The Failure of the Syrian Civil War and Assad's Return to Power

On the 17th of December 2010, a fruit vendor in the small Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid set himself on fire in a desperate act of defiance against his government. The man—whose name was Mohamed Bouazizi—committed the act after having had his fruit cart confiscated by the government for alleged illegal vending, and later having been refused explanation by the governor at the provincial government building in Sidi Bouzid. Bouazizi spent two weeks in a comatose state in hospital, during which time he was visited by then-Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who promised the man’s family that he would send the young man for treatment to France.

But this never happened, and Bouazizi ultimately succumbed to his injuries, dying on the 4th of January, 2011. Mohamed Bouazizi’s story resulted in a massive outpouring of grief, which would quickly spiral into anti-government upheaval both in Tunisia and across the Arab World. What would become known as the Arab Spring kickstarted protests that would strike countries as far removed from one another as Morocco, Iraq, Sudan, Mauritania, and Libya.

Some of these would lead to the violent overthrow of ruling governments, sometimes more than once, and in others, it would lead to massive domestic crises, protests, instability, and outward migration. However, the consequences of the Arab Spring were, and remain, perhaps nowhere greater than in Syria, more than 2,000 kilometres away from the Tunisian town where Bouazizi carried out his protest. Violence in Syria quickly erupted into a civil war, which engulfed practically all of the country, and which continues to this day, having left hundreds of thousands dead in its wake.

Even though the central figure targeted by the protests in Syria, longtime dictator Bashar Al-Assad, succeeded—unlike some of his contemporaries—in remaining in power, this does not mean that the upheaval was any less devastating than some of the successful revolutions occurring elsewhere.

Historical Context: The Origins of the Syrian Civil War and Assad’s Playbook

The consequences of the Syrian Civil War shook not only the Levant region and the broader Middle East, but also—through the massive migration crisis it spawned—Turkey and the European Union. Even now, some twelve years since the outbreak of the war, Syria has not returned to the status quo ante bellum. In fact, in many countries, the insurrections of the Arab Spring can be seen to have failed, with Assad having largely weathered the threat to his rule and, while not regaining full control over the territory of Syria, having been largely rehabilitated and reinstated to his position among other world leaders.

The civil war officially began on March 15th, 2011, a little over two months after Bouazizi’s death in Tunisia. In that time, the Arab Spring had brought with it some swift and decisive results. The outrage in Tunisia at Bouazizi’s death had been so great that President Ben Ali was toppled only ten days later, fleeing to Saudi Arabia.

In Egypt, similar protests brought down President Hosni Mubarak in February after almost thirty years of rule. It wouldn’t be long before the upheaval would spread elsewhere, and by the time it struck Syria in March, the public’s enmity towards the regime was ready to explode. Tired of Assad’s repressive rule and the economic hardships endured by the country, members of both the public and security forces took up arms against the regime, leading to a wide variety of actors emerging as potent threats to the government.

But Assad had seen the protests coming and was prepared to do whatever it took to remain in power. What made the Syrian case somewhat different from the rest was that Assad already had a playbook on the vicious repression of protests, which he inherited from his father and predecessor, Hafez. Hafez Al-Assad had ruled Syria as President from 1971 until his death in the year 2000.

In 1982, an uprising against his rule was led by the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, centred in the western Syrian city of Hama. Hafez’s response was to simply obliterate the Brotherhood as well as the entire city, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths and being described by U.S. foreign affairs analyst Robin Wright as the single deadliest act by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East. Unlike in most other states afflicted by the Arab Spring, the conflict in Syria had a religious-sectarian element to it.

Assad and much of his close network are members of the Alawite sect, a branch of Islam often described as being part of the wider Shia Twelver school. The sect had long held a privileged position in Assad’s nomenclature, with many members of his cabinet, security apparatus, and high-up members of the military belonging to the Alawite religion, which represents ten to fifteen percent of Syria’s population. While many members of the military would abandon service after being expected to open fire upon the protestors, Assad could generally continue to count upon his Alawite kin, which remained an important power base for him even during the most precarious instances of the war.

