Arab Revolutionary War

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The Arab Revolutionary War was a series of major armed conflicts eventually involving all states of the Arab world and many other surrounding and allied/opposing states, which lasted from 11 February 1986 to 20 August 1989. A direct result of the Arab Revolution of 10 February 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 (Ba'ath Party)|National Command]] of the Ba'ath Party in Damascus, in then-independent Syria; hundreds of thousands of people in Beirut and Damascus, and soon several other major cities across the Arab world, took to the streets in support of the revolution, which quickly devolved into armed conflict between Ba'athist and allied forces on one side and the armies of the twenty then-sovereign Arab states on the other, the latter of which formed a unified front by May 1986 known as the Nationalist Army; by the end of 20 June 1986, fighting had spread to virtually all cities across the Arab world. Through the summer of 1986, the Nationalists cracked down violently on (in many cases only alleged) civilian supporters, who were defended by the Arab Army and allied pan-Arabist militias who fought back, marking the escalation of war; nonetheless, the Nationalist Army killed an estimated 110,000 civilians during this period.

By the end of 10 January 1987, the Ba'athist United Arab Republic (UAR; an early form of the Arab Union which at the time fully controlled only of Syria, Egypt and Palestine) had deployed the Arab Army to all remaining Arab states in support of the revolution, resulting in the peak of military violence from mid-January to mid-July 1987. The conflict was thus fought officially between the United Arab Republic on one side and the right-wing and allegedly reactionary governments of the remaining sovereign Arab states on the other. 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 militia of the Ba'ath Party, 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, and also had significant state support from Iran and the Soviet Union; the counterrevolutionary (Nationalist) 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 Palestine in 1967).

The war began to wind down by the end of 1987, by which time the Arab Army had achieved over twice as many battlefield victories as the Nationalist Army, conquering all or most of all remaining Arab states' territory except that of most of Tunisia and all of Morocco and Mauritania. The war officially ended on 20 August 1989 when the United Arab Republic conquered Casablanca, the last remaining stronghold of the Nationalists. The borders of the twenty Arab states remained almost entirely the same as before the war, but now represented divisions between federated states of the UAR as opposed to sovereign states. The Arab Revolutionary War ultimately resulted in an estimated 676,000 military and 230,000 civilian casualties. 65% of military casualties were represented by the the Arab Army and allied forces; they were mostly buried in Marjel Sultan Cemetery in eastern Damascus, while those awarded posthumous medals were buried in El-Kora Cemetery, Palestine, approximately 1.5 kilometres south of the Sea of Galilee, which would later become part of the city centre of the Arab federal capital of Nasseria (established in 1970).