Syria: From French MandateFrench Mandate The League of Nations mandate over Syria and Lebanon administered by France from 1920 to 1946. The Mandate created the modern borders of Syria and Lebanon, pursued a policy of divide and rule along religious and ethnic lines, and produced the political and institutional structures that shaped Syrian and Lebanese politics for the rest of the century. France had claimed a sphere of influence in Greater Syria — covering modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel-Palestine — since the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. When Faisal I attempted to establish an independent Arab kingdom with Damascus as its capital, French forces defeated him at the Battle of Maysalun in July 1920 and established the Mandate. The French administration divided the territory into five separate entities — State of Damascus, State of Aleppo, Alawite State, Jabal Druze, and Greater Lebanon — pursuing the classic colonial strategy of empowering minorities against the Sunni Arab majority that dominated the nationalist movement. The most consequential decision was the recruitment policy for the troupes spéciales: France disproportionately recruited Alawites, Druze, and Circassians into its auxiliary forces, creating a military tradition and institutional pathway that would allow Alawite officers to dominate Syria’s Ba’athist military after independence. The Great Syrian Revolt of 1925–27 demonstrated the capacity for mass anti-colonial mobilisation; the French response — bombarding Damascus and dividing the nationalist movement through negotiation with compliant sectors — foreshadowed the tactics that successive Syrian governments would use against their own populations. Lebanon was permanently separated from Syria, enlarged to include Muslim-majority coastal regions and the Bekaa Valley that Syrian nationalists regarded as historically theirs — creating the Lebanese demographic balance that would generate civil war in 1975. The French Mandate’s legacy is visible in virtually every Lebanese and Syrian political crisis of the subsequent century. The Lebanese sectarian system — its power-sharing arrangements, its politically organised communities, its structural inability to build a nonsectarian state — was not simply the product of ancient religious divisions but of administrative choices made by French officials trying to manage a diverse population in the interests of imperial order. The Alawite domination of Syrian security services that produced both Hafez al-Assad’s dictatorship and the particular ferocity of the civil war was not inevitable; it was the downstream consequence of French recruitment policies designed to prevent a unified Sunni nationalist challenge to colonial rule. Colonialism does not end when the troops leave; it ends, if it ends, when its institutional consequences have been unwound — a process that, in Syria and Lebanon, remains unfinished. to Civil War

Syria is one of the most fiercely contested territories of the modern Middle East — carved from the ruins of the Ottoman EmpireOttoman Empire ottoman-empire The Islamic empire centred on Istanbul that ruled Anatolia, the Arab Middle East, North Africa, and southeastern Europe from the fourteenth century to its dissolution after the First World War. Its collapse created the modern states of the Middle East, Turkey, and the Balkans in ways that continue to shape regional politics. At its peak in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire encompassed an enormous territory from Hungary to Yemen, from Algeria to the borders of Persia. It was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state governed through the millet system, which granted non-Muslim communities (Christians, Jews) significant autonomy in their internal affairs in exchange for taxes and political loyalty. The nineteenth century brought simultaneous challenges: nationalist movements among the Balkan populations — Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Romanians — used the language of national self-determination to carve independent states from Ottoman territory, with Russian and Western support; the empire lost more than a third of its European territory in the 1877–78 war with Russia. Attempts at modernisation and reform — the Tanzimat reforms, the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 — failed to arrest the decline and produced new tensions between Turkish nationalist modernisers and the empire’s Arab, Armenian, and Kurdish populations. The First World War was catastrophic: the empire entered on the German side, suffered the Armenian Genocide (1915–23), lost the Arab provinces to British-led forces, and was dissolved by the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) — replaced by the Turkish Republic under Ataturk, whose territorial integrity was established by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). The Ottoman Empire’s collapse created the modern Middle East in ways that are still unfolding. The borders drawn by the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the subsequent mandates reflected French and British strategic priorities rather than the population distributions, administrative traditions, or political aspirations of the peoples concerned. The result was a set of states whose internal social compositions were incompatible with the nation-state model imposed on them: Iraq with its Sunni-Shia-Kurdish divisions, Lebanon with its confessional arithmetic, Syria with its minority-dominated military, Israel-Palestine with its overlapping claims. These incompatibilities were not caused by the Ottoman Empire — which governed diverse populations through systems of autonomous administration — but by the particular form of its destruction and replacement. The ongoing instability of the region reflects, in significant part, the unresolved consequences of those decisions made in London and Paris between 1916 and 1920. as a French Mandate after 1918, partitioned to create Lebanon, mobilised and fought over in the Second World War, and torn apart by civil war and foreign intervention after 2011. These eight episodes trace that full arc: from the moment the French drew Syria’s borders and crushed its first uprising, through the wartime struggles for the Levant, to the catastrophic civil war and the dramatic collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024.

