While the Syrian conflict began during the Arab Spring of 2011, it was fueled by decades of political oppression. On March 6, 2011, schoolchildren, inspired by uprisings in Egypt and Libya, graffitied anti-Bashir al-Assad messages on several buildings in Daraa. After Syrian police arrested the children, protests erupted in Daraa against the regime and its oppressive reign. Despite gestures towards reform, the Syrian government responded to protests with violence and lethal force. By December 2011, the protests escalated into armed conflict against the Syrian government. As of March 2013, nearly 70,000 Syrians have been killed, with allegations of war crimes committed by both government and opposition forces.

France secured control over Syria as a colonial possession in the aftermath of World War I. The French captured Syria’s capital, Damascus, in July 1920 and subsequently quashed a rebellion opposing their rule. When France fell to Nazi Germany in 1940 and the Vichy government came to power, the European nation’s grip on Syria loosened. By April 1945, the Syrian government independently formed a national army, declared war on the Axis powers, became a charter member of the United Nations (UN) and helped establish the League of Arab Nations. Syria achieved total independence in April 1946, after the French complied with a UN resolution to leave the Middle Eastern nation.

Syria assumed a more active role in the Middle East in the decades that followed its independence. In alliance with several other Arab states, Syria fought against Israel the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Syria fought against Israel twice more in 1967 and 1973, but suffered defeats and lost territory. In 1975, Syria intervened in another Middle East conflict, the Lebanese Civil War. Syria received authorization from the League of Arab Nations to deploy several thousand troops to Lebanon, which began a decades-long occupation.

Syria experienced significant internal changes during this period as well. In November 1970, Baath party member Hafez al-Assad seized control of Syria in a coup. Assad became president in 1971, and in 1973 he removed the Syrian constitutional requirement that the president be Muslim. He maintained an oppressive regime that violently suppressed internal dissent. In February 1982, Assad authorized the military suppression of a rebellion launched by the Muslim Brotherhood in the Syrian city of Hama. The assault resulted in an unknown number of deaths, although estimates from the Syrian Human Rights Committee and Amnesty International (AI) place the figure between 10,000 and 25,000. Assad remained president until he passed away in July 2000, and his son Bashir al-Assad took control of Syria.

Assad eased political restraints during his early years in power. In November 2000, Assad approved the release of several hundred political prisoners. The Muslim Brotherhood, once violently suppressed at Hama, resumed public protests of the Syrian government. Internationally, Syrian forces withdrew from Lebanon in April 2005 after pressure from both the UN and the Lebanese Cedar Revolution. The Syrian government continued to draw criticism, however, from both Israel and the US concerning Syria’s alleged work towards constructing weapons of mass destruction.

When the Arab Spring uprisings began in late 2010, protests against oppressive governments spread throughout the Middle East. In February 2011, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that Syrian police forces had attacked protesters that had gathered in support of revolutionaries in Egypt. As protests continued through March 2011, the Syrian government expressed an interest in better protecting human rights and in lifting the country’s state of emergency law, which banned protests. Although Assad lifted the state of emergency on April 21, 2011, rights groups in Syria reported that the government continued to violently suppress protesters. The UN called on Syria to stop the killings and violence directed against protesters.

However, the violence continued in the following years and has become more complex. Not only have the attacks from the government continued, but presence of groups such as the Islamic State has increased the death toll in Syria. According to the UN, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed and millions of others have been displaced. The UN continues to call on Assad and other countries in the region to help end the violence and find a political soluation.