Syrian Civil War Begins
Syria's war began in March 2011 with protests in the southern town of Deraa, after schoolboys who had written anti-government graffiti were arrested and tortured. The demonstrations demanding their release were fired on, and the funerals produced larger demonstrations. Within months, peaceful protest across the country had been met with live ammunition, mass arrest and torture, and army defectors had begun forming the Free Syrian Army. Bashar al-Assad's calculation was his father's: that concession invites collapse and that force ends it. It did not, and by 2012 the country was in full civil war. It internationalised almost immediately. Iran and Hezbollah fought for the government; Russia supplied it and intervened directly with airpower from September 2015, which is what saved it. Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia backed competing rebel factions; the United States armed some and then concentrated on the Islamic State. The Islamic State took a third of Syria and Iraq in 2014 and was destroyed over four years, largely by Kurdish-led forces with American air support. The government used chemical weapons repeatedly, most notoriously in Ghouta in August 2013, and besieged and starved civilian districts as a systematic method. Something over half a million people died. Around six million left the country and a similar number were displaced inside it, and the refugee movement of 2015 reshaped European politics. Assad had recovered most of the country by 2020. His government collapsed in December 2024 in eleven days, and he fled to Moscow. The country he left is fragmented, impoverished and occupied in parts by Turkish, American, Israeli and Kurdish forces. Reconstruction is estimated in the hundreds of billions.
- Year: 2011 CE
- Category: Military
