In April 2013, a group formed from the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq that called itself the Islamic State of Iraq emerged and exceeded even Jabhat al-Nusra in its brutality.
Jabhat al-Nusra gained Syrian and foreign recruits as it scored greater battlefield successes than rival opposition groups. In January 2012, a group called Jabhat al-Nusra announced itself as al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, and the following month al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri called for Sunnis from around the region to join a jihad against the regime. The regime’s torture and killing was exploited by al-Qaeda militants eager to capitalize on Syria’s chaos. Rival coalitions began to proliferate, and FSA fighters drifted to Islamist brigades that, with funding and arms from Gulf donors, scored greater battlefield successes against the regime. The Syrian National Coalition (SNC) claimed to be the government-in-exile of Syria, and the United States, Turkey, and Gulf Cooperation Council countries, among others, soon recognized it as “the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.” But the SNC and its successor, the National Coalition, were unable to deliver significant diplomatic or material support to the opposition, and many of the regime’s opponents within Syria accorded it little legitimacy. The FSA’s civilian counterpart was also established in summer 2011, in Istanbul. With resources scarce, they preyed at times on the very populations they were charged with protecting. FSA militias often didn’t coordinate their operations and sometimes had competing interests, reflecting their varied regional backers.
Yet the FSA, outgunned by the regime, struggled to bring its loose coalition under centralized command and control.
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In July 2011, defectors from Assad’s army announced the formation of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), and soon after they began to receive shelter in Turkey. Originally established to organize resistance to the regime, many of these committees would take on the roles of public administration and service provision. Local coordinating committees sprang up in villages and urban neighborhoods. Amid international condemnation, the regime offered some concessions, but it also repeated the Deraa response in other places where there were protests, at far greater length and cost, leading some regime opponents to take up arms. The civilian death toll mounted and residents were cut off from food, water, medicine, telephones, and electricity for eleven days. Then, in late April 2011, the Syrian army brought in tanks, laying siege to Deraa. Torture and extrajudicial executions were frequently reported at detention centers. Events in Deraa offered a preview of what was to come elsewhere: The Syrian army fired on unarmed protesters and carried out mass arrests, both targeting dissidents and indiscriminately sweeping up men and boys, human rights monitors reported. Russia, too, has carried out air strikes in Syria, coming to the Assad regime’s defense, while Iranian forces and their Hezbollah allies have done the same on the ground.Īnti-regime protests soon spread from Deraa to major cities such as Damascus, Hama, and Homs. The Turks have pushed Kurdish forces, the United States’ main local partner in the fight against the Islamic State, from border areas. The United States is at the forefront of a coalition conducting air strikes on the self-proclaimed Islamic State, though it abruptly pulled back some of its forces in 2019 ahead of an invasion of northern Syria by Turkey, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally. The country has descended into an ever more complex civil war: jihadis promoting a Sunni theocracy have eclipsed opposition forces fighting for a democratic and pluralistic Syria, and regional powers have backed various local forces to advance their geopolitical interests on Syrian battlefields. Ten years since protesters in Syria first demonstrated against the four-decade rule of the Assad family, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed and some twelve million people-more than half the country’s prewar population-have been displaced.
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