In 1943, veteran nationalist Shukri al-Quwatli was elected president of Syria. An old friend of Saudi Arabia, his first destination was Riyadh, where he was received with red carpets by its founding monarch, King Abdul-Aziz al-Saud, before making a stop in Cairo for an audience with King Farouk.
Together, they co-created the Arab League in 1944 and were founders at the United Nations Conference in San Fransisco in 1945. They also saw eye-to-eye when it came to the territorial ambitions of King Abdullah I of Jordan, who dreamt of creating a “Greater Syria” under the Hashemite Crown, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Sa’id, who at the time was lobbying for his Fertile Crescent project.
Without being formally put into writing, a Saudi-Egyptian-Syrian alliance was crafted in the mid-1940s and remained intact despite the series of coups that rocked Syria starting in 1949 and the instability of post-monarchial Egypt after the 1952 putsch that toppled King Farouk.
It had its ups and downs but was only drowned and subsequently killed by Bashar al-Assad shortly after he came to power in 2000. He betrayed Saudi Arabia’s trust, first by killing their ally, Prime Minister Rafic Hariri of Lebanon, and then by making Syria a home base and launching pad for Iran and Hezbollah.
Despite the bad blood with al-Assad, Saudi Arabia reached out to him in early 2023 following a devastating earthquake that February. The call-out was not for Bashar’s sake but to help save Syria from its crippling isolation. The Saudi embassy in Damascus was re-opened, and al-Assad was invited to three Arab summits in Saudi Arabia, the last being on 11 November 2024, where he met with Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS).
The Crown Prince hoped that he could lure al-Assad from the Iranian orbit and back into the family of Arab nations but the Syrian president refused to budge, standing loyal and committed to Tehran. He turned down every single Arab initiative before ultimately being toppled by an HTS-led lightning offensive on 8 December 2024.
Less than a month later, Ahmed al-Shara became the new president of Syria and was immediately embraced by Saudi Arabia. The Saudi foreign minister came to Damascus ahead of al-Sharaa’s first overseas visit to Riyadh on 2 February 2025, just like Shukri al-Quwatli had done 81 years earlier.
Building on the Quwatli legacy
Throughout the 20th century, Saudi Arabia had always been supportive of Syrian national aspirations ever since Shukri al-Quwatli first came visiting as a young man in the early 1920s, seeking Riyadh’s support for the Syrian-Palestinian Congress, an opposition group in exile aimed at liberating Syria and Lebanon from the French Mandate, and Iraq and Palestinian from the British one.
King Abdul-Aziz supported it politically and bankrolled it financially, helping set up a branch near Abidin Palace in Cairo, which was dubbed the “Abidin Committee.” In addition to al-Quwatli, it included frontline Arab nationalists like Lebanese philosopher Emir Shakib Arslan and Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem.
Returning the favour, al-Quwatli sent a handful of prominent Syrians to help King Abdul-Aziz in nation-building. The list included Rashad Pharoan and Mihdat Sheikh al-Ard, two Damascene natives who rose to prominence in the Saudi court; Pharoan as special adviser to the monarch and then health minister, and Sheikh al-Ard as private physician to King Abdul-Aziz. Sheikh Yusuf Yassin was celebrated Syrian in the Saudi court, becoming private secretary to the king and then foreign minister, and so was Kheir al-Din al-Zirikli, a man of letters who was appointed adviser at the Saudi embassy in Cairo, then director of the Saudi foreign minister and finally, adviser to the king’s son, Emir Faisal.
Syrian independence
In 1927, Saudi Arabia supported the establishment of the National Bloc in Syria, an anti-French political movement aimed at liberating their country by political engagement and ballots rather than bullets. In April 1933, a delegation of its top leaders visited Riyadh to have an audience with the king, headed by future prime minister Jamil Mardam Bey.
King Abdul-Aziz’s support came with no strings attached; he had no territorial ambitions outside the Hejaz and curtly refused an offer to make his son, Emir Faisal, king of Syria in the early 1930s, famously saying: “Syria is for the Syrian people.”
In 1941, he was the first among Arab leaders to congratulate Syria’s new president, Taj al-Din al-Hasani, on the French proclamation of Syrian independence, although the withdrawal of French troops was made conditional on the suspension of military conflict in Europe. The Saudi king promised the Syrian president that he would do all that was possible to secure a swift and smooth evacuation of foreign troops once World War II came to an end.
