Southern Syria

Southern Syria (Arabic: سوريا الجنوبية, romanized: Sūriyā al-Janūbiyya) is a geographical term referring to the southern portion of either the Ottoman-period Vilayet of Syria, or the modern-day Arab Republic of Syria.

The term was used in the Arabic language primarily from 1919 until the end of the Franco-Syrian war in July 1920, during which the Arab Kingdom of Syria existed.

Zachary Foster, in his Princeton University doctoral dissertation, has written that in the decades prior to World War I, the term “Southern Syria” was the least frequently used out of ten different ways to describe the region of Palestine in Arabic, noting it was so rare that “it took me nearly a decade to find a handful of references”.