The Resurgence of the Syrian Civil War: Escalating Violence in 2024

Syria, 2024, is a bombed-out husk of a nation that once was, a burial ground for everything from democratic revolution, to a once-strong autocracy, to the ambitions and potential of the Syrian nation itself. The Syrian Civil War has been a ruinous affair, with well over half a million people, hundreds of towns and cities, and even a once-stable international order, all lying fallen in its wake. It has been one of the defining conflicts of the twenty-first century, matched only by America’s War on Terror, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the seething cold war between Israel, Iran, and all the many proxies in the middle.

Yet even compared to all the rest, Syria stands out, for its multidimensional chaos, its role as a stomping ground for major powers across the world, and the sheer, unforgiving brutality delivered upon the people caught in the middle. But for the last three or four years, the Syrian Civil War has settled into an uncomfortable stalemate until now. Violence is back on the rise across Syria in 2024, ticking past the year-over-year numbers since the stalemate began: more violent than 2023, more violent than 2022, more violent than 2021, and more violent than 2020.

Now, with old resistances getting back into the fight, new groups emerging to stake their claim, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria looking more capable than it has in many years, Syria is coming apart at the seams.

Historical Context and the Origins of the Stalemate

Worst of all, nobody is watching, and with war raging in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, and more, there is a real risk that the first the world hears of this new phase in the Syrian Civil War will be when it has already spiraled out of control. The Syrian Civil War has raged for well upward of a decade now, and for much of that time, the situation has been nothing short of apocalyptic. In its early years, a pro-democracy movement inspired by the wider Arab Spring was quickly subjected to brutal crackdowns by Syria’s ruling Assad regime, and when the movement took up arms, it quickly morphed from a popular revolt to an attempt at revolution.

In the following months, and then the following years, the revolution would fracture into a million pieces—but the regime, too, would be sucked into a war that quickly became unwinnable. The Syrian Civil War saw the descent of foreign powers onto a vulnerable nation, propping up a range of factions to deliver incredible violence on each other. It saw the rise of a jihadist insurgency more frightening, and more powerful, than any other, and the establishment of a short-lived caliphate out in the Syrian wastelands.

And eventually, the conflict saw a slow, marching offensive by the Syrian regime. That offensive would fail catastrophically in unifying the nation, but it would establish a bitter stalemate that must be understood in a broad sense, to grasp what is happening now. Today, a majority of Syrian sovereign territory is under the direct control of the Assad regime.

That includes the capital city of Damascus in the south, along with the city Daraa, internationally hailed as the birthplace of the country’s 2011 revolution, along the southern border with Jordan. The regime also controls the critical northern cities of Homs, Hama, and Aleppo, along with the ancient city of Palmyra in the eastern desert, a critical stronghold in a part of the country that is otherwise low in population, and has the potential to be lawless.

The Fragmentation of Territorial Control in 2024

The ruler of the country today is the same as it was when the Syrian Civil War was at its peak: Bashar al-Assad, currently age fifty-eight. The Assad regime is backed up by the nations of Russia and Iran, both of which grant it substantial military and political aid, and it is part of Iran’s broader network of allied actors across the Middle East, along with the Hezbollah organization in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and others. In the northeast, large portions of Syria are under the control of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, alternately known as Rojava.

Rojava is a Kurdish-administrated area, although it is technically, and quite proudly secular. It is functionally autonomous, a place where the Assad regime asserts next to no control, and it is a place that attempts to gain international support as a less authoritarian, more democratic alternative government for Syria’s future. Although the Rojava administration has been accused of harboring its own authoritarian tendencies, censoring the media, and maintaining a somewhat collaborative relationship with the Assad regime, it has nonetheless drawn acclaim from the Western world for its push for direct democracy, gender equality, religious and cultural pluralism, and more.

