A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the struggle that shaped the Middle East

by James Barr

Since finally winning its independence in 1946 after a quarter of a century of French rule, Syria had proved notoriously unstable, even by the standards of the region. By November 1949 there had already been two coups d’état that year. Shukri al-Quwatli, who had steered the country to independence, was overthrown in March by an army officer, Husni Zaim, who in turn was murdered when the then current president Sami al-Hinnawi seized power in August. Seeking to draw a line under his brutal removal of his predecessor, al-Hinnawi – ‘a fat, slug-like creature with no brain’, according to one diplomat – had called a general election that was now only days away.1

The poll was controversial because al-Hinnawi, who came from the ancient city of Aleppo in the north, had banned the semi-nomadic Bedu tribesmen of eastern Syria from voting on the grounds that they were vulnerable to foreign manipulation from beyond the country’s porous desert borders. This tension between the settled peoples of the urbanised, fertile west and the wild nomads of the eastern desert was one of several that now made Syrian politics so volatile. The tribesmen were deeply angry that they had been disenfranchised – Stirling was well aware of it, because he had gone deep into the desert to report on their resentment eight weeks earlier.2 So when the three men standing at the door claimed they had been sent by the shaykh of a large and influential tribe who was an old friend of his, Stirling took their persistence to mean they brought vital news that might have a bearing on the imminent vote. He relented, and told his servant Ali to let them in. It was to prove a fatal error.