In the five years since protestors in Syria first demonstrated against the four-decade rule of the Assad family, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed in the ensuing violence and some twelve million people—more than half the country’s pre-war population—have been displaced. The country has descended into an ever-more-complex civil war: Jihadis promoting a Sunni theocracy have eclipsed many opposition forces fighting for a democratic Syria. Regional powers have backed various local forces to advance their geopolitical interests on Syrian battlefields. The United States has been at the fore of a coalition conducting air strikes on the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Russia too has carried out air strikes in Syria; though it claimed to be primarily targeting the Islamic State, it appeared to have more often targeted militants who seemed to pose a more immediate threat to the regime.
The anniversary comes amid a cessation of hostilities brokered by the United States and Russia that has brought a sharp reduction in violence to Syria and allowed humanitarian relief into some areas that have been besieged by government-backed forces and rebel groups. But UN-backed efforts to negotiate a conflict-ending settlement remain fruitless as the government and opposition groups, and their respective international sponsors, remain at an impasse on the fundamental issue of whether President Bashar al-Assad can play a role in Syria’s future.
Hafez al-Assad is welcomed in Moscow by Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in 1971. Bettmann/Corbis
Assads’ Rule Breeds Discontent
Hafez al-Assad seized power from a Ba’athist military junta in 1970, centralizing power in the presidency. Assad came from the Alawi minority, a heterodox Shia sect that had long been persecuted in Syria and was elevated to privileged positions under the post–World War I French mandate.
In February 1982, Hafez ordered the military to put down a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in the city of Hama with brute force. Syrian forces killed more than twenty-five thousand. For the regime’s opponents, it would become a rallying cry in 2011. For the regime, it provided Hafez’s son and successor, Bashar, with a template for responding to dissent.
The Assads presided over a system that was not just autocratic but kleptocratic, enriching many urban Sunnis and Christians as well as Alawis. As the 2011 uprising turned to civil war, many members of minority groups remained loyal to the regime, but so too did some Sunnis, fearing revenge if opposition forces were to take Damascus.
Syrians gather outside Deraa's main courthouse, which was set on fire by demonstrators demanding freedom and an end to corruption, in March 2011. Khaled al-Hariri/Reuters
Arab Uprisings Echo Across Repressed Region
The Arab Spring began in December 2010 with the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit vendor decrying corruption. His desperate act inspired protests in Tunisia, and then across the Middle East and North Africa, which forced longtime strongmen in Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt to step down. Inspired by these previously unthinkable events, fifteen boys in the southwestern city of Deraa spray painted on a school wall: “The people want the fall of the regime.” They were arrested and tortured. Demonstrators who rallied behind them clashed with police, and protests spread. Many were calling for something more modest than regime change: the release of political prisoners, an end to the half-century-old state of emergency, greater freedoms, and an end to corruption. Unlike Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Assad responded to protestors immediately, and forcefully, to try to stop an insurrection.
People demonstrate against the Assad regime in the besieged town of Al Qsair, near Homs, in January 2012. Alessio Romenzi/Corbis
From Protest Movement to Civil War
Anti-regime protests soon spread from Deraa to major cities like Damascus, Homs, and Hama. Events in Deraa offered a preview of what was to come elsewhere: The Syrian army fired on unarmed protestors and carried out mass arrests, both targeting dissidents and indiscriminately sweeping up men and boys, rights monitors reported. Torture and extrajudicial executions were frequently reported at detention centers. Then, in late April, the Syrian army brought in tanks, laying siege to Deraa. The civilian death toll mounted and residents were cut off from food, water, medicine, telephones, and electricity for eleven days. Amid international condemnation, the regime offered some concessions, but also repeated the Deraa method elsewhere where there were protests, at far greater length and cost. (The siege of Homs lasted three years and ended with a deal in which fighters and their families evacuated the city.) The regime’s opponents began to organize and take up arms.
