Syria’s unfinished reassembly

In June 1923, exactly 103 years before this article was written, France, then the occupying power in Syria, announced the creation of the “Syrian Federation Council”.

The federation brought together representatives of the “states” of Damascus, Aleppo, and the Alawite region of Latakia. It marked a gradual retreat from the decision taken by French forces after they entered Damascus three years earlier, in July 1920: the dismantling of the Syrian political space inherited from the Ottoman state into five separate units.

The project of fragmentation began with the proclamation of Greater Lebanon in August 1920. That was the first and most consequential step, the one that conferred legitimacy on all that followed. This historical starting point also helps explain later reverberations across generations: the entry of Syrian forces into Lebanon in June 1976; the recent calls by US President Donald Trump for his Syrian counterpart to intervene in Lebanon against Hezbollah; and many other unresolved questions.

One month after the creation of Greater Lebanon, the states of Damascus, Aleppo — to which the Sanjak of Alexandretta then belonged, before France granted it autonomy in 1923 — and the Alawites were established in September 1920. The state of Jabal al-Druze followed in 1921.

In 1925, France replaced the Syrian Federation with the “Syrian State”, once again made up of Damascus and Aleppo. The states of the Alawite Mountain and the Druze Mountain would not join it until 1936, with the declaration of the Treaty of Independence and the election of Hashim al-Atassi as President of the Republic.

The occupying administration believed that dividing natural Syria into communities organised along regional and religious lines, each governed by distinct systems, would allow it to play one against another in the face of a rising national movement beginning to take shape against colonial rule.

This process of dismantling and reassembling of Syria, carried out nearly a century ago, offers ways to understand the condition of Syria’s geographical and historical memory today. It can also serve as a revealing lens through which to examine the strengths and vulnerabilities of the “Syrian space”, both past and present.

Today, Syria is once again being drawn into broader regional projects. These include plans to revive the Hejaz Railway as a rail link between Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, as well as an announcement by Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi of an Iraqi-Syrian-Saudi-Turkish understanding on the transport of oil and gas. Striking in this context were the remarks of Thomas Barrack, the US envoy for Syria and Iraq, who described the nation-states of the region as products of the borders drawn after the First World War and called for the reintegration of the region through “bringing Lebanon and Syria closer and aligning them”.

Such plans and statements go beyond the immediate circumstances created by the shattering regional conflicts that followed the American-Israeli war with Iran. They revive the old image of Syria as a land bridge between the Mediterranean and the Arabian Gulf, between Anatolia and Egypt. They also recall Syria’s place as the most important commercial junction on the historic Silk Road, and the civilisational depth of a Syrian identity shaped by ancient and Islamic cultures alike.

At the same time, these projects remind us how easily strengths can become weaknesses, and how geography can turn into a set of exposed seams. Syria lacks the great natural barriers, such as those that protect Iran, separating it from the major regional powers around it. This helps illuminate and explain the political attitudes of those powers toward the emerging new order in Damascus, where the facts of geography are entangled with the burdens of history, as seen in Lebanese and Egyptian apprehensions about the new government in Damascus.

The fraught relationship between strength and weakness is also visible inside Syria’s own complex geography. Centres of gravity are dispersed between major inland cities with deep commercial legacies and coastal and agricultural regions. Such a landscape has always required a highly flexible central administration capable of restraining competitive tendencies between the regions and preventing administrative fragmentation. To this must be added Syria’s dependence on external sources of water: its main river, the Euphrates, sustains water and food security, rises in Turkey. This makes good relations with the powerful northern neighbour essential.

On this reading, the main pillars of stability and success for the Syrian space are regional dialogue, water and food security, internal balance between centre and periphery, and investment in Syria’s geography of transport.

Reactivating the historical memory of modern Syria’s formation also brings back into view the geographical, regional, and religious diversity of the leaders of Syrian nationalism, who played decisive roles in “reassembling” the Syrian space during the period known as the Great Syrian Revolt and in the birth of the independent state post-1946. At the same time, the cracks in that  orientation help explain how Syria was later pushed toward coups and the Assad era — a period that, despite its regional expansionist agenda, reproduced aspects of the French dismantling of Syria.

It is striking that the historic leader of the revolt, Sultan Pasha al-Atrash, came from Jabal al-Druze, the last of the regions to be incorporated into Syria during the French Mandate. In parallel, Abd al-Rahman al-Shahbandar, the political leader and one of the revolt’s chief strategists, came from the capital, Damascus. It is also historically significant that Fawzi al-Qawuqji, a son of Tripoli in Lebanon, led battles in the Hama region, then later in the Damascus Ghouta and along the Syrian-Lebanese border — before going on to take part in the 1948 “Army of Salvation” that fought Israel, itself another story of dismantling and reassembly of Greater Syria. Ibrahim Hananu, of Kurdish origin and from Idlib — then administratively attached to Aleppo — led the northern front, while Sheikh Saleh al-Ali, an Alawite, led operations on the Syrian coast.

The memory of dismantling and reassembly does more than summon the past and explain the events that followed. It also demands a new appendix: an inquiry into the other identity memories it revived, developed, and armed. In such moments, the political struggle over geography becomes a struggle over history itself. This happened in the culture of the Assad era, and after Assad’s fall, in relation to the Alawites. It is happening again with Hikmat al-Hijri, the Druze sheikh of reason turned political and military leader, who has invoked the name “Jabal Bashan”, drawn from biblical mythology, as a symbolic alternative to Jabal al-Druze or Jabal al-Arab. The adoption of the term “Jabal Bashan” inserts it into wider regional projects and frames it within a conflict of memories and competing historical narratives that leave little room for a shared Syrian national memory.

This is why the Syrian question has never been merely a question of borders, nor simply a matter of who controls Damascus. It is a struggle over the meaning of the country itself: whether Syria is to remain a field for outside powers to dismantle, rename, and rearrange, or whether Syrians can recover the deeper memory of a political community that, at its strongest moments, was able to turn diversity from a colonial instrument of division into the foundation of national reassembly.