Syrian Social Nationalist Party - The SSNP in Lebanon

The SSNP in Lebanon

After Saadeh was executed and its high-ranking leaders were arrested, the party remained underground until 1958 when it sided with then-president Camille Chamoun against the Arab nationalist rebels.

The party launched an abortive coup attempt in 1961, under the semi-authoritarian rule of General Fouad Chehab. This resulted in a renewed proscription and the imprisonment of many of its leaders. In prison, some of the SSNP militants came under the influence of Marxism with the left-wing Al Taware faction splitting off in the 1970s, a split that would remain until the end of the Lebanese Civil War.

With the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, the SSNP formed a militia that allied with the leftist Lebanese National Movement (LNM), against the Phalangists and their allies of the Lebanese Front. The SSNP saw the Lebanese Civil War as the inevitable result of the divisions of the Syrian nation into small states and away from a liberation war against Israel. After the defeat of leftist forces in the 1982 Lebanon War, the SSNP joined a number of the leftist organizations who regrouped to resist the Israeli occupation, including the killing of two Israeli soldiers in a Wimpy Cafe in west Beirut by party member Khalid Alwan. The FBI blames the SSNP for the assassination, in in 1982, of Bachir Gemayel, Lebanon's newly elected president supported by the Israelis besieging Beirut. In 1983 the party joined the Lebanese National Salvation Front.

The SSNP participated in a number of general elections in Lebanon, winning 6 seats in 1992, although seeing a decline in subsequent elections winning 2 seats in both 2005 and 2009. The SSNP were involved in the 2008 conflict in Lebanon, with gunmen attacking an SSNP office.