A History of Greater Syria

1799-Napoleon's army in Egypt launches an offensive into the Levant. Taking Gaza easily, the army then lays seige to Jaffa (near Tel Aviv).

-7th March: Jaffa falls. Napoleon gives orders for all prisoners to be treated well, and for the townspeople to be, so far as possible, left undisturbed (POD: IOTL, after taking Jaffa, Napoleon massacred all 4000 of the prisoners, making towns further along the invasion route more likely to resist him)

-2nd April: Acre falls, after a brief siege. This convinces Basher Shihab, the Maronite Catholic Emir of Lebanon, to turn against the Ottoman empire and ally with Napoleon (OTL: Knowing of Jaffa's fate, the Acre garrison fiercely resisted Napoleon. The siege dragged out much longer and ultimately failed, ending Napoleon's Syria campaign. Basher Shihab remained neutral)

-June: Reinforced by supplies and a contingent of Lebanese troops provided by Basher Shihab, Napoleon's forces storm Damascus.

-July: Napoleon lays siege to Aleppo. However, plague has broken out in the French army, Egypt is becoming restive, and Napoleon's supply lines are becoming long. Having second thoughts, Basher Shihab and his soldiers depart from the siege and go back to Lebanon.
September 16th: A Turkish army, reinforced by British soldiers, routes Napoleon's forces outside the walls of Aleppo. Napoleon begins a slow, fighting retreat down through Syria, but is again intercepted by a pro-Ottoman army in Damascus on October 20th. Napoleon fights them off, but suffers heavy casualties. His army is now only a quarter of the size it started as, Napoleon retreats back to Egypt, where he faces a Mamluk rebellion his severely reduced army is unable to put down. At the beginning of December, Napoleon slips out of Egypt and heads back to France.
******
However:

December 14th 1799: A contingent of Albanian mercenaries in Damascus, led by Muhammad Ali, has gone unpaid ever since helping the Ottomans against Napoleon in October. Furious, they storm Damascus citadel and take the Ottoman pasha prisoner. In the following months, Muhammad Ali gradually subjugates the area around Damascus.

March 1800: Meanwhile, hoping for Ottoman support, several Druze warlords have risen against Bashir Shihab in Mount Lebanon. Muhammad Ali allies with Bashir and sends his men to help put down the Druze. In return, Bashir agrees to support Muhammad Ali in the rest of Syria. In July, Muhammad Ali takes Homs, which had been occupied by another local warlord. Hama falls the next month, and in late 1800, after intevening in several intertribal disputes among the Alawites on the northwest Syrian coast, Muhammad Ali gains the support of most of the Alawite tribes.

1801: In March, Muhammad Ali launches a six-month offensive into Palestine, that puts all of that territory down to Gaza and Aqaba under his control. Like in northern Syria the previous year, Muhammad Ali relies as much on diplomacy as on military force-he intervines in intertribal disputes, and promises tribes and other local leaders who support him broad local autonomy.

January 1802: Muhammad Ali captures Aleppo from the Ottomans, who award him the title "Kheldive of Syria" in exchange for a yearly tribute. Egypt is now effectively independent as well, under Mamluk control, and the Ottomans continue to hold most of Iraq (including the part of the Euphrates valley in OTL NW Syria)
 
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Muhammad Ali's Syria was at first a rather loose, feudal collection of tribes, and the first decade of his reign was largely spend fighting internal conflicts against various tribes. These mostly went in Muhammad Ali's favor, and by 1811, he was able to reform the Syrian government along a more centralized model. The country was divided into the provinces (Turkish: Vilayet, Arabic: Wilayat) of Damascus, Aleppo, Alexandretta, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Muhammad Ali confiscated large tracts of land from his political opponents. This land went to the state, and in the 1810's Muhammad Ali introduced a series of sweeping reforms to Syria's government. The administrative bureaucracy was expanded, and regularized taxes, collected by the central government, were introduced in leu of the old practice of tax farming. Muhammad Ali also established a system of state monopolies controlling most of Syria's major trade goods. However, centralization wasn't complete-Muhammad Ali was careful not to disturb the Christian or Druze communities in Mount Lebanon, which remained largely self-ruling under their own leaders. Likewise, the Alawites of the northwest were largely left to their own devices, in exchange for loyalty and tribute.

