Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction) in the context of "17 July Revolution"

The Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party – Syria Region (Arabic: حزب البعث العربي الاشتراكي – قطر سوريا Ḥizb al-Ba'th al-'Arabī al-Ishtirākī – Quṭr Sūriyā), officially the Syrian Regional Branch (Arabic: الفرع القطري السوري), was a neo-Ba'athist organisation founded on 7 April 1947 by Michel Aflaq, Salah al-Din al-Bitar and followers of Zaki al-Arsuzi. The party ruled Syria from the 1963 coup d'état, which brought the Ba'athists to power, until 8 December 2024, when Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus in the face of a rebel offensive during the Syrian civil war. It was formally disbanded in January 2025.

The party was founded on 7 April 1947 as the Arab Ba'ath Party through the merger of the Arab Ba'ath Movement led by Michel ʿAflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar and the Arab Ba'ath, led by Zaki al-Arsuzi. The party espoused Ba'athism, an ideology mixing Arab nationalist, pan-Arab, Arab socialist, and anti-imperialist interests. Ba'athism calls for the unification of the Arab world into a single state. It quickly established branches in other Arab countries, although it would only hold power in Syria and in Iraq. Following their ascent to power in 1963, neo-Ba'athist officers proceeded to stamp out the traditional civilian elites in order to construct a military dictatorship operating on totalitarianlines; wherein all state agencies, party organisations, public institutions, civil entities, media and health infrastructure were tightly dominated by the military establishment and the Mukhabarat (intelligence services).

Ba'athism, also spelled Baathism, is an Arab nationalist ideology which advocates the establishment of a unified Arab state through the rule of a Ba'athist vanguard party operating under a revolutionary socialist framework. The ideology is officially based on the theories of the Syrian intellectuals Michel Aflaq (per the Iraqi-led Ba'ath Party), Zaki al-Arsuzi (per the Syrian-led Ba'ath Party), and Salah al-Din al-Bitar. Ba'athist leaders of the modern era include the former president of Iraq Saddam Hussein, and former presidents of Syria Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad.

The Ba'athist ideology advocates the "enlightenment of the Arabs" as well as the renaissance of their culture, values and society. It also advocates the creation of one-party states and rejects political pluralism in an unspecified length of time—the Ba'ath party theoretically uses an unspecified amount of time to develop an "enlightened" Arab society. Ba'athism is founded on the principles of Arab nationalism, pan-Arabism, and Arab socialism, as exemplified by its slogan "Unity, Freedom, Socialism".

The war on terror, officially the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), is a global military campaign initiated by the United States in response to the September 11 attacks in 2001. A global conflict spanning multiple wars, some researchers and political scientists have argued that it replaced the Cold War.

The main targets of the campaign were militant Islamist movements such as al-Qaeda, the Taliban and their allies. Other major targets included the Ba'athist regime in Iraq, which was deposed in an invasion in 2003, and various militant factions that fought during the ensuing insurgency. Following its territorial expansion in 2014, the Islamic State also emerged as a key adversary of the United States.

The Iran–Iraq War was an armed conflict between Iran and Iraq that lasted from September 1980 to August 1988. Active hostilities began with the Iraqi invasion of Iran and lasted for nearly eight years, until the acceptance of United Nations Security Council Resolution 598 by both sides. Iraq's primary rationale for the attack against Iran cited the need to prevent Ruhollah Khomeini—who had spearheaded the Iranian revolution in 1979—from exporting the new Iranian ideology to Iraq. There were also fears among the Iraqi leadership of Saddam Hussein that Iran, a theocratic state with a population predominantly composed of Shia Muslims, would exploit sectarian tensions in Iraq by rallying Iraq's Shia majority against the Baʽathist government, which was officially secular but dominated by Sunni Muslims. Iraq also wished to replace Iran as the power player in the Persian Gulf, which was not seen as an achievable objective prior to the Islamic Revolution because of Pahlavi Iran's economic and military superiority as well as its close relationships with the United States and Israel.

The Iran–Iraq War followed a long-running history of territorial border disputes between the two states, as a result of which Iraq planned to retake the eastern bank of the Shatt al-Arab that it had ceded to Iran in the 1975 Algiers Agreement. Iraqi support for Arab separatists in Iran increased following the outbreak of hostilities; Saddam disputedly may have wished to annex Iran's Arab-majority Khuzestan province.

The Assadist–Saddamist conflict, also known as the Ba'ath Party intraconflict, was a conflict and ideological rivalry between the Assadist Syrian-led Ba'ath Party and its subgroups, loyal to Ba'athist Syria, and the Saddamist Iraqi-led Ba'ath Party and its subgroups, loyal to Ba'athist Iraq. The conflict continued ideologically even after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and subsequent toppling of President Saddam Hussein, and ended after the fall of the Assad regime to a Syrian opposition offensive. Nonetheless, both regimes demonstrate shared traits, including strong militarization of society, autocratic rule, oppression, limitations on freedoms, power monopolization, electoral fraud, and responsibility for extensive suffering in both nations and the wider region.