Alongside the podcast episodes below, Explaining History has published a complete written guide to the Syrian Civil War — ten detailed articles tracing the conflict from the Arab Spring uprisings to the fall of Assad. Read the Complete Guide to the Syrian Civil War →

---

Part One: The French Mandate & Colonial Syria (1918–1946)

France received the Syrian Mandate at the 1920 San Remo Conference and immediately set about dividing and controlling a territory that had briefly declared itself an independent Arab kingdom. These episodes cover the creation of Lebanon out of Greater Syria, the bloody suppression of the 1925 uprising, and the wartime struggle for the Levant between Vichy France, Nazi Germany, and Britain — ending with Syrian independence in 1946.

Dividing Greater Syria: French Imperialism, Sectarianism, and the Creation of Lebanon

France carved Lebanon out of Ottoman Syria in 1920, drawing borders that embedded sectarian divisions and denied Arab nationalists the unified state they had been promised. This episode examines how French imperial strategy shaped both countries — and left a political legacy that persists to this day.

France and the Syrian Uprising 1925

In 1925, a revolt began in the Jebel Druze and spread rapidly across Syria into Damascus itself. France’s response — including the aerial bombardment of the old city — shocked international opinion but crushed the uprising. This episode examines the causes, course, and consequences of the Great Syrian RevoltGreat Syrian Revolt The large-scale anti-colonial uprising against French Mandate rule in Syria from 1925 to 1927, which began among the Druze of Jabal Druze and spread to Damascus and other major cities. It was the most significant anti-colonial revolt in the interwar Arab world. The revolt began in July 1925 when the Druze community of Jabal Druze, led by Sultan al-Atrash, rose against French administrative policies that violated the autonomy they had been promised. French forces were defeated in several early engagements, and the revolt spread rapidly to the Damascus region, the Hauran plain, and to sections of the city of Damascus itself, drawing in Arab nationalists who saw an opportunity to challenge French rule more broadly. The French response was decisive and brutal: Damascus was bombarded twice — in October 1925 and again in May 1926 — destroying significant parts of the old city and killing hundreds of civilians. The combination of military pressure, aerial bombardment, and political negotiation (including promises of a consultative council) broke the revolt by 1927, though Sultan al-Atrash and other leaders went into exile rather than submit. The revolt demonstrated several things that would prove significant: the capacity for cross-sectarian alliance between Druze, Sunnis, and some Christians in opposition to colonial rule; the willingness of France to use overwhelming force including civilian bombardment to maintain its authority; and the limits of military resistance without external support or a unified political leadership. The Great Syrian Revolt is sometimes described as a failure because it did not achieve independence. This framing misses its significance. It established the political geography of Syrian nationalism — demonstrating that resistance to colonial rule was possible, that cross-sectarian coalitions could form around national rather than communal identity, and that France’s authority was not accepted. It also established the French approach to governing Syria: a combination of military force sufficient to suppress direct challenge and political manipulation of communal divisions sufficient to prevent unified nationalist challenge. These techniques — bombardment of civilian populations, political co-optation of compliant communal leaders, maintenance of emergency powers — would be adopted, with variations, by the Ba’athist governments that claimed to inherit Syrian nationalism while suppressing it..

