SUMMARY
In March 2011, the Government of Syria faced an unprecedented uprising, where protesters across the country took the streets to demand for regime change and to topple President Bashar al-Assad. The government resorted to the use of excessive violence and attempted to crack down on the protests by sending thousands of law enforcement officers, ranging from the police and the military to intelligence and paramilitary forces. The opposition quickly took up arms and began to form militias in 2011. By 2012, the initial unarmed conflict transformed into a brutal civil war, during which the government lost large parts of the country to rebel groups and the IS. The conflict soon became highly internationalized as various foreign powers supported conflicting actors; Russia, Iran and Hezbollah intervened on the government’s side, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia backed various rebel groups, and the U.S.-led coalition supported the SDF. After years of high-intensity civil war, the Syrian government regained control over the majority of the country in 2017. Two years later, in 2019, the territorial defeat of the IS was formally declared.
While conflicts remained active, 2020 marked the beginning of a relative status quo, as frontlines largely froze. For the first time in a decade, fighting between the government and Syrian insurgents did not reach the level of war in 2021. Conflicts began to rise again in 2023. On 5 October, a drone attack on the Military Academy of Homs killed 135, leading to the government escalating shelling on insurgent-controlled areas in northwestern Syria. That same year, the IS conducted a major attack on a checkpoint in eastern Syria, killing 68, including 61 civilians.
Several conflicts in Syria escalated over the course of 2024, culminating into the fall of former president Bashar al-Assad on 8 December, thereby terminating the conflict between the government and Syrian insurgents. Notably, in early 2024, Iranian-backed groups targeted U.S. bases in eastern Syria, under the banner of “revenge for Gaza”, leading to a tit-for-tat with the U.S. The escalatory spiral peaked with a drone attack on the U.S. base Tower 22 in Jordan on 28 January, near the Syrian border, killing three U.S. soldiers and prompting a major retaliation that killed over 50 Iranian-backed fighters. On 27 November, the HTS initiated the rebel offensive that eventually led to their control of Damascus, in battles that killed nearly 900. The HTS-led offensive quickly succeeded in controlling the city of Aleppo, as the government forces put up little resistance and began withdrawing south. Heavy fighting followed around Hama and Homs, with hundreds killed on both sides before the rebels seized both cities. In the early hours of 8 December, Assad fled the country as rebel forces entered Damascus, bringing an end to 54 years of Assad family rule.
Since 1946, Syria has experienced the interstate, intrastate, non-state and one-sided categories of UCDP organized violence.
2025
Despite the end of the Syrian civil war and the formation of a new transitional government, Syria continued to experience high levels of violence, broadly in line with previous years. Two major episodes of violence, on the Mediterranean coast and in the south, drove the trend upward.
In March, an insurgent group composed of former regime forces, the Military Council for the Liberation of Syria, pledged to overthrow the transitional government and launched attacks on government forces. Within days, clashes between government forces and former regime insurgents, as well as one-sided violence perpetrated by the warring parties, killed over 2,000. The vast majority of victims, some 1,400 civilians hailing from the Alawite minority, were killed in massacres carried out by government and pro-government forces.
In July, tensions between Druze factions and Bedouin tribal militias in southern Suwayda province triggered local clashes, which escalated into mass violence after the Syrian government launched an offensive to establish control over the semi-autonomous region. Notably, the violence drew in Israeli intervention on the behalf of the Druze faction. The events in Suwayda caused over 1,700 deaths, many of them Druze civilians. However, only a portion of these fatalities could be included in UCDP data. Fatalities from clashes between government forces and the Druze Suwayda Military Council are not included, as the Suwayda Military Council lacks a stated incompatibility. In addition, available reporting often did not provide sufficiently disaggregated information to separate fatalities by type of violence. UCDP therefore documented over 400 fatalities from non-state fighting between local groups and one-sided violence perpetrated by government and pro-government forces, as well as by the Suwayda Military Council, though the actual number was likely significantly higher.
Meanwhile, clashes between the SDF and the SNA (the latter was later integrated into the Syrian army), continued during the early months of the year. Fighting was mainly concentrated in eastern Aleppo, where the two sides battled for control of areas along the Euphrates River, causing close to 500 fatalities. Although SNA factions had been incorporated into the Syrian army by late January, fighting continued under the Government of Syria–SDF dyad. Clashes largely subsided after the Syrian government and the SDF reached an integration agreement, under which the autonomous administration in the north east would be brought under central government authority.
IS remained active in Syria, though at lower levels than in previous years. Most notably, fatalities in the conflict between the Syrian government and IS dropped sharply, from more than 600 in 2024 to 29 in 2025. Instead, the group appeared to concentrate its conflict activity in the north east, where it continued to clash with the SDF at levels comparable to previous years. By October, the U.S. and Syria announced their cooperation in the fight against IS, making the U.S. a secondary warring party to both the Syrian government and the SDF. In parallel, a new extremist group emerged in Syria, the Saraya Ansar al-Sunna. The group perpetrated a deadly church bombing in June, killing 27 worshippers, and targeted an Alawite mosque in late December, killing eight.
