The Syrian civil war was an armed conflict that began with the Syrian revolution in March 2011, when popular discontent with the Ba'athist regime ruled by Bashar al-Assad triggered large-scale protests and pro-democracy rallies across Syria, as part of the wider Arab Spring. The Assad regime responded to the protests with lethal force, which led to a series of defections, the emergence of armed opposition groups, and the civilian uprising descending into a civil war. The war lasted almost 14 years and culminated in the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. Many sources regard this as the end of the civil war even though clashes have continued into 2026.
The Syrian opposition to Bashar al-Assad began as an insurgency, forming groups such as the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Anti-Assad forces received arms and training from Qatar, Turkey, a United States-led program, and others. Pro-Assad forces received financial and military support from Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah: Iran launched a military intervention in support of the Syrian government in 2013, and Russia followed in 2015. By this time, rebels had established the Syrian Interim Government after capturing the regional capitals of Raqqa in 2013 and Idlib in 2015. Use of chemical weapons during the war, predominantly by Syrian government forces, was the deadliest since the Iran–Iraq War. The Ghouta sarin attack was followed by unsuccessful international attempts to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons through military action or diplomacy.
In 2014, the Islamic State (IS) seized control over Eastern Syria and Western Iraq, prompting a United States-led coalition to launch an aerial bombing campaign against the IS, while providing ground support and supplies to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-dominated coalition led by the People's Defense Units (YPG). In 2016, Turkey launched an invasion of northern Syria in response to the creation of the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava), while also establishing the Syrian National Army (SNA) to help it fight ISIS and pro-Assad forces.
The 2016 victory of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and other pro-Assad forces in the four-year Battle of Aleppo marked the recapture of what had been Syria's largest city before the war. In Idlib Governorate, the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militia formed the Syrian Salvation Government, a technocratic, Islamist administration that governed the region from 2017 until 2024. Meanwhile, IS was territorially defeated in the Syrian Desert, Central Syria, Raqqa, and Deir ez-Zor campaigns. In December 2019, the SAA and its allies launched an offensive on Idlib province, which resulted in a ceasefire lasting from 2020 until November 2024. During this period, there were regular clashes between pro-Assad forces and HTS.
HTS launched a major offensive in November 2024, joined by the SNA. Aleppo fell in three days as the SAA began to collapse, giving momentum to revolutionaries across the country. HTS soon captured Hama and began to advance south towards Homs. Southern rebels and the Syrian Free Army launched their own offensive, capturing Daraa, Suwayda, and Palmyra. On 8 December, Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow as Homs fell to HTS while southern rebels entered Damascus. Assad's prime minister remained in Damascus and transferred power to a provisional government. Israel launched an invasion of Syria's Quneitra Governorate (including the UN buffer zone) from its 58-year occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights.
At the Syrian Revolution Victory Conference held at the Presidential Palace in Damascus in January 2025, the new government announced the dissolution of several armed militias and their integration into the Syrian Ministry of Defense, as well as the appointment of former HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa as president of Syria. Later that year, a Druze insurgency formed in the southern Suweida Governorate following clashes with the government and alleged sectarian violence.
The Syrian civil war was an armed conflict that began with the Syrian revolution in March 2011, when popular discontent with the Ba'athist regime ruled by Bashar al-Assad triggered large-scale protests and pro-democracy rallies across Syria, as part of the wider Arab Spring. The Assad regime responded to the protests with lethal force, which led to a series of defections, the emergence of armed opposition groups, and the civilian uprising descending into a civil war. The war lasted almost 14 years and culminated in the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. Many sources regard this as the end of the civil war even though clashes have continued into 2026.
The Syrian opposition to Bashar al-Assad began as an insurgency, forming groups such as the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Anti-Assad forces received arms and training from Qatar, Turkey, a United States-led program, and others. Pro-Assad forces received financial and military support from Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah: Iran launched a military intervention in support of the Syrian government in 2013, and Russia followed in 2015. By this time, rebels had established the Syrian Interim Government after capturing the regional capitals of Raqqa in 2013 and Idlib in 2015. Use of chemical weapons during the war, predominantly by Syrian government forces, was the deadliest since the Iran–Iraq War. The Ghouta sarin attack was followed by unsuccessful international attempts to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons through military action or diplomacy.
