Syria has imploded since pro-democracy protests first shook the regime of Bashar al-Assad in March 2011. A brutal and complex war fuelled by sectarian, political and international divisions has killed hundreds of thousands of people and created millions of refugees.
What began as protests met by increasing violence spread across the region as refugees poured out and foreign fighters, money and arms poured in. Below, the story is told how it was witnessed, from neighbourhoods ringed by snipers and first-hand accounts of massacres, to rebel fighters who warned of the rise of Islamic State and civilians who saw their lives and loved ones shattered by violence.
In Syria’s rebel city ‘they will shoot anything that moves’
1 May 2011: Deraa was the first city to revolt against the rule of Bashar al-Assad, in mid March 2011. Protests were met with violence and that April Syrian army tanks and snipers were sent in to crush the rebellion. A resident gave a first-hand account of the violence:
Anyone who leaves the house is being shot. There are snipers on every building and the army is in the streets. We are just staying inside now, because you know that if you try to leave the house you are already a dead man. They will shoot anything that moves. And if soldiers refuse to fire on people they are executed.
It is dangerous for me to talk on the phone but we need to do this. We will do whatever it takes for the world to hear our stories.
The first refugees
9 June 2011: The first thousands of a flow that would come to number millions crossed Syria’s borders as the Assad government’s crackdown intensified. In southern Turkey, minivans shuttled along a bitumen road between the two countries, disgorging dozens of men, women and children who then made their way along dirt roads winding between olive groves. Refugees were ushered into makeshift camps and away from the waiting press.
Allowing Syrians to cross the border but not to speak appeared to be part of a delicate Turkish balance as it positioned itself between Damascus and the west. One Syrian, 39-year-old Abu Majid, however told the Guardian how his besieged hometown of Jisr al-Shughour had been largely abandoned by its population of 41,000 amid heavy fighting and fears of a full-scale government assault.
‘They are pushing Syria into a religious war that they will certainly get’
16 February 2012: Near Homs, a city surrounded by the Syrian army, inhabitants of a terrified town down the valley feared an onslaught from the vengeful military hidden on the outskirts. Snipers reminded residents that the might of the Syrian army was out there – and preparing to come after them.
Sectarianism was beginning to bite in the heartland of the revolution. As a funeral procession filled the desolate streets, collective rage was gathering steam as it neared the edge of sniper alley. “One, one, one, Sunni blood is one,” a man screamed into a microphone. Others vented against Assad’s Alawite sect. Protesters said they used to view the Alawites as a privileged ruling elite but now saw them as persecutors acting out both an ancient Islamic rivalry and bid for control of the region on behalf of Iran.
Houla massacre survivor tells how his family were slaughtered
28 May 2012: An 11-year-old boy described how he smeared himself in the blood of his slain brother and played dead as loyalist gunmen burst into his home at the start of a massacre in Houla, which killed at least 108 people, including 49 children.
My mum yelled at them. She asked: ‘What do you want from my husband and son?’ A bald man with a beard shot her with a machine gun from the neck down. Then they killed my sister, Rasha, with the same gun. She was five years old. Then they shot my brother Nader in the head and in the back. I saw his soul leave his body in front of me.
They shot at me, but the bullet passed me and I wasn’t hit. I was shaking so much I thought they would notice me. I put blood on my face to make them think I’m dead.
Foreign fighters joining the war against Bashar al-Assad
23 September 2012: Abu Omar al-Chechen’s ragtag band of foreign fighters was huddled in the doorway of a burned-out Aleppo apartment building. He gave an order in Arabic, which was translated into Chechen, Tajik, Turkish, French, Saudi dialect and Urdu. The men retreated in orderly single file towards a house behind the frontline where other fighters had gathered.
Sitting in the shade of the trees was a thin Saudi dressed in a dirty black T-shirt and a prayer cap. According to the Saudi, it was an easy walk from Turkey to a small Syrian town where recruits were received and organised into fighting units – each team was given 10 days’ basic training, the point of which was not to learn how to shoot but to communicate and work together.
