt, commander of French troops in southern Syria, put it:


“Whether [Syria’s ruling] authority be cruel or kind, regressive or liberal, it will always be detested by the majority, and especially by the Muslim masses, because it represents order.”

France’s repression of the Great Syrian Revolt, a widespread nationalist uprising against French colonial rule that lasted from 1925 to 1927, involved previously unimaginable levels of violence. An estimated 6,000 rebels were killed and over 100,000 people displaced from their homes. Entire neighbourhoods were destroyed, villages burned, rebels shot or hanged, and their corpses exhibited in public to impress upon the population the futility of rebellion against the mandatory power. 

Alice Poulleau, a French civilian living in Syria, described the scene at al‐Merjeh square in Damascus in uncompromising terms: 

“All around the square were soldiers, guns in hand. In the middle were gendarmes, their hands in their pockets, the chief of police in his cravat, and civilian and military officials. On the ground were long trails of blood. It was a Dantesque horror: the corpses’ shoes were scattered all about; they had tragic faces, their arms outstretched. One, so very young, still had his mouth open, as if he were crying something out. Bloodied brains, guts spilling from open stomachs—it was a scene of human carnage.” 

Neep notes how, in contrast to Poulleau’s moral outrage, French officials observing how Syrians reacted to the scene dispassionately reported back that ‘the psychological effect seems to have been considerable’

In 1941 the British and Free French invaded Syria and Lebanon to overthrow mandatory authorities that were loyal to the Vichy (pro-Nazi) regime. The size of the occupying army was so great that over the next few years the Allied forces spent an estimated 800 million Syrian pounds on supplies and local labour. This huge injection of cash provoked rampant inflation in the Syrian economy, which had been left essentially moribund by French colonial policy.

Equally as important as this injection of foreign capital were the wartime measures introduced by Britain to prevent mass famine. Local speculators took advantage of the cheap wheat redirected to the region and learned how to profit from the rationing system. Brokers benefitted as the prices of foodstuffs and basic goods shot sky‐high, prompting some traders to hoard grain and stockpile considerable wealth. “When independence arrived in 1946, the barrage broke and freed these pent‐up reservoirs of capital to seek more productive outlets. The subsequent flood of private investment stimulated agricultural production and fuelled the acceleration of modern industry in Syria.”

Foreign observers were astounded at the economic success that the Syrian private sector enjoyed in agriculture. The absence of any real support from the government in Damascus led some observers to argue that the Syrian experience disproved the received wisdom of international development experts, who in the post‐war years largely agreed on the crucial need for state intervention to stimulate economic progress.

More often though, to survive peasants were forced to borrow money from the landowner, at usurious rates of interest, which only entrenched their misery.
 

In May 1945, as the war was ending in Europe, France was still battling Syrian rebels and a new wave of civil disobedience brought turmoil to the streets of the Syrian capital. The French “made a futile attempt to restore order by shelling and bombing Damascus from the air. The bombardment killed 400 people and—in a crudely symbolic act—the parliament building was all but destroyed.”

 

The period following the end of the Second World War, from 1946–1970, Neep defines as one of instability, coups, and Arab Nationalism. And of course, one of the central threads is the tragedy of Palestine. Of the 750,000 Palestinians who were expelled or fled from their homes in 1948 after a United Nations dominated by colonial forces gave approval for a Jewish state, some 100,000 eventually arrived in Syria, where they were directed to settle in camps close to major cities. However, over subsequent decades, says Neep, successive governments in Syria oversaw the social and economic integration of Palestinians, this in contrast to other Arab states, which imposed separation. 

 

Dreams of a unified Arabism also foundered in the face of the proposal that Iraq should join the Western‐sponsored defence agreement signed by Turkey and Pakistan on 2 April 1954 to form a ‘northern tier’ of states as the frontline against communist expansion into the Middle East. The proposal elicited strong opposition from Egypt’s Abd al‐Nasser, who insisted instead on a collective Arab defence pact. 