Members of the Free Syrian Army in January 2012. Alessio Romenzi/Corbis
A Disorganized Opposition Splinters
In July 2011, defectors from Assad’s army announced the formation of the Free Syrian Army, and soon after they began to receive shelter in Turkey. Yet the FSA, outgunned by the regime, remained a loose coalition of mostly locally based militias that didn’t always coordinate their operations or share common interests.
Its civilian counterpart was also established in summer 2011, in Istanbul. The Syrian National Coalition claimed to be the government-in-exile of Syria, and the United States, Turkey, and Gulf Cooperation Council countries, among others, soon recognized it as “the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.” But many of the regime’s opponents within Syria accorded it little legitimacy to direct the opposition. Rival coalitions began to proliferate.
Islamic State militants pose for a photo posted online in the Yarmouk refugee camp, in the Damascus suburbs. Balkis Press/Sipa via AP Images
Al-Qaeda and Islamic State Emerge
The regime’s torture and killing was exploited by al-Qaeda militants eager to capitalize on Syria's chaos. In January 2012, a group calling itself Jabhat al-Nusra announced itself as al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, and the following month al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri called for Sunnis from around the region to join a jihad against the regime. Nusra gained Syrian and foreign recruits as it scored greater battlefield successes than rival opposition groups.
In April 2013, a group formed from the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq that called itself the Islamic State emerged and exceeded even al-Nusra in its brutality. In several months, its forces established control over territory spanning western Syria and eastern Iraq. The ascendance of the Islamic State and other extremists groups fed an increasingly sectarian, zero-sum conflict.
The rise of extremist groups in Syria was, in part, the regime’s own doing, as Assad wanted to present to the world a stark choice between his secular rule and a jihadi alternative. In mid-2011, the regime released hundreds of Islamist militants from prisons to discredit the rebellion. They would form extremist groups like Ahrar al-Sham, which espoused a sectarian agenda.
A father holds his dead child in Aleppo, which has been contested for months, in October 2012. MAYSUN/epa/Corbis
Civilians as Targets
Both Assad’s forces and rebel groups have regularly targeted civilians in areas beyond their control. The deaths of some 1,400 civilians from chemical weapons deployed by the Assad regime in the summer of 2013 mobilized world powers to dismantle the regime’s chemical arsenal, but in the years since the Syrian government has employed devastating conventional arms that have also caused massive civilian casualties.
The regime has made regular use of sieges and aerial bombardment. These collective-punishment tactics serve dual purposes, analysts say: They raise the costs of resistance to civilians to pressure rebels to acquiesce, and also prevent opposition forces from offering a viable alternative to the regime’s governance. In February 2014, the UN Human Rights Council called the regime’s “systematic” attacks on civilians “crimes against humanity,” and noted that nonstate groups too had committed war crimes.
In May 2014, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon reported that 3.5 million Syrians resided in areas difficult or impossible for humanitarian aid to reach, and 241,000 were under siege. The toll mounted despite a UN Security Council resolution earlier in the year aimed at securing humanitarian aid routes. Truces have since brought occasional relief to besieged populations, but humanitarian leaders say this has made food and medicine a political bargaining chip, undermining long-standing norms.
At a Hezbollah rally in the Beirut suburbs, the militant group's supporters wave flags featuring the faces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Bilal Hussein/AP Photo
From Domestic Rebellion to Internationalized Civil War
The deepening of Syria’s civil war made both pro- and anti-regime forces dependent on external sponsors. As major powers have gotten increasingly involved, Syria has become a battlefield on which the region’s geopolitical rivalries have been fought.
As Assad’s army weakened, the regime came to rely increasingly on Iran and Russia. Iran, a longtime ally interested in protecting a vital land route to its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, has invested billions in propping up the regime. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps advises Assad’s army and has sustained several hundred casualties in combat. Its volunteer Basij paramilitary force and Hezbollah militants have sustained even more casualties.
