A decade has passed since the eruption of peaceful protests in Syria as part of the so-called Arab Spring wave that swept through the region. Syrians dispute when the actual protests broke out as they do over several other issues.
Over the past ten years, the country has witnessed several geographic, military, social and military changes. Perhaps the only thing that hasn’t changed is the suffering.
The Syrians are divided by many issues, but they feel that they are in crisis inside the country and beyond it, but the one thing that brings them together is suffering. It is difficult to find someone who has not been affected directly by what has taken place in the past ten years. Only a very small segment of society has benefited from the conflict, but it has also incurred losses in other places. It may have won on the ground, but it has lost history and the future.
On the tenth anniversary of the conflict, Asharq Al-Awsat will as of Monday publish a series of reports that underscore the extent of the humanitarian suffering inside Syria and beyond and that shed light on the role played by various major foreign actors in shaping the country.
The Arab Spring spark was lit in Tunisia and northern Africa in late 2010. It took time for the wave of protests to take hold in Syria, where demonstrations had been banned for half a century and the government seemed more entrenched than anywhere else in the region.
The uprising began with vigils in front of the Libyan embassy in Damascus to show support to other revolts and in “careful defiance” of the ruling regime. The chants were addressed to Tunis, Tripoli and Cairo, but they were “speaking with” Damascus.
“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 says, retracing the beginnings of Syria's revolt in a phone interview with AFP. “Who was going to be Syria's Bouazizi?”
The closest equivalent to Mohamed Bouazizi, the young street vendor whose self-immolation was the trigger for Tunisia's December 2010 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. 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. Protests had already erupted in Daraa and central Damascus on February 17.
Journalist and author Rania Abouzeid describes the moment that gives its title to her book on the Syrian war: “No Turning Back”.
“The great wall of fear had cracked, the silence was shattered. The confrontation was existential -- for all sides -- from its inception,” she wrote.
The protests would then expand, with people first demanding improved services to then calling for the ouster of the regime. The demonstrations reached their peak with a massive march in Hama in July 2011. Foreign ambassadors, including then US envoy to Syria Robert Ford, were seen at rallies. The impression at the time was that the allies of the protesters supported their demand for the ouster of the regime. Then US President Barack Obama’s statement in August 2011 demanding that Assad step down only fueled this wrong impression.
Military shift
A number of factors led to a shift to a military confrontation. At first, regime forces and security agencies cracked down violently on the protesters. They resorted to barrel bombs, shelling and sieges, and accusations of an existence of a fifth column among the protesters.
Reports said thousands of extremists were released from regime jails. Many had fought the Americans in Iraq in the post-2003 invasion period, giving way to the emergence of ISIS. They used their organizational and fighting experience to make territorial gains, placing the West before two choices: The regime or ISIS.
In the meantime, the “Friends of Syria” group, which supported the opposition, was formed. It included army defectors, who would form the Free Syrian Army. Significantly, countries were divided in supporting the opposition given its lack of organization. The CIA at one point in 2012 backed a secret program for the opposition that was based in Jordan and Turkey.
The protest camp's voice was gradually drowned out and outside support only ever came for the conflict's many other players.
In 2012, 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.
For many, this was a changing point in the conflict.
At that point, opposition factions had dealt major blows to the army, which was further weakened by defections.
The tide began to turn when Russia and the US reached an agreement in September 2013 to remove the regime’s chemical weapons, dashing the hopes of the opposition and their allies that Washington would strike Damascus. This would soon be followed with the emergence of ISIS and other extremist groups in the country.
But 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 the opposition was on Damascus' doorstep.
American and Russian intervention
Confronted with ISIS’ advance in Syria and Iraq in 2014, the US formed an international coalition to combat the group. The US would then reduce its support to the opposition that was fighting the government forces.
In early 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin intervened in Ukraine. This too was a turning point as he began to link the crisis there to the conflict in Syria. By spring 2015, the government only controlled 15 percent of Syrian territories. Putin saw it as an opportunity to pounce in Syria through direct military intervention.
The intervention took place after slain Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani had scrambled to travel to Moscow over the summer to plead with it to “save the Syrian ally.” A deal was then struck: Russia would control Syria’s skies, while Iran would control the ground. The purpose was saving the regime without Russia having to become embroiled in the Syrian “swamp”, avoiding the trap the Soviet Union was caught in when it intervened in Afghanistan.
With the support of Russia's air force, equipment and advisers, and with the added manpower of militia groups deployed by Tehran, Assad embarked on a vengeful scorched earth campaign to reconquer the country.
Turkish intervention
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.
By late 2016, the tide was firmly in the regime’s favor after bloody sieges of Aleppo and eastern Ghouta, an opposition enclave near Damascus, ended with surrender deals that were replicated across the country. Extremists and opposition 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 the radical group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
This new process of recapturing territories led the country towards a new phase where “zones of influence” were introduced. In May 2017, Russia, along with Turkey and Iran, forged a new path in Syria by launching the Astana process. It was aimed at reaching “de-escalation” agreements in Daraa, Ghouta, Damascus, Homs and Idlib.
This approach led to exchange agreements in various regions: In return for recapturing eastern Aleppo, pro-Turkish factions were allowed to enter northern Aleppo. In exchange for Ghouta and Homs, pro-Turkish factions entered the Afrin region in northern Aleppo in 2018. These deals with Turkey were aimed at preventing the Kurds from establishing their own state on its southern borders.
Elsewhere, Iran was entrenching itself in Syria, forcing Israel to launch strikes against its positions. In mid-2018, the US, Russia and Jordan reached an agreement to expel Iran and its militias from the areas neighboring Jordan and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Government forces were allowed to return to these regions.
Zones of influence
Turkey has an estimated 15,000 troops deployed inside Syria and now wields significant influence in the north.
A ceasefire deal reached a year ago by Moscow and Ankara, now 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 foreign powers on a direct collision course.
The Damascus government 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.
“Borders are the sovereignty symbol par excellence, and the regime's scorecard remains nearly blank on that front,” he argued in a recent study showing that government forces controlled only 15 percent of Syria's borders.
The rest is de facto controlled by Turkish, US, Kurdish and Iranian-backed forces.
External powers are “informally dividing the country into multiple zones of influence and unilaterally controlling most of its borders,” Balanche wrote.
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.
“But our wounds are still fresh... and now the economy is the crisis everyone is experiencing, so in fact the war may be over but the suffering is not,” he told AFP in a phone interview.
