Mar 15,2020: Syria’s brutal conflict enters its 10th year Sunday with President Bashar al-Assad’s regime consolidating its hold over a war-wracked country with a decimated economy where foreign powers flex their muscle.
When Syrians took to the streets on March 15, 2011, they could scarcely have imagined their anti-government protests would turn into a complex war entangling rebels, jihadists and outside forces.
At least 384,000 people have since died, including more than 116,000 civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said Saturday.
The conflict has displaced more than 11 million people internally and abroad.
“Nine years of revolution illustrate the extent of the suffering we have known, between exile, bombings and deaths,” said Hala Ibrahim, a rights activist who now lives in the town of Dana, in Idlib province.
“I left my university, my house which was bombed,” the woman in her 30s said. “We’ve lost everything.”
Originally from the northern city of Aleppo, Ibrahim left in late 2016 after the regime retook rebel-held areas and she sought refuge in Idlib.
The northwestern region — Syria’s last rebel stronghold — is the regime’s latest target.
Thanks to the military support of Russia, Iran and Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Assad has clawed back control of over 70 percent of the war-torn country.
A fragile ceasefire came into effect in the northwest earlier this month, and Turkish and Russian officials have agreed to start joint patrols in Idlib.
Syrian forces and Russian warplanes have heavily bombarded the region since December, killing nearly 500 civilians, the Observatory says, and forcing nearly a million to flee, according to the United Nations.
