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Syria: From the Great War to Civil War

August 27, 2014 at 10:10 am

Author: John McHugo

Hardcover: 291 pages

Publisher: Saqi Books

ISBN-10: 0863567533

Review by John Kelly


This book comes just a year after John McHugo’s Concise History of the Arabs which is a great help to anybody trying to understand the historical background to Northern Arabia – the Levant. John McHugo homes in on Syria to explain the background to the current civil war. He starts with Greater Syria – the Ottoman Province and shows how France and Britain took advantage of the Ottoman decline to carve up Syria to suit their own agendas.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 led to the artificial divide between Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan. The later division of Palestine created a Jewish state in such a chaotic way so as to leave decades of misery, distrust and rankles, especially in Syria due of the annexation of the Golan Heights in 1967.

The French mal-administered Syria – of that there is no doubt. McHugo explains how decisions made by democratic governments in Paris to suit their own interests undermined all chances of creating any kind of democracy in Syria. The chaos left behind after World War Two paved the way for a dictator to emerge in the form of Hafez Al Assad.

John McHugo gives some sympathetic treatment to the modernising of the country that took place under the rule of Hafez Al-Assad – particularly the education reforms, the improvements to the economy and his genuine, but rebuffed attempts to reach peace with a disinterested Israel. Although a socialist, he continued the traditional patronage system with his own kind of corruption. He did his best to keep a lid on sectarianism and himself in power by deploying the notorious brutality of the secret police. Steadily his family and their cronies lost touch with the resentment that this was generating across the country. This has left a particularly nasty legacy that undoubtedly did much to provoke the present civil war.

Basher Al Assad comes across as a man too young for power and rather out of his depth as he struggles from one crisis to another – not really in control of his own government, but at the same time quite happy to continue the brutal practices of his father’s regime. John McHugo reflects on the current civil war and, although he went to press in April 2014, he accurately predicted the emergence of the Islamic State (ISIS) as a regional power force. To those who are now suggesting that boundaries should be redrawn to reflect the new realities (separate states for Sunnis, Shias and Kurds etc.), he warns that this could only come about with western interference and could cause even more problems.

Well worth reading – not least by Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries before they do any more harm in the Levant!