The first major test of Muhammad Ali's new state would be against the Saudi tribe, which had taken over most of the Arabian peninsula and begun attacking Ottoman and Syrian trade caravans, and even launching raids into Ottoman and Syrian territory. In response, the Ottomans and Syrians declared war on the Saudis in 1814. Syrian troops recaptured Mecca and Medina from the Saudis in 1815, but thereafter the war slowed, with Syrian troops fighting a long, grinding war of attrition in the Arabian desert. The two sides agreed to a true in 1818, in which the Saudis recognized a Syrian-dominated Emirate of the Hijaz. However, the war resumed in 1821. Muhammad Ali's skillfully diplomacy again proved useful, and by cultivating alliances with anti-Saudi tribes, he was finally able to take the Saudi capital of Diryah (near present-day Riyadh) in 1825, destroying Saudi power in the peninsula for a generation.
 
The Greeks, long under Ottoman rule, rebelled in 1821. The Ottoman Sultan had difficulty dealing with it, and in 1824 turned to Egypt, technically part of the empire but in practice ruled by al-Bardisi, a Mamluk (soldier of slave origins) who ran the country with a Mamluk elite that formed a sort of aristocracy. Al-Bardisi and the Ottomans had one thing in common-both felt threatened by the growing power of MUhammad Ali's Syria. The Ottomans promised al-Bardisi that, in exchange for assistance in Greece, they would give him Crete and the Peleponese to rule, and support him in an invasion of Syria.

The Ottoman fight against Greece was thus, in the large part, led by Egypt from 1824 onwards, though after its defeat of the Saudis in 1825, Syria contributed its fair share of men to the effort as well, with Ibrahim Pasha (Muhammad Ali's son, who had led the latter part of the Saudi campaign) personally commanding the Syrian troops in Greece. The fight looked like it would go badly for the Greeks, but in 1827, France, Britain, and Russia intervined on the Greek side, destroying the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Navarino. In 1832, the powers of Europe finally forced the Ottoman Empire to recognize an independent Greece.

However, the 1820's had been important for another development in Syria-Muhammad Ali, having been impressed by the capabilities of the British and French armies during Napoleon's campaign, began sending promising young officers to European military academies (mainly in Britain and France). The new students came back quite impressed with European modernity, and soon Damascus recieved its first printing press, which began cranking out Arabic translations of European military texts. A European-style military academy was set up in Damascus itself in 1834. Muhammad Ali's modernized military performed admirably when Mamluk Egypt invaded in 1837, driving its armies back at Jaffa and then entering Egypt itself. Muhammad Ali, in his drive to create a personal empire, almost certainly sought to add the populous Nile valley to his domains, but it was not to be-Britain and France, wanting to preserve the status quo in the Mideast, intervened, and, at the Battle of Giza, Muhammad Ali's military suffered a heavy blow at the hands of the European armies it had sought to emulate.

Muhammad Ali died in 1849, and his son Ibrahim suceeded him as Kheldive. Ibrahim ruled only for six years, and his son, Khalid Pasha, would prove to be a much less capable ruler than his father and grandfather. Since the events of 1837, Egypt had generally made a policy of seeking a French alliance, and by contrast, Muhammad Ali, Ibrahim, and Khalid had sought support from the British, who benefited from many trade contacts in the Levant. Khalid, however, wasn't as skillful at managing relations with Syria's religious minorites (particularly Alawites, Druze, and Christians), which in their respective areas-Mount Lebanon and the Northwest-held a considerable amount of political power. Khalid tried to undercut this and extend the centralized government Muhammad Ali had created into all of Syria, causing the minorites-especially the Maronites of Mount Lebanon-to turn to the French.

The dispute would be taken to a new level when, in cooperation with the Eygptian government, a French company began constructing the Suez Canal in 1854. Britain, fearing that France would dominate trade through the new Canal, coluded with Syrian agents to fund attacks by the Sinai Beduoin on the project, and in the late 1860's, the French, in revenge, began funneling money to Alawite and Maronite Christian tribes in Syria. The Suez Canal opened in 1865, though British sabotoge and other factors ensured that the French investors had gone deeply into debt and were skirting with bankruptcy.

