In 1971 Hafez al Assad grabbed power in Syria from the Army junta leading to a dynasty that saw his son succeeding him in 2000. Bassar al Assad the son of Hafez is the current President of Syria. The Assads came from the minority Alawi community in a largely Sunni country, ditto in Iraq, where the Sunnis are largely left out in the power sharing arrangement following the US invasion of 2003. The Sunnis of both Iraq and Syria are divided by a post World War I Sykes Picot Treaty. The French mandate in Syria helped the Assads grip on power.
The first uprising to Hafez's rule came from the province of Hama, where the Muslim Brotherhood engineered revolt seriously put his government in a corner. But Hafez put down the revolt by brute force, leaving nearly twenty five thousand dead. That was Feb 1982 and the left the first serious threat to the Assad's rule. Syria experienced a severe drought in 2006-2010 and ominously for Bassar the Arab Spring of December 2010 began to gather steam across the Muslim world. The yearning for democracy was the root cause of Arab Spring where several countries are reeling under autocratic rule. The self immolation of a Tunisisn fruit vendor was the trigger of the Arab Spring movement, which toppled the head of States of Tunisian, Egypt and Yemen from power. Hosni
Mubarak the powerful Egyptian President was forced to resign.
The tremors of Arab Spring rolled into Syria, where in the town of Deraa, fifteen young boys wrote in a wall, "The people want the fall of the regime". But unlike Tunisian President Zine alAbidine and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Bassar al Assad responded differently, which embroiled the country in a crisis. Civil War broke out in Syria in 2011, as from Deraa the anti-regime protest spread into Damascus, Hama and Homs. The first signs of the general nature of the revolt saw Army desertion that later saw the group crystallize into FSA (Free Syrian Army) with its civilian counterpart SNC (Syrian National Coalition) and found shelter in Turkey. The group was immediately recognized as the Government-in-Exile by US, Turkey and GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council). By summer of 2011, this recognition propelled the Civil War into an international stage, where in due course multitude of actors, both State and Non-State got involved leading to 2.5 million deaths, 5.5 million Syrians leaving the country and 6.6 million IDP (Internally Displaced Persons). In the terror landscape of Middle East the global Islamic jihadi group Al Qaeda first appeared in Syria by the name Jabhat ul-Nusra (JUN) and by April of 2013 remnants of AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq) emerged as Islamic State of Iraq, and exceeded JUN in brutality seizing large swathe of western Iraq and eastern Syria.
The Syrian revolt of Sunnis reverberated in northern and western Sunnis populated areas, that proved propitious for Islamic State under Al Baghdadi, the shadowy leader of the group since 2010. By mid 2011 the regime released hundreds of Islamist militants from Syrian prison that soon after formed a group called Ahrar al-Sham and followed a sectarian agenda. As the twin assault
of JUN and Islamic State threatened the regime, Hizbollab militants from neighbouring Lebanon appeared to bolster the flagging Syrian Army. Syria is backed by Iran a Shite power and the war clouds started to loom over the whole of Middle East.
With Iranian support at hand the Army of Conquest formed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar's help in 2015 proved Infructous. A year earlier on 29th June Al Baghdadi announced the formation of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) that quickly overran Kobani in northern Syria, a Kurdish enclave sharing borders with Syria. That brought the YPG (Kurdish People's Protection Units) against ISIS, backed by SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) made up of Kurds. When the SDF turned the heat on ISIS, Turkey claimed that PKK (Kurdistan Worker's Party) based in Western Kurdistan in Rojava, that are fighting for autonomy inside Turkey have joined forces with SDF and launched a bombing campaigning forces of Kurds. Pro Syrian rebel groups like SAA (Syrian Arab Army) came up that began to fight the Asian jihadis like the Chechens, Uzbek and Uighurs swelled the ranks of JUN and ISIS. Uighur groups like TIP (Turkistan Islamic Party) and ETIM(East Turkistan Islamic Party) both having cadres from China's Xinjiang province turned Syria as the new Afghanistan.
If Afghanistan spawned international terror groups like Al Qaeda that targeted US in 9/11 attacks, Syrian war produced ISIS, the chillingly brutal terror group that pales Al Qaeda into insignificance. The TIP is protected by the Jaish al Fatah, a coalition of six Sunni groups also known as the Army of Conquest, that was formed in 2015. By then Russian domination over Syrian skies are near complete and ISIS were ejected from Raqqa, their nominal capital in northern Syria. In 2020 Israeli forces began
bombing Hezbollah targets as the ISIS threat to the regime was stabilized, and the dreaded group was holding the last few string of villages on either side of Euphrates in 2019. In 2021 looking for a diplomatic solution Russian, Turkey and Qatar opened negotiations that are yet to find a way out of the Syrian impasse, a brutal war that saw the worst human tragedy after the second World War.