Hundreds of people died after rockets containing the nerve agent Sarin were fired at rebel-held towns in the Ghouta region. The US, UK and France concluded that the attack could only have been carried out by government forces, but the president blamed rebel fighters.
Although the Western powers did not carry out their threats to launch punitive air strikes, they did compel Mr Assad to allow the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons OPCW to destroy Syria's declared chemical arsenal. The disarmament process ended in June , the same month that Mr Assad ran for a third term in office, winning Other candidates were allowed on the ballot for the first time in decades, but many dismissed the election as a farce.
That summer also saw international attention largely shift away from the war between the Syrian government and opposition towards the threat posed by the jihadist group Islamic State IS , which had overrun large swathes of Syria and Iraq and proclaimed the creation of a "caliphate". In the first half of , the government suffered a string of defeats, losing control of the northern provincial city of Idlib to rebel factions and more territory in the east to IS.
Worried by his ally's precarious position, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the start of a major air campaign in support of Mr Assad that September. The Russian military said its strikes would only target "terrorists", but activists said they repeatedly hit mainstream rebel groups and civilian areas. The intervention swung the conflict heavily in Mr Assad's favour. Intense Russian air and missile strikes were decisive in the battles for the besieged rebel strongholds of eastern Aleppo in late and the Eastern Ghouta in early UN human rights investigators accused government and Russian forces of committing war crimes during the offensives, which reportedly left hundreds of civilians dead and led to the forced displacement of tens of thousands.
The government was also accused by a joint UN-OPCW mission of being behind a Sarin attack on the rebel-held northern town of Khan Sheikhoun in April , which opposition health officials say killed more than 80 people, and accused by Western powers of an attack allegedly involving the toxic chemical chlorine in the Eastern Ghouta town of Douma in April that rescue workers said left 40 dead.
The latter prompted the US, UK and France to conduct air strikes that they said targeted facilities associated with the "Syrian regime's chemical weapons programme". Mr Assad and the Russian military denied committing war crimes, and said the incidents in Khan Sheikhoun and Douma were "staged" by the opposition and their Western backers.
After recapturing the Eastern Ghouta, pro-government forces set their sights on the last three opposition bastions. They retook an enclave north of Homs in May and regained full control of Deraa province two months later.
They then declared their intention to "liberate" Idlib province. The UN warned there would be a "bloodbath" if the government launched an all-out assault on an area home to about three million civilians, half of them displaced from other parts of Syria. Mr Assad was not deterred, but the offensive was halted that September by an agreement between Russia and Turkey, which called for a "demilitarised buffer zone" along the front line and the withdrawal from it of the jihadist fighters that dominate Idlib.
However, the deal was never fully implemented, and fighting on the ground and air strikes continued. In Damascus the predominantly Catholic wealthy quarter in the Old City was burnt and looted by a mix of impoverished Druze and Bedouin, while many indigenous Orthodox Christians who lived in poverty-stricken Midan outside the walls to the south were spared and protected by their Muslim neighbors. Only the flagship Aleppo Umayyad mosque and the Homs Khaled ibn al-Waleed mosque are being rebuilt for show, as empty shells.
The war, like the war that rages today in Syria, was often mislabeled a civil war. Episodes of persecution were frequently misread by Europeans as sectarian, rather than economic, in nature. But as with the current war, it only exacerbated the root cause of the grievances, deepening foreign interference. In the wake of French troops educational and philanthropic agencies began to arrive, often run by Catholic missionaries, founding orphanages, boarding schools, and dispensaries in which their own religion was privileged.
But their attempts were resisted in the Great Revolt of , which began in the southern Druze region. The Syrian people showed their innate pluralism by refusing to identify themselves by sect. After the end of the Crimean War, the Russians, needing to create a Christian majority, brought in Christians and by had pushed over half a million Muslims out into the Ottoman heartlands.
In the French separated the Sanjak of Alexandretta from Syria and ceded it to Turkey, triggering the exodus of thousands of Armenians and Arabic-speaking Alawi, Sunni, and Christian refugees into northern Syria. In after capturing the Golan Heights in the Six Day War, Israel began almost immediately to settle Israeli Jews there, before illegally annexing the territory in Israeli maps show it as Israeli territory, not as Syrian territory occupied by Israel.
I am Shiitte, and my wife is Christian. Our peaceful coexistence, however, is now under threat. I doubt that the jihadists will adhere to democratic values and from attacking Syrians with different beliefs if they succeed in overthrowing the government. We must not forget that Assad was responsible for launching democratic reforms.
He abolished the state of emergency [in a bid to appease opposition factions, the government adopted a series of reforms in April that brought an end to the state of emergency, abolished the Supreme State Security Court and implemented a new constitution based on political pluralism February 26, ]. I voted democratically for his reelection [Assad was reelected president in May, with The election was widely believed to be fraudulent] and for the new constitution.
Should the opposition really have the right to remove an elected president? Mistakes are often made by local officials, as the president cannot be everywhere at once. Remember that the crisis started in March, in Deraa. In May , a year and a half before his death, photos circulated on social media appeared to depict Zahreddine posing next to the severed remains of people who were killed, sliced up and left hanging. Throughout that war, both government forces and their allies and armed opposition groups have been accused of war crimes and human rights violations.
According to some estimates, more than 11 million people have fled their homes, finding refuge outside of the country or ending up internally displaced within its borders. More than a million Syrians have received or requested asylum in Europe, where rising far-right parties and populist groups have regularly rallied against their presence. In Italy, CasaPound has led far-right demonstrations against refugees and migrants, has reportedly attacked anti-fascists , and advocates a return to fascist rule — under which the country toiled from until its liberation at the end of World War II in Ada Oppedisano, president of Solidarite Identites Sol.
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