The Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) is a Syrian nationalist party operating in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. It advocates the establishment of a Greater Syrian nation state spanning the Fertile Crescent, including present-day Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Palestine, Cyprus, Sinai, Hatay Province, and Cilicia, based on geographical boundaries and the common history people within the boundaries share. It has also been active in the Syrian and Lebanese diaspora, for example in South America with over 100,000 members as of 2016, it is the second-largest legal political group in Syria after the ruling Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party. Founded in Beirut in 1932 by the Greek Orthodox Lebanese intellectual Antoun Saadeh as an anticolonial and national liberation organization hostile to French colonialism, the party played a significant role in Lebanese politics and was involved in attempted coups d'état in 1949 and 1961, following which it was thoroughly repressed. It was active in resistance against the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent occupation of southern Lebanon until 2000, while continuously supporting the Syrian presence in Lebanon out of belief in Syrian irredentism. In Syria, the SSNP had become a major syncretic political force in the early 1950s, but was thoroughly repressed in 1955–56. It remained organized, and by the late 1990s had allied itself with the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Lebanese Communist Party, despite the ideological differences between them. The SSNP was legalized in Syria in 2005, and joined the Ba'ath Party-led National Progressive Front. From 2012 to 6 May 2014, the party was part of the Popular Front for Change and Liberation. During the course of the Syrian Civil War, the party has become more prominent in Syria, where almost 12,000 fighters of the party's armed branch, the Eagles of the Whirlwind, have fought alongside the Syrian Armed Forces against the Syrian opposition and the Islamic State. Background Early Syrian nationalists In the mid-nineteenth century Butrus al-Bustani was one of the first to assert the existence of a natural Syrian nation that should be accommodated in a reformed Ottoman Empire. He belonged to the Nahda, thinkers influenced by the Arabic Literary Renaissance and the French Revolution and who wished to shape the Tanzimat reforms, which were an attempt to introduce a constitutional monarchy with religious freedom to reverse the Ottoman state's creeping economic marginalisation and which would lead to the Young Turks and the Second Constitutional Era.