Syrian Civil War. An Analysis of its Genesis, the Actors and Their Interests

Resumen o Introducción

Syria, located in the Middle East, has been under the clutches of civil war for the last decade. In this paper an attempt to offer a detailed analysis of the Syrian civil war, begins by a brief review of the history of the Middle East and how the Syrian nation came into existence. The Middle East as we know it today, was under the Ottoman Empire in the beginning of the twentieth century . The whole Mediterranean region covering what is now Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, North Yemen, Jordan, and Palestine was under Ottoman rule . However, after about 500 years, the Ottoman empire began to crumble under the weight of internal insurrections, Arab revolts, and incoming British and French conquests of the region.

With the conclusion of World War I, the British and French governments came up with the Sykes-Picot Agreement that redrew boundaries in the Middle East, dividing into several nation-states. This agreement mainly catered for British and French colonial, strategic, national and geopolitical interests and not those of the region’s inhabitants. However, in the 1920s, Syrians began agitating for independence with nationalists against the division of Greater Syria covering Palestine, Lebanon and Transjordan as British and French Mandates.

The French would later invade Damascus in 1920, overturning Emir rule in Syria. This would later be followed by a rebellion by Druze rebels in 1925 and subsequent revolts until 1936 when an agreement was reached between the French and the Syrians on the terms of independence. Unfortunately the agreement was not ratified by the French whose government fell in 1941 under German invasion in World War II. Before the Germans could get to Syria, the British invaded her. The French left Syria in 1946 with April 17 becoming the official Syrian independence day. The newly independent Syria was composed of Alawites, Druze, Christians, Sunnis, Kurds, Circassians, Turkomans, Jews and Ishmaelites all competing with one another socially, politically, and even economically. These competitions established the roots of the present-day civil war.