State of Damascus

The State of Damascus was one of the states created by the French general Henri Gouraud in the mandate of Syria after the San Remo conference of 1920 and the defeat of King Faisal's short-lived Arab kingdom. It was proclaimed on 3 September 1920, with Damascus as its capital and Haqqi al-Azm as its first president. The state initially included Damascus, Homs, Hama and the Orontes valley, but it lost the Biqa valley and southern Lebanon to the French-administered State of Greater Lebanon. Its institutions were built under French supervision, with a representative council and a local administration that mirrored the mandatory power's structures. In 1922 Damascus joined the short-lived Syrian Federation with Aleppo and the Alawite State, and in 1925 it was merged with the State of Aleppo to form the State of Syria. The state was thus a brief administrative stage in the French partition of Syria, which nationalists regarded as a deliberate fragmentation of the Arab country.