Ostensibly on the same side, tensions were brewing between the rebel Free Syrian army and the foreign jihadis. As members of the FSA slept near the Bab al-Hawa border post, a burly Egyptian with a silver beard addressed a group of 20 foreign fighters. “You are in confrontation with two apostate armies. When you have finished with one army you will start with the next.”
How saying the wrong thing can get you tortured
25 September 2012: A young man approached a rebel checkpoint in Aleppo, mistaking the fighters in their military fatigues for regular soldiers. When he said he could help them find FSA members in the neighbourhood, a rebel wearing a jacket with FSA insignia was called over.
He flinched. “Are you rebels, sir?” he asked.
“No, no, but we dress like them to infiltrate them.”
“Sir, I want to join you and help you fight.”
The other rebel started filming the young man with his phone, pretending he was doing it for the pro-regime TV channel. The joke ended with a huge slap landed on his neck. He was taken and tortured for names. Three days later, one of the rebels said all were fake. “Now the Islamists have him.”
The story behind one of the most shocking images of the war
11 March 2013: A line of bodies lay in neatly spaced intervals on a river bed in the heart of Aleppo. All 110 victims had been shot in the head, their hands bound with plastic ties behind their back. Their brutal murder only became apparent when the winter high waters of the Queiq river, which courses through the no man’s land between the opposition-held east of the city and the regime-held west, subsided.
All the men were from the rebel-held part of Aleppo. Most were of working age. Many disappeared at regime checkpoints. A Guardian investigation established the grisly narrative behind the massacre.
Damascus adjusts to the constant sound of war
14 April 2013, Damascus: It was hard to tell exactly where the noise was coming from, but it was impossible to miss: all day and night the dull thud and boom of artillery, rockets and planes pounding rebel positions beyond the city could be heard.
“You do get used to it after a while,” said George, an IT technician from an Alawite village on the coast. “But you never know exactly what they are hitting.”
That usually became clear later from videos posted by opposition media outlets on YouTube – shell-damaged buildings, corpses and a disembodied voiceover naming the location and date.
On that Sunday, men were puffing on water pipes in a palm-shaded park, children playing between the flowerbeds and couples chatting demurely on benches as the unmistakable thunderclap of high explosive rippled through the air a few miles away: 10 children had died in a jet attack on a civilian area of Qaboun.
“As you can see everything here is fine, but we have to hit the terrorists, these extremists,” an army officer said.
The al-Nusra Front – ruthless, organised and taking control
10 July 2013, Shadadi, eastern Syria: A young commander known to his followers simply as the “emir of gas” sat on a green mattress on the floor of his office. His faction, the al-Nusra Front, was the most powerful jihadi group in Syria and controlled massive silos of wheat, factories, oil and gas fields.
The secret to al-Nusra’s power, he said, was organisation: all its loot went to a central committee, which directed it to the various battle fronts. “When we bring in cars or weapons, we don’t keep them,” said the emir. Rival groups wasted the proceeds of their looting locally, he said. “If your money is scattered around, you can’t succeed. But if you centralise your resources, you can do a lot.”
The emir had been a law student when the revolution started, he said, and for a full year, he fought under the FSA banner. But now the FSA was also the enemy. “We can’t topple Bashar and hand it to the FSA to establish the same apostate secularist state. We are not fighting against Bashar only; we are fighting the system.”
The second civil war – the coming of Isis
18 November 2013: For an army defector in northern Syria, the second civil war started shortly after the first staggered into a quagmire of sectarian violence. The goals of the first – freedom, Islam, social equality of some sort – were replaced by betrayal, defeat and anger towards rival militia, jihadis and foreign powers.
“I am now in an impossible situation,” he said, eating a lunch of boiled potatoes and rice in watery soup and watching battle videos on an iPad as he rested with some of his men. “The army is ahead of me and they are surrounding me from behind.”
“They” were Islamic State. “I can’t defeat them and the army. I am about to collapse. I can hold out for a month or two at most. Isis are expanding in a fearful way.