But in 1867, something else would take European attentions off Egypt for a time-tensions between the Druze landowners and Maronite Catholic peasants of Mount Lebanon had finally come to a boil, and a peasant rebellion erupted, with Khalid's Syrians supporting the Druze. The affair quickly degenerated into a sectarian war between Druze and Christians, and in Europe, sensationalized, highly exaggerated accounts of horrible Christian massacres in Syria galvinized public opinion. The French pushed for intervention, but the British resisted. However, by July of 1867, the Syrian government had largely gained control of Mount Lebanon, and accounts of Syrian "depredations" turned British public opinion in favor of an intervention.

On August 12th-13th, 1867, French forces landed at Beirut and Latakia, while a British army landed in Jaffa. Pushing inward, the French expelled Syrian armies from Mount Lebanon, where they were greeted with open arms and cheers by the Maronites, before advancing deeper into Syria. Syrian Arab troops mounted fierce, but ultimately futile, resistence to the invaders at the battles of Damascus, Aleppo, and Haifa. But by the end of October, most of Syria was under Anglo-French control. The Anglo-French deposed Khalid, who was exiled to Istanbul, and proclaimed his six year old son Ahmed Kheldive. Since Ahmed was too young to actually rule anything, and Anglo-French "Regency commission" comprising two Frenchmen and two British people was set up in Damascus. Damascus, Aleppo, Beirut, Jerusalem, and Latakia all recieved Anglo-French garrisons.

However, competing British and French interests caused the commission to spend most of its time in gridlock. The army of the Kheldivate had been effectively destroyed, and, faced with a two-headed master unable to govern coherently, the bureaucracy and administration of Syria began to disintegrate as well. Tribes and local rulers began regaining some of the power they had lost over the last half-century, and increased banditry and lawlessness began to stifle trade.

The situation rapidly became untenable, and meanwhile, the Franco-Prussian war sent France deeply into debt. Thus, in 1873, French and British diplomats met in Paris to hammer out their nation's respective interests in the Middle East. The result would be the Treaty of Paris, signed later that year.

-Britain agreed to buy all the French shares of the Suez Canal company, and assume all the debts of the French shareholders.

-France recognized Egypt as a British sphere of influence, and agreed not to interfere with British interests there.

-Britain likewise recognized Syria as a French sphere of influence, and agreed to withdraw its troops and its representatives on the Regency commission.

-The Sinai Peninsula was confirmed as part of Egypt, providing a buffer zone between France and the Suez Canal.
 
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Map of Ottoman Syria from wikipedia. All of the named Vilayets except Dayr-az-Zor are part of the TTL Khedivate of Syria. Note that Latakia (the northern part of Beirut Vilayet, and the coastal parts of Aleppo Vilayet) is a seperate province in this TL.

Ottoman_Syria_1918.png
 
"Indeed, it must be said that the failure to anticipate the events of 1875 is largely the fault of Francois de Sorel, the French high commissioner, and his administration. After Britain withdrew from Syria, de Sorel, as the senior French representative on the Regency Committee, had effectively become the governor of Syria, and had embarked on an ambitious effort to reassert control from Damascus. Rural patrols were set up against highway robbers, and punishment was metted out not only to individuals, but often to whole villages accused of hiding them. In appointing French administrators to each province, and re-instituting regular tax collection-funneled directly through French hands and into the treasury of the Regency-de Sorel pushed aside-and thus alienated-what was left of the Kheldivate's bureaucracy-men who knew the area far better than the French, and who could, perhaps, have stopped what was coming. Indeed, the first two years of direct French control were largely characterized by an attempt to browbeat and threaten any local elites into submission, and punish those who didn't. The merchant families of Damascus and Aleppo, and the landowners of the countryside, came under large burdens from French taxes. Faced with uncooperative local administrators, de Sorel's regime increasingly presented a French face to its subjects. It was French tax collectors that came to town, French troops who searched travellers on the road looking for bandits, French gendarmie who kicked down doors at night, and off-duty French soldiers who, under the undue influence of the local wine, took to misbehaving among the women of Damascus, Aleppo, and the other towns they were stationed at. But de Sorel had only 20,000 or so French troops, scattered across the whole of Syria, supplemented by about twice as many local recruits, many of them Muslim and unhappy with the way the French administration was going. De Sorel didn't have enough men or resources to run the country in the way he tried. Perhaps a smarter, more diplomatic personality might have won local cooperation, but de Sorel's condescending cultural arrogance did no such thing. Throughout the end of 1874 and the first half of 1875, he recieved warnings that resentment was building to a boiling point, that plots were being hatched for a restoration of Khedival rule, that the tribes were organizing under Khalid's leadership, that the plotters had infiltrated, and gained the support of, at least some of the colonial Muslim regiments. Considering de Sorel's innaction, what started on July 11th, 1875 is not at all surprising..."
-From The Tragedy of Syria by John Rockwell

