During the Franco-Syrian War, ar-Rastan served as one of the bases for Saleh al-Ali and his local allies and was shelled by French forces in early 1920. Two Sunni Muslim agricultural clans, the Firzat and the Hamdan, dominated ar-Rastan in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The former claimed descent from the Banu 'Abs tribe that arrived in Syria as part of Khalid ibn al-Walid's army in the mid-7th-century. A member, Sheikh Abd al-Qader, served as ar-Rastan's "mukhtar" in the late Ottoman and French Mandate periods.