“By mid‐1956, the political unity that had been so striking in Syria at independence had been entirely shattered. Debates about social reform, economic development, Arab relations and the Cold War had become so polarized that rational argument, or even political pragmatism, looked unable to build bridges between the two camps. The fragmentation was complete; the centre could hardly hold. Little over a year later, Syria would cease to exist.”

On 12 January 1958, a delegation of senior Syrian officers flew to Cairo and met personally with Abd al‐Nasser. Several days later. Bitar emerged on 21 January and declared that agreement had been reached for a full union between Egypt and Syria. This announcement was unexpected: the Ba’thists had intended a limited federal union, not the merger of two countries into one. Faced with the potential threat of an army coup in favour of union with Egypt, the Syrian government accepted this as a desperate, last‐ditch measure. 

On 1 February 1958, the United Arab Republic was officially born: it had one capital, one flag and one president. Later that month, a referendum revealed resounding public support for the union: 99.99 per cent in Egypt; 99.98 per cent in Syria. Yet Egypt was a giant, with some 26 million inhabitants by the late 1950s, compared to just 4 million Syrians. It soon became clear that Abd al‐Nasser had little intention of permitting Syrians to play a significant role in government. Mere months into the UAR, there was a mounting sense that Syria was being subjected to a policy of involuntary Egyptianization. 

Instead, only five years later, in 1963, the Syrian Baʿathists took power. 
The word ba’th means ‘renaissance’ or ‘rebirth’ and refers to the belief that Arab unity is not simply a political goal, but a catalyst for the social, moral and cultural revitalization of the entire Arab nation.

“The Ba’th Party had an ornate political ideology. Its founders had become close friends while students in Paris in the 1930s, where they read European philosophy, politics and history. Aflaq and Bitar dallied briefly with Marxism yet devoted more time to romantic German nationalists such as Fichte and Herder. What attracted them to these thinkers was their insistence that the nation was the fundamental building block of human society. Contrary to the French idea that people formed nations voluntarily, by deciding to become citizens of a particular civic community, German nationalists argued that people were born into nations that had their own distinct culture and language and that existed independently of the state.”

The founders of the Ba’th Party found in this argument an obvious parallel with the Arab nation, Neep writes. “Although it had been fragmented by colonialism into an assortment of states, and although that there had never been an independent Arab state in the past, they believed the Arab nation was destined to have a collective independence. This was not an Arab nation based on race or biology, but one rooted in ‘a shared language, a common culture, and a glorious history’. This understanding of what it meant to be Arab was captured in the famous Ba’thist slogan of One Arab nation with an eternal mission.”  

In an emotional speech to the Egyptian people, Abd al‐Nasser denounced Syria’s ‘fascist regime’ saying: “There cannot be a joint aim with a system based on treachery and stabbing in the back” and accused the “Ba’th regime in Damascus” of being “anti‐unionist” and “anti‐socialist”.

And then, on the morning of 5 June 1967, the Israeli air force reimposed Arab unity by bombing Egyptian bases and runways, destroying nearly 70% of Egypt’s military aircraft before going on to wreck the Jordanian and Syrian air forces, as well as a couple of squadrons of Iraqi planes in Jordan. Israeli land forces poured over the borders, swiftly pushing back Egyptian forces to take control of Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, and Jordanian forces to take the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

Three years later, in 1970, with Syria both politically and geographically divided, Hafez al-Assad seizes power and the next chapter in Syria’s history begins: that of the modern Syrian authoritarian system. For many observers, writes Neep, the key to understanding late twentieth‐century Syria was to be found in “the inscrutable cipher” of Hafez al‐Assad, aptly named the ‘sphinx of Damascus’. 

