More than 350000 people already died in the civil war in Syria which is ongoing for almost five years. More than 12 million people were expelled from their homes because of the battles between various factions. How did the “peaceful” protests turn into a big war? This is the summarized background.
In March 2011 Anti-Assad protests erupted in the southern town of Daraa. Rumors circulated that some teenagers got arrested and tortured after they painted revolutionary slogans on school walls. More demonstrations occured and security forces started to open fire on the protestors. The civil unrest triggered wide spread demonstrations demanding Bashar Al-Assad to resign. The more security forces tried to crush the protests in many city, the heavier the protests got. Opposition supporters eventually took up arms to expel the government forces out of their cities. However, government sources claim, that the protestors took up arms before the security forces started shooting at them.
Violence escalated quickly and the country descended into a heavy civil war. Rebel forces were created and many government soldiers defected to join this rebel brigades. Many battles over the control of cities, towns, villages and countrysides started. The fighting between rebels and government forces reached Damascus, the capital of syria and Aleppo, the secon largest city in syria in 2012. By June 2013, the United Nations claimed that already 90,000 people had been killed in the civil war. By August 2015, that number had climbed to 250,000, according to rebel activists and the United Nations.
The armed revolt has evolved seriously since its inception. Secular moderates are now outnumbered by Islamists and jihadists, whose cruel tactics have caused worldwide outrage. So-called Islamic State has benefited from the tumult and taken control of large swathes of Syria and Iraq, where it proclaimed the beginning of a “caliphate” in June 2014. Its many foreign fighters are engaged in a “war within a war” in Syria, fighting rebels and hostile jihadists from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, as well as government and Kurdish Soldiers.
In September 2014, a US-led Coalition launched air strikes inside Syria in an effort to “degrade and finally destroy” IS. But the coalition has rejected attacks that might benefit Bashar Assad’s army. Russia began air strikes targeting terrorists in Syria a year after the US-led Coalition, but rebel activists say its strikes have mainly killed Western-backed rebels and civilians.
So eventually the syrian war which started as a civil uprising turned into a proxy war in which the world powers argue out their differences.
