ABSTRACT
A brief overview of the country Syria is an Asian country located on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, bordering Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan and Palestine to the south, the Mediterranean Sea and Lebanon to the west. Syria is a country of the Arab Homeland, and the official language is Arabic. Mansfield (1985: 368) referred to the country as ‘The Heart of Arabism’. Crucial to understanding Syria today is an awareness of its political history, especially the period before the First World War, when Syria was part of the Bilad-ash-Sham region under the Ottoman Empire. This included a vast territory whose national boundaries were later redrawn. This large area came under French and English mandates following the Sykes-Picot agreement (signed in 1916, made public in 1917 and implemented after the war), with modern Syria and Lebanon under the French, and Jordan, Palestine and Iraq under the English.