“Assad united the Ba’thist party and expanded its ranks yet diluted its ideology for the sake of expediency and turned radical activists into career bureaucrats. He endowed the Syrian state with the most powerful institutions it had ever possessed, yet undercut those institutions by riddling them with cliques based on family, region and sect. He crushed the opposition and eradicated all space for politics yet entrusted to his loyal followers a surprising degree of autonomy. He watched Syrian citizens chant his name, pledge oaths of love and allegiance, and hang his image in offices, schools and shops across the country, yet he had no personal charisma: his speeches were dry and tedious, his rhetoric formal, heavy and humourless.”

Assad’s Syria was a complex mix of institutions, enticements and fear. But it also represented regional aspirations, most particularly though the 1973 ‘Glorious October War of Liberation’.  For decades to follow, as first Egypt and then Jordan made their separate peace, Syrians were repeatedly reminded that Assad was the only Arab statesman who remained principled and steadfast in the ongoing struggle with Zionism. 

 

Following the 1973 war, Assad dramatically expanded the Syrian army, which trebled in size over a decade. This build‐up of military might was not necessarily intended to strengthen Syria in anticipation of a renewed conflict with Israel—Assad was too much of realist for that—but certainly held symbolic value for Syria’s political standing in the region Much of this spending was covered by aid from the Gulf states to support Syria’s frontline position in the Arab–Israeli conflict.

 

Syria’s flurry of industrialization was also in many ways a legacy of the 1973 war with Israel. The hike in oil prices had turned the Arab oil states into serious players in regional politics, ready to show their support for the Palestinian cause with loans and grants to frontline countries such as Syria. 

 

Neep details how, when Assad came to power in 1970, only 218 of Syria’s thousands of villages had been electrified. By 1980, the electricity network now brought power to nearly 2,000 villages. Over the same period, about half of all rural villages and almost every urban home obtained access to clean piped drinking water. Even, so, not that Neep mentions this, with 90% of the Syrian population still living under the poverty line, Syria today tops the list of the world’s poorest countries, according to the World Health Organization. Such context is surely useful, yet sometimes lacking, as too when Neep flatteringly describes the draining of the “impassable swamps of the Ghab” and their replacement with “fertile farmland” even as other sources note that today at least ten thousand hectares of land are on the verge of drought.

A second irrigation project Neep also mentions, even more massive and impactful than the draining of the Ghab— was the completion of the vast Euphrates Dam in 1973 built with Soviet financial and technical aid. Not only was this dam intended to unleash new potential for irrigation and hydroelectricity, writes Neep, it also represented for Syria everything that the mighty Aswan Dam had represented for Egypt. Which is why, to celebrate the regime’s success, the new reservoir that formed on the Euphrates was given the name ‘Lake Assad’. Here, Neep does note a dark side: villages that had been home to 60,000 people—members of the Weldeh tribe, for the most part—were flooded. However he does not add that today the water level of the Euphrates River is in decline, posing a direct threat to the Euphrates Dam.

 

Of course, it’s always essential in a history book to triangulate accounts – as every observer has their own bias. For example, the political ‘success’ that saw Israel persuaded by US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of the strategic advantages of allowing Syria a limited ground presence south of the Beirut– Damascus highway in support of Maronite Christian militias was achieved against Palestinians and left‐leaning Arab nationalists—a betrayal, as Neep says, that sent shockwaves across the Arab world. 


Despite its length and scholarship, summaries and overviews are too often missing. Nonetheless, this is a history that really does deserve to be a standard reference. Neep has recorded events that need to be part of our collective knowledge, for example, the Assad regime’s brutal crushing of resistance that came to a head with the 1982 Hama uprising.

“The regime response was decisive. It surrounded the city with units from Rif’at al‐Assad’s Defence Companies, as well as the Special Forces and the Third Armoured Division that had brutalized Aleppo two years earlier. After sealing the exits, these forces began to comb every shop, mosque and home to hunt down the radicals. They killed hundreds of people in mass executions, often arbitrarily, and demolished whole buildings full of people with their inhabitants trapped inside. The killing was indiscriminate: even Ba’th Party members were not spared punishment. For days on end, artillery and tanks relentlessly attacked the city, flattening entire neighbourhoods, in an orgy of death and destruction.”

