![]() ![]() ![]() While "much of the hot fighting in Syria has subsided, you still have massive displacement of people," Michele Dunne, director of the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, tells NPR. Along the way, it has brought out ethnic and sectarian divides, helped foster a revival of the extremist Islamic State militia, displaced millions of people and left hundreds of thousands - mostly civilians - dead. The conflict has not only pitted Assad against a band of rebels, but drawn the U.S., Iran, Russia and Turkey, among others, into a complex proxy war. Days after the initial protests, Syrian soldiers fired on demonstrators, killing dozens in what would become the opening shots in a seemingly endless civil war that has reverberated far beyond the Middle Eastern country's borders. ![]() On March 15, 2011, protesters inspired by successful "Arab Spring" uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, rallied in Syria to call for an end to their own repressive regime.īut unlike the governments that had earlier more or less collapsed in the face of popular uprisings and armed insurrections, Syria's President Bashar Assad was not about to go quietly. A Syrian child poses atop a stack of neutralized shells at a metal scrapyard on the outskirts of Maaret Misrin town in the northwestern Idlib province, Syria last week. ![]()
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