Syria — Uprising and Civil War

Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Overview

The wave of Arab unrest that began with the Tunisian revolution reached Syria on March 15, 2011, when residents of a small southern city took to the streets to protest the torture of students who had put up anti-government graffiti. The government responded with heavy-handed force, and demonstrations quickly spread across much of the country.

President Bashar al-Assad, a British-trained doctor who inherited Syria’s harsh dictatorship from his father, Hafez al-Assad, at first wavered between force and hints of reform. But in April 2011, just days after lifting the country’s decades-old state of emergency, he set off the first of what became a series of withering crackdowns, sending tanks into restive cities as security forces opened fire on demonstrators. In retrospect, the attacks appeared calculated to turn peaceful protests violent, to justify an escalation of force.

In the summer of 2011, as the crackdown dragged on, thousands of soldiers defected and began launching attacks against the government, bringing the country to what the United Nations in December called the verge of civil war. An opposition government in exile was formed, the Syrian National Council, but the council’s internal divisions kept Western and Arab governments from recognizing it as such.

Syrian opposition factions signed an agreement in November 2012 to create a unified umbrella organization with the hope of attracting international diplomatic recognition as well as more financing and improved military aid from foreign capitals. The coalition, known as the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, was recognized by Britain, France, Turkey and several Gulf Arab countries. However, several extremist Islamist groups fighting in Syria said they reject the coalition.

One of the biggest obstacles to increasing Western support for the rebellion is the fear that money and arms could flow to a jihadi group that could further destabilize Syria and harm Western interests. On the diplomatic front, Russia has steadily blocked attempts by the Obama administration and Arab countries to win United Nations authorization for strong action against the Syrian government, its longtime ally.

By the end of 2012, Syria was many months into what the United Nations called an “overtly sectarian” conflict that was pulling fighters from across the Middle East and North Africa into the fray. The sharpest split is between the Alawite sect, a Shiite Muslim minority from which President Bashar al-Assad’s most senior political and military associates are drawn, and the country’s Sunni Muslim majority, mostly aligned with the opposition, a U.N. panel noted. But it said the conflict had drawn in other minorities, including Armenians, Christians, Druze, Palestinians, Kurds and Turkmen.

By the start of 2013, more than 60,000 people, mostly civilians, were thought to have died and tens of thousands of others had been arrested. More than 400,000 Syrian refugees had registered in neighboring countries, with tens of thousands not registered. In addition, about 2.5 million Syrians needed aid inside the country, with more than 1.2 million displaced domestically, according to the United Nations.