Across the country, it is the Syrian Democratic Forces of this northeastern region that are the most potent military threat to the Assad government, although skirmishes now break out only rarely, and those are usually constrained to fighting between Kurdish forces and pro-Assad militias. In the northwest, control is shared predominantly between three groups. The Syrian Salvation Government is an alternative government that represents Syria’s opposition, but while it has previously been seen as a unifying government that was intended to bring together a disparate Syrian resistance, it has come increasingly under the direct sway of the rebel coalition that founded it: Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham or HTS.

A Sunni Islamist organization, HTS is regarded as a terror organization in many countries, and it is the successor organization to the jihadist force, the Al-Nusra Front, which was internationally recognized as al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch in 2012. Today’s HTS has rebranded somewhat, under messages of pluralism and tolerance, and to the organization’s credit, it has been more successful in withstanding regime conquest than most former members of the Syrian resistance. Even still, HTS and its Syrian Salvation Government are holed up in and around the city of Idlib, and are widely understood to have little or no potential to pull off the breakthrough that would reverse its fortunes.

Also in the northwest is another organization claiming to represent the Syrian opposition, the Syrian Interim Government or SIG. The SIG controls limited amounts of territory across Syria’s northern border, and it also draws support from the third force at work in that area, Syria’s northern neighbor nation of Turkey. The SIG works through a number of affiliated militias, claiming to lead Syria in exile, while Turkey occupies about 8,800 square kilometers of land and uses the SIG to jointly administrate that territory.

The Turkish occupation is present largely to counterbalance Kurdish forces to their west, and has attacked the SDF in the past, with rumors rising in 2022 that a subsequent offensive might be coming—although that assault ultimately never materialized. The Turkish occupation has been accused of ethnic cleansing to clear much of northern Syria of its Kurdish residents, while the SIG’s primary military force, the Syrian National Army, has carried out attacks against both the Kurdish SDF force and the government in Idlib.

Fissures in the Status Quo and Resurgent Resistance

In the country’s southeast, the Syrian Free Army, also known as the Revolutionary Commando Army, controls a territorial radius mostly consisting of empty desert. The Syrian Free Army boasts only a few hundred fighters, and they are unlikely to ever rise to the level where they could pose a threat to the regime, but that is not their purpose. Instead, the Syrian Free Army works alongside American forces, who maintain a secure radius around the al-Tanf military base, fifteen miles west of a critical border crossing with Iraq.

That base, and a handful of nearby military outposts, host the combined forces of the Syrian Free Army and a few hundred American soldiers, although the Americans’ numbers are hard to establish precisely at any given time. There, the US and the Free Syrian Army exist as a counterweight to a number of different insurgencies, but one most of all: the Islamic State. Although it has been pushed out of its major strongholds, the Islamic State still remains as the final entity in Syria that maintains a consistent territorial base.

By and large, they live out in the open desert, where they can establish small camps, move within patches of safe territory, and exert control over the occasional villages and hamlets they roll into. It has been years since they controlled any level of territory that they could claim as a caliphate, but they have proven to be highly competent insurgents, while anti-ISIS campaigns by the US-led military presence in the east, the Kurdish forces to the north, and the Assad regime to the west, have all struggled to make real headway in eliminating them. Today, the Islamic State has built resilient networks of power all across Syria’s wastelands, and they have been making ready for war, while the rest of Syria has moved increasingly toward a tenuous peace and the beginnings of reconstruction.

For the past few years, Syria has not seen the sorts of major battles or nationwide carnage that defined the worst period of its civil war. But nor has the Syrian Civil War ever been declared complete, or even gotten substantively close. The Kurdish-controlled regions of the northeast, the Turkish-controlled opposition government in the northwest, the US-backed counterinsurgency in the southeast, the Islamist-led opposition government in Idlib Province, and the Islamic State in the badlands, all do not wish to swear loyalty to the Assad regime, any more than they wanted to during the worst of the violence.

And for the Assad regime to attempt to take any of that territory by force, would lead to a new round of major hostilities. While few of the opposition groups have the means to go toe-to-toe with the Assad regime in open battle, and those that do, do not have the desire to do so, they are all either entrenched in defensive positions that the regime cannot overcome, or, in the case of the Islamic State, they are optimized for asymmetric warfare that puts them ten steps ahead of the regime. Rather than move even an inch toward an actual peace, Syria has spent years caught in a stalemate, with each of its many territorial governments exercising authority in the areas they control, and working slowly to accumulate the military and political capital.