Moreover, from the outset of the war, Assad could count on the support of Iran, which provided him materials and munitions and also sent Hezbollah fighters from nearby Lebanon to bulwark his regime as the civil war erupted. And when Russia joined the conflict in 2015, the combined support proved decisive in allowing him to survive the conflict with his reign intact.

The Rise of Opposition Forces and International Intervention

From the very first instance of spiralling protests against his rule, Assad followed his father’s example and unleashed his security forces upon the public to quell the unrest by whatever means necessary. Nevertheless, his efforts were not successful. The opposition which arose against Assad was not only large in number, but had powerful backers of its own—especially in the form of Sunni Muslim governments from the region.

Most of the remainder of Syria’s population is Sunni Muslim, with significant minorities of Christians, Druze, and Ismaili Shiites. Many of the opposition movements also took on a religious character. The Druze and Assyrian Christians formed their own militias to protect their communities, leading to a complicated network of alliances throughout the war.

But it was the opposition groups representing the Sunni Muslim population, making up around seventy-four percent of Syria’s population, who would come to play the most noteworthy role. With the backing of Sunni countries such as Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, the conflict spawned the rise of multiple powerful groups against Assad. Perhaps the most notorious was the Islamic State, a Salafist organisation which split from the mainstream opposition and took over large swathes of land across Syria.

As the conflict dug in, the group attracted fighters from Syria, Iraq, and across the world, and began to pose a greater and greater risk to the government. By 2014, the Islamic State was at its strongest, and controlled about half of Syrian territory, with a population of around ten million people. As the Islamic State rose and began to inspire attacks in Europe, Western powers became involved in the conflict, establishing a coalition in 2014 with some cooperation with the Syrian government.

However, the coalition’s relationship with the government was functional at best, hinged around the destruction of the Islamic State. Both as a response to the well-known excesses of Assad’s government, as well as the need for partners in the long-term suppression of the jihadists, the United States also began to back the Kurdish factions in 2017, who came to represent another important player in the civil war. The conflict in Syria may appear, from a distance, to have entered a stalemate.

As it stands, Syria is divided between three primary entities. In the east and northeast, large swathes of territory are held by the Kurdish-controlled Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava. Rojava controls around one-quarter of Syria, including the cities of Al-Hasakah and Raqqa.

But while the Kurds have largely succeeded in matching Assad’s forces in combat, they also suffer from precious few outside backers, and multiple threats from different directions. Aside from Assad, the Kurds have long been in conflict with Turkey, both in Syria and in Turkey itself, and also have tepid relations with Iran and its subsidiaries, including Hezbollah. The Kurds’ only state allies are the United States, United Kingdom, and France—which, together, have provided it material support and training.

It also had limited cooperation with the Syrian government and Iran against the Islamic State, but has otherwise been in conflict with these also. Along Syria’s northern border, the Syrian Interim Government—one of the first opposition movements to emerge in the war—controls around eleven percent of Syria’s territory, with the backing of Turkey. Assad and his government in Damascus control most of the remaining two-thirds of Syrian territory, with small pockets under the control of resurgent factions of the Islamic State.

Displacement, Earthquakes, and the Humanitarian Catastrophe

The trouble is that the reduction in the intensity of the conflict and the overall defeat of the Islamic State offered a semblance of things returning to normal when, in fact, quite the opposite is true. The UNHCR reported in 2022 that the conflict had resulted in over twelve million forcibly displaced Syrians. All told, around 14.6 million Syrians were described as being in need of humanitarian assistance, itself an increase of over a million from just the previous year.

The UNHCR further estimated that some 6.8 million of these remaining displaced internally within Syria following the fighting. This figure—a massive amount for any country—represented more than a quarter of Syria’s estimated population of a little over twenty-three million. To make matters worse, on February 6th, 2023, Syria and Turkey were rocked by a vicious earthquake, which flattened buildings and killed an estimated 60,000 people.

