Flag of Syria

How to read it

Article 6 of Syria’s Constitutional Declaration of 13 March 2025 sets out the flag: a rectangle of three equal parts, green at the top, white in the middle and black at the bottom, with three red stars in the middle of the white. The English translation published by ConstitutionNet, marked as automated, gives the proportions as a length two thirds of the width; Store norske leksikon notes that the flag is most often shown at 2:3, and also in a longer 1:2 version. The flag has been in use since 8 December 2024, when President Bashar al-Assad left Syria, Store norske leksikon records; from 2013 it had been the flag of the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. The new flag was raised at United Nations headquarters in New York on 25 April 2025, Rudaw reported. It replaced the flag of red, white and black stripes with two green stars that Syria had used officially since 1980, described in its 2012 constitution.

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The independence flag of 1932

Moubayed, writing for the Carnegie Endowment in 2012, gives the flag’s origin: a parliamentary committee headed by Ibrahim Hananu, one of the leaders of the revolts against the French in the 1920s, created it in 1932, in the time of Syria’s first elected civilian president, Muhammad Ali al-Abid. White stood for the Umayyads, black for the Abbasids and green for the Rashidun caliphs. The official decree of 1932 says the three stars stood for three revolts against the mandate: those of the Alawites, the Druze and northern Syria. The flag was hoisted on government buildings on Syria’s independence day in 1946. It was dropped in 1958, when Syria joined Egypt in the United Arab Republic, came back when the union ended in 1961, and stayed in use for almost a year after the Ba’athists came to power in 1963. The Norwegian encyclopedia Store norske leksikon dates the flag to 1930 instead, with proportions of 1:2.

The flag from 1980 to 2024

Syria’s 2012 constitution described the flag it replaced: red, white and black stripes of equal height, with two green five-pointed stars in the middle of the white, its width two thirds of its length. According to Store norske leksikon, this was the flag of the United Arab Republic of Syria and Egypt from 1958 to 1961, and that the two-star form was officially adopted in 1980. It has the same stripes as Egypt’s flag, which has a golden eagle of Saladin on the white, and Yemen’s, which has nothing on them.

Telling it from Jordan’s and Palestine’s flags

Jordan’s and Palestine’s flags have the same four colours, but their stripes run black, white and green from the top, the reverse of Syria’s, and both have a red triangle at the pole. Syria’s has no triangle; its red is in the three stars.