In 2014, the Islamic State (IS) seized control over Eastern Syria and Western Iraq, prompting a United States-led coalition to launch an aerial bombing campaign against the IS, while providing ground support and supplies to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-dominated coalition led by the People's Defense Units (YPG). In 2016, Turkey launched an invasion of northern Syria in response to the creation of the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava), while also establishing the Syrian National Army (SNA) to help it fight ISIS and pro-Assad forces.
The 2016 victory of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and other pro-Assad forces in the four-year Battle of Aleppo marked the recapture of what had been Syria's largest city before the war. In Idlib Governorate, the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militia formed the Syrian Salvation Government, a technocratic, Islamist administration that governed the region from 2017 until 2024. Meanwhile, IS was territorially defeated in the Syrian Desert, Central Syria, Raqqa, and Deir ez-Zor campaigns. In December 2019, the SAA and its allies launched an offensive on Idlib province, which resulted in a ceasefire lasting from 2020 until November 2024. During this period, there were regular clashes between pro-Assad forces and HTS.
HTS launched a major offensive in November 2024, joined by the SNA. Aleppo fell in three days as the SAA began to collapse, giving momentum to revolutionaries across the country. HTS soon captured Hama and began to advance south towards Homs. Southern rebels and the Syrian Free Army launched their own offensive, capturing Daraa, Suwayda, and Palmyra. On 8 December, Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow as Homs fell to HTS while southern rebels entered Damascus. Assad's prime minister remained in Damascus and transferred power to a provisional government. Israel launched an invasion of Syria's Quneitra Governorate (including the UN buffer zone) from its 58-year occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights.
At the Syrian Revolution Victory Conference held at the Presidential Palace in Damascus in January 2025, the new government announced the dissolution of several armed militias and their integration into the Syrian Ministry of Defense, as well as the appointment of former HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa as president of Syria. Later that year, a Druze insurgency formed in the southern Suweida Governorate following clashes with the government and alleged sectarian violence.
Violence in the war peaked during 2012–2017 amid rebel and government ground offensives alongside sectarian and Islamist violence. By 2019 the Islamic State in Syria had been forced into an insurgency after years of territorial and personnel loss due to clashing with most other factions, including opposing jihadist groups, Assad's forces and allies, Kurdish conquest and US-led operations. International organizations accused virtually all belligerents involved—the Assad government, the Islamic State, opposition groups, Iran, Russia, Turkey and the US-led coalition—of severe human rights violations and massacres. The conflict caused a major refugee crisis, with millions of people fleeing to neighboring countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan; however, a sizable minority also sought refuge in countries outside of the Middle East, with Germany alone accepting over half a million Syrians from 2011 to 2019. Numerous peace initiatives were launched since the start of the war, including several led by the United Nations, but fighting continued.
After the 2020 Idlib ceasefire, frontline clashes between Syrian government and rebel forces mostly subsided and the war effectively became a stalemate, although sporadic clashes and minor skirmishes between opposing factions continued. From 2021 to late 2024, Assad was consolidating power and slowly reversing the diplomatic isolation resulting from the war, however this was halted after lightning offensives by opposition groups across the country successfully collapsed his regime and caused him to flee to Russia. The civil war concluded with the creation of a new provisional government which integrated elements of both the SIG and SSG alternative governments. The transitional government, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, would go on to experience lower-level fighting within the country in the aftermath of the war, while also overseeing reconstruction efforts and reinventing the country's diplomatic standing.
Background
Assad government
The Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party government came to power through a coup d'état in 1963 by overthrowing the Second Syrian Republic. A second coup in 1966 ousted the old Baathist leadership of Michel Aflaq, replacing it with a militaristic, hard-left, pro-Soviet regime led by Salah Jadid, causing a split between the Syrian branch of Ba'ath, which supported Jadid, and the Iraqi branch, which remained loyal to Aflaq. Jadid was in turn removed in November 1970 by General Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite who declared himself President in March 1971. This marked the beginning of the domination of personality cults centred around the Assad family that pervaded all aspects of Syrian daily life and was accompanied by a systematic suppression of civil and political freedoms, becoming the central feature of state propaganda. Authority in Ba'athist Syria was monopolised by three power-centres: Alawite loyalist clans, the Ba'ath Party and the Syrian Armed Forces. All three united by their allegiance to the Assad family.
