Syria

Damascus claims to be the world's oldest continuously inhabited city—a distinction that reveals Syria's fundamental nature. For at least 11,000 years, humans have occupied this specific location because geography commanded it. The city sits where the Anti-Lebanon Mountains meet the Syrian Desert, at the junction of the Fertile Crescent's trade routes. Whoever controlled Damascus controlled traffic between Mesopotamia, Egypt, Arabia, and the Mediterranean. This made Syria eternally valuable and eternally contested.

The land's position created its pattern: external powers have ruled Syria for most of recorded history. Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Mongols, Mamluks, Ottomans—each wave deposited populations, religions, and grudges that never fully dissolved. The Ottoman Empire administered the region for four centuries as separate provinces: Aleppo in the north (commercial, Turkic-influenced), Damascus in the center (administrative, Arab), and various coastal and mountain districts where minorities—Alawites, Druze, Christians—found refuge in terrain that resisted central control.

France carved modern Syria from this Ottoman patchwork after World War I, deliberately fragmenting it into ethnic and sectarian statelets before reuniting them into a single mandate. Independence in 1946 produced a state that experienced twenty-one coups or coup attempts in its first twenty-four years. The Ba'ath Party seized power in 1963; Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite air force officer, took control in 1970 and ruled until his death in 2000. His son Bashar inherited the presidency—a republican monarchy.

The Assad system inverted Syria's demographics: Alawites, roughly 12% of the population, dominated the security services, military command, and key economic positions, while the Sunni Arab majority (65-70%) held formal offices but not real power. This minority-over-majority structure required constant coercion to maintain. When Arab Spring protests reached Syria in 2011, the regime's response—mass arrests, torture, military assaults on civilian areas—triggered an escalating civil war that fragmented the country into competing zones.

By 2024, after thirteen years of conflict, Syria had shattered into what biologists would recognize as alternative stable states. The Assad government controlled perhaps 70% of territory including Damascus, Aleppo, and the coast—but this core contained barely half the prewar population. Kurdish-led forces administered the northeast, including critical oil and agricultural resources. Various opposition groups held pockets in the northwest. Turkey occupied strips along the northern border. An estimated 500,000 Syrians had died; 14 million—more than half the prewar population—had been displaced internally or abroad.

The December 2024 collapse of the Assad regime after a rapid rebel offensive marked a phase transition whose outcome remains uncertain. The coalition that toppled Assad unified against a common enemy but fractured immediately over governance, ideology, and the fundamental question of what Syria should become. Kurdish autonomy, sectarian representation, the role of Islamist groups, reconstruction funding, refugee returns—each issue reveals the impossibility of restoring a unified state from fragments that have developed their own institutions, economies, and identities over a decade of separation.

Syria in 2026 faces a choice between two futures: reconstitution as a unitary state (requiring either consensus or conquest), or formal fragmentation into successor entities that acknowledge the civil war's territorial realities. History suggests the latter—the borders drawn by Sykes-Picot in 1916 may finally yield to the boundaries that conflict has carved. Damascus will remain inhabited, as it has for eleven millennia. Whether it will be capital of a nation or merely the largest city in a particular zone is the question this decade will answer.