Bilad al-Sham - Syrian Rebirth (1945-1948)

The emergence of the Syrian Arab Republic at the end of the Second World War marked the beginning of a new era in the struggle for control of the area between the remnants of the European colonial powers and the two emerging superpowers, as well as between the Arab states. A crucial arena in this struggle was the Eastern Mediterranean, and in particular Syria, whose French Mandate was being brought to an end. The Mandate had relied on divide and rule tactics, with the local populations being exploited by their different classes and sects. Thus, the newly independent Syrian state was from the very beginning highly fragmented.

On 29 May 1945 French troops attacked the Syrian parliament in Damascus while Shukri al-Quwatli, the President of Syria, and Saadallah al-Jabiri, Speaker of the Parliament, were being hunted by them. The electricity was cut in Syria in the attempt to find the two leaders in the dark. But when it was found out that they were in the parliament building the French started to bomb it. Thanks to the British intervention the fighting finally came to an end. The French troops were confined to the French zone in Syria, and thus the French Mandate in the Levant came to an end.

The French were attacked by French troops in Damascus on 29 May, and two days later the French were bombed by French planes in a bid to arrest the Syrian president, Shukri al-Quwatli, and the speaker of the Syrian parliament, Saadallah al-Jabiri. The French were repelled by the Syrian troops and were then expelled by the British. The British had entered Syria on 1 June, in compliance with an ultimatum from the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, to the French leader, Charles de Gaulle, in order to defend vital communication lines to the Far East as well as to fulfill an obligation to the Arab leaders to put an end to the French Mandate over Syria and the Lebanon. The French were then confined to their barracks by the British commander, General Bernard Paget, and were soon forced to recognize the end of the French Mandate over the two Levant states. The Anglo-French aggression of the Levant Crisis of May 1945 was highly resented by the Syrian population, who harbored deep suspicion of Western imperial designs on Syria. However, the end of the French Mandate brought immediate relief, as the Syrian leaders were now able to secure the assistance of British intelligence in its quest for a solid and independent Syrian army, which would protect Syria from any future external threats, especially from the Soviet Union.

The First UN Veto and the Soviet Pivot

The first confrontation with France, the Levant Crisis in May 1945, had brought independence to Syria in an atmosphere of intense nationalism. Syria was shortly to be confronted with a new crisis as the Anglo-French security treaty of 1939 was brought up for approval by the Syrian Parliament in February 1946. Foreign Minister Faris al-Khoury demanded unconditional withdrawal of all foreign troops from Syria. After some hesitation the earlier concluded Anglo-French security treaty was rejected by the Syrian Parliament. It was proposed in the Security Council by the US for a resolution to have the troops withdrawn as soon as practicable. The Soviet Union threatened to use its first veto in UN history in order to force a more rapid withdrawal of the troops. It was in the end international public opinion that brought about the unconditional withdrawal of French and British troops from Syria by April 1946.

Initially Syria’s newly found independence seemed promising; however, with the absence of support from the West in military equipment and finances, Syria was quickly swept into the arms of the Soviet Union. The alliance of a powerful patron and a weak client had an immense impact on the balance of power in the Cold War. Moreover, it brought an end to the Western near monopoly on the arms trade in the region. Soviet support came in the form of arms, military advisers and even the assistance in building the Syrian national army. The agreement was signed in February 1946 by the Soviet envoy, Mr. Solod and the Syrian government.

Inter-Arab Rivalries and the Defense of the Republic

After Syria gained its independence, the newly found Arab Republic encountered the ferocious inter-Arab rivalry. The Middle East was divided between two schools of thought. The first school advocated for Pan-Arabism and unifying all Arab states under one flag. The second school believed in preserving the borders of individual Arab states and maintaining the status-quo in the Arab world. On the surface, the Arab League seemed to be a unified body working towards realizing the noble ideal of a unified Arab world and safeguarding the interests of its individual member states. In reality, however, the Arab League concealed deep-seated rivalries and intense competition for regional and local influence. Among the various regional rivalries, none was as challenging to Syria as the so-called “Greater Syria” (Bilad al-Sham) project initiated by King Abdullah I of Transjordan. The “Greater Syria” plan was designed to expand the territorial boundaries of the Hashemite kingdom of Transjordan. It was inspired by the legacy of the 1916 Great Arab Revolt led by the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, against the Ottoman Empire. He had declared war on the Ottomans with the secret support of the British. The aim of the plan was to incorporate the newly found Arab Republic of Syria, as well as the French mandated territories of Lebanon and Palestine, into the territorial domain of the Hashemite kingdom of Transjordan. In short, the “Greater Syria” project was an attempt to create a vast territorial entity stretching from Kuwait in the south east of the Arab world to Cyprus in the north. It was also an attempt to extend British-aligned Hashemite influence across the region.