July 11th, 1875. Night

There was something uneasy about Damascus that day...the French survivors would later write that the air seemed tense, as if something were about to happen. That night everyone went to bed, and many would never wake up.

The first sign of trouble was when a mob gathered around the house in Damascus where Rene Marcel, the second member of the now two-man regency committee, lived. Woken by the noise, Marcel looked out to find his house surrounded by a mob wielding torches, swords, the occaissional gun, and any other weapon they might have. Unable to dispatch a message, Marcel ordered his servants to fire into the mob to disperse it, but it had the opposite effect. The mass of humanity at first held back, but as the bullets flew, the men with guns in the crowd answered back, and one of the Frenchmen fell. The mob rushed forward. Torches were thrown into the windows of the stone courtyard house, and soon flames began to cackle from inside. Some of the occupants attempted to flee the burning house, only to be torn apart by the mob, while others died in the flames.

A short time later, a Syrian Muslim army captain, guarding the gates to Citadel of Damascus, where the Khedeval and French governments had been based, surrepticiously opened the gates. More colonial troops, having torn off their French insignias, poured in and stormed the Citadel after a brief fight with the actual French guards. De Sorel and the other Frenchmen were dragged from their beds. The 7,000 French troops, housed in a cantonment just outside the Damascus city walls woke to find the gates shut against them, thousands of Syrian tribesmen surrounding them, and the smell of ash as the homes of Frenchmen, and known French collaborators, inside Damascus burned.

The story was repeated throughout Syria. In Aleppo, the garrison fought its way from the Cantonments back into the old city, only to hole in the walls, their former colonial auxilleries outside and a hostile population among them. In the previous months, the agents of the deposed Kheldive Khalid had organized the tribes, and the auxilleries, against the hated French. And now, throughout Syria, the French prescense receeded. Isolated French patrols in the countryside were quickly hunted down and dispatched. Outside Damascus, the cantonments held out for a month before the starving garrison were overwhelmed. Khalid re-entered Damascus, and personally ordered the beheading of de Sorel and the other French officers. In Aleppo the garrison, under Bernard de Mac-Mahon, grew increasingly desperate as its supplies too began to run low. The Jerusalem garrison fought its way out, past sniping Palestinian insurgents, and made its way to Mount Lebanon, still held by French-allied Maronites. The Maronites also helped put down a Muslim rebellion in Beirut, and the Latakia garrison, having stormed into a rebel-held city, was resupplied by sea. Throughout Syria, it seemed as if French rule might be beginning to come to an end.

But it was not to be. Having been humiliated by the Germans just four years before, France was determined not to loose the Holy Land to what seemed, to them, a motely army of Arab heathens. The French began to organize a relief expedition of over 70,000 men, determined to bring Syria back under the French grip for all time.

The relief expedition landed November. In Beirut, the entire French Foreign Legion marched off its transport ships to the stirring notes of La Marseillaise and the cheers of local Frenchmen and Maronites. In Latakia, French reinforcements drove the siege lines away from the walls. From Beirut, the French troops first cleared Mount Lebanon of Druze and Shia rebels, then marched eastward, smashing a Syrian army at the Battle of Homs. The outcome was never in doubt-Aleppo, on the brink of surrender, was soon relieved by a French force, while French cannon and dynamite blasted gaping holes in Damascus' ancient city walls. By March 1876, less than three months after the French relief forces had landed, France controlled all Syria's major towns and cities, and more reinforcements swept in, as French troops hunted down suspected rebels from village to village. 1876 and 1877 would go down as one of the darker years in Syria's history-whole villages burned down for harboring suspected rebels, and in the cities, a reign of terror as anyone even reported to have aided in the uprising was given a brief trial, then sent to the hangman. Reinforcements poured in, and the scattershot countryside insurgencies that broke out were quickly put down. Kheldive Khalid, after trying to escape Damascus, was caught by a French patrol and killed, and his son Ahmed sent to Istanbul. The French officially abolished the Kheldivate and declared Syria a French colony, under direct rule from an appointed governor. Syria, for now at least, was under the boot.

