Let’s talk about the war in Syria.
Entire cities flattened ...
hospitals bombed …
ancient sites blown up …
13 million people forced to leave their homes.
At one point the UN said the battlefield chaos made it impossible to count the dead. So they stopped.
But the fighting hasn’t and people are still dying.
So who’s fighting who?
Where are Syria’s millions of refugees?
And why does this seem like a war without end?
For years the Syrian war was the biggest news story around. Today, not so much.
Maybe it’s media fatigue, maybe people think it’s over and that President Bashar al-Assad has won.
The Syrian government seems to think so.
Cities and railways are being rebuilt.
Domestic flights have started up again.
They’re even letting travel vloggers in.
In reality, though, most of Syria is still in ruins.
It all started back in 2011.
The Arab Spring was happening and leaders in Tunisia and Egypt had already been overthrown.
In Syria some children had been watching all that on TV and decided to send their president a message.
The children were arrested and tortured and people started protesting.
The government responded with force and the Syrian uprising was on.
The Assad regime had been in power for more than 40 years — starting with Bashar’s father.
Many people were tired of things like corruption, being repressed. They wanted al-Assad out.
When the war started it was very much a civil war — Assad forces against the Syrian opposition.
That included people who defected from the military and opponents who picked up a gun.
Then other players piled in.
The US, Turkey and others sided with the opposition pretty much from the start.
The Syrian president had allies too.
Russian warplanes bombed from the air and militias backed by Iran fought on the ground.
But there were other enemies common to them all.
ISIL, al-Nusra Front and other groups considered terrorists took advantage of the chaos to take control.
Then Syrian Kurdish fighters got involved.
They joined up with Arab militias to push ISIL out and stake their own territorial claim.
Turkey, though, sees them as terrorists and didn’t want them on its southern border so they went to war with the Syrian Kurds.
It’s been a messy battlefield.
And over the course of those 10 years the Syrian people have suffered the most.
People who weren’t part of that war were barrel bombed by the Assad regime …
attacked with chemical weapons …
blockaded, starved and detained — mainly by Assad forces.
Victims have filed allegations of war crimes in courts all over Europe.
Things were bad during the peak of the war.
But right now the economy has never been worse.
Nearly 90% of Syrians live below the poverty line.
Their currency, the pound, is at its lowest ever level against the dollar, making everything expensive.
There are shortages of fuel, food — some places only have electricity for a few hours a day.
Add to that a COVID-19 epidemic that no one knows the real scale of.
OK, so where is the war at right now?
These days the government has control of about two-thirds of the country.
But they’re still fighting for parts of the north where all kinds of groups are still hanging on.
Some Syrian rebels are in one part where Turkey’s basically in control.
And then there’s Idlib — the last opposition stronghold.
It’s a complicated place. Syrian rebels are mixed in with lots of groups considered terrorists.
Millions of refugees are living there in camps.
And every so often Syrian and Russian forces attack.
They say they’re liberating Idlib from terrorists.
Meanwhile Syrian Kurds control this region.
Hundreds of US soldiers are still there, too, mainly protecting oil fields.
But there are other groups roaming around, including militias backed by Iran like Hezbollah.
You’ll notice, though, there’s no sign of ISIL anywhere.
It took a while but eventually they were pushed out.
Their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed by the US in 2019 and most of their fighters were either captured or killed.
But ISIL’s ideology has survived and it’s spreading in camps where fighters and their families are being held.
So that’s where the conflict is at.
But you can’t talk about a nation without talking about its people — and half of the Syrian people are refugees.
More than 6 million are internally displaced.
But another 5.5 million are living outside of Syria.
Turkey’s taken in the most followed by Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt.
Over the years there have been countless peace talks and all of them have failed.
Right now the UN has put together a committee made up of both opposition and government people.
It’s to try to turn the page on the war by writing a new constitution.
But it’s not really working.
Meanwhile there are all those external players still using Syria to settle their scores.
There’s an argument to be made that this war really is over, that the Assad regime has won.
If that’s true it’s come at an enormous cost, and 10 years on, things in Syria have never been worse.
Ten years of war in less than 10 minutes is a big ask.
So think of that episode as a primer.
You can visit aljazeera.com for more context and the latest news out of Syria.
I’ll see you next week.