Violence has escalated rapidly since the Syrian population rose up against President Assad's regime in early 2011. Who is fighting whom and why exactly is getting more and more complicated. The best way to understand it is to delve into the country's history, as the conflict has ancient roots.
With the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, a long period of relative stability in the Syrian region came to an end. The former Ottoman territories in the Middle East were divided in pencil and ruler on the map by the victors of the war:Great Britain and France. The line drawn by the French and British colonial negotiators still marks the artificial borders of modern-day Syria and Iraq.
Syria thus became a French mandate territory. Believing themselves to be a superpower after the 'victory' over the German Empire during the First World War, the French ruled their new colonial territory with a firm hand from the start. As yet another foreign ruler, they quickly became unpopular among the population. In the wake of the romantic nationalism that arose in Europe in the nineteenth century, a striving for autonomy for the Arab peoples arose in the Arab world. This Arab nationalism initially found support mainly among a small, intellectual upper class. But under the French yoke, nationalism among the Syrian Arabs soon grew.
Divide and conquer
The French divide-and-rule policy made good use of the long-standing split between Shia and Sunni and the centuries-long oppression of a small Shia minority:the Alawites. Alawites are Muslims who have divergent views and practices even within the Shia version of Islam. Today they make up about 12% of the Syrian population. Alawites are Arabs, but they had little sympathy for the ideas of Arab nationalism. The main nationalists were Sunnis.
To counter nationalism as much as possible, the French divided their mandate territory into semi-autonomous regions along ethnic lines. The Alawites and Lebanon, less nationalistic and more pro-French, got their own state. Under pressure from the Arab nationalists, the State of Damascus and the State of Aleppo were united in 1925 in the State of Syria.
In 1927 there was a major nationalistically inspired uprising against the French. To maintain order in their mandated territory, the French took advantage of the feelings that existed among the isolated Alawites. They recruited and armed Alawite men as members of their security forces and secret police. With the help of Alawite militias, the French finally managed to put down the uprising with great force.
Alawites inherited French power
When the French finally left Syria after the Second World War, the Alawites had built up a privileged position of power. As part of the colonial power apparatus, they were wealthier than average, well-trained and, moreover, armed. Nevertheless, Syria, which through centuries of foreign rule had no experience of governing itself, was a political chaos until the 1960s. Democracy did not function. The country was in the grip of military and security forces, many of whom were Alawite. In the first ten years after independence in 1946, twenty cabinets passed and four different constitutions were written.
After the lost 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Syria moved closer to the Soviet Union to reverse the burgeoning power of US-backed Israel. During this period of instability, the Pan-Arab idea, the idea that all Arabs should be united in one state, gained more and more support. This, along with moderate socialism, is one of the principles of the Baath Party founded in 1947. One of the members of the first hour was the Alawite Hafez al-Assad.
Assad was a fanatical nationalist. He became a fighter pilot and later completed his officer training in Moscow. This Assad was determined from an early age to resolve the political chaos in his country and – in the spirit of Pan-Arab thought – to found a great Syrian empire. After a military coup in 1966, he was appointed defense minister. He witnessed the military defeat of Syria (and Egypt) against hated Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War. Israel occupied, among other things, the fertile Syrian Golan Heights.
In 1970, the Syrian army led by Assad staged another coup. The population was so tired of the failing and unstable politics that a large part - Sunnis, Shiites, Christians and Alawites - welcomed Assad as a 'strong leader'. He strengthened the power of his own people, the Alawites, inherited from the French, within the army and security services.
Hama Massacre
Within a few years, Assad, with the support of a huge secret police apparatus, was ruling as an autocrat. He organized the administration of Syria in a decidedly secular way. This not only meant that Islamist ideas were not allowed to play a role in the government or the judiciary, but also that contradiction by Islamic groups such as the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood was not tolerated. This soon sparked Sunni resistance against Assad's secular, Alawite dictatorship. From the mid-1970s uprisings, attacks and demonstrations against the regime were the order of the day.
One of the strongholds of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was behind much of the attacks, was the city of Hama. In February 1982, the Syrian army, led by Assad's younger brother Rifaat Al-Assad, put a bloody end to an uprising in that city. Thousands of demonstrators were shot and the city was partially razed to the ground with artillery fire and bulldozers. The uprisings stopped, but the Muslim Brotherhood vowed revenge.
Not least because of support from the Soviet Union and Iran, which saw a stable Syria as an indispensable counterweight to an otherwise American-dominated Middle East, Assad remained in power. His dictatorship and oppression of the Syrian Sunni majority continued until 2000, the year Assad died.
Smoldering powder keg
Bashar al-Assad, Hafez' second-eldest son (intended successor Assel al-Assad died in 1994 in an unexplained car accident) succeeded his father as president. For a while there was hope for a softening of the dictatorship. Bashar was a London-trained ophthalmologist and known for being moderate. His first speeches as president pointed to reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis. Bashar himself was married to a Sunni woman and said he wanted to end the division within Syria.
While Bashar's ambitions may have been sincere, reforms never came. The new president was sucked in by the authoritarian system. He carried out economic liberalization, but these reforms mainly benefited the Alawite elite who had actually held power since the departure of the French.
The oppressed Sunni majority, who so fervently hoped for reform, soon stood on the sidelines in disillusionment. Poverty and inequality increased rapidly. A period of severe drought since 2005 drove millions of poor rural residents to the cities, hoping for work and a better life. These mostly young, male, Sunni new city dwellers did not get a foothold there, because almost the entire economy was in the hands of Shiite Alawites around the regime.
Drought, centuries of foreign domination, memories of Hama's bloody massacre and lost hopes for reform turned Syrian cities into powder kegs in 2010. A spark was enough to make it explode. It came in early 2011. All over the Arab world, oppressed citizens took to the streets to demand the fall of their regimes. Foreign interference, especially from Iran and Saudi Arabia, has now turned the Syrian conflict into a regional shadow war. After thousands of years of history, the strategic importance of the region is still as clear.