Throughout the 2010s, the Syrian Arab Republic was ripped apart by a vicious civil conflict that killed at least half-a-million people, displaced and made refugees of millions more and led to the rise of notorious terrorist groups like the Islamic State.
The conflict emerged out of the Arab Spring of 2011, when Arabs from across the Middle East and North Africa took to the streets to protest the various regimes that ruled over them, oppressed and brutalized them and plundered the wealth of their countries.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad watched as Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled his country, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, and rebels murdered Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi after an armed uprising.
Early in the Arab Spring, Assad insisted his regime was different and wouldn’t face any uprising. However, when some young protesters in the southern Syrian city of Daraa, inspired by the initial success of the Arab Spring in the aforementioned countries, began protesting against Assad’s rule they were brutally met with violence by regime forces.
Over the next year, Assad’s state security forces repressed protests across the country, which became increasingly more violent. Protesters were shot in the street, imprisoned and tortured. The uprising descended into a full-fledged civil war by 2012. Syrian Army officers defected to the opposition forming the Free Syrian Army (FSA) against the regime. Various other armed groups, many of them violent Islamists, exploited the chaos and gained ground.
The scorched earth tactics the regime used against opposition groups, particularly in urban areas, infamously reduced some of Syria’s most beautiful cities and heritage sites into heaps of rubble. The regime besieged rebels in the Syrian city of Homs for a staggering three years and destroyed large parts of it.
Syria’s second city, Aleppo, was subjected to an even longer series of increasingly vicious battles between July 2012 and December 2016, becoming one of the longest and most significant sieges in modern warfare that left over 30,000 people dead.
Assad’s regime also infamously used gas in East Ghouta, killing as many as 1,300 people in August 2013. While Western powers did not intervene against him for that attack, they did successfully compel his regime to surrender large stockpiles of its declared chemical weapons arsenal, which were shipped out of Syria and rendered inert. Despite this, subsequent chemical attacks ensued in 2017 and 2018. While the US did retaliate on those two occasions, it only fired cruise missiles at a couple of fixed targets, doing little to deter the regime from using chemicals again.
Chemicals also killed comparatively few Syrians compared to Assad’s use of conventional weapons, ranging from artillery to airstrikes to infamous barrel bombs, which terrorized civilians who lived in opposition-held areas.
Over the decade, Syria’s neighbours Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon sheltered millions of refugees, many of whom lived, and still live, in overcrowded camps. Millions were also displaced inside Syria.
The conflict, predictably, did not remain confined within Syria’s borders. Most infamously, the notorious ISIS group gradually rose to power and captured swathes of territory in eastern Syria. It fought against another sub-state entity established by the Syrian Kurds (often referred to by its Kurdish name ‘Rojava’) in the wake of the power vacuum caused by the conflict.
ISIS captured the city of Raqqa and large swathes of the eastern oil-rich Deir ez-Zor region, but not all of its eponymous capital city. In 2014, it successfully pushed into Iraq and captured one-third of the country, including its second city Mosul, and declared its self-styled caliphate which, at the height of its power, spanned a territory roughly equal in size to the United Kingdom. It symbolically dismantled the border between Iraq and Syria, declaring those states dead. Among various other atrocities, it subjected Iraq’s Yazidi minority to a vicious campaign of genocide.
The rise of ISIS and the general tumult in Syria ultimately led to intervention by a series of foreign powers. In response to ISIS, the US formed a multinational coalition of Western and Arab states to confront the group in both Iraq and Syria. In Syria, it refused to coordinate with the Syrian regime. Instead, it gradually formed an ad-hoc alliance with Syrian Kurdish-led forces and assisted them in repelling ISIS’ vicious siege on the Syrian Kurdish border city of Kobane.
The Syrian Kurds established an alliance with various other tribes and formed the multiethnic Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in October 2015. With coalition air support, the group gradually destroyed the Syrian wing of the ISIS caliphate, capturing its de-facto capital city of Raqqa in October 2017 and the last redoubt of the self-styled caliphate in the eastern Syrian town of Baghouz in March 2019. The SDF suffered approximately 11,000 dead in the process.
In September 2015, Russia directly entered the Syrian conflict on the side of Assad, which at that time was on the defensive and controlled only about a quarter of the country. Moscow’s airstrikes helped Damascus regain the offensive, most notably in the final stage of the battle for Aleppo in December 2016.
Russia supports Syrian regime attacks on the northwestern province of Idlib, that is primarily controlled by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) which originated as the Al-Qaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra. As many as three million Syrians remain trapped in Idlib. Moscow has received widespread criticism over its intentional targeting of hospitals across that province.
From as early as January 2012, Israel began launching hundreds of airstrikes into Syria, primarily targeting Iranian weapon systems it doesn’t want to be transferred to Hezbollah and other Iran-related targets across the country.
Then there is Turkey. Ankara initially wanted to intervene in support of the rebellion against Assad early in the conflict but gradually became more alarmed by the rise of Rojava. US-Turkey relations deteriorated over this, as Turkey argued that the US alliance with the SDF was inappropriate, given the predominance in that fighting-force of a group Turkey insists is indistinguishable to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) it has fought for decades.
Turkey launched three major incursions into northern Syria in the second half of the past decade. In 2016, it invaded a large swath of northwestern border territory occupied by ISIS. Then, in 2018, it went on to invade Rojava’s isolated northwestern enclave of Afrin, displacing well over 100,000 Kurdish civilians in the process. This past October, it also occupied a swath of northeastern Syria in its latest war against the SDF.
While the 2010s have utterly devastated Syria, there still doesn’t seem to be an end in sight for the bloody conflict. While 2018 and this year had relatively low casualties compared to the rest of the decade – and by low we’re still talking about 30,000 dead – flashpoints remain across the country that could ignite or reignite and extend this brutal war into the 2020s.
Image credit: World Humanitarian Summit / EPA / STR