Most of the deaths occurred in Turkey, where at least 50,000 people lost their lives. Around 6,000 people died in Syria, and the quake happened to take place in a part of Syria still recovering from the war, much of which is illegally occupied by Turkey. The earthquake further contributed to Syria’s humanitarian woes.

By 2024, the number of people in need of humanitarian assistance in Syria had risen to an astonishing 15.3 million people, according to the UNHCR’s Operational Report for January of that year. With an urgent need for aid to flow in order to stem the crisis, the West and other actors were forced to grudgingly cooperate with Assad’s government to secure access, although the United States has rejected any move toward normalising relations with Damascus until it has made progress towards free and fair elections under United Nations supervision. And the need for access became only more acute in the time since the earthquake.

With Turkey having borne the brunt of the force of the quake and therefore tending to its own affairs, the disaster offered Assad significant leverage and an opportunity to control foreign aid flows coming into Syria. This, in part, is what resulted in his rehabilitation, largely seen as accomplished with his presence at an Arab League summit in May 2023, his first appearance at the annual event in twelve years. And amidst the normalisation, Assad quietly proceeded as ever before.

Demolitions, Law 10, and Evaluating Coalition Objectives

The same year that the Islamic State was defeated, the Syrian government passed a notorious piece of legislation known as Law 10, which effectively allowed the government to repossess or demolish vacated or unclaimed homes, many of whose inhabitants had fled for their lives in the midst of the conflict. According to Human Rights Watch, the government wielded the law to demolish not only homes whose owners could not prove property rights in time, but also entire neighbourhoods known to harbour sympathies for opposition groups. The group concluded that this practice, in fact, long preceded the signing of Law 10, and had been used as a tactic by the government since the earliest stages of the war, something which no doubt further contributed to the chaos and displacement among Syria’s population.

Now, in order to answer the question of whether the war in Syria was successful in accomplishing certain goals, one must look closely at the intended objectives behind the course of the conflict. If the objective was to eliminate the most vicious non-state actors to emerge from the conflict, especially the Islamic State, and to return relative stability to the country in the wake of the Arab Spring, then the answer may be yes. The Islamic State was defeated in 2018 after years of intense conflict, and that defeat has mostly remained decisive.

Certainly, the territory controlled by the group, which once spanned from Aleppo to Baghdad and which the group considered the bedrock of its would-be caliphate, has dwindled to minor pockets in arid regions of eastern Syria. Similarly, the Al-Nusra front, another Salafist Islamist faction which controlled significant pockets of territory in northern Syria, was also eliminated, being dissolved in 2017 after a five-year campaign. With that said, sporadic re-emergence of Islamic State factions has occurred, notably with the killing of thirty-three government soldiers in a surprise attack in Deir Az-Zor last year.

The violence has continued in 2024, with Islamic State fighters behind an attack on government soldiers which killed nine soldiers in the same region on January 1, and with many more such attacks occurring as this year has progressed. The group has even claimed responsibility for fresh attacks carried out in Europe, such as the stabbing attack in Solingen, Germany in August this year, which resulted in three deaths. Moreover, with thousands of radicalised Islamic State fighters and their families languishing in Kurdish prisons, the potential for a return to the brutal cycle of violence inflicted by the state has not been entirely ruled out.

Separately, if the objective were to reduce the number of Syrian refugees fleeing abroad, then according to statistics, this objective has been somewhat successful. The rate of outward migration has slowed—from a high of 80,000 Syrians arriving in Europe in 2016 down to 21,000 six years later. With that being said, the success of this objective also comes with an asterisk.

The flow of refugees has slowed due to a general reduction in the scale of the conflict, but also due to the progressive introduction of migration-reduction policies in the European Union, and in Turkey. And while some Syrians have been returning to their home country, this number is really nothing more than a trickle. It is thought that only those with sympathies towards Assad have returned.

And that, unfortunately, is where any relative success emanating from the war in Syria rather comes to an end.