"We have at last completed the work of the Crusades-we have reclaimed the land of Christ's birth, and we have shown the Arabs the consequinces of defying French power"-Henri Renaud, commander of the French expeditionary force, 1876

"The hand of French colonialism would echo down throughout Syrian history-in classical "divide and rule" politics, France, in governing Syria after 1876, would bring in a number of settlers from Europe, and put in place a system of sectarian rule that would privilege Syrian over Syrian based on religious grounds, and erode national unity. Even after the departure of the French, the system they put in place, and the echos of it, would remain, and the national identity shown in the rebellion of 1876 would prove ever more elusive."
-The Tragedy of Syria, John Rockwell
 
After 1877, Syria was divided by the French into districts, corresponding to the provinces of the Kheldivate, with each district ruled by a directly appointed French governor. Most towns recieved a French-appointed mayor, for larger cities an actual Frenchman, for smaller cities and towns usually a locally chosen Arab.

French rule in Syria was, despite the outwardly secular nature of the state, very sectarian. The most favored group were the Eastern Rite Catholics, who formed a majority in Mount Lebanon and had communities in other regions. Due to their shared religion, Catholics in Syria easily took to French culture-many learned French and sent their children to French schools to recieve an elite French education. The colonial bureaucracy, and the colonial police and military, recruited heavily from the Catholic populations, and in 1896 Catholics were officially granted French citizenship, putting them on par with the 50,000-odd Europeans (mostly Frenchmen, but also Italians, Maltese, and Spaniards) who had immigrated to Syria. After the grant of citizenship, intermarriage between Europeans and Arab Catholics became somewhat common. Almost all Catholics learned French, and some of the Frenchmen knew Arabic. By the 1910's, may commentators noted that the lines between Frenchman and Arab Catholic had begun to blur.

Below Catholics were Syria's other minority communities-non-Catholic Christains, Ismailis, Druze, Alawites, Armenians, Beduoin, Jews and Twelver Shia. The French army raised entire regiments of Druze and Alawites, and they were extensively recruited into the police and the lower rungs of the bureaucracy (the higher posts being reserved for Frenchmen and Catholics). Christian and other non-Sunni owned businesses tended to be favored over Sunni ones, and generally, the Sunni majority tended to see the worst end of colonial rule-selected elites were cultivated, while most Sunnis were left powerless and embittered.

Ideologically, the French often praised Syria's Roman and Byzantine past, and portrayed themselves as the heirs to the Roman rulers of two millenia ago. This was most notable in the French project to develop the eastern Jordan valley, known as the Decapolis in antiquity. The cities built or expanded by the French all had the names of ancient Roman towns-Philadelphia (Amman), Arbella (Irbid), and Scythopolis (Beth-Shean, Israel) to name the three largest examples. France did put a good deal of effort into developing Syria's infrastructure-by 1910, rail lines cris-crossed the country, and the harbors at Haifa, Beirut, Latakia, and other ports had been expanded. New universities were founded-the Ecole Polytecnique Syrien and Universite de Damas in Damascus, and other institutions of higher learning in Aleppo, Jerusalem, and other large cities. Increasingly, Syria developed a Francophone elite-first Catholics, but then among other communities as well. Georges Hanna, a Greek Orthodox student at the Universite de Damas, would, in 1904, write Nahda (Renaissance), a work that would later become one of the main texts of Syrian Arab nationalism. Syrians of all confessions would send their young men to fight for France in the Great War of 1914-1918, and throughout the 1920's and 1930's, an increasingly educated Syrian middle class began to demand greater autonomy.

