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| See also: | Other events of 1981 List of years in Syria | ||||
The following lists events that happened during 1981 in Syria .
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| Decades: | |||||
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| See also: | Other events of 1981 List of years in Syria | ||||
The following lists events that happened during 1981 in Syria .
Bashar al-Assad is a Syrian politician, military officer, and former dictator who served as the president of Syria from 2000 until his government was overthrown in the Syrian Revolution in 2024. As president, Assad was commander-in-chief of the Syrian Arab Armed Forces and secretary-general of the Central Command of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party. He is the son of Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria from 1971 until his death in 2000.
Haddad is an Arabic surname meaning blacksmith, commonly used in the Levant and Algeria.
Damascus University is the largest and oldest university in Syria, located in the capital Damascus, with campuses in other Syrian cities. It was founded in 1923 as the Syrian University through the merger of the Medical School and the Institute of Law. It adopted its current name after the founding of the University of Aleppo in 1958.
Major General Maher Hafez al-Assad is a Syrian former military officer who served as commander of the Syrian Army's elite 4th Armoured Division, which, together with Syria's Military Intelligence, formed the core of the Ba'athist regime's security forces until its collapse in 2024. He is the younger brother of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and also was a member of the Central Committee of the Syrian Ba'ath Party.
There has been a varying nature of human rights under various governments that ruled Syria since the French colonial rule in Syria starting in the 1920s.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Syria face serious legal challenges which are not experienced by non-LGBT residents. In Ba'athist Syria (1963–2024), Article 520 of the penal code of 1949 prohibited "carnal relations against the order of nature", and it was punishable with a prison sentence of up to three years. However, it is unclear whether this still applies after the Fall of the Assad regime. Vigilante executions, beatings, and torture against LGBT people occur frequently in Syria, including attacks by the rebel group Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham and the Islamic State.
Syria, officially the Syrian Arab Republic, is a country in West Asia located in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east and southeast, Jordan to the south, and Israel and Lebanon to the southwest. It is a republic under a transitional government and comprises 14 governorates. Damascus is the capital and largest city. With a population of 25 million across an area of 185,180 square kilometres (71,500 sq mi), it is the 57th-most populous and 87th-largest country.
Although relations began in 1835, diplomatic relations between Syria and the United States are currently non-existent; they were suspended in 2012 after the onset of the Syrian Civil War. Priority issues between the two states include the Arab–Israeli conflict, the Golan Heights annexation, alleged state-sponsorship of terrorism, etc. As of 2025, the United States had begun to work with the new Syrian government after the collapse of the former regime under the Assad family.
The Syrian civil war is an ongoing multi-sided conflict in Syria involving various state-sponsored and non-state actors. In March 2011, popular discontent with the Ba'athist regime ruled by Bashar al-Assad triggered large-scale protests and pro-democracy rallies across Syria, as part of the wider Arab Spring protests in the region. After months of crackdown by the government's security apparatus, various armed rebel groups such as the Free Syrian Army began forming across the country, marking the beginning of the Syrian insurgency. By mid-2012, the Syrian Revolution escalated into a full-blown civil war.
Ali Farzat or Ali Ferzat is a Syrian political cartoonist. He has published more than 15,000 caricatures in Syrian, Arab and international newspapers. He serves as the head of the Arab Cartoonists Association. In 2011, he received Sakharov Prize for peace. Farzat was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2012.
The 1981 Azbakiyah bombing was a terrorist car bomb attack in the neighborhood of al-Azbakiyah, Damascus on 29 November 1981. The attack was blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood which was waging an insurrection against the government of Hafez al-Assad at the time.
The following is a timeline of the Syrian civil war from September to December 2012. Information about aggregated casualty counts is found at Casualties of the Syrian Civil War.
The Aleppo University bombings took place on 15 January 2013, during the Syrian Civil War. The bombings killed at least 87 people at the Aleppo University, including students and children. The explosions reportedly struck an area between the University of Aleppo's halls of residence and the faculty of architecture, on the first day of exams. Both sides blamed each other for the explosions. While the university has been a center of antigovernment demonstrations, it is also in a government-held area, with neither side seemingly having had an obvious reason to strike. It was also a refuge for over 30,000 civilians fleeing the fighting in Aleppo.
The 2013 Latakia offensive was a campaign during the Syrian Civil War launched by rebel groups led by Salafi jihadists in the Latakia Governorate. The stated aim of the offensive was to conquer al-Haffah city, but government supporters assumed conquering Mount Nabi Younes was more likely the real aim. A calculated side effect may have been to spark more sectarian violence in Syria by carrying out a sectarian attack on an Alawite-majority area. The offensive began in early August 2013. During the campaign, rebel forces captured a dozen villages. However, in mid-August, the military counter-attacked and recaptured all of the territory previously lost to the rebels.
Several incidents have taken place on the Israeli–Syrian ceasefire line during the Syrian Civil War, straining the relations between the countries. The incidents are considered a spillover of the Quneitra Governorate clashes since 2012 and later incidents between Syrian Army and the rebels, ongoing on the Syrian-controlled side of the Golan and the Golan Neutral Zone and the Hezbollah involvement in the Syrian Civil War. Through the incidents, which began in late 2012, as of mid-2014, one Israeli civilian was killed and at least 4 soldiers wounded; on the Syrian-controlled side, it is estimated that at least ten soldiers were killed, as well as two unidentified militants, who were identified near Ein Zivan on Golan Heights.
The history of Syria covers events which occurred on the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic and events which occurred in the region of Syria. Throughout ancient times the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic was occupied and ruled by several empires, including the Sumerians, Mitanni, Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Arameans, Amorites, Persians, Greeks and Romans. Syria is considered to have emerged as an independent country for the first time on 24 October 1945, upon the signing of the United Nations Charter by the Syrian government, effectively ending France's mandate by the League of Nations to "render administrative advice and assistance to the population" of Syria, which came in effect in April 1946.
The following is a timeline of the Syrian Civil War from August to December 2015. Information about aggregated casualty counts is found at Casualties of the Syrian Civil War.
The March 2020 Daraa clashes was an armed conflict between rebel fighters aligned with the Free Syrian Army and Syrian government forces in the Daraa Governorate. Clashes began after the start of a government security operation against FSA insurgent cells in Al-Sanamayn and other areas in the Daraa governorate that have been active since 2018 after the defeat of rebel forces in the province. This crackdown led to actions of retaliation by rebels across the province that led to levels of fighting unseen on such a scale since the government offensive in 2018. The fighters involved in the attack are believed to be former rebel fighters that surrendered to the government in 2018, as well as former rebels that defected to the government, and had been working against the government from within.
The following is a timeline of the Syrian civil war for 2021. Information about aggregated casualty counts is found at Casualties of the Syrian civil war.