The interstate conflict between Israel and Syria became active for the first time in decades. Following the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, Israel expanded its military activities in Syria, carrying out hundreds of airstrikes on Syrian military assets, conducting frequent ground incursions, and expanding its presence beyond the UN-monitored buffer zone in the Syrian south. In 2025, Israeli attacks targeting Syrian government forces killed 35, including civilians.
Background
After roughly 25 years of French administration, the independent Syrian Arab Republic was founded in 1946. Following a period of political instability and a series of coups, Syria became part of the United Arab Republic under the leadership of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1958. However, only three years later Syria seceded. In 1971, Hafez al-Assad took power in a military coup and became President of Syria, a position he held until his death in 2000. He was succeeded by his son Bashar al-Assad.
Syria's population is predominantly Sunni Muslim, but there are a number of religious minorities such as the Alawite Muslims, Christians and Kurds. The Assad family belongs to the Alawites who under their rule succeeded in holding all key position in the State, the armed forces and the economy. This dominance resulted in grievances among the Sunnis, while other minorities, notably the Christians, appreciated the relative religious freedom resulting from the secularization of the state promoted by Hafez al-Assad.
The Syrian civil war
In 2011, an uprising swept across the Middle East and North Africa - later called the “Arab Spring”. In Syria’s case, it manifested in a violent way from relatively early on.
The Syrian war can be divided into different sections during which different actors play a major role: the beginning of protests and early militia formation in 2011; armed rebellion and the rise of radical rebel groups Jabhat Fateh al-Sham in 2012; the Hezbollah intervention in 2013; the rise and spread of the Islamic State (IS) in 2014; the Russian intervention in 2015; the Turkish intervention in 2016; and finally the rebel decline since 2017.
The Syrian civil war was a highly internationalized intrastate war, often considered as a complex conflict with many different sides and players involved. The main parties of the conflict were the Government of Syria, Syrian insurgents, SDFand IS. All of those parties - with the notable exception of IS - have foreign state support.
External support
Over the years, the warring parties in Syria have been receiving an increasingly open support from external actors. Above and beyond the internal power struggle, the conflict acquired the character of a proxy war in which international, regional and sub-national conflicts were fought out. The actors - Syrian and foreign - treated the conflict as a zero-sum game, where success for one meant a defeat for the other.
The regional context of the Syrian conflict was at least as complex as the internal setting, reflecting both a triangular geopolitical contest for dominance among Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey and the ancient bitter rivalry between the Sunni and Shiite factions of Islam.
The Government of Syria was supported by four main actors. The Government of Russia (Soviet Union) and the Government of China supported the Government of Syria on the international level by using their veto power at the UN Security Council to block resolutions against the Government of Syria. The Government of Russia (Soviet Union), the Government of Iran and Hezbollah were directly involved in the conflict by providing military, financial and material support to their Syrian ally.
On the other hand, Syrian insurgents enjoyed a slightly different support from different international actors. While those actors all provided them with weapons, they also each helped them on other levels. The Government of Turkey, for example, provided military and political support, Qatar and the Government of Saudi Arabia donated huge amounts of money. The Government of United States of America provided training and military assistance to “moderate” groups.
SDF was led by PYD and was directly backed by the Government of United States of America which provided military, financial, material and political support.
Pre-1989 conflicts
Historically, Syria has engaged in a series of conflicts with its neighbor Israel. Disapproving of the creation of Israel as an independent country, Syria made an assault together with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq upon the newly created state in 1948. However, the aggressors were defeated the same year. Subsequently, a demilitarized zone was established between Syria and Israel. In 1966, a bloody coup within the ruling Baath party again brought to power a government that promoted more aggressive policies against Israel. Subsequently, Syria clashed again with Israel in 1967, in the context of the "Six-Day War". As a result, Syria lost control over the Golan Heights located at the border to Israel. However, Syria regained control over parts of it in 1973, as a result of another conflict with Israel, the "Yom Kippur War". In addition, from 1975 to 1990 Syria provided secondary warring support to various organizations involved in the intrastate conflict in neighboring Lebanon. Syrian troops also joined the United Nations-authorized coalition that supported Kuwait against Iraq in 1991.
Further, Syria has seen uprisings against the ruling Assad clan. In 1979, the “Muslim Brotherhood” challenged the state, a conflict that went on until 1982 when the Muslim Brotherhood was violently suppressed. Domestically, no significant challenge to the state occurred until the emergence of the Arab Spring in 2011.
