That is a thing I can do, though heads up; you can take a magnifying glass to any part of what I am about to say and it unfolds into a fucking novel. If you want more details (or just sources) on a specific claim, feel free to ask, but otherwise this is going to be the simple answers to the questions "why?" and "who?"Mask_De_H wrote:I would like to see DSM's primer of the Syrian Civil War.
So, the first thing to understand is that the latest round of instability in the Middle East starts with the Arab Spring. A bunch of different people living under a bunch of different governments from a variety of different ideological backgrounds all agreed - relatively simultaneously in late 2010/early 2011, thanks to the power of the internet making this shit contagious - that they fucking hated their governments. It can be tempting to say that this was a democratic uprising against authoritarianism, blatant corruption, and human rights abuses, and to a large extent that was absolutely true. But some of the protesters were also just assholes whose primary grievance was not the nature of the government but rather that they weren't the ones running the show. Even other assholes hate assholes, and there is no point pretending that the only people who want to topple Assad are good guys. Of course, it's also really fucking racist to pull a maglag and pretend all the people who want to topple Assad are cannibals, so don't do that either.
Every country has a slightly different Arab Spring story, but for the most part those stories all start peacefully. People took to the streets to demand various reforms and then shit went south from there. In the case of Libya and Syria, the governments broke up protests with (often lethal) force until the protests grew so large the police could no longer contain them, at which point the army was mobilized and the country's respective leaders, Gaddafi and Assad, started giving very concerning speeches about 'exterminating cockroaches' and other bullshit. They were both going to kill a lot of people and restructure their regimes as even more openly brutal and violent than they were before. So in Syria, facing an increasingly aggressive military response, protesters hit their breaking point and raided some police stations through the power of sheer numbers, some soldiers who'd been ordered to fire on civilians simply defected, and yes, shortly thereafter foreign powers started shipping in armaments. So now the protesters are armed rebels, but they are not - and this is critical - all that organized or unified. Here is a list of all the groups involved in the Syrian Civil War. Here is a territorial map. So, let's just go color by color.
The red bits are the pro-government forces. So that's the actual Syrian Army, a number of loyalist militias, some Iranian troops, and a side of operational support from the Russian airforce.
The black bits are ISIS. ISIS really are a "join us or die" type of operation, and as such they don't have a lot of friends. But ISIS and Assad do have a tentative frenemy-type relationship. ISIS has captured a lot of territory and a lot of natural resources. Assad has much better access to international markets. Both have problems other than eachother that they need to deal with. There's a relationship of mutual benefit there, and Assad bare minimum turns a blind eye to let it happen. But otherwise even ISIS and al Qaeda are trying to murder eachother; they just don't have a lot of friends. It's also important to remember that ISIS showed up to the game late; 2013.
The green bits are the Free Syrian Army. Here's the big reveal; the FSA is not a real organization. It's a label certain groups wear (or sometimes just sort of gets shoved on them) that lets you know they hate Assad, but there is no centralized command structure and a bunch of the groups also hate eachother. You may as well scribble "here be rebels" over the green portions of the map for all it matters. Democratic secularists are in there. Every flavor of nationalist under the sun is in there. Al Qaeda and associated groups are in there. It's a rainbow not-quite-coalition and frankly a shitshow, but that's to be expected. Decades of constant political turmoil have bred a huge number of different factions - and also turned a lot of those factions uncompromisingly radical. You can blame most of that on western colonialism and the aftermath thereof.
The yellow bits are the Syrian Democratic Forces. The SDF is mostly centrally-organized, and as such is much, much closer to a real organization than the FSA. It's also ethnically diverse and fairly secular, which are always promising traits to have in your rebel groups. The SDF has a... complicated relationship with the pro-government forces. The two have fought eachother before, and the two will almost certainly fight eachother again, but you may notice on the map that the yellow bits barely touch the red bits while the yellow bits and black bits share a border almost the entire length of the country. The SDF spends most of its time and resources fighting ISIS; they've even shown up to help defend pro-government territory against ISIS advances. There's certainly a hypothetical future in which ISIS's presence in Syria crumbles and a bloodied and battered Assad simply does not have the resources to continue the war against the SDF and we see two states emerge out of Syria's ashes. The SDF has a terrible relationship with a lot of the northern rebel groups, because those rebels groups are pro-Turkey, and Turkey does not think the SDF would make a good neighbor. Turkey's local kurds are already uppity enough without having a bunch of kurds on their southern border chanting terrorist propaganda like "democracy is cool." I've mentioned this previously.
The United States provides support to the SDF and various "members" of the FSA (which, again, not a real organization). We've recently withdrawn support from some of the northern FSA members, because they are backed by Turkey, and Turkey has a nasty habit of shelling SDF positions and then sending those rebel groups to attack them, which is not a thing we want happening. Our goals are to stop Assad (because he will kill a bunch of people to stay in power) and ISIS (because they will kill a bunch of people to kill a bunch of people), and even the really nasty islamicist members of the FSA are noticeably less genocidal than those two options, though we would obviously prefer to see more moderate groups than that win in the end.
Russia provides support to Assad. There are some minor strategic reasons for this, and also some vaguely historical ones, but to be perfectly honest it seems to almost entirely boil down to a pissing contest with the United States for the sake of a pissing contest with the United States. It's difficult to suss out reasons any more coherent than that, but there is some background information that may be relevant; Russia had some absolutely fucking huge protests back in 2011 when Vladimir Putin declared he was running for president again. Those protesters called for things like fair elections, the release of political prisoners, resignations of current government officials, an investigation into fraud, and basically just wanted to clean house on the Russia government. Those are almost exactly the exact same things Syrian protesters were saying. There was genuinely some concern that Russia was looking at the start of a revolution. They had their pet media empire blame it on the west, arrested a fuckton of protesters, passed a bunch of anti-protest laws, and just all around cracked the fuck down. You can make the case that Russia has a political interest in defending the international legitimacy of illegitimate governments - like Assad's. Events like the Arab Spring are genuinely intimidating to regimes like Putin's, and I have no doubt he would prefer it when they fail. Or maybe he just hopes that by waving his dick around against the U.S. he can rally his yes-they-really-are-openly-authoritarian supporters back home, because they eat shit like that up.
Turkey is there too. I've covered them, but in brief they oppose Assad, the SDF, and ISIS, and they support some FSA members who are fighting those groups.
Iran is there too two. They support Assad.
Anyway, uhh... I guess that's a basic rundown? I feel like I have not said nearly enough, but I also feel like I could rant about this shit for pages and pages still not give the conflict the depth it is due. For example, not featured in this at all; "where the fuck did ISIS come from? What does the formation of ISIS have to do with the Syrian Civil War?" And if instead of more detail you want the most tl;dr version possible of the Syrian Civil War, here; "protesters respond to being gunned down by militarizing and splintering; chaos ensues."