That capital will either force the Assad regime to grant them an impossibly favorable peace accord, or, when violence inevitably cascades again, it will give each side their best possible chance at surviving. But this fragile status quo inside Syria has started showing fissures again, cracks in the surface that suggest not only a restless stalemate, but the beginnings of a round of violence that could grow far larger than what any of Syria’s many sides are prepared for. To illustrate just what sorts of issues are starting to crop up in Syria, Syria and counterterrorism expert Charles Lister, writing for Foreign Policy, notes: “There are clear and sustained signs of an Islamic State recovery; a multibillion-dollar regime-linked international drugs trade; and ongoing geopolitical hostilities involving Israel, Iran, Turkey, Russia, and the United States.”

The Tactics of Rebellion: Kidnappings and Assassinations

Resistance has again started to take hold in the southern province of Daraa, the cradle of the 2011 revolution. Daraa was originally intended by the Assad regime to be cleansed during the conflict, and made into a model province for the peace, stability, and endurance of the Syrian regime in the war’s aftermath. It has been restless ever since the violence really died down in 2018, never really returning to the peaceful state the Assad regime had envisioned, but never really picking up in violence, until now.

Over the last few months, Daraa and the neighboring province of Suwayda have become a hot zone for insurgent activity, criminal violence, and everything in between, not just because of any single instigating group, but because of a range of factions operating simultaneously, and sometimes at cross purposes. Many of the organizations currently at work in Daraa are so-called ‘reconciled’ combatants, groups that used to be directly at odds with the Assad government, agreed to a peace, but have now begun launching attacks again. Perhaps the most effective method these groups have employed so far is kidnapping—and, precisely, the kidnapping of military officers.

Arbitrary detention of ordinary civilians is commonplace in areas of Syria under government control, especially in areas that have had trouble with continued violence in recent years. But since June, dozens of Syrian military officers have been captured and held hostage, in order to provide a counterweight against these detentions and to negotiate the release of people who have been wrongly detained. Although the tactic certainly is not foolproof, it has worked very well for the resistance, who have found that the Syrian government is unwilling to allow harm to its officers unless it truly cannot be avoided.

Quoting Charles Lister again, “Never before has the regime been so consistently challenged and forced to submit.” In one instance back in June, a prominent anti-regime cleric of the Druze faith was kidnapped from his car, after weathering a sustained grappling campaign. But Druze gunmen acted quickly, taking four Syrian Army officers hostage in return and successfully organizing a prisoner swap in which all five hostages were released.

Armed factions are actively looking for hostages to capture in order to exchange for a mother, two children, and another relative, taken captive several weeks ago by a regime-allied militia. Graphic video of the torture of those hostages has been sent to their family members in Daraa, prompting a unified effort to get them back by any means necessary. Groups believed to be associated with the rescue effort have launched numerous attacks against regime checkpoints and set up highway roadblocks.

The counter-regime acts of the resistance are wider-ranging than just kidnappings, they are broadly carried out under the same approach: retaliating directly against the acts of the regime, rather than launching a truly unpredictable guerrilla movement. Armed groups have launched multiple attacks on military checkpoints, government buildings, and other targets, but as a direct, and quite thorough response to abuses by the military. When the regime in neighboring Suwayda set up a checkpoint in and out of its capital city of the same name, several armed groups banded together for two days of heavy fighting against regime targets across the city.

The regime would send reinforcements from the Syrian capital city of Damascus, but it ultimately would not matter. Within two days, their fortified checkpoint would be abandoned by the military, essentially becoming just another empty guard post. At the same time, targeted assassinations and abductions have become a mainstay on all sides of this conflict.

For example, a prominent commander was killed by a hit man in his home on July 17, after leading several of the most significant attacks against the regime in recent weeks. On the same day, two men believed to be assassins for the regime’s provincial intelligence were shot dead, too. Just days prior to that, though, the deputy intelligence chief of Daraa province was killed, after reportedly having spent the last decade orchestrating the torture of inmates at Daraa’s largest detention center.