That same year, Shukri al-Quwatli was exiled from Syria on the charges of being pro-Nazi. He was given asylum in Mecca, and King Abdul-Aziz lobbied on his behalf with French and British authorities, claiming that all the accusations brought against him were baseless and entirely false. He asked that al-Quwatli be allowed to enter Syria with no persecution or harassment, but General Charles de Gaulle insisted that he relocate to Beirut rather than Damascus to separate him from his power base in the Syrian capital.
Once again, King Abdul-Aziz said no, and al-Quwatli returned safely to Syria, running for the presidency and winning in 1943. He was sworn in on 17 August, and his first overseas visit was to Riyadh.
The Quwatli-Churchill Summit of 1945
The year 1945 was pivotal in the history of bilateral relations, with President al-Quwatli visiting Riyadh again to meet with the king after the latter's famous summit with US President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 14 February. King Abdul-Aziz asked President Roosevelt to meet al-Quwatli in person, assuring him that he was a fine patriot with whom the Americans could do business. He also asked that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and King Farouk be present at the summit. Roosevelt gave an initial okay but had to apologise at the very last moment due to his health.
The Syrian-British summit took place in Cairo on 17 February 1945. During that meeting, Churchill agreed to invite Syria to the inauguration of the United Nations in San Francisco next April, giving him an international platform to make his country's case for full independence from colonial France. The Quwatli-Churchill summit and Syria's presence at the UN hastened the end of the mandate, and although King Abdul-Aziz was unable to attend the first Independence Day celebrations in Damascus on 17 April 1946, he sent his son Emir Faisal with a 10-man delegation of Saudi royals. Shoulder-to-shoulder, Emir Faisal helped raise the flag of Syrian independence with al-Quwatli, which now returns to the skies of Damascus as the flag of post-Assad Syria.
The two states would then work together for the creation of the Army of Deliverance in Palestine, which the Arab League mandated after the Palestine Partition Plan was issued in November 1947. King Abdul-Aziz handled its salaries while its training camps were established near the Syrian capital.
String of military coups
Like everybody else in the Arab World, King Abdul-Aziz was shocked by the news coming from Damascus early on the morning of 30 March 1949 that President al-Quwatli had been toppled by a military coup the previous night, staged by army commander Husni al-Za'im. He greatly feared that this would awaken the appetite of the Syrian officer class and cabled al-Za'im, saying that Saudi Arabia would only recognise his new administration if al-Quwatli's life were spared.
Al-Za'im obliged, sending al-Quwatli into exile in Egypt, after which Riyadh formally recognised the new Syrian regime, which ended up collapsing only a few months later when al-Za'im was toppled and subsequently executed on 14 August 1949.
King Abdul-Aziz immediately reached out to Syria's new head of state, Hashim al-Atassi, a former president who had worked with him back in the 1930s, helping solve disputes with neighbouring Yemen. Then came the military coup of Colonel Adib Shishakli in November 1951, which, although coming at the expense of President al-Attasi, nevertheless established excellent ties with Riyadh. Saudi Crown Prince Saud Ibn Abdul-Aziz visited Damascus and Latakia under Shishakli in April 1953, before the passing of his father on 9 November.
When Shishakli was toppled in February 1954, he chose Saudi Arabia as his first destination before moving to Europe and finally to Brazil. The Saudis supported him until the curtain fell but welcomed the decision to restore Hashem al-Atasi to complete what was left of his constitutional term, which was aborted by the Shishakli coup of 1951.
The Nasserist age
During this period and coming at the apex of the Cold War, King Saud began worrying about what the future had in store for Syria due to the rising influence of communism, socialism, and Nasserism. The 1954 election of a communist deputy to the Syrian parliament troubled him greatly, and so did the increased tutelage of the USSR and Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.
In 1957, he intervened politically to defuse a military confrontation with Turkey, which had amassed troops on its border with Syria, threatening to intervene and topple the pro-USSR government. As King Saud invested in diplomacy, Gamal Abdel Nasser went for a flamboyant approach, sending troops to Syria and threatening to go to war if the Turkish Army attacked. Although King Saud eventually solved that crisis politically, it was Abdel Nasser who eventually took credit for avoiding a military showdown.
King Saud was further appalled by the Syrian-Egyptian union of February 1958, under which bilateral relations deteriorated sharply with Damascus after then-director of Syrian military intelligence Abdul Hamid al-Sarraj accused him of bankrolling an assassination attempt on Abdel Nasser's life.
