Published on 9 Aug 2012 by KitKirja
سورية or سوريا : ܣܘܪܝܐ,
Syrian Arab Republic
الجمهورية العربية السورية
an Arab country in Western Asia,
bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north,
Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south,
and Israel to the southwest.
In English, the name Syria was formerly synonymous with the Levant, known in Arabic as Sham, while the modern state encompasses the sites of several ancient kingdoms and empires, including the Eblan civilization of the third millennium BC.
In the Islamic era, its capital city, Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, was the seat of the Umayyad Caliphate, and a provincial capital of the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt.
The population of Syria is
74% Sunni (mostly Sunni Arabs, but also Kurds, Circassians and Turkomans),
12% Alawi and Shia (mostly Arabs),
10% Christian (Arab Christians, Assyrians and Armenians) and
3% Druze (sometimes considered part of Shia Islam).
Combined, 87% of the Syrian population is Muslim.
The majority of the Syrian population is Arab.
The modern Syrian state was established after the First World War as a French mandate, and represented the largest Arab state to emerge from the formerly Ottoman-ruled Arab Levant.
It gained independence in April 1946, as a parliamentary republic.
The post-independence period was tumultuous, and a large number of military coups and coup attempts shook the country in the period 1949–1971.
Between 1958 and 1961, Syria entered a brief union with Egypt, which was terminated by a military coup in Syria.
Syria was under Emergency Law from 1963 to 2011, effectively suspending most constitutional protections for citizens, and its system of government is considered to be non-democratic.
Bashar al-Assad has been president since 2000 and was preceded by his father Hafez al-Assad, who was in office from 1971.
Since March 2011, an uprising against the government of Assad, considered an extension of the events of the Arab spring, has thrown a significant part of the country into armed conflict.
As of July 15, 2012, Syria is effectively in a state of civil war.
World War III (WWIII or Third World War) is the conflict that denotes a successor to World War II (1939–1945).
The conflict would be on a global scale, with common speculation that it would likely be a nuclear war and devastating in nature.
In the wake of World War I, World War II, the commencement of the Cold War and the development, testing and use of nuclear weapons, there was early widespread speculation as to the next global war.
This war was anticipated and planned for by military and civil authorities, and explored in fiction in many countries.
Concepts ranged from the limited use of atomic weapons, to the destruction of the planet.