Furthermore, when Syria’s parliamentary elections occurred on July 15, the elections fell under attack from the local resistance in Daraa and Suwayda alike. Protesters raided voting stations and spoiled ballots and ballot boxes, also working to disrupt voter access to the polls, which were widely denounced as a sham.

The Escalating Threat of the Islamic State

The rising resistance in Daraa and Suwayda isn’t the extent of the chaos rising in Syria. In fact, it is only just the beginning. Chaos has taken hold in and around Damascus, in the city of Aleppo, in the rebel-held northern province of Idlib, and on the border between Syria’s regime-controlled territory and the Kurds to the north.

But no group is quite so able to spread pandemonium as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—better known as ISIS. The United States’ Central Command described the problem best in a brief released July 16, indicating that in 2024, ISIS was set to more than double the number of attacks its followers perpetrated in Iraq and Syria, compared to 2023. The numbers alone are striking.

ISIS has claimed 153 attacks across Iraq and Syria from January to June of this year, already surpassing the group’s total for all of 2023. And, per close observers of the Syrian conflict, that number is a drastic undercount. Experts put the true number of ISIS attacks, in that same stretch of time, at 551 at a bare minimum, in Syria alone.

Within the country, ISIS attacks occur everywhere, both in and around the group’s territorial strongholds in the empty desert, and in settled areas and even cities. After splintering in the late 2010s, ISIS has spread and established countless cells across Syria, and their targets are as unpredictable as they are unlucky. ISIS attacks the regime; it attacks the local militias; it attacks the various opposition governments; it attacks criminal organizations; and it attacks ordinary people who have little, if anything, to do with any of the factions involved.

Against civilians, the group’s attacks have been especially horrific, often aimed at people that ISIS followers believe have violated the terror group’s religious ideals in some way. In two attacks in Daraa province, on July 12 and 15 respectively, two women were killed after being accused of witchcraft by the group. One was shot by unknown gunmen; the other was hanged in front of her husband in their home.

A week prior, no fewer than nine men had been killed by ISIS in the province of Raqqa; two were Bedouin herders, while the other seven were militiamen attempting to fight ISIS off. Meanwhile, the group has kept up ambush and raiding attacks on any armed faction it can reach. In just the month of July, ISIS engaged in dozens of ambush attacks and killings against Syrian regime targets, Kurdish forces in the north, pro- and anti-government militias, and more.

In one particularly notable attack, ISIS was able to take no fewer than eight Syrian soldiers hostage after attacking a checkpoint on motorbikes and pickup trucks. Often, the group targets oil tankers driving across open desert roads, and they are believed to have destroyed dozens of them since early June. In particular, ISIS tends to attack tankers associated with Kurdish forces, but regime tankers are not unlikely to be targeted, either.

All in all, the current ISIS surge is its biggest, and best-sustained wave of attacks since 2017. Various anti-ISIS forces have had some success, including a raid by Syrian intelligence at the end of June that captured an alleged ISIS commander who had run the group’s assassination campaign in Daraa, and earlier that month, the US military killed a senior ISIS facilitator in a drone strike. But nonetheless, the group’s success with its attacks thus far would indicate that they will only be growing in strength and confidence as time goes on.

The Booming Narco-State and Regime Internal Strife

Then, there is the question of Syria’s booming drug smuggling market. To get a feel for how serious Syria’s drug problem has become, a raid that took place in the Saudi Arabian port city of Jeddah on July 1 is notable. In the city considered the gateway to Mecca, less than two weeks after the conclusion of the Hajj pilgrimage of this year, Saudi Arabia found over 3.6 million Syrian-made pills in a single stash.

Their street value is thought to be about 55 million US dollars. The pills were Captagon, a stimulant referred to as the ‘poor man’s cocaine’ or the ‘drug of jihad’, depending on the setting. It is a stimulant and a party drug, producing a euphoric intensity in users that allows them to stay awake, calm, and focused for a very long time, while staving off hunger.

