Syrian Arab Republic

The Syrian Arab Republic (Arabic: الجمهورية العربية السورية al-jumhūriyah al-‘arabīyah as-sūrīyah), informally known as Syria (سورية sūriyah), is one of the Arab Union's 20 republics, located in the Levant region of the country. Its capital and largest city is Damascus; other major cities include Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Latakia and Raqqa. According to the January 2020 census, the republic has a population of 27,345,590, making it the sixth-most populous republic of the Arab Union. A land of of fertile plains, high mountains, deserts and river valleys, Syria has a diverse population of multiple ethnicities and faiths: while Arabs who practice Sunni Islam make up approximately 85% of the population, 10% consists of both Arab and Kurdish members of various sects of Shia Islam, other Sunni ethnic groups such as Turks, Arab Christians, Christians of other ethnicities (especially Armenians and Greeks), and Druze; the remaining 5% accounts for immigrant and expatriate communities, the largest groups of which are Chinese, Indian and Southern African.

The name "Syria" historically referred to a wider region, broadly synonymous with the Levant, and known in Arabic as al-Sham (الشام "the North"). The modern state encompasses the sites of several ancient kingdoms and empires, including the Eblan civilization of the 3rd millennium BC. Aleppo and the capital city Damascus are among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. In the Islamic era, Damascus was the seat of the Umayyad Caliphate and later a provincial capital of the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt. The modern Syrian state was established in the mid-20th century after centuries of Ottoman rule and a brief period under a French mandate, and represented the largest Arab state to emerge from the formerly Ottoman-ruled Levantine provinces. It gained de jure independence as a parliamentary republic on 24 October 1945, when the Republic of Syria became a founding member of the United Nations, an act which legally ended the former French Mandate, although French troops did not leave the country until April 1946. The post-independence period was tumultuous, with many military coups and coup attempts shaking the country from 1949 to 1971. In 1958, Syria entered a union with Egypt called the United Arab Republic (UAR), and was renamed the Syrian Arab Republic. After the 1970 War of Attrition and resultant defeat of the State of Israel and subsequent admission of Palestine into the new union as the Palestinian Arab Republic, the UAR remained as such for the following two decades, governed as a unitary state. First UAR President Gamal Abdel Nasser died in 1970, and was succeeded by the Syrian Hafez al-Assad, leader of the Syrian-dominated faction of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, which has ruled the union ever since.

Following the 1986 Arab Revolution, the UAR was the leading force alongside Ba'athist and pan-Arabist allies on one side of the resulting 1986–1989 Arab Revolutionary War, which pitted them against conservative Arab monarchies and other Western-funded Islamist groups, especially the Muslim Brotherhood. Much of the war's Levantine theatre took place in Syria, especially in the west and south. By the end of the war, the Ba'athist UAR controlled 20 Arab states, which were subsequently formally admitted into the UAR; the 20 member states between 1990 and 1993 were each given a regional government with devolved authority from the UAR central government. After a decade of postwar rebuilding, the 1999 constitution of the UAR restructured the state as a federation: the 20 devolved regional governments were formalised as governments of the newly federated republics, the central government became the new federal government, and the state was renamed the Union of Arab Republics, or the Arab Union, consisting of 20 republics. The UAR's interior ministry and several other ministries were abolished and their responsibilities transferred to new republican ministries. The police and other domestic security agencies were reconstituted under the reformed Syrian Ministry of Interior. In 2000, Hafez al-Assad died, and his son, Bashar, succeeded him to the Arab Union presidency in the 2000 Arab Union presidential election.

Today, Syria is a vibrant, cosmopolitan republic of the Arab Union, and has one of the union's most educated communities. Between 2011 and 2019, Syria was a major frontline of the Arab Winter, also known as the Arab Civil War, which involved multiple extremist Islamist groups including the Muslim Brotherhood as well as ISIS and al-Qaeda; many major battles took place in Syria, causing an exodus of millions of people and the internal displacement of millions more. As of 2020, the Arab Army has regained control of the republic and life continues normally for the overwhelming majority of the population. Small pockets of remaining extremist groups do, however, continue a low-intensity guerrilla war, periodically attacking police checkpoints or other symbolic targets. Nevertheless, the economy has recovered significantly, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had little negative impact on the population, due to both a robust and world-class healthcare system and a rapid lockdown and contact-tracing effort by the state boosted in its authority by martial law, which remains in effect across the Arab Union as a relic of the only recently-ended civil war.

Etymology
Several sources indicate that the name Syria is derived from the 8th century BC Luwian term "Sura/i", and the derivative ancient Greek name: Σύριοι, Sýrioi, or Σύροι, Sýroi, both of which originally derived from Aššūrāyu (Assyria) in northern Mesopotamia. However, from the Seleucid Empire (323–150 BC), this term was also applied to The Levant, and from this point the Greeks applied the term without distinction between the Assyrians of Mesopotamia and Arameans of the Levant. Mainstream modern academic opinion strongly favors the argument that the Greek word is related to the cognate Ἀσσυρία, Assyria, ultimately derived from the Akkadian Aššur. The Greek name appears to correspond to Phoenician ʾšr "Assur", ʾšrym "Assyrians", recorded in the 8th century BC Çineköy inscription.

The area designated by the word has changed over time. Classically, Syria lies at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, between Arabia to the south and Asia Minor to the north, stretching inland to include parts of Iraq, and having an uncertain border to the northeast that Pliny the Elder describes as including, from west to east, Commagene, Sophene, and Adiabene.

By Pliny's time, however, this larger Syria had been divided into a number of provinces under the Roman Empire (but politically independent from each other): Judaea, later renamed Palaestina in AD 135 (the region corresponding to modern-day Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and Jordan) in the extreme southwest; Phoenice (established in AD 194) corresponding to modern Lebanon, Damascus and Homs regions; Coele-Syria (or "Hollow Syria") south of the Eleutheris river, and Iraq.