The Syrian Regional Branch remained the dominant political authority in what had been a one-party state until the first multi-partyelection to the People's Council of Syria was held in 2012. On 31 January 1973, Hafez al-Assad implemented a new constitution, leading to a national crisis. The 1973 Constitution entrusted the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party with the distinctive role as the "leader of the state and society", empowering it to mobilise the civilians for party programmes, issue decrees to ascertain their loyalty and supervise all legal trade unions. Ba'athist ideology was imposed upon children as a compulsory part of school curricula as the Armed Forces became highly monitored by the Party. The constitution removed Islam from being recognised as the state religion and stripped existing provisions such as the requirement that the president of Syria be Muslim. These measures caused widespread furor amongst the public, leading to fierce demonstrations in Hama, Homs and Aleppo organized by the Muslim Brotherhood and the ulama. The Assad regime violently crushed the Islamic revolts that occurred during 1976–1982, waged by revolutionaries from the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.
The Ba'ath Party carefully constructed Assad as the guiding father figure of the party and modern Syrian nation, advocating the continuation of Assad dynastic rule of Syria. As part of the publicity efforts to brand the nation and Assad family as inseparable, slogans such as "Assad or we burn the country", "Assad or to hell with the country" and "Hafez Assad, forever" became an integral part of the state and party discourse during the 1980s. Eventually the party organisation itself became a rubber stamp and the power structures became deeply dependent on sectarian affiliation to the Assad family and the central role of armed forces needed to crack down on dissent in the society. Critics of the regime have pointed out that deployment of violence is central to the rule of Ba'athist Syria and describe it as "a dictatorship with genocidal tendencies". Hafez al-Assad's nearly three-decade rule was marked by its methods, ranging from censorship to violent measures of state terror such as mass murders, forced deportations and brutal practices such as torture, which were unleashed collectively upon the civilian population. Upon Hafez al-Assad's death in 2000, his son Bashar al-Assad succeeded him as the president of Syria.
Bashar's wife Asma, a Sunni Muslim born and educated in Britain, was initially hailed in the Western press as a "rose in the desert". The couple once raised hopes amongst Syrian intellectuals and outside Western observers, being seen as a path towards implementing economic and political reforms. However, Bashar failed to deliver on promised reforms, instead cracking down on the civil society groups, political reformists and democratic activists that emerged during the Damascus Spring in the 2000s. Bashar Al-Assad claims that no 'moderate opposition' to his government exists, and that all opposition forces are Islamists focused on destroying his secular leadership; his view was that terrorist groups operating in Syria are "linked to the agendas of foreign countries".
Demographics
The total Syrian population in July 2018 was estimated at 19,454,263 people. By ethnic groups, Syria was approximately Arab 50%, Alawite 15%, Kurd 10%, Levantine 10% and 15% of other ethnic groups (includes Druze, Ismaili, Imami, Assyrian, Turkmen and Armenian). Its religious breakdown was: Muslim 87% (official; includes Sunni 74% and Alawi, Ismaili and Shia 13%), Christian 10% (mainly of Eastern Christian churches—may now be smaller as a result of Christians fleeing the country), Druze 3% and Jewish (uncounted in the estimate, but with few remaining in Damascus and Aleppo).
Socioeconomic background
Socioeconomic inequality increased significantly after free market policies were initiated by Hafez al-Assad in his later years, and it accelerated after Bashar al-Assad came to power. With an emphasis on the service sector, these policies benefited a minority of the nation's population, mostly people who had connections with the government, and members of the Sunni merchant class of Damascus and Aleppo. In 2010, Syria's nominal GDP per capita was only $2,834, comparable to sub-Saharan African countries such as Nigeria and far lower than its neighbors such as Lebanon, with an annual growth rate of 3.39%, below most other developing countries.
The country also faced particularly high youth unemployment rates. At the start of the war, discontent with the government was strongest in Syria's poor areas, predominantly among conservative Sunnis. These included cities with high poverty rates, such as Daraa and Homs, and the poorer districts of large cities.
Drought
The unrest coincided with the most intense drought ever recorded in Syria, which lasted from 2006 to 2011 and resulted in widespread crop failure, an increase in food prices and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers. This migration strained infrastructure already burdened by the influx of some 1.5 million refugees from the Iraq War. The drought has also been linked to anthropogenic global warming, with evidence that human-caused climate change influenced the severity and duration of the regional drought. Some analysis, however, has challenged the relative contribution of climatic changes to the conflict, arguing that other factors played a more important role. Adequate water supply continues to be an issue in the ongoing civil war and is frequently the target of military action.