Syria

Syria is one of the oldest inhabited regions on Earth. Damascus and Aleppo are both among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world; Ebla, Mari, and Ugarit were Bronze Age powers, and Ugarit produced one of the first alphabets. The land passed through Aramean, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman hands — Palmyra grew rich as a caravan city and briefly rebelled under Queen Zenobia — and became an early centre of Christianity.

After the Muslim conquest of the 630s, Damascus became the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate, one of the great early Islamic empires, whose Great Mosque still stands. Later came the Abbasids, the Crusader states on the coast, Saladin, the Mamluks, and from 1516 four centuries of Ottoman rule. After the First World War, France governed Syria under a League of Nations mandate, drawing borders and favouring minorities in ways that shaped later politics.

Syria became fully independent in 1946 and then unstable, with repeated coups and a brief union with Egypt. The Baʿath Party seized power in 1963, and Hafez al-Assad, from the Alawite minority, took control in 1970, building a security state that his son Bashar inherited in 2000. Peaceful protests in 2011, part of the Arab Spring, were met with force and spiralled into a civil war drawing in ISIS, Kurdish forces, Turkey, Iran, Russia, the United States, and Gulf states. Hundreds of thousands were killed, half the population displaced, and cities like Aleppo and Homs shattered. In December 2024 a rebel offensive took Damascus, Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, and a transitional government began the uncertain task of rebuilding.

Ahmed al-Sharaa was appointed president for the transitional period in January 2025 and signed a Constitutional Declaration that March setting out five years of transition; a parliamentary election followed in October 2025, and the new People's Assembly first sat in July 2026. The United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and others have lifted their economic sanctions. None of this has been calm: clashes have continued in several parts of the country, Israel has occupied the buffer zone on the Golan since December 2024 and carried out air strikes, and although Syria has stayed out of the war that began between Israel, the United States and Iran in February 2026, that war has spilled over its borders.

Syria is religiously and ethnically diverse: a Sunni Arab majority alongside Alawites, Christians of many churches, Druze, Ismailis, and Twelver Shia, and ethnic Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Turkmen, and Circassians. Cities like Damascus and Aleppo historically wove these communities together in shared quarters, markets, and trades — a coexistence badly strained by the war.

Hospitality is a defining value: guests are pressed with coffee, tea, and food, and refusing outright can cause offence. Family and clan networks are central, respect for elders is expected, and modest dress is the norm, more strictly in conservative and rural areas. Religious festivals — the two Eids, Ramadan evenings, Easter — punctuate the year for their respective communities.

Syria has a deep tradition in poetry, music (the muwashshah and the Aleppo qudud), calligraphy, brocade weaving, inlaid woodwork, and soap-making, and Syrians take pride in a cultural heritage far older than the modern state.

Syria's population is put at about 26 million. The civil war displaced more than half the country: over six million people left as refugees — chiefly to Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan — and millions more were uprooted inside Syria. Some have begun returning since 2024, to homes and neighbourhoods often in ruins, and the fighting in Lebanon in 2026 pushed more than a hundred thousand people across that border into Syria within weeks.

The economy collapsed during the war: the World Bank estimated that Syria's output shrank by about 84 per cent between 2010 and 2023, more than nine in ten people were left in poverty, and sanctions cut the country out of the banking system. The currency is worth a fraction of its former value, and shortages of fuel, electricity, bread, and medicine are chronic. Much of the population relies on remittances and humanitarian aid. Syrian reports describe renewed growth since sanctions began to be lifted, but more than half the population still needs aid, and food and fuel prices rose again in 2026.

Daily life in the more stable areas has meant coping — queuing for subsidised bread and fuel, rationed power, disrupted schooling, and navigating checkpoints — against a backdrop of cautious hope, and considerable uncertainty, about the transition.

Syrian cuisine is a high point of the eastern Mediterranean table. Aleppo in particular is famed for its food — muhammara (walnut and red-pepper dip), kibbeh in dozens of forms, cherry kebab (kebab karaz), and liberal use of Aleppo pepper. Meze spreads of hummus, baba ghanoush, fattoush, tabbouleh, muhammara, stuffed vine leaves, and pickles open a proper meal.

Mains include grilled meats, shawarma, freekeh (roasted green wheat) with chicken, maqluba-style layered rice dishes, and slow-cooked stews (yakhne). Flatbread is eaten with everything, and fatteh — bread, chickpeas, yoghurt, and ghee — is a classic breakfast.

Sweets are a Damascus speciality: baklava, barazek sesame biscuits studded with pistachio, and booza, the ice cream pounded and stretched in a drum rather than churned. Halawet el-jibn, a roll of sweet cheese and semolina filled with clotted cream, is claimed by both Homs and Hama. Bitter cardamom coffee, sweet tea, and, on special occasions, arak, the aniseed spirit, accompany gatherings.

Syria's cultural sites are extraordinary and, in several cases, war-damaged. The UNESCO-listed ancient cities of Damascus and Aleppo — the Umayyad Mosque, the covered souqs, the citadels — remain the heart of any visit, though much of Aleppo's covered souq was burnt or ruined from 2012 and the Great Mosque's minaret, raised in 1090, was brought down in 2013. Krak des Chevaliers, one of the most important preserved medieval castles in the world, was damaged by shelling and an air strike during the war but still stands.

Palmyra, the desert caravan city, was deliberately dynamited by ISIS, which held it from May 2015 to March 2016 and again from December 2016 to March 2017 and destroyed the Temple of Bel, the monumental arch, and tower tombs; the 1.1-kilometre Great Colonnade and the theatre survive in part, and restoration has been piecemeal — the Lion of al-Lat, for one, was repaired and is now in the National Museum in Damascus. The "Dead Cities" — hundreds of abandoned Byzantine settlements in the northwest — and the great pilgrimage church of Saint Simeon Stylites, itself damaged in an air strike in 2016, are also UNESCO-listed.

Beyond the ruins are the Mediterranean coast around Latakia and Tartus, the Orontes valley and the norias (water wheels) of Hama, the crusader coastal castles, the monastery towns of the Qalamoun, and the basalt landscapes of the Hauran in the south. When and whether they can be safely visited depends entirely on the course of the transition.