Arab Revolutionary War

The Arab Revolutionary War was a series of major armed conflicts eventually involving all states of the Arab world and many other surrounding and/or allied states, which lasted from 11 February 1986 to 20 August 1989. A direct result of the Arab Revolution of 1986, it resulted in the establishment of the Arab Union as a sovereign federation of 20 Arab republics, and the subsequent political and economic integration of the Arab world and its self-realisation and ultimate reinvention on the global stage as a major power. The revolution began in the morning of 10 February 1986 in Beirut, Lebanon, when the Lebanese Regional Branch of the Ba'ath Party, which had won the Lebanese parliamentary elections the previous day, was barred from forming a government and subsequently repressed by the incumbent Lebanese government, which included thousands of arrests and hundreds of executions of local Ba'athists and sympathisers. The Lebanese Regional Branch called on its supporters to mobilise, as did the National Command of the Ba'ath Party in Damascus; hundreds of thousands of people in Beirut took to the streets in support of the revolution; by the end of the day, the unrest had spread to most major cities across the Arab world. The following day, 11 February, security forces in multiple Arab countries including Lebanon cracked down violently on demonstrators, many of whom were armed Ba'athist or allied pan-Arabist militants and who fought back, marking the start of the war.

By the end of 11 February 1986, the Ba'athist United Arab Republic (an early form of the Arab Union which at the time consisted only of Syria, Egypt and Palestine) had deployed the Arab Army to at least four sovereign Arab states in support of the revolutionaries, from which point the situation escalated into all-out war. The conflict was thus fought officially between the United Arab Republic and the right-wing and/or reactionary governments of the sovereign Arab states involved in the conflict. Each side drew many allies into the war, both state and non-state: The Arab Army was supported in virtually every Arab country by the Pan-Arab Army (PAA), the official military wing of the Ba'ath Party across the Arab world, as well as in multiple theatres by the pan-Arabist Revolutionary Mobilisation Front (RMF), a major militia movement which was pro-Ba'ath but consisted of many communists and anarchists as well, in addition to the Ba'athist militants, and also had significant state support from Iran and the Soviet Union; the counterrevolutionary side was supported directly by Turkey and indirectly by the United States, United Kingdom, and also received major assistance in the Palestinian theatre from the Zionist Resistance Front (ZMF; the former Israel Defence Forces which became an insurgent movement after Israel's invasion and defeat by the United Arab Republic in 1967).