The Saudi king watched in disbelief as Syria slipped into a police state and socialist economy, with Abdel Nasser issuing his Agricultural Reform Law in September 1958, crushing Syria's old landowning elite, followed by the nationalisation laws of July 1961 which targeted Syrian banks, factories, and private enterprise.
And it was with little surprise that he would be the first to celebrate the coup that toppled the United Arab Republic on 28 September 1961. Saudi Arabia lobbied with Bank of America to present Syria with an immediate $5mn loan to help compensate for Abdel Nasser's socialist measures and agreed to defer a loan that it had given to the Syrian government before 1958 worth $5mn. King Saud also used his influence to restore Syria's independent seat at the United Nations and the Arab League, much to the displeasure of Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The Ba'athist age
The post-union era did not last long and was soon toppled by the Baath Party coup of 8 March 1963. Another major slump in Syrian-Saudi relations would ensue, but it never evolved into a complete break in bilateral relations. The Saudis were upset by Syria's new leaders dismissing hundreds of qualified officers from military service – mainly Sunni Muslims – and by the new nationalization laws issued under President Amin al-Hafez in January 1965.
When Hafez al-Assad came to power in November 1970, Riyadh initially welcomed his ascent, seeing him as strikingly different from Baath hardlines, who had run the state since 1963. Former military strongman Salah Jadid, who al-Assad jailed in 1970, had frequently referred to Saudi Arabia and Jordan as "reactionary states" allied to "Western imperialism."
Riyadh welcomed al-Assad and bankrolled the Syrian treasury after the October War of 1973, with King Faisal famously using oil as a weapon to pressure the US in support of the Syrian president and his Egyptian counterpart Anwar Sadat.
Although the environment for foreign investment was very unwelcoming under a socialist economy, Saudi Arabia continued to fund development projects in Syria during what remained of the 1970s, despite the fact that Saudi investors were not immune to harassment and thuggery in light of the highly corrupted Syrian judiciary.
And yet, it did not object to Hafez al-Assad supporting Ayatollah Khomeini during the Iran-Iraq War that broke out in 1980. By then, King Khaled was in power, and he reasoned that Syria could influence the Iranian regime to soften its hardline approach and limit its territorial ambitions in the Arab World.
Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 was a golden moment to jumpstart bilateral relations and take them to a new level. Along with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, both al-Assad and King Fahd were furious with Saddam Hussein.
After meeting with US President George HW Bush in Switzerland in November 1990, al-Assad agreed to send troops to protect Saudi Arabia from a possible Iraqi invasion and then to help liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein's army in January 1991.
The Syrians and Saudis worked together well in the 1990s, helping orchestrate the Taif Conference that ended the Lebanese Civil War, and al-Assad agreed to back Riyadh's choice for Lebanon's prime minister, Lebanese-Saudi tycoon Rafic Hariri. In return, the Saudis agreed to keep Syrian troops in Lebanon, conditioning that all militias surrender their arms, with the exception of Hezbollah, which was allowed to keep its arsenal under the guise of resisting the Israelis—a concession granted by King Fahd to Hafez al-Assad.
The Syrian-Saudi alliance in Lebanon would live long and operate well until Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father as president on 17 July 2000.
Crown Prince Emir Abdullah took part in Hafez al-Assad's funeral on 13 June 2000, supporting Bashar's ascent to power without ever imagining that he would be the first to backstab the kingdom, first by killing Hariri in 2005, and then by opening Syria's territory to Iranian militias.
Saudi Arabia continued to try and talk reason into al-Assad, especially after the outbreak of the Syrian Revolt in 2011. It lobbied for serious political reforms, but al-Assad would hear nothing of it, calling on Hezbollah instead to wage a long war against the Syrian people, during which entire cities were bulldozed to the ground, with hundreds of thousands being killed either on the battlefield or in al-Assad's jails, and millions being uprooted from their homes and forced to flee as refugees.
Al-Assad would eventually lose that uphill battle when he was forced out of Damascus on 8 December 2024, becoming a refugee in Moscow. His regime collapsed and was replaced by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the military group commanded by Ahmed al-Sharaa, which translates from Arabic as a "liberation of Damascus." Al-Sharaa was true to his word; he liberated Damascus without spilling a drop of blood, ending 54 years of the Assad family and 61 years of Ba'athist rule.
