Outbreak of the Syrian civil war
- Date
- March 2011
- Category
- Military & conflict
- Region
- Syria
- Era
- Contemporary
- Significance
In March 2011 protests demanding political reform spread across Syria, galvanised by the arrest and torture of teenagers who had scrawled anti-regime graffiti in the southern city of Daraa.
A 'Day of Rage' on 15 March and large demonstrations from 18 March are generally treated as the start of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. Security forces responded with lethal force, killing protesters in Daraa and besieging the city. As the crackdown intensified, defectors and opposition fighters took up arms, and by 2012 the unrest had become a full civil war. The conflict drew in a tangle of foreign powers, jihadist groups including the Islamic State, and Kurdish forces. Russia intervened militarily in 2015 to rescue Assad, while the United States, Iran, Turkey and Gulf states backed various sides. By the late 2010s the war had killed an estimated half a million people and displaced more than half the population, producing the largest refugee crisis of the era and reshaping regional and global politics.
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Related military & conflict events
- Russian military intervention in Syria30 September 2015
- The September 11 attacks11 September 2001
- Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine24 February 2022
- The 7 October Hamas attack and the Israel–Gaza war7 October 2023
- The Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi7 April – 19 July 1994
- Fall of Saigon and reunification of Vietnam30 April 1975 (reunified 1976)
Further reading
The wider story
A History of the Modern Middle East
The go-to survey of the region from the late Ottoman era to the present.
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