It would come after the fall of France during World War II. In late 1940, after a brief occupation by Vichy France, Syria was liberated by the British, but a coalition of Alawite, Druze, Christian, Shia, and Zionist political parties demanded independence. Reluctantly, the Free French agreed and, after much stalling, duly gerrymandered elections produced a National Assembly dominated by non-Sunni parties. After tense negotiations between Britain, France, and the assembly's chosen PM Ahmed Junblatt, the French confirmed the independence of the Syrian Republic in 1945.

The new Republic, however, continued to mostly shut out its Sunni population. Gradually, it came to be dominated by two groups-Christians and Jews (who thanks to the Zionist movement formed a large minority in Palestine), with non-Sunni Muslims also heavily favored. Throughout the 1950's and into the 1960's, an economic boom and apparent prosperity ran throughout Syria, but the effects were distributed uneavenly, along secatarian lines.

"Before World War II, and certainly after it, Syria became a mecca for European and American tourists looking to experience the exotic. If one's tastes tended towards the extravagent, you could go to the Casino de la Syrie in Damascus, and bet entire fortunes on high-stakes card games amid the glitz and glamour of the Caberet shows-featuring scantily clad belly dancers, elaborate stage sets, and, on one occasion in 1964, live monkeys, horses, and elephants. For more limited budgets, there was still the "Syrian Riviera" along the coast of Lebanon, and the countless "Medinas" and "Souks" where one could experience, as one promoter touted, "the Wonders of Araby".

Syria's universities became the envy of the Arab world, and the oil deposits in the north, drilled by a government monopoly, contributed to the economic boom of the 1960's. French remained popular among the middle and upper classes, and as long as one stayed in the right sections of Damascus, Aleppo, or Jerusalem, the atmosphere seemed like that of any European country. Indeed, at home and abroad, Syrian elites, over glasses of wine, proclaimed their nation to be "a part of Europe".

But when that setting was escaped, the atmosphere was quite different. The apparent prosperity mainly benefited the ruling alliance-Christians, Jews, non-Sunni Muslims. Sunnis, still more than 60% of the population, formed, along with less privileged members of other communities, a vast underclass. Out of sight of the tourists, they poured into Syria's largest cities, settling in impovershed suburbs and slums, like the "Belt of Misery" that, by the late 1960's, completely surrounded Damascus. Other cities developed their own "Belts of Misery", whose residents were confined to menial jobs, kept off the voting rolls and out of higher political and economic life. They provided cheap labor for export manufacturing, and they provided the dishwashers and janitors for the tourist resorts, sentenced to witness a prosperity the likes of which their birth and creed shut them out from. But they were there, they were many, and they would not be silent forever."
-The Tragedy of Syria, John Rockwell.
 
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"Foremost of all, we demand an equal Syria, a fair Syria, a Syria governed by the majority of its population. For too long, Syria has been trapped in a half-colonial, half-feudal system. The riches of our country have gone to a wine-sipping elite, while the masses, the true sons of the Syrian nation whole toil in the factories and fields, have been cheated. No more!"
PCS pamphlet, 1962

The Syrian Communist Party (Partei Communist Syrien, PCS) was founded in 1958 by Muhammad al-Jafari. Following a largely Marxist line, the PCS railed against the inequalities of "European" Syria, where 30% of the populace lived a first-world existence and the rest quite firmly didn't. In 1961, it was estimated that only two-thirds of Syria's Sunni population was literate in Arabic, and most of those had little to no knowledge of French, the language of wealth and power ever since the 1870's. Throughout the 1960's, al-Jafari would be in and out of prison several times, and eventually wind up exiled to Cyprus, yet his firey speeches against the social and political system that governed Syria galvinized the nation's underprivileged, and in Damascus' "Belt of Misery", he soon became a figure of almost godlike reverence. Al-Jafari declared that no civil rights movement, no non-violent resistence, would convince the elites of Syria to give the Sunni masses their due. The masses would have to take it for themselves. Hardly anyone noticed when the first letter bomb went off in a Hama post office in 1963, but by 1970, they had become an almost daily occurence. Organizing in small groups, PCS cells formed in the poorer parts of virtually every city, organizing demonstations, distributing propaganda, and conducting bombings and assassinations against government officials and promenant businessmen. The PCS also organized the countryside among villages, and began ambushing isolated police and army patrols. In 1967, the Syrian government organized its first major, large-scale military crackdown on the growing PCS insurgency, but the military couldn't find every hideout, and the tactics employed-mass arrests, torture, indefinate imprisonment, destroying the houses of suspected PCS members-often deepened anti-government sentiment. The PCS particularly targeted the tourist industry, and the car bombing of the Hotel Grand de Beyrouth in 1968, and of the Casino de la Syrie in 1969 virtually killed tourism. By the early 1970's, PCS attacks on urban infrastructure, and a growing countryside insurgency had enourmasly disrupted life in Syria, sending the country into a deep depression. This, of course, produced more economic desperation, leading to more recruiting for the PCS. In the countryside, the insurgency grew increasingly brazen, with large tracts of rural areas effectively falling out of government control (especially outside Jewish-dominated areas in Palestine and Catholic, Druze, and Alawite-dominated areas in the north and west).

