From 'Arab Spring' to chaos: How Syria's civil war reached a boiling point

In the year 2010, the ‘Arab uprising’, dubbed as ‘Arab Spring’, saw the first protest that subsequently raged through several countries and with regimes getting changed as its outcome.

Syria was not untouched. Today, almost 14 years after the first protest started against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad and the subsequent civil war, Assad had been ousted on Sunday. He fled Syria, while his capital Damacus fell to armed ‘opposition fighters’.

In January 2011, when the protests broke out, Assad retaliated with a massive crackdown. What started off as protests spiraled out into a civil war.

Over the years, large portion of the country slipped out of control of Al-Assad, and is under ‘opposition forces’ which in turn have several hues and affiliations with foreign figures, militias, regional governments, and global powers.

The US, Russia, Iran and Turkey have intervened at various points in time, and for separate entities, stirring the cauldron of uncertainty.

At least twice — in 2013 and in mid-2015 — the regime of Al-Assad was threatened, it almost collapsed. Russia and Iran bailed it out with military power. Today, as violent protests raged through Syria, the 53-year rule of the Assad family is facing the gravest threat and could be at a point of no return.

Al-Assad boarded a plane and has fled the country to an unknown destination, news agency Reuters reported. Syrian Prime Minister Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali was quoted saying that the government was ready for any handover of power as the armed rebels announced the “end of the era”.

Opposition leader Abu Mohammed Al-Julani has said that all state institutions will remain under the supervision of Al-Assad’s PM until they are handed over officially. Julani heads the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) that is supported by allied Turkish-backed factions.

The sequence of events in Syria in the past few weeks look like a re-run of events of how Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Shiekh Hasina was forced to flee her country in August following protests. Hasina had boarded a military plane and landed in India.

Adding to the developments in Syria, US President-elect Donald Trump posted on X “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, the US should have nothing to do with it. This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved”.

On ground in Syria, the offensive is named ‘Operation Deterrence of Aggression’ and several armed Syrian opposition groups led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), whose leader Abu Mohd Al-Julani has ruled the governorate of Idlib for years before the latest offensive was launched.

Syria slowly slipped after the events in early 2011, when youth had scrawled anti-regime graffiti on walls. They were arrested, held for days and tortured. As peaceful protests spread across Syria, Al-Assad unleashed his military firepower.

By 2012, Syria had descended into a full-scale civil war, with multiple rebel brigades — many armed by foreign patrons — that seized key cities in the north, including Aleppo, Syria’s largest city.  By 2013, Lebanon’s Hezbollah deployed its fighters and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) dispatched military advisors to prop up the Assad government.

Later by 2014, the ISIS and other hardline Islamist groups sought the creation of an Islamic State caliphate — which claimed roughly a third of Syrian territory, with Raqqa as its capital. It prompted a direct US military intervention and Russia added to the situation by providing airpower and sophisticated air defence systems – like the S-400.

By the end of 2016, the Al-Assad regime retook some territories.  The United Nations tried to intervene but nothing moved, meanwhile Russia launched a separate initiative, with Iran and Turkey as partners.

Matter went out of control and millions of refugees poured into Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and even Iraq and Egypt as well as several European countries. Massive civilian displacement and humanitarian need that overwhelmed the international assistance infrastructure and imperiled neighboring countries that tried to host refugees.

From a perspective of peace, the Syria civil war and multiple rebel groups have seen the rise of a new generation of jihadists who espoused a more virulent ideology and focused on seizing territory and creating their own states.

Meanwhile, international aid and monitoring agencies have reported how Al-Assad carried out indiscriminate bombing of civilians and used chemical weapons. The UN backed ‘Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons-United Nations Joint Investigative Mechanism’ reported about chemical weapons in 2016.

It accused the Syrian government of having used chemical weapons—from sarin, a toxic nerve agent banned by international law, to chlorine, a dual-use chemical. But with so many armed proxies in the region, a threat to global peace exists.