Syrian civil war

The Syrian civil war grew out of peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011 and became one of the deadliest and most complex conflicts of the 21st century, drawing in regional and world powers. After almost 14 years of fighting, a rapid rebel offensive toppled Assad on 8 December 2024, ending more than six decades of Ba'athist rule. Many sources treat his fall as the end of the war, though violence has continued in parts of the country.

In March 2011, as the Arab Spring swept the region, large crowds across Syria demanded democratic reform from Assad's Ba'athist government. Security forces met them with lethal force, and the crackdowns killed and detained many thousands. Soldiers defected, local militias took up arms, and by 2012 the revolt had become a full civil war. Rebel forces, among them the Free Syrian Army, received weapons and training from Qatar, Turkey, an American-led programme and others, and in 2013 and 2015 they captured the provincial capitals of Raqqa and Idlib.

The government survived with outside help. Iran intervened militarily in 2013 and the Lebanese movement Hezbollah fought alongside government forces, while Russia began air strikes and ground operations in September 2015. Chemical weapons were used repeatedly, mainly by government forces, according to UN and international investigators; the sarin attack on Ghouta near Damascus in August 2013 was the deadliest chemical attack since the Iran–Iraq War. In 2014 the Islamic State overran large parts of eastern Syria and western Iraq; a coalition led by the United States responded with air strikes and backed the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led alliance. Turkey, hostile to the Kurdish-led autonomous administration in the north-east, invaded northern Syria in 2016 and sponsored its own rebel force, the Syrian National Army.

Pro-government forces won the four-year Battle of Aleppo, before the war Syria's largest city, in 2016. In the north-west, the Islamist militia Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) ran Idlib province through its Syrian Salvation Government from 2017. By 2019 the Islamic State had lost its territory and been reduced to an insurgency. A government offensive on Idlib from December 2019 ended in a ceasefire in 2020, after which the front lines largely froze, and Assad slowly began to escape diplomatic isolation.

On 27 November 2024 an HTS-led coalition launched a major offensive from Idlib. Rebels entered Aleppo two days later as the army collapsed, then took Hama and advanced on Homs, while southern rebel groups moved on Daraa and Damascus. On 8 December Assad fled to Moscow, where he received asylum. His last prime minister handed power to a caretaker government drawn from the Salvation Government, and Israeli forces moved into the UN buffer zone on the Golan Heights. In January 2025 the former HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa was named president for a transitional period; in March the Kurdish-led forces agreed to join state institutions and a transitional government was sworn in. Clashes have nonetheless continued, including an insurgency among the Druze of Suwayda in 2025.

Death tolls vary by source and method. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition activist group, put the total at about 656,000 by March 2025. The UN human rights office documented at least 306,887 civilian deaths between March 2011 and March 2021, while warning that indirect deaths were not included. In 2015 the head of the UN's commission of inquiry said that the government was responsible for most civilian deaths up to that point. By 2022 some 6.7 million Syrians had fled abroad, most of them to neighbouring states such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and another 6.2 million were displaced inside the country.

Our 2010 map shows Syria on the eve of the uprising; the war and its aftermath fall after our most recent map.