T.E. Lawrence
Syria 2024
December 10, 2024. The renewed war in Syria had its roots in the October 7, 2023 attack on Israelis and Tel Aviv’s subsequent destruction of much of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s anti-Israel strategy across the Levant. What will happen next? In reality, no one knows, least of all me. What I can discuss is where Syria is today, literally, and politically, the implications both for the region and the wider world.
Syrian is a country in the Levant of some 22 million people which is bordered to the north by Turkey, to the east by Iraq, to the south by Jordan and to the west and south-west by Israel, Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea. Consequently, Syria is the epicentre of several contending and parallel geopolitical, regional strategic, confessional, and ethnic struggles.
Syrian society has been riven by ethnic tensions ever since the minority Alawite community seized power in Damascus led by former President Bashir al-Assad’s father and the Ba’ath Party in 1966. Syria is 90% Arab, with some two million Kurds plus other smaller groups making up the balance of a population that grew by over 300% between 1966 and 2013. It is a demographic shift that is evident across much of the Middle East and North Africa, as are many of the ethnic divisions.