Document trove shows ‘industrial scale’ killing of detainees
21 January 2014: A cache of photographs smuggled out of Syria by a former military police photographer revealed what an international lawyer described as the systematic killing of about 11,000 detainees.
Most of the victims were young men and many corpses were emaciated, bloodstained and bore signs of torture. Some had no eyes; others showed signs of strangulation or electrocution.
The defector, who for security reasons is identified only as Caesar, told the investigators his job was “taking pictures of killed detainees”. He did not claim to have witnessed murders or torture. But he did describe a highly bureaucratic system.
Aleppo’s most wanted man – the rebel leader behind tunnel bombs
20 May 2014: The most wanted man in Aleppo was feeling satisfied. Less than a week before, he had helped pack the last of 25 tonnes of explosives into a tunnel under a hotel that was filled with Syrian troops.
“We heard the blast from here,” said Abu Assad, the rebel commander of Aleppo’s tunnel forces. “It made us very happy.”
The explosion that destroyed the Carlton Citadel hotel, killing 30-50 Syrian troops, rumbled well beyond the nine miles between the bomb site and where the commander was sitting recalling the day. It sent shockwaves through the well-dug-in Syrian military command in the city’s until-then impregnable west, and jolted to life an opposition whose war had been going badly.
Flushed with success, Assad chose to reveal himself to the Guardian as the leader of Aleppo’s tunnellers. He claimed not to be bothered by the fact that showing his face would give an already furious military even more reason to hunt him down. “I want them to be scared of me,” he said. “They need to know I am coming for them.”
How an arrest in Iraq revealed Isis’s $2bn jihadi network
15 June 2014: Two days before Iraq’s second city, Mosul, fell to Isis, Iraqi commanders stood eyeballing its most trusted messenger. The man had finally cracked after a fortnight of interrogation and given up the head of Isis’s military council.
Several hours later, the man he had been attempting to protect lay dead in his hideout and Iraqi forces had hoovered up more than 160 computer flash sticks that contained the most detailed information yet about the terror group.
Before them in extraordinary detail were accounts giving a full reckoning of a war effort. It soon became clear that in less than three years, Isis had grown from a ragtag band of extremists to perhaps the most cash-rich and capable terror group in the world.
Civilians in Isis’s capital wait in fear for US airstrikes
15 September 2014: Summary slaughter was taking place most days in Raqqa’s main square – routine killings without hearing or mercy. Families said they stopped taking their children to public parks.
And each night since the US president, Barack Obama, said he would bomb Isis targets in Syria, the residents of Raqqa sat in fear waiting for airstrikes to begin. After controlling the city for more than a year, Isis was by then well embedded in its ramshackle neighbourhoods.
“Isis are spreading themselves among civilians and they occupy the old FSA and regime headquarters,” said Abu Maya Al-Raqawi, 40. “People in Raqqa have to deal with two evils, Isis or Assad. Which one is better? I don’t know the answer.”
Construction worker Khalid, 31, said: “Isis could have been stopped a long time ago, but no one did and now they all want to attack them.
“If they knew I was speaking to you right now, I would be beheaded in Na’em Square just for speaking to foreign media.”
‘Hell is never far away’: the female medic risking her life for Aleppo
2 December 2014: Whenever she heard the helicopter, Umm Abdu tensed, collected her medical kit and ran through the lanes of Old Aleppo to the only working hospital in her neighbourhood.
It was a familiar routine: the thump of the rotor blades, the boom of the explosion from the barrel bomb released by the government troops far above, followed by her scramble.
“Hell is never far away,” she said while resting on a gurney. She was the only woman on the floor but Umm Abdu stood out for another reason: the steel pistol she holstered to her back. “I’ve used the weapons,” she said. “Then I’ve treated people who were injured.”
The contradiction seemed lost, or maybe no longer relevant, in a convict where death often comes from the skies.
Umm Abdu’s son Yosef was killed by a barrel bomb while travelling on a minibus to work in the only other functional hospital in the city’s east. “We did everything together: we played, we dreamed, we grew. Now he’s gone. What can I say.”