Syria has been implicated for years in a level of Captagon production that led British news outlet The Guardian, in 2021, to call Syria a narco-state. Every once in a while, a stash of pills will turn up, and when they do, they often contain pills numbering in the millions. Local militias have been increasingly emboldened to act in this newest wave of violence, and they have had the collateral effect of kicking the hornet’s nest when it comes to Syria’s drug producers.

Captagon is consumed in Syria, but mostly, Syria is a factory to produce the substance and send it elsewhere, bringing money pouring in to the benefit of local gangs and other groups that control supply. Those same groups have been a target of animosity from local communities for years, but now, those communities have the means to answer back. On June 18 and 19, several civilians were caught in the crossfire amidst a fight between local gunmen and a militia working for a drug kingpin outside Damascus.

In early July, video circulated of an alleged drug smuggler captured, eaten, and executed by unknown gunmen, forced to make a video confession of his crimes. The regime has continued to make its own arrests against the drug producers and smugglers. However, the regime is widely understood to run its own side of the Captagon industry, marketing largely to the Syrian poor and maintaining several suspected industrial-scale production facilities.

That includes several in the Eastern Ghouta region, believed to produce a combined 20 million Captagon pills each month. Elsewhere in Syria, a strange death of a regime official has raised eyebrows in the rest of the world, even as it appeared to be covered up at home. On July 2, Bashar al-Assad’s senior personal adviser, a woman named Luna al-Shibl, was involved in a suspicious car accident on the highway outside Damascus.

She would be diagnosed with a severe cerebral hemorrhage, fall into a coma, and die three days later, but rather than be honored by the regime, her situation was placed under a strange veil of secrecy. The hospital in Damascus where she was treated was taken over by regime intelligence, and the CCTV street cameras facing the hospital from nearby streets were all shut off. Not a single regime official was present at her funeral, her casket was not honored with the draping of a Syrian flag, and Syrian news and state television barely acknowledged it.

Images taken of al-Shibl’s vehicle indicated that it was not hit in a way that should cause a fatality, while unnamed sources in Syria claimed to have witnessed the car being struck by an armored vehicle. Al-Shibl’s family had apparently fallen under suspicion of espionage, with her brother, a brigadier general, arrested on those charges, and her husband’s business assets in Russia being seized by the Assad regime. Even all that does not do full justice to the situation in Syria.

The country is racked by assassinations, ambushes, and kidnappings each and every day, at a pace and a scale it has not had to endure in many years. On the whole, the country’s people and their local defensive militias have nowhere to turn in order to abate the violence. Every side in Syria, it seems, is taking up arms, and not in a way that suggests a brief bloodletting, followed by a return to normalcy.

The country’s many warring factions are establishing positions, working to gain dominance in cities and communities, and targeting each other’s leadership in a way that, in aggregate, seems to suggest that each faction understands that something bigger is coming.

Global Interventions and Competing Cross-Purposes

With Syria looking more and more as if it is back in a death spiral, one critical question remains: Will anybody step in? On that front, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that although Syria has not been a part of global headlines in quite a while, it is a part of the world in which several major and regional powers are still actively engaged.

The bad news is that each of them are operating at cross purposes with someone else, and those that are the most heavily involved are either in support of the Assad regime or simply looking to exploit the conflict for their own goals. Vladimir Putin’s Russia never really stopped supporting the Syrian regime militarily, and its forces in the country have taken an active role in the last year. Per a UN-backed report from the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, Russia has participated in bombardments that have hit “well-known and visible hospitals, schools, markets and camps for internally displaced persons.”

Russian forces continue to carry out bombing runs from the air against a range of targets, generally including anybody that the Syrian government would like to oppose. In one wave of airstrikes on July 10, Russia allegedly targeted a school, a swimming pool, a camp for displaced people, and more. Russia appears to consider Syria as vital a strategic vassal as it has ever been, and clearly intends to retain its strong influence there, even if it means dedicating more military power despite its struggles in Ukraine.

