The definition of civil war has never quite applied in the case of Syria. Ever since the armed insurrection against the Assad government began in 2011, it has never been a clear case of insurgents fighting against the ‘regime’. Rather, the war quickly degenerated into a series of ethnic, confessional and national conflicts of which…

The Russians are the ones who, having taken a direct military role alongside Damascus in 2015, have done most to defeat ISIS and perhaps, more importantly, the other rebel forces. The Turks will want to ensure that they can maintain a military presence in northern Syria to watch over Kurdish separatist ambitions. Israel keeps the…

On 6 March 2011, a group of teenagers wrote anti-government graffiti on a school wall in Dara’a, a Sunni-majority city in the south of the country, suffering from a long drought and poor harvests. During the following days, the regime reacted with arrests and one of the students was found dead. But instead of fear,…