Implications and Impact: The Ongoing Limbo and the Push for Repatriation

For one thing, it is important to stipulate that the war in Syria is still very much alive. Although the active stage of the conflict has diminished, it has converted into a slow-burning conflict, but one which still killed 4,000 people in 2023. Much of Syria continues to operate in a limbo, with Kurdish-controlled Rojava having de-facto control over much of its territory without any recognition, and a foreign power in Turkey occupying much of the north.

And while some of the principal cities which fell into the hands of Salafist factions have now been recovered, this is only after they were largely reduced to smithereens by government bombing campaigns, with much of cities like Aleppo, previously at the epicentre of much of the fighting, still lying in rubble. Much of this bombing was carried out by Assad and his allies, with none of these held to account for these crimes. Yet, despite the conflict still ongoing, if there is one thing that the recent developments in the war in Syria have undoubtedly accomplished, it is to heighten calls for Syrian migrants to be returned to their homeland.

During the course of the war, some six million Syrians fled abroad. Although many of these made their way to Europe, perhaps as many as half arrived in Turkey, where public hostility against the migrants has reached fever pitch in recent years. Turkey has struggled to tend to its large migrant population.

Accommodating almost four million migrants would be no small feat for any country, but it only got worse as Turkey’s economy began to tank in the late 2010s. Added to that, the cultural collisions between the Turks, the Syrian Arab arrivals, and the many Kurds which also fled to Turkey, and the temperature in the country rose. And with the most intense period of the war seemingly having subsided, calls by Turkish leaders to repatriate the Syrians sheltering in Turkey have grown in number.

One of the most vocal advocates for the immediate return of the Syrians, perhaps surprisingly, was Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition party in Turkey, the CHP. Kilicdaroglu declared he would send all refugees back to their homes in a fiery speech before his closely-run presidential election with Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2023. These calls have been matched by other prominent political factions in Turkey, as well as in Lebanon, where some 1.5 million Syrians fled to.

It has been reported that the situation for Syrians in Lebanon has deteriorated massively in the wake of its own recent troubles, with misinformation resulting in civil campaigns and xenophobia against Syrians. Calls for the repatriation of Syrians have also grown more vociferous in the European Union, especially in the wake of the signing of the Pact on Migration and Asylum in 2024, the consistent arrival of irregular migrants by land and sea to EU countries, and episodes like the aforementioned stabbing attack in Germany. But back in Syria, the situation remains far from stable.

Economic Devastation and the Failure of Regional Accountability

In 2023, Syria was ranked by the Institute for Economics and Peace as the third-least peaceful country in the world, behind countries like Sudan, Somalia, Ukraine, and Russia. And the threat to repatriated Syrians should they return to their homeland remains severe. Assad’s government remains as vindictive as ever, and that is not even to speak of the fact that for some of these Syrians, their former homes now lay in the hands of a completely foreign entity or repossessed by the government, if they even stand at all—with many of their homes having been destroyed by the fighting or by the devastating earthquake in 2023, or repossessed under Law 10.

Even aside from this, if the prospects of a normal life in Syria before the war were poor, they have become even worse still. The long years of fighting have ravaged Syria’s economy, destroying businesses and restricting economic development all over the country. These problems got only worse following the earthquake, which laid further waste to the prospects of a return to normality for the depleted regions of Syria’s north.

The humanitarian situation worsened further with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with grain imports having been curtailed due to the disruption of supply lines from Russia and Ukraine. This is another part of the reason why Assad has been rehabilitated by the West, with foreign aid being largely reliant on the Syrian government for access to the massive internally-displaced population, resulting in a leverage used by Assad to curry favour with external partners. With so many people at risk of a humanitarian crisis, many countries seemingly decided that it would be much better to cooperate with the ruling regime rather than to risk a catastrophic loss of life and another refugee crisis by withholding aid.

