Five years ago, I was one of a small group of people invited to meet and hear from a visitor from Syria in a meeting room in Parliament. The speaker was a former general who had once been in Assad’s inner circle, but had defected soon after the civil war broke out. I took no notes and cannot recount exactly what was said, but I do recall one moment. Something led me and another member of the audience, a former minister for whom I had once worked, to exchange glances. For both of us the penny had dropped simultaneously. We were being asked, obliquely, to lobby the British government to support a coup.

When this meeting took place in the summer of 2019, Bashar al-Assad seemed to have survived and the mood inside the room felt sceptical. But the general’s overture was not as unbelievable as it might seem. In 1956 the British government did plot with the Americans to put a former Syrian foreign minister, named Michael Ilyan, in power. Their aim was to halt the country’s leftward drift towards the Soviet Union. The coup was scheduled to take place in the late autumn of 1956, but, when it became clear that the British were simultaneously colluding with the French and Israelis to remove Egypt’s leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, it unravelled. The Americans were furious at British duplicity; so, too, was Ilyan who feared being seen as an Israeli pawn.

The following year saw three further unsuccessful American attempts to overthrow the Syrian government, two solo, and one with the British. That summer the Foreign Office had decided that Syria could ‘now be regarded as a Soviet satellite’. What complicated the situation was that Syria’s neighbours were divided about what to do about this. The possibility that Israel might take unilateral action raised fears of an uncertain Soviet response. An Anglo-American working group laid out a plan that involved encouraging unrest inside Syria, border incidents and false flag operations on foreign turf that would give Syria’s neighbours grounds to intervene. It authorised the sabotage, harassment and assassination of three leading Syrian politicians. Yet again the plan came to nothing, because Nasser, Khrushchev and King Saud all intervened. While Saud flew in to try to mediate, Khrushchev made loud noises about the danger that the confrontation could trigger a world war. Nasser outdid them both by landing troops in northern Syria to help deter a possible Turkish invasion. British files on this operation remain closed.

A few weeks later, in January 1958, a delegation of disaffected army officers went to see Nasser in Cairo and begged him to unite their countries and take charge. Nasser agreed, on two conditions: the United Arab Republic, as it became known, would be ruled from Cairo and Syria’s parliament and political parties would be dissolved. ‘You have acquired a nation of politicians’, Syria’s jaded president Shukri Quwatly is supposed to have told Nasser during his visit to Damascus. ‘Fifty per cent believe themselves to be national leaders, 25 per cent to be prophets, and at least ten per cent to be gods.’

Nasser’s visit marked the zenith of his power. Famously he paid a visit to Saladin’s tomb, which is next door to the Umayyad Mosque in the Syrian capital. Saladin took power in Egypt in 1169. Five years later, following the death of his patron, Nur al-Din, he then took over Damascus. Control of Egypt and eventually Syria enabled him to squeeze the kingdom of Jerusalem in between; in 1187, after defeating the king of Jerusalem’s army at the battle of Hattin he took the Holy City. The parallel was obvious and, as had been the case with Saladin, whose dominion splintered following his death, the United Arab Republic did not last.

Part of the problem was the disparity between the two. As an American intelligence officer put it, ‘the only commodity Syria can contribute to Egypt’s economy is apricots’. The country may have relatively few resources, but its geographical position means it is seen as strategically important. Syria has been fought over rather than fought for.

The Baath party, a nationalist and socialist movement, wanted to change that. It championed the workers, not the merchants for whom Syria has long been famed. The Baath seized power in 1963 and subsequently its military wing took over.

In 1970 an air-force officer, Hafez al-Assad, seized power. His answer to the country’s instability was tyranny: he and his son would rule for almost 55 years. The commercial classes supported the Muslim Brotherhood; Hafez dealt savagely with this threat, massacring tens of thousands in the city of Hama in 1982 and then building a tourist hotel over a mass grave. When Syria began to open up in the early 2000s after his death, the place still seethed with ratty leather-jacketed men who lurked behind pillars trying to eavesdrop. Their faint absurdity made it too easy to ignore their menace.

For a while Bashar al-Assad was courted by everyone: he met Tony Blair, had tea with the Queen and received the Legion d’Honneur from the French. British politicians of all stripes visited him in Damascus. Syria was a secular country, it was said, repeatedly.

Over lunch in Damascus during one of my visits, a well-heeled Syrian woman mentioned that she had noticed there were growing numbers of bearded students. At the time I was inclined to dismiss this as middle-aged pearl-clutching, but the observation stuck in my mind. It is now clear that Assad was also worried about what was going on inside his country. Fearing he was next on George W. Bush’s to-do list of dictator-toppling, his regime encouraged would-be jihadis to go to Iraq hoping that they might bog the Americans down after the 2003 invasion. This spectacularly backfired when the jihadis soon came home.

After Syrian fingerprints were found all over the bomb that killed Lebanon’s prime minister Rafic Hariri in 2005, and the Israelis discovered Assad was trying to build a nuclear bomb, foreigners were forced to confront a truth many Syrians had known all along. After the Arab Spring prompted demonstrations against him, Assad, by now a pariah, tried to make a virtue of his isolation, claiming that the opposition was illegitimate because Syria was the toughest opponent of Israel and the West.

By that point, Syria was far more vulnerable than it appeared. A drought had driven significant migration from the countryside into the cities and, as in other Arab countries, there was little work to provide those new arrivals with a living. A couple of entrepreneurial boys who appeared after I had a puncture just outside Deraa charged me a dollar – that was all – to patch the tyre. The bodge lasted a thousand miles or so.

In 2009, I drove out to Deir ez Zor, on the Euphrates, and then upstream past Raqqa to Aleppo, entirely unsuspecting of what was about to happen. By then, Syria had become crucial to Iran. Arms could be shipped through Iraq via Deir-ez-Zor and Homs and on to Hezbollah in Lebanon. It was Hizbollah that convinced the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei to intervene in Syria in 2012. The head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps Qasim Solemani in turn went cap in hand to Moscow in 2015, when it seemed like Assad was on the brink.

Although the battle for Aleppo drew the attention of the outside world, the earlier struggle for the city of Homs was arguably more important. Its position, at the mouth of a gap in the mountains that screen the Syrian hinterland from the coast, has made it important down the ages. In Roman times the city was famous for the manufacture of a diaphanous fabric that commanded astronomic prices. Control Homs and you control access to Lebanon and the Syrian desert and communications between Damascus and Aleppo. This was why the Hospitallers built their most famous castle, the Crac des Chevaliers, in the hills west of the city. Just as the fall of the Crac in 1271 portended the collapse of Outremer two decades later, so the rebels’ capture of Homs last week clearly showed that Assad was on his final legs. How long his successor will survive in power is hard to say. The outsiders who have bedevilled Syrian politics since independence have not gone away.