![]() 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. Iranian forces and their Hezbollah allies have done the same on the ground, inadvertently making themselves the targets of strikes by Iran’s enemy Israel.Īnti-regime protests soon spread from Deraa to major cities such as Damascus, Hama, and Homs. Russia, too, has carried out air strikes in Syria, coming to the Assad regime’s defense. ![]() Since then, the Turkish military has pushed Kurdish forces, the United States’ main local partner in the fight against the Islamic State, from border areas. ![]() The United States was at the forefront of a coalition conducting air strikes on the self-proclaimed Islamic State, but 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. Today, the country is fractured by actors with apparently irreconcilable interests: in areas beyond the regime’s control, extremists promoting a Sunni Muslim theocracy have eclipsed opposition forces fighting for a democratic and pluralistic Syria, while regional powers have backed various local forces to advance their geopolitical interests on Syria’s battlefields. Twelve years after protesters in Syria first demonstrated against the four-decade rule of the Assad family, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed and nearly thirteen million people-more than half the country’s prewar population-have been displaced.
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