A History of Modern Syria

Few countries have had as vexed a political history as Syria. Carved out of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War, Syria was brutally ruled as a French colony, cut off by a series of new borders with equally newly created neighbours that pulled apart families, trade networks and political assumptions that had already been ravaged by the war. Syria's subsequent history has been a series of attempts to make sense of its borders, including a failed attempt in the late 1950s to unite with Egypt and several humiliations at the hands of Israel's armed forces. It has been a satellite of France, an ally of the USSR and, most recently, torn apart by a civil war that has now been in turn subverted by the rise of the Islamic State, an entity that refuse to acknowledge any of Syria's existing borders.