Damascus

Damascus claims to be the oldest continuously inhabited city on Earth, and while Jericho and Aleppo contest the title, none can dispute that people have lived in this specific oasis for at least 11,000 years. The city exists because the Barada River flows from the Anti-Lebanon Mountains into the desert, creating the Ghouta—a fertile plain surrounded by arid steppe. This oasis effect made Damascus a mandatory stop on every trade route connecting Mesopotamia to Egypt and the Mediterranean to Arabia. Control Damascus and you control the crossroads.

The Arameans established Damascus as a kingdom around 1100 BCE. Alexander the Great conquered it in 333 BCE; the Romans made it a major city; and in 634 CE, the Arab conquest transformed it into the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate—the largest empire the world had yet seen, stretching from Spain to Central Asia. The Umayyad Mosque, built in 715 CE on the site of a Roman temple to Jupiter (itself built on an Aramean temple), contains what tradition holds as the head of John the Baptist. Each civilization built directly on the foundations of the last, creating archaeological layers that compress four millennia into a few meters of depth.

The Ottoman centuries (1516–1918) made Damascus a provincial capital and the launching point for the annual Hajj caravan to Mecca. The French Mandate (1920–1946) imposed colonial borders that still define Syria. Independence brought a succession of coups—three in 1949 alone—until Hafez al-Assad seized power in 1970 and established the dynasty that ruled until 2024. The Assad regime's architecture of control—intelligence services, sectarian balancing, and strategic alliances with Iran and Hezbollah—operated from Damascus with the same geographic logic as every previous ruler: whoever holds this oasis holds Syria.

The civil war that began in 2011 devastated Syria but left central Damascus largely intact—the regime prioritized defending the capital above all else. The surrounding Ghouta suburbs were besieged, bombed, and subjected to chemical weapons attacks that killed an estimated 1,400 people in August 2013. An estimated 500,000 Syrians died in the war; over 13 million were displaced. In December 2024, opposition forces captured Damascus as the Assad regime collapsed, ending over five decades of Assad family rule. The city—population approximately 2.1 million in the city proper, historically over 4 million in the metro area before the war—faces reconstruction needs that dwarf its current economic capacity. The oasis that sustained 11,000 years of continuous habitation now must sustain a new political order on the ruins of the old.