And on that note, if the intended objective was to bring down the despotic regime of Bashar Al-Assad—which, for the West, at some point it was—then that objective has, for now, ended with resolute failure. After ten years of war, Assad’s rehabilitation was complete when he sauntered down the gangway in Jeddah, to reassume his position at the Arab League summit for the first time since 2011. If anything, Assad’s position has been strengthened by the war with the elimination of many of the groups opposed to him, the blunting of the threat posed by others, as well as being able to provably count on the support of partners such as Russia and Iran.

The combined force of this axis resulted in a colossal loss of life in Syria. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) estimated in 2024 that more than 617,000 people—civilians and combatants alike—had died during the course of the war, and that the single biggest number of civilian deaths was, by a wide margin, attributable to Assad’s security forces or factions allied with the regime. According to the SOHR’s report, of the 164,223 civilian deaths identified by name and cause of death, more than 130,000 were killed by Assad’s forces and its backers, equally divided between death in detention centres and due to government-led airstrikes.

The Council on Foreign Relations added that up to 1,400 died by way of prohibited chemical weapons used by the government in the summer of 2013. The SOHR further stated that of the deaths in Syria, only around 10,000 of these were caused by opposition factions, jihadist groups, and explosive devices combined, with the remainder being the work of the government, killing wantonly until there was little left of the resistance.

Contested Death Tolls and the Protracted Migration Crisis

It is important to mention that the SOHR has received some scrutiny for its perceived sympathy towards the opposition, and its statistics—as well as its allocation of responsibility—have been contested by some sources. Akhbar News, a media site in Lebanon, refuted the SOHR’s figures as overly generous towards the opposition, although Akhbar News was itself accused of sympathising with Assad by a former contributor, journalist Max Blumenthal. It is also worth mentioning that the relatively more minor body count on the part of some opposition groups does not absolve them of vicious bloodthirst.

The Islamic State, for example, carried out most of its atrocities in Iraq, where—despite not having the advanced weaponry of states involved in the conflict—it still slaughtered around 37,000 people, including alleged genocides of both the Turkmen and Yazidi minorities. What makes the death toll obscure is the lack of verifiable information coming out of the conflict, making the number of dead and parties responsible difficult to precise, especially when the total figure became runaway in scale. The United Nations gave up counting the number of casualties in January 2014.

The true figure has remained contested ever since. Nevertheless, there are few who would contest the enormity of the crimes committed by Assad’s regime, and the immensity of the body count left in its wake. And while responsibility for the devastation may be in doubt, its scale is not, and it continues to grow in 2024.

Furthermore, if the intention was—as it is likely to have been for the European Union and for Turkey—to not only reduce, but outright end the massive migration streams coming out of Syria, this hasn’t worked either. Though their numbers have fallen, according to the International Organisation for Migration, Syrians remained the single largest irregular migrant group arriving in Europe in 2023, with more than 38,000 Syrian migrants arriving in Europe that year. This trend has continued in 2024, with close to 20,000 Syrians having arrived so far.

Admittedly, many of these came in the wake of the devastating earthquake which shook the region in 2023, and the numbers pale in contrast to the 80,000 Syrians who arrived in Europe in 2016. Nevertheless, Syrians have consistently remained among the largest single nationalities fleeing to Europe since the outbreak of the war, which indicates that the situation domestically is certainly not as stable as one would have hoped. But perhaps above all, if the objective of the war was to end the human suffering in Syria, that objective has most decisively failed.

In addition to the massive amount of deaths previously mentioned, Syria finds itself in a critical humanitarian situation in 2024. According to a report by Voice of America, the number of people living in Syria and in need of humanitarian aid of some kind is now roughly seventeen million, the most since the outbreak of the conflict, and a significant increase on the fifteen million from only two years before. So while the intensity of the conflict has dialled down, the scale of the humanitarian challenge has remained stable, and even eclipsed the challenge during the very height of the war.

And with the Assad regime not having been held accountable for these crimes, there is little doubt that they shall continue, and the misery heaped upon the population will continue as long as the war does and likely beyond.

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