SYRIA--Crossroads & Battleground

SYRIA sits at such a vital crossroads--between Europe, Africa and Asia--that the traffic through it has always been heavy, and its inhabitants have never had much chance for peace and quiet. Often a battleground, usually under foreign occupation, the area has no indigenous name; the word Syria was adopted by the Greeks to describe the rich, wide crescent stretching from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates.

The Land & the People

Modern Syria, one of four nations carved out of old Syria since World War I,* is only slightly larger than Missouri. Of its 72,000 square miles, one-third is desert or mountain, another third is steppe, which furnishes seasonal pasturage for Bedouins. Save for a bit of the Euphrates Valley and the wheat-growing plains of the extreme northeast, most of Syria's fertile land lies in a narrow, well-watered belt paralleling the Mediterranean coast. So do the nation's two biggest cities (each about 500,000 population): the commercial center of Aleppo and colorful Damascus, which boasts that it is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, and is as notable for its strikingly modern apartments as its ancient bazaars and narrow alleys.

Ethnically Syria is a melting pot of Arab, Kurd, Turcoman, Circassian, Armenian and a score of forgotten peoples, but of its 3,900,000 inhabitants 86% are Moslem. Besides orthodox Moslems, there are Jews, five major varieties of Christian, a sprinkling of devil worshipers and 117,000 Druses, hard-bitten mountaineers who hate Christians, are free to ignore Moslem fasts and believe that an 11th century Egyptian caliph was the last incarnation of God.

The Economy

Poor by Western standards, Syria is moderately prosperous as Middle Eastern nations go. Though she has no oilfields of her own, nearly a seventh of her national budget last year came from transit fees paid by Tapline and Iraq Petroleum Co. pipelines across it. (Because the Syrian army sabotaged the I.P.C. pipeline at the time of the Suez invasion, oil is flowing through it at only 40% of its pre-Suez rate.) For all her chronic political chaos, Syria has made notable economic progress since World War II. Irrigation schemes, mostly private, have more than doubled wheat production since 1938, and the cotton crop, Syria's main export, has tripled since 1950.

Early History

Some time in the 20th century B.C., Sinuhe, an Egyptian who had fled there to escape Pharaoh's wrath, wrote of Syria: "Plentiful was its honey, abundant its oil and all fruit are on its trees." But Syria's early inhabitants--predominantly Semites--got little chance to enjoy the oil and honey. Around 2000 B.C. they were conquered by Hammurabi, the great lawgiver of Babylon; later their homeland was a perennial battleground for the Hittites and the Egyptians. Then Sennacherib the Assyrian "came down like the wolf on the fold," to be followed over the centuries by Nebuchadnezzar, the Persians, Alexander the Great and, finally, in 64 B.C., Pompey.

For almost 700 years after Pompey's conquest, Syria was a Roman and Byzantine province, but sometimes it was difficult to tell who were the conquerors and who the conquered. When Rome celebrated the 1,000th anniversary of her founding in A.D. 248, the Roman Emperor was Syrian-born Philip the Arab. As the incubator of Christianity--Paul was converted on the road to Damascus--Syria gave Rome five Popes: John V, St. Sergius, Sisinnius, Constantine and St. Gregory III.

The Arab Glory

Mohammed the Prophet never wanted to see Damascus, because "one Paradise is enough," but within three years of his death in 632, his followers surged out of the desert and seized Damascus. Under the Ommiad Caliphs, Syria, so long a pawn, became the heart of an empire that stretched from the Pyrenees to the Punjab. Enlightened and energetic, Syria's new rulers drained the country's marshes, irrigated her steppe, gave Damascus a water system--still functioning--and converted the Byzantine Church of St. John the Baptist into one of Islam's great shrines, the Ommiad Mosque, still standing in gilded glory. For centuries, while Europe was in its dark ages, the Arabs were the light of civilization, preserving the ancient heritage of scholarship, devising Arabic numbers and making great strides in mathematics and science.

From Turkey to France

But with the fall of the Ommiad caliphate in 750 and the shift of the Arab imperial capital to Baghdad, Syria once again became a pawn, subjected to the Byzantines, the Seljuk Turks, the Mamelukes of Egypt, the Crusaders, the Mongols of Hulagu Khan and, finally, in 1516, the Ottoman Turks. Not until World War I, when Lawrence of Arabia and Sherif Hussein of Mecca set Arab nationalism ablaze, did ravaged Syria at last emerge from the long night of Ottoman rule. And then, at the moment when the Arabs thought the land at last theirs, they discovered that the British had blandly assigned Syria to France and Iraq to themselves. Under a League of Nations mandate, the French treated Syria as a colony, exploiting and repressing it. When a nationalist revolt started by the Druses in 1925 spread to Damascus, French troops twice bombarded the city, killing over 1,000 people.

In 1941 the Vichy government gave the Nazis permission to let German aircraft use Syrian bases. In a savage, month-long campaign, British and Free French forces (who began the invasion with the proclaimed intention of giving Syria independence) overwhelmed 35,000 stubborn Vichy troops. The Free French almost immediately began to retreat from their promises of freedom, but France's wartime weakness gave her old Mideast rival Britain an irresistible opportunity. In 1945, when rioting broke out in Damascus, Winston Churchill compelled the French to confine their troops in Syria to barracks. Within two months Syria was for all practical purposes an independent state.

The Discontented

Shukri el Kuwatly, independent Syria's first President--and President again now--did not long survive Syria's humiliating performance against the Israelis in 1948. (Syria's one claim to military distinction was the capture of a small hill 48 hours after the armistice.) In March 1949 Kuwatly was ousted in a bloodless revolt led by a Kurdish colonel. Two more revolts followed and the second brought to power hard-eyed little Colonel Adib Shishekly, who favorably impressed visiting Western statesmen. But his ironhanded dictatorship earned him innumerable enemies, and in 1954 another army revolt sent him scurrying off to Beirut under safe conduct. He is now variously reported to be in Beirut, Paris or Saudi Arabia, and is invariably accused of masterminding every plot against the regime.

Syria has a Parliament of 144 Deputies, mostly landlords and sheiks, with the nationalists and leftist extremists numbering only 18, but at least 30 of the others have fled the country or are in jail, and the rest are divided and terrified. The 18 prevail, working hand in hand with the soldiers, who may not be very good in battle, but are so far unbeatable in domestic intrigue.

*The others: Lebanon, Jordan, Israel.

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