Russia, traditionally averse to regime change, has provided Assad with critical diplomatic support. Moscow has cited what it calls an illegal intervention in Libya and the ensuing chaos there as justification for vetoing measures in the UN Security Council that would have punished the regime. Russia entered the conflict directly in September 2015 with the deployment of its air force. Though Moscow claimed its air strikes would primarily target the Islamic State, analysts said it more often targeted other extremist groups, many of which were intermingled with other rebels, near the front lines with the regime. This helped Assad strengthen his control of population centers along the country’s western spine. Russia announced its partial withdrawal from Syria in March 2016.
Opposition forces, too, depend on foreign support. A rapprochement between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar enabled the formation in March 2015 of the Army of Conquest, which was designed to overcome the lack of coordination among rebel groups in the north and comprises an array of opposition and extremist groups. The CIA, too, reportedly provides covert training and arms to opposition forces.
A YPG base in northern Syria bears signs of rocket fire from a Turkish attack. Soran Qurbani/Demotix/Corbis
The Kurdish Bid for Autonomy
Kurds have fought to consolidate a de facto autonomous territory in northern Syria, which has made them alternately friends and foes of Arab opposition groups. The Islamic State’s siege of Kobani in the fall of 2014 was a turning point, and the battle to oust the militant group highlighted the effectiveness of the Kurds’ People’s Protection Units (YPG) against the Islamic State. U.S. forces aided in ousting Islamic State fighters from Kobani and continue to provide arms and air support to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. But the YPG’s priority has turned to consolidating autonomous Kurdish cantons in the country’s north, a region the Kurds refer to as Western Kurdistan. YPG fighters, interested in protecting fellow Kurds, do not fight for areas beyond territory they claim as Kurdish, and in mixed Arab-Kurd areas, they have been accused of ethnic cleansing. Turkey considers the YPG an extension of the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which Washington has designated a terrorist organization. The United States considers Turkey a vital partner in the war against the Islamic State, and it faces the dilemma of trying not to alienate either partner.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura, and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry hold a news conference in Vienna in October 2015 amid frustrated efforts to find a political solution to Syria's civil war. Brendan Smialowski/Pool/Reuters
The Diplomatic Thicket
UN-backed attempts to mediate a conflict-ending political transition in Syria have been stymied by differences among veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security Council and other powers. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey aligned with the United States against the Assad regime, while Iran joined Russia in backing it. Russia and China cast multiple vetoes on Syria-related Security Council resolutions, and the threat of veto has deterred or watered down humanitarian and human rights measures, reinforcing a view of the body as toothless. Yet the UN remains at the center of efforts to broker a peace agreement.
A June 2012 multilateral document known as the Geneva Communique has become the basis for negotiations. It calls for “a Syrian-led political process,” beginning with the establishment of a transitional governing body “formed on the basis of mutual consent.” But multiple rounds of peace talks to implement these principles have yielded little. A core issue is Assad himself: He has no interest in negotiating his own political demise and retains Russia's and Iran's backing, while the possibility of Assad staying on in a transition is anathema to the opposition as well as many of their backers—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United States among them. Meanwhile, diplomats in the Security Council are reportedly mulling the federal division of Syria, though both the Assad regime and the main opposition negotiating bloc have rejected this. A partial cease-fire took effect in early March 2016.
Volunteers help a Syrian refugee on the southeastern Greek island of Lesbos. Manu Brabo/AP Photo
Refugee Crisis Brings European Union to a Breaking Point
More than half of Syria’s pre-war population of twenty-two million has been displaced by the violence, with an estimated seven million displaced internally and another five million fleeing abroad. Neighboring countries have borne the heaviest burden: Lebanon, a country of only 4.5 million people, is hosting more than one million Syrians, and Jordan, with more than half a million, has begun blocking refugees from crossing the border. Turkey is host to nearly three million Syrians, straining government resources. With limited work and educational opportunities, and little hope that they will soon be able to return safely home, nearly one million refugees have journeyed to Europe, contributing to what the UN has called the largest migrant and refugee crisis since World War II. Disputes over how to settle refugees across the EU has thrown the bloc into disarray, threatening to bring an end to the Schengen system of open borders on the continent and jumpstarting an improvement in its relations with Turkey even as the country has taken an authoritarian turn.
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