-
The Islamic State did not emerge from nothing. It emerged from a specific history: from the Al-Qaeda franchise established by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq after the American invasion of 2003, from the Sunni insurgency against the US occupation, from the sectarian civil war that followed, from the Iraqi prisons — particularly Camp Bucca — where former Ba’athist officers and Islamist militants shared space and forged relationships, and from the collapse of institutional authority across large areas of Iraq and Syria that created the vacuum into which a ruthlessly organised, apocalyptically motivated organisation could move.
-
The Syrian uprising that began in Deraa in March 2011 was, in its initial phase, a remarkably diverse and predominantly peaceful movement. The protests that spread from the south to Homs, Hama, Latakia, the suburbs of Damascus, and eventually to Aleppo were not organised by a single political party or ideological movement. They were local, spontaneous, and driven by grievances that were simultaneously economic (unemployment, crony capitalism, rural poverty), political (emergency law, mukhabarat brutality, one-party dictatorship), and profoundly personal — the humiliation of everyday life under a security state that treated citizens as subjects to be managed rather than persons…
-
Bashar al-Assad became president of Syria in July 2000 at the age of thirty-four, inheriting a state built around his father’s personality, sustained by institutions his father had designed, and facing pressures his father had deferred rather than resolved.
-
In the first days of February 1982, Syrian army units and security forces surrounded the ancient city of Hama on the Orontes river in central Syria. What followed over the next three weeks was one of the most savage acts of political violence carried out by any Arab government against its own population in the twentieth century — a military assault on an urban centre that killed between ten and forty thousand people, destroyed whole districts of a city that had been continuously inhabited for eight thousand years, and established, beyond any further argument, what the rules of political life…
-
Between 1976 and 2000, Hafez al-Assad transformed Syria from a state perpetually on the brink of internal collapse into a formidable regional power whose approval was required for any significant political transaction in the Levant. He did so not through conventional military dominance — Syria’s armed forces, though large, were never strong enough to defeat Israel outright, and the Gulf monarchies dwarfed Syria’s economic resources — but through a combination of strategic positioning, proxy relationships, calculated ambiguity, and a willingness to sustain costs that other actors could not or would not match.
-
When Hafez al-Assad seized power in November 1970 in what he called the Corrective Movement, he inherited a state that had undergone ten coups in twenty-two years. His singular achievement over the next three decades was to ensure there would not be an eleventh — at least not a successful one
-
The Ba’ath Party’s seizure of power in 1963 promised Arab socialism and national unity. Within seven years it had consumed itself in factional violence, lost the Golan Heights, and produced the conditions for one man’s absolute rule.
-
Syrian independence in 1946 brought not stability but a revolving door of coups, failed unions and civilian governments undone by their own militaries — and at the root of it all, the unresolved questions the French Mandate had left behind.
-
By 2016, the Syrian war had lasted five years, killed more than four hundred thousand people, displaced approximately half the country’s pre-war population of twenty-two million, and produced a humanitarian catastrophe of a scale Europe had not witnessed since the Second World War.
-
How the French Mandate transformed Syria from the heart of Arab nationalist ambition into a fragmented territory governed by divide-and-rule, setting the foundations for every crisis that followed.