As Neep writes, the sheer devastation visited upon Hama was a blow from which the resistance would never recover. “Professional associations were disbanded, intellectuals imprisoned, Islamists slaughtered or expelled, and corpses buried beneath the reconstructed city centre. The story of Hama became a tragedy, a warning and a taboo—a symbol of how far the regime would go to maintain its grip on power.”
Fear would chill opponents of the regime for the next thirty years even as, on the surface, Syria was a success story with Assad managing to ally not only with the Soviet Union but also the United States.

An understanding Assad reached with his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak, culminated in the Syrian president visiting Cairo the following July with this rapprochement.

“In early 1990, delegations of US senators and then senior US officials visited Syria, as did former US president Jimmy Carter, followed by direct telephone conversations between presidents Hafiz al‐Assad and George Bush. That August, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait provided the opportunity for diplomatic breakthrough. Assad swiftly decided to support the military expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait.” 

As Neep says, “Rapid changes in Syria’s international standing—especially in its relationship with the United States—in many respects provided a bulwark against domestic pressures for reform.”

Political rewards for siding with the West came in two forms. The first was the de facto recognition of Damascus’s hegemony over Lebanon which, as Neep writes, the Syrian state elite had found “offered a feast of options for illicit payoffs, crooked backroom deals and general corruption in the context of the fast pace of post‐war reconstruction”. 


Soon, however, the demise of the Soviet Union, epitomised by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, deprived Assad of a leading source of arms and aid as well as an unwelcome example of a totalitarian system suddenly crumbling. Assad responded by orchestrating a constitutional amendment to enable him to run for a fourth consecutive term in office with his candidacy duly approved by a public referendum in December 1991, which he won with 99.98 per cent of the vote. 
Not much later though, influential figures in the Washington, D.C. policy establishment started to include Syria as a target within the ever‐widening remit of what they described as a global war on terror. In May 2002, US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton described Syria—alongside Libya and Cuba—as a ‘rogue state’. 

Within Syria too, things were deteriorating. 

“In the late 2000s, the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have‐nots’ was widening to the point that it began to resemble the old inequalities between feudal landowners and rural peasantry that had become so starkly entrenched in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries… Syria was once again about to reach a critical, if not revolutionary, historical juncture.”

In June 2012, Assad admitted that Syria faced a state of internal war.

“To ensure its survival, his regime would prove itself prepared to reduce the Syrian nation to ashes. By that summer, it had adopted a scorched earth strategy: artillery and, increasingly, aerial bombardment of rebel‐held towns to displace the population was followed by the demolition of their homes to prevent the possibility of return. Barrel bombs filled with nails, screws and shrapnel were first dropped during this time in Aleppo. The practice soon spread to other cities.”

As the conflict continued, armed opposition to the Assad regime increasingly assumed an Islamist tone.

“December 2024 ushered in one of those exceptional, critical moments in which Syria’s political future seemed genuinely undetermined. For the first time in over half a century, there was space in which political questions could at least be posed without the answers necessarily being imposed from above. Despite the historical rupture delivered by the astonishing implosion of the Assad regime, in many ways the debates in Syria of the 2020s resonated with the same set of challenges that earlier generations of Syrians had also faced. 
The first was the tension between previous rulers’ desire to monopolize power, centralize authority and impose their own vision on society, on the one hand, and the existence of powerful centrifugal forces throughout the regions of Syria agitating for their own local autonomy, on the other.”

Time and time again, concludes Neep, connections between and among the cities, villages and fields of the lands of Syria were “twisted, torn and transformed into new configurations by the seismic forces that shaped the global economy”. Yet, while the destruction visited upon Syria is extreme, its “experience of making and remaking was by no means exceptional in the modern world”. In this respect, “we have much to learn from the history of Syria”. 

Reviewed by Martin Cohen

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Syria: A Modern History 
By Daniel Neep

Basic Books (2026)
ISBN: 9781541608122