Increasingly, the growing strength of the insurgency fractured Syria's ruling alliance. Historically, the Legeslature had been dominated by a coalition of Catholic, Orthodox, Druze, Alawite, Shia, and Zionist parties, with each group being allotted positions in the government bureaucracy and army. Now, however, ethnic militias-some attached to established political parties, some not-began to form, largely made up of retired soldiers and street thugs determined to make "their" slice of Syria safe for "their" ethnicity as the state's efforts at combatting the PCS looked increasingly ineffective. In 1976, insurgents with a sholder-fired missile shot down a Syrian Airlines jetliner that had just taken off from Damascus airport, killing over 200-an event that left many questioning whether the Syrian government could ever contain the PCS. Directly in reaction to this, a group of Jewish businessmen, politicians, and military officers led by David Pearlman formed a secret organization, the Haganah, with the aim of preserving the power of Syria's Jewish community-whether in the Syrian state or without. In 1978 a similar Catholic organization, the Phalange, was also founded.

On October 15th, 1978, PCS insurgents suceeded in detonating several bombs around the highly guarded oil tanks in Damascus that held Syria's Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Efforts to quench the fire were unsuccessful, and all of the oil ultimately burned, taking over a week and sending a plume of black smoke miles into the sky, visible from all over Damascus. To many observers, it seemed an apt metaphor for what was happening to the old Syrian order. The state began, more and more, to colude with militias like the Haganah and the Phalange, which often gained much support, and even membership, in their respective community's army units.

By 1980, Michel Shihab, President of Syria, looked out over what was increasingly becoming a failed state. Despite billions in aid from a Europe fearful of a leftist takeover, the Syrian military had lost control much of its countryside, its army largely restricting itself to guarding major towns and the roads connecting them. Even those roads were not safe to travel at night. Large sections of Damascus had fallen out of government control as well, the police and even the army fearing to enter. No tourists came anymore, the economy was wrecked, the Syrian Franc one of the most worthless currencies in the world. The military and government had become increasingly atomized-Christian, Jewish, Alawite, and Druze units all unofficially demanded to be deployed in areas inhabited by their own respective ethnicities, to guard them from the PCS. The state was deeply in debt, and beginning to have trouble paying its own soldiers. Most of the ethnic militias had taken to drug smuggling and other such activities, and ensured the money was funnelled to the parts of the army that were loyal to them. Everyone, it seemed, knew the end was coming ,and wanted to preserve their own and their communities. Michel Shihab knew that their was only one way to solve the crisis, and determined to open peace talks with the PCS.

Unfortunately, the Haganah saw the idea of negotiation with the PCS as tantamount to admitting defeat, and were not ready to give up on their position yet. David Pearlman ensured all the units loyal to the Haganah were deployed in Palestine and, on July 21st, 1980, the day before the talks were scheduled to start, proclaimed the seccession of the "State of Israel", comprising the area in between the Litani river and the southern border, from Syria. The PCS only redoubled its attacks, and a Phalange/Druze alliance responded by declaring an independent Lebanon, and the Alawites and independent Latakia. PCS units quickly overran Damascus and Aleppo, raising their red flags over the citadel and capturing large stores of ammunition and military equipment. The first target of the new "Syrian People's Republic" was the "State of Israel" (which still controlled a majority Arab population), and PCS tank columns advanced southward, aided by their more traditional guerilla insurgent tactics. The fighting was fierce, and the Israelis managed to hold out for a time, but were slowly forced to give back. After potracted urban warfare, Jerusalem fell in January 1982, and the rest of Palestine by the end of the year. The PCS then turned its attention to the "Republic of Lebanon" and the "Republic of Latakia", slowly grinding its way across the Lebanese mountains. The small Alawite state was overrun quickly, with Latakia falling in April 1983. Beirut was captured slightly less than a year later, effectively ending conventional military resistance to the PCS regime.

