Saladin's Shaky Successors

To politicians and cartographers, Syria is an invention of the 20th century. To scholars, however, the term also refers to a once vast, occasionally powerful, always proud empire. Greater Syria, as historians call the broad area east of the Mediterranean, has a long and bloody past. That region, which included the territory of contemporary Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel, was situated at the approximate point where Europe, Asia and Africa converge. As such, it was a traditional meeting place and killing ground for peoples of both the East and the West.

Over the millenniums, Syria has repeatedly been overrun by conquerors from the desert or the sea: Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Aramaeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Nabataeans, Byzantines, Arabs. During the 7th and 8th centuries A.D., Damascus flourished as the capital of the Umayyad Empire, which stretched from Spain to India. In the 12th century the Crusaders' brief reign came to a violent end at the hands of the warrior Saladin, who remains a Syrian folk hero to this day. After Saladin's death, his domain fell to

stronger powers. Damascus was sacked and plundered in 1401 by Tamerlane, the Turkic conqueror, and in 1517 it came under the rule of the Ottoman Turks, where it languished for most of the next 400 years.

That period ended at last in 1920, when Syria became an independent monarchy under King Faisal I of the Hashernite royal family. But Britain and France were at work redrawing the region's boundaries. Faisal's sovereignty ended after only a few months when the French claimed Syria under a League of Nations mandate. To weaken the Arab nationalist movement, the French created contemporary Lebanon by carving from Syria the Christian region around Mount Lebanon, the predominantly Muslim Bekaa Valley and the coastal cities of Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon and Tyre. Even as they never forgave the Crusaders who overran their homeland, the Syrians have never absolved the French for taking territory from them. After World War II, France reluctantly departed, and Syria became an independent republic. The Syrians still celebrate April 17, the date of the 1946 French withdrawal, as Evacuation Day.

As with so many countries born in the past 40 years, Syria's modern history has been a saga of coups and countercoups. In 1958 Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser merged his country with Syria to form the United Arab Republic, but the union lasted only 3 1/2 years. In 1963 the Arab Socialist Resurrection (or Baath) Party overthrew President Nazem Koudsi and seized power in Damascus.

After leading a bloodless coup in 1970, Hafez Assad took over and appeared to be a relative moderate. He signed a disengagement agreement with Israel over the Golan Heights in 1974. He sent his army into Lebanon in 1976 to save the Maronite Christians from defeat by the Palestine Liberation Organization and a coalition of leftist Muslim forces. He told TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn in 1977 that he was ready to make peace with the Israelis if they would withdraw from the territory they had captured in the 1967 war. But in the past three years, as he has fought against internal challenges, Assad's regime has become increasingly bloody and repressive. In the region, he has aligned himself with two menacing Islamic nationalists, Iran's Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. By the time President Reagan announced his peace initiative last year, Assad was fearful of Israeli gains in Lebanon and disenchanted with U.S. diplomacy. In no mood for negotiations, Assad believed that foreigners had trifled with Syria long enough. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.