“Hama Rules” is a phrase coined by American journalist Thomas Friedman in his 1989 book From Beirut to Jerusalem to describe the doctrine of political violence demonstrated by the Assad regime’s destruction of the city of Hama in February 1982. The phrase captures the idea that in certain political contexts, challenges to state authority will be met with overwhelming, annihilating force, without regard for civilian casualties or proportionality. The phrase derives from the massacre that established the doctrine: the three-week Syrian army assault on Hama’s old city following a Muslim Brotherhood uprising, which killed between ten and forty thousand people…

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Pan-Arabism is the political ideology holding that the Arabic-speaking peoples of the Middle East and North Africa constitute a single Arab nation (umma) that was artificially divided by European colonialism and should be politically unified. It emerged as a significant force in the early twentieth century, drawing on Romantic nationalist thought as well as the experience of Ottoman collapse and European colonial partition. Pan-Arabism’s high point came in the 1950s and 1960s under Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose pan-Arab charisma attracted mass followings across the Arab world. The Ba’ath Party was one of pan-Arabism’s primary institutional vehicles. The United…

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The Druze are a religious community whose faith developed out of Ismaili Shia Islam in eleventh-century Egypt and later spread to the mountain regions of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine/Israel. They constitute approximately 3% of Syria’s population, concentrated in the Jabal al-Druze (Jabal al-Arab) region in the southwest. Like the Alawites, they were targeted by French Mandate recruiters for the troupes spéciales. The Druze-led Great Syrian Revolt of 1925–27, which began as a Druze uprising under Sultan al-Atrash before spreading to Damascus and other areas, was the largest anti-colonial uprising in the interwar Arab world. Under the Assad regime, the Druze…

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The French Mandate over Syria and Lebanon was a League of Nations trust territory administered by France from 1920 to 1946. It was established after France defeated the short-lived Arab Kingdom of Faisal I at the Battle of Maysalun in July 1920 and expelled Faisal from Damascus. French administrators divided Syria into separate administrative units along religious and ethnic lines — a State of Damascus, State of Aleppo, Alawite State, Jabal Druze, and the Sanjak of Alexandretta (ceded to Turkey in 1939). Lebanese territory was separated and enlarged as Greater Lebanon. The French pursued a deliberate policy of recruiting Alawites,…

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The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a secret accord concluded in May 1916 between Britain’s Sir Mark Sykes and France’s François Georges-Picot, dividing the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire into British and French spheres of influence. Britain received control of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and Palestine; France received Syria and Lebanon. The agreement was made without the knowledge or consent of the Arab leaders who had been promised independence in exchange for rising against the Ottomans. When published by the Bolsheviks in 1917 after they discovered it in tsarist archives, the revelation produced lasting Arab resentment that fed into nationalist movements for…

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Mukhabarat is the Arabic term for intelligence and security services. In Syria under Hafez al-Assad, it refers collectively to four deliberately competing agencies — Military Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, General Intelligence Directorate, and Political Security Directorate — each reporting directly to the president. The competition was designed: poor inter-agency coordination meant any conspiracy needed to penetrate multiple systems simultaneously, while Assad alone held the complete picture. Their detention facilities, including Saydnaya prison, became synonymous with torture and enforced disappearance. The Caesar photographs (2013–14) documented systematic killing of detainees. When Assad fell in December 2024, Saydnaya was opened and thousands of…

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