Syrian Arab Armed Forces (Ba'athist Syria)

The Syrian Arab Armed Forces were the combined military forces of Ba'athist Syria. They consisted of the Syrian Arab Army, the Syrian Arab Air Force, the Syrian Arab Air Defense Force and the Syrian Arab Navy, with the President of Syria as commander-in-chief and the Minister of Defence as his deputy. Men were conscripted at age 18. Officers including Hafez al-Assad seized control in the March 1963 coup, after which many Sunni officers were discharged and Alawite officers rose to the top posts, and the forces grew sharply under Hafez al-Assad from 1971. They fought Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, intervened in Lebanon from 1976 as the core of the Arab Deterrent Force and stayed there until April 2005, and were stretched by the Syrian civil war that began in 2011, which cut army strength from about 325,000 to about 150,000 by December 2014. The forces collapsed in 2024 when the Assad government fell.