Though in theory Maoist, the PCS, under the firebrand rhetoric of chairman al-Jafari, zealously rounded up "class enemies" and "oppressors of the poeple", who disproportionately happened to be non-Sunni. The old elite of Syria fled abroad, rotted in prison, went into hiding, or were killed. In an ironic reversal of the previous situation, the new regime found itself targeted by several ethnically based insurgent movements-Jewish in Palestine, Christian, Druze, and Alawi elsewhere-that prevented it from fully asserting control and would not go away. All property and businesses were nationalized, but central planning failed to improve the economic situation, and often had quite the opposite effect. As the economy failed to improve and the depredations of the PCS continued, even some Sunnis, formerly its backbone of support, began to take up militant opposition to the regime.

Chairman Muhammad al-Jafari died in 1988, and his successer, Fouad Khalil, proved less adapt at containing the insurgency. By his death in 1996, the Syrian economy was near collapse, whole regions were on the brink of starvation, and hundreds of thousands of refugees poured out the country, filling the ports and airports of Europe. Finally, in 1998, with a country utterly in ruins, Syria's third Communist chairmen, Samir Nasri, decided to engage the main insurgent leaders in peace talks.

The result, after several intense years of negotiation, was the 2001 Cairo Accord, which called for a ceasefire by all parties, greater political freedom, and internationally monitored elections. Held in 2004, the elections swept the Communists out of power in favor of the Syrian Democratic Movement (MDS), a conglomerate of former anti-communist insurgents. Most of the Sunnis, fed up with Communist rule, voted for the MDS, which drafted a new, democratic, federal constitution. As of 2011, the Syrian economy has shown a marked recovery, although forecasters predict at least another decade will be needed to get back to the levels of the early 1960's, and more to catch up to to the decades lost after that. Some tourism has returned, though the scars of war are visible throughout Damascus and Syria's other cities, and visitors can expect all the usual problems in an undeveloped country still devestated from wars. Land mines in particular remain a danger, and it will be years before much of Syria becomes open to off-road hiking. The old sectarianism that characterized Syria is still evident, but among Sunni, Shia, Druze or Alawite, Muslim or Christian or Jew, there is an oft-noted resolve to avoid, at all costs, repeating the hell of the war decades, and to move forward, as Syrians, to together rebuild a shattered country.
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First TL I ever finished, and I must say, its turned out to be my darkest, darker than I thought it would be going in. But I think I at least managed to end it on an optimistic note. Comments?
 
Bravo! Grim, but not implausible. My only real objection is the lack of butterflies in Europe - we still have a Great War 1914-1918, still have a WWII with a Fall of France 1940 and a Vichy France.

Bruce
 
Bravo! Grim, but not implausible. My only real objection is the lack of butterflies in Europe - we still have a Great War 1914-1918, still have a WWII with a Fall of France 1940 and a Vichy France.

Bruce

Thanks! I didn't feel like writing another history of Europe, so I used the OTL one;). I'm actually thinking of incorporating this (with minor changes) into my Huguenot America TL.

I admit this is a little short-what in particular do you all feel is a tad implausible now, or needs to be expanded/clarified?

EDIT: Does Leo still answer PM's? It occurs to me that he might be most helpful here.
 
I don't why I'm bumping this but after re-reading this, I have to say that I have never been impressed with a timeline as short as this. It's very well thought out.
 
Thinking of reviving and/or expanding this. Would anyone be interested, and is there anything in particular you'd like me to elaborate on?
 
I'd like to know more about what happens to Iraq. Does it become one nation, is it split into emirates, or does it get divided among other Arab nations/even Iran? Sorry if I skimmed over any passages that answer my question. I'm interested in the premise overall and find the outcome realistic.
 
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