Syria: seven years of conflict
It may not be possible to bring all Syrians together again but they deserve an end to this destruction
Syrian families aboard a Syrian Red Crescent bus evacuating humanitarian cases from Douma in the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta on Wednesday. Photographer: Hamza al Ajwehhamza
Seven years to the day from the start of Syria’s civil war, some 350,000 people are thought to have died and half the country’s 20 million population has been displaced internally or beyond its borders. That is roughly 50,000 deaths per annum, 4,000 per month or 300 every day.
President Bashar al- Assad’s war has run in several phases, first against rebels in many regional centres, then, from 2014, concentrating with other allies and antagonists on defeating the Islamic State jihadist enclave there and in neighbouring Iraq. That task was accomplished last year; Syria has become a deadly site of proxy wars between the regime’s allies Iran and Russia and a range of Islamic rebels backed by Saudi Arabia and the United States. The latest confrontations pit the regime against them in the Damascus outskirts of eastern Ghouta and in opposition to Turkey’s potentially dangerous military intervention in the oil-rich territory controlled by Syria’s Kurds.