The Syrian civil war began as a revolution with simple demands, but very quickly turned into a conflict of such complexity it baffled even the most experienced Middle East analysts.
Today, there is almost no major power in the world that is not directly involved in this civil war. Syria, which perhaps could boast of a more coherent national identity than any other Arab country, has now turned into a battlefield — a sectarian and religious war by proxy.
The al-Assad family, along with around six percent of Syrians, belong to the Alawite minority. Before the war, few people paid much attention to the fact that the Alawites are Shia Muslims. But the intervention of the Islamic Republic of Iran on one hand, and major Sunni powers including Saudi Arabia and Qatar on the other, helped turn this conflict into a sectarian war.
The more the Assad regime lost ground, the more it needed foreign support — and this support came mainly from the Islamic Republic, as well as from groups including Lebanese Hezbollah, which dispatched its forces under the banner of Shia Islam and defense of Shia holy places. Iran itself sent a considerable number of Revolutionary Guards forces, and later, soldiers from the country’s armed forces, which operate separately from the Guards. The Islamic Republic also enticed a number of Iraqi and Afghan Shias to fight in the Levant by promising them payment and other benefits.
The superpower Russia intervened in the war on the side of al-Assad — because of both its antagonism toward the United States and Western countries allied with Saudi Arabia, and its longtime alliance with the Assad regime. Moscow has been involved in the Syrian civil war almost from the start, but on September 30, 2015, it stepped up its efforts and directly intervened. Despite this clear intervention, its status as a superpower and its membership in the United Nations Security Council has given it a degree of independence, as well as an ability to make deals with the other side. This is of course also true for the US, the other superpower in the war, and its European allies.
The other complicating factor is of course the terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which emerged from the remnants of the militant group Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia, and combined elements of Saddam Hussein’s former military and foreign jihadists, and which now controls considerable parts of Syria and Iraq. Those members of Al Qaeda who refused to join ISIS continued as the Al Nusra Front, a terrorist group still officially linked to Al Qaeda. Areas under Al Nusra’s control are so intertwined with areas controlled by other opposition groups that it often lacks an independent presence.
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