Russia is believed to have set up no fewer than ten observation points in the borderlands near the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, quietly making an implicit threat to Israel by putting Russian troops in the line of fire, in the event that Israeli hostilities with Syria would ever break out. Turkey has been equally active in the conflict, as its president leads a people who have become deeply embittered against Syrian refugees over the last few years. Not only that, but Turkey sees a major threat from the autonomous Kurdish SDF forces in the region, and from the prospect of a functionally sovereign Kurdish area on its border.

In addition to its troop occupation in the north, Turkey has kept itself engaged in active hostilities against the Kurds in Syria; for example, a drone strike on May 31 of this year killed four SDF fighters and wounded eleven civilians. Turkey’s involvement in Syria will not be finished for a very long time, but it does appear that Ankara is looking to scale back its role there in the coming years. With Moscow as an arbiter, Ankara stands a chance of reconciliation with Damascus, and as Syrian demonstrators have taken care to express, that is a problem for everybody else who has to live in Assad’s splintered nation.

In the north, protesters have increasingly expressed their rage at the Turkey-backed Syrian Interim Government, deriding it as a racist state, and a threat to the Syrian revolution. Israel, too, has been active in Syria, for purposes that do relate to its ongoing operations against the Lebanese militant organization Hezbollah. The organization is active in Syria, and has been targeted by Israeli forces repeatedly, including in a June 26 strike on a Hezbollah front company that receives money from Iran, and in a strike on July 8, when an Israeli missile hit a shipment of purportedly Iranian weapons headed Hezbollah’s way.

Israel has attacked Syrian regime targets too. Arguably the most important of these was a man named Mohammed Baraa Qaterji, who was killed in an airstrike while driving on the highway from Damascus to the Lebanese capital of Beirut. Qaterji and his two brothers were considered one of, if not the most important financier behind the Syrian regime’s war machine.

Iran’s role in Syria also goes deep. The ties between Ayatollah Khamenei and Bashar al-Assad go much deeper than simple arms smuggling. Iran wants to embed its political and strategic influence deeply in Syria, making Assad’s regime something of a tool for Iran’s broader geopolitical goals.

And in the event that war was to break out between Israel and its range of Iran-backed adversaries, the United States would find itself in danger. The US operates primarily out of the al-Tanf airbase in southeastern Syria, leveraging a few hundred troops who have been sitting ducks for Iran-backed militias.

Implications: Is a New Round of All-Out War Beginning?

Syria, as a whole, exists in the summer of 2024 as a tangled mess of foreign influence. It is still splintered between a number of influential and militarily powerful groups, and it is still a very dangerous place for ordinary people to live. But all the things that have changed are for the worse, and they stack on top of each other, one after the next.

Syria is increasingly more volatile, with skirmishes and low-grade conflicts between more parties, with more competing interests, in more places, than the country has seen in years. It is under increasing pressure from Iran and its many proxy forces; it is under increasing pressure from the asymmetric forces of ISIS; it is under increasing pressure from local militias that are pushing back against its control; and Israel and Hezbollah could have a war spilling onto its territory in a matter of weeks. It is time to ask the only question left, and the only question that matters, in the thirteenth year of the Syrian Civil War: Is a new round of all-out war about to begin?

On the one hand, the conditions on the ground in Syria do not suggest that war would break out across the entire country, as it did in the early 2010s. Unlike then, Syria’s territory is now clearly divided into its various holdings, and most of the groups that do control territory, do not yet have the means to make war at scale. The northern province of Idlib is able to hold its perimeter, but it is unlikely that it would strike outward with any level of success.

The Islamic State has the numbers, and the reach, to sow chaos as insurgents, but not to fight a conventional war. The Assad regime, for its part, is dealing with too much, in too many places, to devote the resources it would take to stand up to the unrest in the southern provinces or the Islamists in Idlib. But on the other hand, there is a whole lot of room for things to get worse in Syria than they currently are, and still stop short of a return to the worst phases of the civil war.

