Syria's Own Officers Asked Nasser to Abolish Their Country | THE DREAM BRITAIN FEARED Part 3

History Onion · Part 3 · 2:54

On 11 January 1958 a delegation of Syrian army officers flew to Cairo without telling their own president and asked Gamal Abdel Nasser for union. Syria had run through six governments in six years, and the officers believed that if it stayed independent it would go communist. President Shukri al-Quwatli learned of the trip a day later; he flew to Cairo himself at the end of January to sign. That was not the plan Egyptians had drawn up in 1919. The federation the founders described was a union of sovereign states, none able to outvote the rest. Nasser said as much — he told the Syrians the two countries were not ready, and by his colleague Abdel Latif al-Boghdadi's account he had wanted a looser federation. What changed his mind was the same fear of a communist Syria. He set his terms: a single state, every Syrian party dissolved, the army out of politics. The Syrians accepted, and on 1 February 1958 the United Arab Republic was proclaimed — one state, ruled from Cairo. Egyptian officers and administrators took over Syrian ministries. Nasser's Syrian deputy, Abdul Hamid al-Sarraj, ran a secret police that Syrians nicknamed after Sultan Abdul Hamid II. In July 1961 Cairo nationalised Syria's banks and industry by decree. On 28 September 1961 Syrian officers took Syria out of the union, and nobody fought to keep it. What survived was the radio — Cairo's Voice of the Arabs, broadcasting at more than 500 kilowatts by 1956, kept selling the dream of unity, including the campaign to rename the Persian Gulf the "Arabian Gulf". Then, on 26 September 1962, army officers in Yemen overthrew the king and asked Nasser for help. Within two years there were 70,000 Egyptian soldiers in Yemen's mountains, and the declassified British intelligence record documents Egyptian aircraft dropping mustard gas on the caves where the royalists sheltered. Historians have called it Egypt's Vietnam. The army Egypt wore down in Yemen was the army that would face Israel in June 1967.