The leaders of the various nations of the Middle East were for the most part urban notables who made up the National Blocs, which had dominated the politics of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine since the 1920s. From their perspective, the Greater Syria Plan, which was designed to link Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq under a single Hashemite constitutional monarch, threatened the very existence of Syria as a sovereign nation. It would give the British a renewed role in the area and could even allow the Zionists to establish themselves in Palestine. In February 1946, the Syrian parliament therefore passed a resolution condemning the Greater Syria Plan and its architects. It was in this spirit of fear of being swallowed up by Hashemite expansion that the leaders of Syria found allies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Together, they could form a defense pact against the Hashemites within the framework of the League of Arab States, founded in 1945 by Egypt for the purpose of collective action against the remaining colonial powers in the region. The Arab League thus became a highly effective regional organization, employing Pan-Arabism for the purposes of colonial struggle while at the same time acting as a most effective neutralizing device against Greater Syrian projects of border revision.

The 1948 War and Northern Strategic Encirclement

Syrian concern over the Zionist project had first manifested itself as early as 1936 when the leader of the Syrian National Party and subsequently President of Syria upon the country’s independence in 1946, Shukri al-Quwatli, had rejected any collaboration with the Zionists with the aim of realizing their own objectives in the region. The Partition Plan for Palestine, proposed by the United Nations in 1947, was perceived in the Syrian capital of Damascus to be yet another attempt on the part of the Western powers to carve up the remaining territories of the East into colonies. Thus when on 14 May 1948 the Zionists declared the establishment of the State of Israel, the Syrian Arab Army was swiftly dispatched to participate in the fighting in Palestine as part of a broader Arab effort to reverse the new colonial divide being drawn up in the region.

At the time of its entry into the war over Palestine in May 1948, the Syrian army had very little military experience and was furthermore not adequately armed to fight against well-entrenched, well-armed Zionists. However, thanks to a secret contract signed in 1947 by the Syrian Arab Army with the Czechoslovakian Skoda works, the Syrian army was able to acquire a small cache of guns and sufficient amounts of ammunition for their use in the war over Palestine. However, throughout the war over Palestine, the armies of the Arab states failed to coordinate their efforts in a rational, unified command structure, and thus were unable to defeat the Zionists in the war. The defeat suffered by the Syrian Arab Army at the hands of the Zionists in the war over Palestine served to shake the very foundations of the newly independent Syrian state, and exposed the inherent weaknesses of the pre-military rule civilian establishment which had attained independence for Syria, for being fundamentally incapable of leading the newly independent nation. As a result, the armed services of Syria went on to seize power in the first of many military coups that would be experienced by the country in 1949. Anti-Zionism would serve as the radicalising organising principle of the Syrian state.

In addition to these developments, as soon as Syria had finally attained its independence after a long and arduous struggle, it found itself threatened by hostility along its northern frontier. French had transferred the Syrian province of Alexandretta to Turkish control in 1939. This annexation had never been recognised by the Syrians, and when the Turks began to construct fortifications along the frontier in 1947 the Syrians hastened to construct their own frontier outposts. However, the main issue that was to increasingly dominate hostilities along the two country's border in the subsequent decades was to become that of hydro-hegemony of the Euphrates River. For the time being, however, the new rulers of the Syrian republic were concerned with a variety of issues that ranged from the newly emergent Israeli threat from the south to subversion from the east, led from the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan. And from within the country itself.

Conclusion

The modern Syrian Republic, which acquired its hard-won independence in October 1946, was a very vulnerable state in the face of a complex variety of foreign relations. These foreign relations were in turn involved in a great struggle for world supremacy. Indeed, the year 1946, in which Syria had finally acquired its hard-won independence, saw the world in the grip of a great conflict between the two superpowers, the USA and the U.S.S.R., and this struggle for supremacy was not confined to the two superpowers themselves. On the contrary, it involved all of the states of the world. In other words, the world was already involved in the early stages of the Cold War. As was mentioned earlier, it was in 1946 that the Syrian Republic finally acquired its hard-won independence. And it is worth noting here that this acquisition of independence was, in fact, the result of a great struggle undertaken by the Syrian people against the French, who had been in occupation of Syria since 1926, and that this struggle for independence had, in the end, involved the rival interests of two of the greatest powers on earth, France and Britain. Once Syria had finally acquired its hard-won independence, the Republic, which had been established as a result of this great struggle, found itself drawn, albeit involuntarily, into the emerging conflict between the two superpowers of the world, the USA and the U.S.S.R., and this conflict for supremacy between the two superpowers was to have far-reaching consequences for the newly independent Republic. The article below will attempt to describe these external forces that played such a great role in the life of the Syrian Republic in the years immediately following the cessation of hostilities with France in 1946, and will attempt to show how these forces created a highly militarized and, at the same time, a greatly besieged state.

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