Shi'ite in the context of Imam Husayn Shrine

From the 2000s until the fall of the Assad regime, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Syrian Arab Republic were close strategic allies, and Iran provided significant support for the Syrian Ba'athist government in the Syrian civil war, including logistical, technical and financial support, as well as training and combat troops. Iran saw the survival of the Assad regime as being crucial to its regional interests. When the uprising developed into the Syrian civil war, there were increasing reports of Iranian military support, and of Iranian training of the National Defence Forces both in Syria and Iran. From late 2011 and early 2012, Iran's IRGC sent tens of thousands of Iranian troops and Shi'ite foreign paramilitary volunteers in coordination with the Syrian government to prevent the collapse of the regime; thereby polarizing the conflict along sectarian lines.

Iranian security and intelligence services advised and assisted the Syrian military in order to preserve the erstwhile Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's hold on power. Those efforts included training, technical support, and combat troops. Estimates of the number of Iranian personnel in Syria ranged from hundreds to tens of thousands. Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, backed by Iran's government, had taken direct combat roles from 2012 until 2024. From the summer of 2013, Iran and Hezbollah provided important battlefield support for Assad, allowing it to make advances on the opposition.

Salamiyah (Arabic: سلمية, romanized: Salamiyya; also transliterated Salamiyya, Salamieh or Salamya) is a city in central Syria, administratively part of the Hama Governorate. It is located 33 kilometres (21 miles) southeast of Hama, 45 kilometres (28 miles) northeast of Homs. Its inhabitants are predominantly Ismaili.

The city is nicknamed the "mother of Cairo" because it was the birthplace of the second Fatimid caliph al-Qa'im bi-Amr Allah, whose dynasty would eventually establish the city of Cairo, and the early headquarters of his father Abdullah al-Mahdi Billah who founded the Fatimid Caliphate. The city is an important center of the Shi'ite Nizari Isma'ili and Taiyabi Isma'ili Islamic schools of Ismailism and also the birthplace of influential poet Muhammad al-Maghut. The population of the city is 66,724 (2004 census).

Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (Arabic: أَبو موسى جابِر بِن حَيّان, variously called al-Ṣūfī, al-Azdī, al-Kūfī, or al-Ṭūsī), died c. 806−816, is the purported author of a large number of works in Arabic, often called the Jabirian corpus. The c. 215 treatises that survive today mainly deal with alchemy and chemistry, magic, and Shi'ite religious philosophy. However, the original scope of the corpus was vast, covering a wide range of topics ranging from cosmology, astronomy and astrology, over medicine, pharmacology, zoology and botany, to metaphysics, logic, and grammar.

The works attributed to Jabir, which are tentatively dated to c. 850 – c. 950, contain the oldest known systematic classification of chemical substances, and the oldest known instructions for deriving an inorganic compound (sal ammoniac or ammonium chloride) from organic substances (such as plants, blood, and hair) by chemical means. His works also contain one of the earliest known versions of the sulfur-mercury theory of metals, a mineralogical theory that would remain dominant until the 18th century.