Syria, officially the Syrian Arab Republic, is a country in West Asia located in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Turkey to the north and northwest, Iraq to the east and southeast, Jordan to the south, and Israel and Lebanon to the southwest. It is a republic under a provisional government and comprises 14 governorates. Damascus is Syria's capital and largest city. With a population of 26 million across an area of 185,180 square kilometres (71,500 sq mi), it is the 56th-most populous and 87th-largest country.
The name "Syria" historically referred to the region of Syria, or known as Greater Syria and Syria-Palestine. The modern state encompasses the sites of several ancient kingdoms and empires, including the Eblan civilization. Damascus was the capital of the Umayyad Empire and later became an important political and administrative center, alongside Aleppo, under the Ayyubid and Mamluk Sultanates and the Ottoman Empire. The modern Syrian state was established in the mid-20th century after centuries of Ottoman rule, as a French Mandate. The state represented the largest Arab state to emerge from the formerly Ottoman-ruled Syrian provinces. It gained de jure independence as a parliamentary republic in 1945 when the First Syrian Republic became a founding member of the United Nations, an act which legally ended the French Mandate. French troops withdrew in April 1946, granting the nation de facto independence. The post-independence period was tumultuous, with multiple coups and coup attempts between 1949 and 1971. In 1958, Syria entered a brief pan-Arab union with Egypt, which was terminated following a 1961 coup d'état. The 1963 coup d'état carried out by the military committee of the Ba'ath Party established a one-party state, which ran Syria under martial law from 1963 to 2011. Internal power-struggles within Ba'athist factions caused further coups in 1966 and 1970, the latter of which saw Hafez al-Assad come to power. Under Assad, Syria became a hereditary dictatorship. Assad died in 2000, and he was succeeded by his son, Bashar.
During the Arab Spring in 2011, members of the Syrian opposition organized protests against the Assad regime, which became known as the Syrian Revolution. After the government responded with lethal violence, the Free Syrian Army was formed, and the revolution escalated into a multifaceted 13-year civil war, drawing in several countries and triggering a refugee crisis that displaced more than 6 million people. Rebel advances were reversed following the emergence of the Islamic State, which occupied roughly two-thirds of Syria by May 2015. Alongside rebel and government counteroffensives, several countries led a campaign that resulted in the Islamic State's territorial defeat in 2017. Following its defeat in the four-year Battle of Aleppo, the Free Syrian Army fragmented and declined. By 2020, the civil war had become a frozen conflict, while Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) consolidated the remaining rebel groups in its stronghold in northwestern Syria. In late 2024, HTS and other opposition forces launched a series of offensives, culminating in the fall of Damascus and the fall of the Assad regime on 8 December 2024. The Syrian caretaker government was established following the fall of the Assad regime and remained in place until it was replaced by the Syrian transitional government in March 2025, under Ahmed al-Sharaa, the new president of Syria. Post-war conflict continues following the fall of the Assad regime, involving clashes with Assad loyalists, Alawite and Druze insurgents, the former Syrian Democratic Forces, and Israeli forces.
Syria has been a unitary presidential republic since the fall of the Assad regime and is currently undergoing a political transition. It is governed by the Syrian transitional government under the Constitutional Declaration, with executive authority vested in the president. Syria is a developing country with a mixed economy. Its economy was primarily based on agriculture in its early years but deteriorated following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011. A country of fertile plains, high mountains, plateaus, and deserts, Syria is home to diverse ethnic and religious groups. Levantine Arabs are the largest ethnic group, while Sunni Muslims constitute the largest religious group. Syria is a founding member of the United Nations and the Arab League and is a member of numerous international organizations. It is also home to six UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Several sources indicate that the name Syria is borrowed from the Ancient Greek name Σύριοι Sýrioi, or Σύροι Sýroi, which is in turn borrowed from Luwian sura/i- (attested in the 8th century BC), and ultimately derived from Aššūr (Assyria) in northern Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq and north-eastern Syria). However, from the Seleucid Empire (323–150 BC), this term was also applied to the Levant, and from this point the Greeks applied the term without distinction between the Assyrians of Mesopotamia and Arameans of the Levant. Mainstream modern academic opinion strongly favors the argument that the Greek word is related to Ἀσσυρία Assyria, ultimately borrowed from Akkadian Aššur. The Greek name appears to correspond to Phoenician ʾšr 'Assur', ʾšrym 'Assyrians', recorded in the Çineköy inscription (dated to the 8th century BC), where Luwian sura/i- is also attested.
The area designated by the word has changed over time. Classically, Syria lies at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, between Arabia to the south and Asia Minor to the north, stretching inland to include parts of Iraq, and having an uncertain border to the northeast that Pliny the Elder describes as including, from west to east, Commagene, Sophene, and Adiabene.
By Pliny's time, however, this larger Syria had been divided into a number of provinces under the Roman Empire (but politically independent from each other): Judaea, later renamed Palaestina in AD 135 (the region corresponding to modern-day Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Jordan) in the extreme southwest; Phoenice (established in 194) corresponding to modern Lebanon, Damascus and Homs regions; Coele-Syria (or "Hollow Syria") and south of the Eleutheris river.
The Natufian culture was the first to become sedentary around the 11th millennium BC and became one of the centers of Neolithic culture (known as Pre-Pottery Neolithic A), where agriculture and cattle breeding first began to appear. The site of Tell Qaramel has several round stone towers dated to 10650 BC, making them the oldest structures of this kind in the world. The Neolithic period (Pre-Pottery Neolithic B) is represented by rectangular houses of Mureybet culture. At the time, people used containers made of stone, gyps, and burnt lime (Vaisselle blanche). The discovery of obsidian tools from Anatolia are evidence of early trade. The ancient cities of Hamoukar and Emar played an important role during the late Neolithic and Bronze Age. Archaeologists have demonstrated that civilization in Syria was one of the most ancient on earth, perhaps preceded by only that of Mesopotamia.
The earliest recorded indigenous civilization in the region was the Kingdom of Ebla near present-day Idlib, northern Syria. Ebla appears to have been founded around 3500 BC and gradually built its fortune through trade with the Mesopotamian states of Sumer, Assyria, and Akkad, as well as with the Hurrian and Hattian peoples to the northwest, in Asia Minor. Gifts from Pharaohs, found during excavations, confirm Ebla's contact with Egypt. One of the earliest written texts from Syria is a trading agreement between Vizier Ibrium of Ebla and an ambiguous kingdom called Abarsal c. 2300 BC. This is known as the Treaty between Ebla and Abarsal. Scholars believe the language of Ebla to be among the oldest known written Semitic languages after Akkadian. Recent classifications of the Eblaite language have shown that it was an East Semitic language, closely related to the Akkadian language. Ebla was weakened by a long war with Mari, and the whole of Syria became part of the Mesopotamian Akkadian Empire after Sargon of Akkad and his grandson Naram-Sin's conquests ended Eblan domination over Syria in the first half of the 23rd century BC.