After a decade of violence and human tragedy that has made Syria the defining war of the early 21st century, the fighting has tapered off but the suffering hasn’t, said an AFP report.
In 2011, Bashar al-Assad and his government briefly looked like another domino about to fall in the whirlwind of pro-democracy revolts sweeping the Middle East.
Ten years later, Assad is still there, a pyrrhic victor offering no credible prospects of reconciliation for the Syrian people and exercising limited sovereignty over a land left prey to foreign powers.
In late January 2011, the uprisings that toppled dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya became known as the “Arab Spring” and the contagious nature of the region’s revolts became obvious.
It took time for the wave of protests to take hold in Syria, where demonstrations had been banned for half a century.
Some of the first gatherings, such as vigils outside the Libyan embassy in Damascus, were ostensibly in support of the other uprisings and not a direct challenge to the four-decade-old rule of the Assad clan.
“We would call for freedom and democracy in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, but we were actually chanting for Syria,” prominent Syrian activist Mazen Darwish recalled.
“We became obsessed with finding the spark that would put us next in line,” he said, retracing the beginnings of Syria’s revolt in a phone interview with AFP. “Who was going to be Syria’s Bouazizi?”
Darwish was arrested several times in Syria, most recently in February 2012 for more than three years before his release in 2015, and he then left the country.
The closest equivalent to Mohamed Bouazizi, the young street vendor whose self-immolation on Dec 17, 2011 was the trigger for Tunisia’s revolt, turned out to be youngsters who spray-painted the words “Your turn, doctor” on a wall in the southern town of Daraa.
The slogan was a clear reference to Assad, wishing the London-trained ophthalmologist the same fate as Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had to flee into exile -- or perhaps even Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak who stepped down under the pressure of the street and the army.
The graffiti led to arrests and torture, which in turn caused an uproar that rallied a critical number of Syrians behind the protests.
March 15, the date which AFP and many others use for the start of the Syrian uprising, was not the first day of protests but the day that demonstrations happened nationwide and simultaneously.
The displacement, which saw half of Syria’s pre-war population of 22 million forced to flee their homes, was the largest induced by conflict since World War II.
Half of those displaced fled the country, some of them swelling a wave of refugees reaching the shores of Europe, a phenomenon whose scope affected public opinion, politics, and the outcome of elections on the continent.
In the chaos that followed the eruption of civil conflict in Syria, ISIS proclaimed a “caliphate” straddling Syria and Iraq that reshaped global terrorism.
Arch foes Iran and the United States both sent troops to Syria to protect their interests, as did Turkey. Russia for its part launched in 2015 its largest military intervention since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a move that turned the tide in Assad’s favor.
Almost 400,000 people were killed in 10 years, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).
The regime used chemical weapons on civilian areas to subdue pockets of resistance, it has raided densely inhabited areas with crude barrel bombs that sow indiscriminate death, and systematically resorted to siege and starvation tactics.
Countless strikes were carried out against medical facilities in defiance of global outrage.
The rapid militarization of the regime’s response to the initial protests and the emergence of extremist groups -- helped by the government’s mass release of al-Qaeda militants -- turned the Syrian uprising into the Syrian destructive war.
The ultra-violence that ISIS group projected and its ability to attract fighters from Europe and beyond instilled a fear in the West that wiped out the early pro-democracy enthusiasm.
The world’s focus shifted to the fight against extremists and away from the Syrian people’s struggle against Assad, who quickly recast himself as the best rampart against terrorism.
“We were very naive when we started the revolution,” said Darwish, who was among those who created the first coordination committees organizing the anti-government movement.
“Our outlook was sentimental, poetic, romantic. We thought our moral high ground alone would be enough. We had no tools when the others -- the regime and the Islamist groups -- had real partners and huge financial resources,” he explained.
In 2012, then US president Barack Obama described Assad’s use of chemical weapons as a “red line.”
But when it was crossed a year later, he stopped short of deciding on the military intervention many had hoped for, in what remains a defining moment of his administration.
Opposition factions fighting under a myriad of different banners, some receiving funding and weapons from abroad, were gradually bringing a Syrian army weakened by mass defections to its knees.
However, the intervention of Iran and its proxies -- first among them the Lebanese Hezbollah -- and the massive Russian expeditionary operation of 2015 stopped the rot.
At one point, the government had lost control over almost 80 percent of the national territory, including most of its oil resources, and rebels were on Damascus’s doorstep.
With the support of Russia’s air force, equipment, and advisers, and with the added manpower of groups deployed by Tehran, Assad embarked on a vengeful scorched earth campaign to reconquer the country.
In an interview with AFP in February 2016, Assad made it clear there would be little room for negotiation and that his goal was nothing short of a full reconquest.
“Regardless of whether we can do that or not, this is a goal we are seeking to achieve without any hesitation,” he said.
The bloody sieges of Aleppo and eastern Ghouta, a rebel enclave near Damascus, ended with surrender deals that were replicated across the country.
Rebel fighters were forced into the northwestern province of Idlib, an enclave where around three million people now live in abominable conditions under the rule of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
Turkey has an estimated 15,000 troops deployed inside Syria and wields significant influence in the north.
The Syrian Kurdish forces that the United States allied with to combat ISIS in 2014 have remained in control of the northeast since they retook the last dregs of the so-called caliphate in 2019.
A ceasefire deal reached a year ago by Moscow and Ankara, the two main brokers in the conflict, has held despite sporadic fighting.
The offensive Assad long threatened on Idlib looks increasingly unlikely in that it would send the two mighty foreign powers on a direct collision course.
The Damascus regime controls less than two-thirds of the national territory, and geographer Fabrice Balanche argues that a look at the country’s borders paints an even less flattering picture.
He argued in a recent study showing that government forces controlled only 15 percent of Syria’s borders.
Last year saw the lowest number of casualties by far since the start of the war, with military operations having significantly wound down.
But while it may look to the outside world like the conflict has essentially ended, the lives of many Syrians have paradoxically never been worse.
“The war is over in the sense that the fighting and the battles are over,” said Hossam, a 39-year-old translator living in Damascus.
According to the United Nations, 60 percent of the population is now food insecure. The Syrian pound has lost 98 percent of its value in a decade and a World Vision report this month put the cost of the war at $1.2 trillion.
A court in Koblenz, Germany, sentenced a member of the Syrian secret police to four and a half years in jail for crimes against humanity in February.
The verdict was a first and offered a glimmer of hope that some form of justice could be handed down for the conflict’s victims, but Assad and his inner circle are in no immediate danger.
The 55-year-old, who came to power in 2000, is widely expected to secure another term in an election due to take place in the coming weeks.
“Syria is one of the youngest countries in the region and a significant portion of its population wasn’t even born in 2011,” said Gilles Bertrand, who heads the EU’s delegation to Syria.
“These girls and boys will be Syria’s young adults in five or 10 years and will, in turn, want a future, economic prospects and political freedoms that the system cannot give them if it doesn’t reform,” he told AFP.