The violence in Daraa and Suwayda Provinces appears to be the most imminent threat to the regime. The armed factions there, like every other entity across Syria, have learned extensive lessons from the war that has taken place up to this point, and they have learned to repeat what works against the regime, while avoiding what does not. Across the country, the Islamic State’s surge in power could have a wide range of knock-on effects, and it could get a whole lot worse, very quickly.

Over 10,000 ISIS members are currently imprisoned in detention centers across Syria, widely understood to be a hive for recruitment and further radicalization. As their allies in the countryside gain strength, prison breaks become easier to plan and execute. Swell the ranks of ISIS with hundreds of released prisoners, arm them well, and they can turn around and liberate thousands more.

Every group across Syria, no matter its allegiance or ideology, will make what it considers to be rational decisions, based on the information and the situations it is forced to confront. To each of these groups, chaos translates into threats, and threats that are perceived to be violent in their intent, will be greeted with violence in return. Thirteen years of endless mixing of factions, ideologies, and human lives have created hundreds, if not thousands, of communities that host factions operating at cross purposes.

All of them have guns, and after thirteen years of war, all of them know how to use those guns. Each one has a different idea of its own endgame, but start acting toward that endgame, and the dominos will fall, as each successive group gets in on the action. If Syria is, indeed, headed toward another explosion of violence in its long war, then this time, it will be communities against themselves, in a new cycle of violence that will catch fire far easier, and be far harder to extinguish.

Frequently Asked Questions

How severe is ISIS’s resurgence in Syria in 2024?

ISIS claimed 153 attacks across Iraq and Syria in the first half of 2024 alone, already surpassing its total for all of 2023, and close observers put the true figure in Syria at a minimum of 551 attacks. The US Central Command warned in July that ISIS was on track to more than double its attack count year-over-year. The group operates cells across the country, targeting the Assad regime, local militias, Kurdish forces, and civilians, and holds over 10,000 members in detention centers that serve as recruitment hubs.

What tactics are rebel factions in Daraa and Suwayda using against the Assad regime?

Reconciled fighters in Daraa and Suwayda have turned to kidnapping Syrian military officers as leverage to free arbitrarily detained civilians. In one case, Druze gunmen seized four army officers to swap for a kidnapped cleric, and the exchange succeeded. Armed groups have also attacked checkpoints and government buildings in direct retaliation for regime abuses. Counterterrorism analyst Charles Lister wrote that the regime has been “so consistently challenged and forced to submit” in this way as never before.

How has Syria become a narco-state, and who profits?

Syria has become the world’s leading producer of Captagon, a stimulant described as the “poor man’s cocaine.” A single raid in Jeddah on July 1 seized 3.6 million Syrian-made Captagon pills worth roughly $55 million. While local militias and criminal networks control much of the supply chain, the Assad regime is widely understood to run its own side of the industry, with suspected production facilities in the Eastern Ghouta region believed to produce 20 million pills per month.

What do Russia, Turkey, Iran, and Israel each want from Syria?

Russia continues bombing runs in support of Assad and has established observation posts near the Israeli-held Golan Heights as an implicit warning to Israel. Turkey occupies about 8,800 square kilometers in the north, targeting Kurdish SDF forces to protect its own border. Iran uses the Assad regime as a node in its regional proxy network and routes weapons to Hezbollah through Syria. Israel strikes Iranian arms shipments and Hezbollah positions — including killing regime financier Mohammed Baraa Qaterji — and operates near the Syrian-Lebanese border.

What does the suspicious death of Luna al-Shibl reveal about the Assad regime?

Bashar al-Assad’s senior personal adviser, Luna al-Shibl, died on July 5 following a suspicious car accident. Her car showed damage inconsistent with a fatal crash, unnamed sources reported an armored vehicle struck it, regime intelligence took over the hospital, CCTV cameras outside were shut off, and no senior officials attended her funeral. Her brother, a brigadier general, had been arrested on espionage charges and her husband’s Russian assets seized. Analysts read the episode as evidence of deepening internal fractures and potential infighting within the Damascus inner circle.

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