The Mandate SystemMandate System Full Description:A mechanism established by the League of Nations after World War I to administer former Ottoman and German territories. “Class A” Mandates—Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Transjordan—were considered nearly ready for independence but placed under temporary control of France or Britain until they could “stand alone.” In reality, Mandates were colonies by another name. Critical Perspective:The Mandate System was hypocrisy institutionalized. The same powers that carved up the Middle East for their own advantage claimed they were acting as benevolent trustees. No timetable for independence was set; “readiness” was defined by the mandatory power. Iraq was granted nominal independence in 1932, but with a British client king and treaty that preserved British military bases and oil control. The Mandate was not the road to freedom but the road to neocolonialism.
Read more: Palestine, Syria and Iraq

The League of NationsLeague of Nations Full Description:The first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. Its spectacular failure to prevent the aggression of the Axis powers provided the negative blueprint for the United Nations, influencing the decision to prioritize enforcement power over pure idealism. The League of Nations was the precursor to the UN, established after the First World War. Founded on the principle of collective security, it relied on moral persuasion and unanimous voting. It ultimately collapsed because it lacked an armed force and, crucially, the United States never joined, rendering it toothless in the face of expansionist empires. Critical Perspective:The shadow of the League looms over the UN. The founders of the UN viewed the League as “too democratic” and ineffective because it treated all nations as relatively equal. Consequently, the UN was designed specifically to correct this “error” by empowering the Great Powers (via the Security Council) to police the world, effectively sacrificing sovereign equality for the sake of stability.
Read more Mandate system was presented as a form of enlightened trusteeship — in practice it was a mechanism for extending British and French imperial control across the former Ottoman Arab lands. This episode examines how the Mandates for Palestine, Syria, and Iraq were constructed, contested, and ultimately failed.

Britain’s War with Nazi Germany and Vichy France in Iraq and Syria: 1941

In the summer of 1941, Britain fought two little-known campaigns — suppressing a pro-Axis coup in Iraq and then invading Vichy-held Syria and Lebanon to prevent German use of Levantine airfields. This episode examines how the Middle East became a crucial theatre of the Second World War and what the campaigns meant for Syrian and Iraqi independence.

French National Pride and Empire: 1944 — Syria and Lebanon’s Road to Independence

As the Free French sought to reassert control over their empire after liberation, Syria and Lebanon pressed for the independence they had been promised. This episode examines the tensions between French imperial prestige and the gathering force of Arab nationalism — ending in British intervention and the effective end of the French Mandate in the Levant.

---

Part Two: The Syrian Civil War & the Fall of Assad (2011–2024)

Syria’s civil war began in March 2011 as part of the Arab Spring and became the defining humanitarian catastrophe of the 2010s — drawing in Russia, Iran, Turkey, the United States, and a bewildering array of armed factions. These three episodes analyse the conflict’s dynamics, Russia’s decisive military intervention from 2015, and the sudden collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024.

Making Sense of Syria

A clear-eyed overview of the Syrian conflict: its origins in the Arab Spring protests of 2011, the regime’s brutal response, the fragmentation of the opposition, the rise of ISIS, and the intervention of regional and global powers. Essential context for understanding how a popular uprising became one of the most destructive wars of the twenty-first century.

Russian Defeat in Syria

Russia’s military intervention in Syria from September 2015 saved Assad from military collapse and reasserted Russian power in the Middle East after decades of absence. But the intervention came at a cost — and Russia’s investment in Assad ultimately ended in humiliation when the regime fell in December 2024. This episode examines what Russia gained, what it lost, and what its Syrian adventure revealed about the limits of Russian power.

Special Report: Syria and the Defeat of Assad

In December 2024, Bashar al-Assad’s regime — which had survived fourteen years of civil war, foreign intervention, and international isolation — collapsed within days as rebel forces swept from Aleppo to Damascus. This special report analyses how and why the Assad government fell so rapidly, what the fall means for Syria’s neighbours and the wider Middle East, and what a post-Assad Syria might look like.

---

Read More: The Complete Guide to the Syrian Civil War

Explaining History’s written Syria series covers the conflict in depth across ten articles — from the origins of Assad family rule and the outbreak of the Arab Spring, through the military campaigns, foreign interventions, and humanitarian catastrophe, to the final collapse of the regime. Read the full series at:

---

Subscribe to Explaining History

New episodes on modern history every week — covering the Middle East, Europe, Russia, empire, and the forces that shaped the contemporary world. Subscribe free on your preferred platform:

---

Related Collections

• The Arab-Israeli Conflict
• The Ottoman Empire
• The Cold War
• British Empire & Decolonisation
• Browse all topic collections →

---