Syrian Independence (Evacuation Day)
The last French troops left Syria on 17 April 1946 after a mandate that had been fought over from the day it began. Faisal had been proclaimed king of a Syrian Arab kingdom by a congress in Damascus in March 1920, on the strength of the Arab Revolt and the British promises that came with it. France, which had been awarded Syria and Lebanon at San Remo the following month under the Sykes-Picot arrangement, destroyed his army at Maysalun in July and expelled him. The mandate was administered on a policy of division. Syria was broken into separate states for Damascus, Aleppo, the Alawites and the Druze, Greater Lebanon was detached with a Christian majority engineered by adding Muslim districts, and the Sanjak of Alexandretta was ceded to Turkey in 1939. The Great Syrian Revolt of 1925 to 1927 spread from the Druze mountain across the country and was suppressed by aerial bombardment of Damascus, twice, with thousands of deaths. A treaty of independence was negotiated in 1936 and never ratified in Paris. The war settled it. Vichy held Syria until British and Free French forces invaded in 1941, and de Gaulle's representative proclaimed independence to secure Syrian cooperation and then declined to deliver it. Elections in 1943 produced a nationalist government, France shelled Damascus again in May 1945, and British troops intervened to stop it. The United Nations and American pressure did the rest. Syria had seven coups in the following two decades. The borders left behind are the ones that still define the region's quarrels. Lebanon's confessional balance, the Alexandretta cession, the Alawite minority's later hold on the Syrian state, and the absence of any Syrian tradition of stable civilian rule all begin in the mandate.
- Year: 1946 CE
- Category: Political