Kobani residents dare to dream of a new start for destroyed city
31 January 2015: The concrete eagle in what used to be Freedom Square was surveying Kobani imperiously. But around it nothing stood. Buildings had vanished in months of heavy shelling, replaced by snarls of steel and rubble and the yawning craters left by US airstrikes.
The Kurdish forces’ victory in this north Syrian town marked a huge strategic and propaganda loss for Isis, which once seemed unstoppable.
But the mountain of ruins, decaying corpses and shattered power and water systems meant that while Kobani has been freed it was no longer a town in anything but name. Salvation from Isis came at the price of Kobani itself.
“There are no words coming back to a destroyed city that was your home,” said Shamsa Shahinzada, who fled before Isis arrived. “This was the main square where people crowded every week to ask for freedom. This was our friend’s home. Beside there, there was a school – my high school.”
Is Bashar Al-Assad facing the end?
23 May 2015: One evening at the end of March, a Syrian rebel leader called an urgent gathering of his commanders. The five men turned up at his house in Idlib province expecting to receive the same pleas for patience. This time, though, they were in for a shock.
He told his men that the grinding war of attrition was about to turn in their favour. “And the reason for that was that I could now get nearly all the weapons I wanted,” he said. “The Turks and their friends wanted this over with.”
Saudi Arabia’s newly crowned King Salman had agreed to send gamechanging weaponry, including anti-tank misiles, to northern Syria in return for guarantees of discipline and coordination between rebel groups.
The results were shocking. The regional capital of Idlib fell within days. Several weeks later, the nearby town of Jisr al-Shughour also fell to an amalgam of jihadis and moderates who had kept their end of the bargain.
Passport, life jacket, lemons: what Syrian refugees take to Europe
4 September 2015: Syrians explained why they have no choice but to flee across the sea – and what was in their rucksacks. One, Abu Jana, left the Syrian army after witnessing a state-led massacre in 2011, a decision that made him a wanted man at home. In Egypt, he had no official paperwork, meaning he cannot get a job, and no birth certificate for his two young daughters.
“Even if there was a [European] decision to drown the migrant boats, there will still be people going by boat because the individual considers himself dead already. Right now Syrians consider themselves dead. [A Syrian] is a destroyed human being, he’s reached the point of death.”
The Afghan refugees sent by Iran to die for Assad in Syria
5 November 2015: In the eastern Iranian town of Mashad, photographer Mujtaba Jalali, who has since fled to Europe, captured the funerals of members of an Afghan refugee battalion raised by Iran to fight for its ally Assad in Syria – or what it claims to be a sacred endeavour to save Shia shrines in Damascus.
The Fatemioun is the second largest foreign military contingent fighting for Assad after the Lebanese militia Hezbollah. Iran has always claimed it acts in Syria in an advisory capacity, overseeing operations, but the Afghan involvement shows other methods.
“This is the war Iran is fighting at someone else’s expense,” Jalali said. “It’s Afghan refugees in Iran who are paying the price of Tehran’s support for Assad and they are being lied to about the real motives. It’s not religious. It’s political. Instead of protecting its refugees, Iran is using them.”
Killed by a Russian bomb, a five-year-old visiting relatives in Syria
4 December 2015: Raghat loved singing, nail polish, teasing her toddler sister, the alphabet she was starting to learn at nursery, and goofing for the camera. After two years in Turkey, her mother had persuaded Raghat’s father it was safe enough to take the children to visit relatives in northern Syria for Eid.
In the last photos of her, taken barely 10 minutes before the Russian bombs landed, she showed off a new bracelet and freshly painted nails with glee, then squeezed a kiss from her squirming baby sister.
“I only took my children back to Syria for six days,” said her mother, Suheer, her eyes welling up as she played a video on her smartphone, bringing a shadow of her daughter momentarily back to life.
Raghat was buried alongside her grandfather and her 28-year-old cousin Ahmad in the town of Habeet, near Idlib, where she died in October, just as the Russian bombing campaign began. When the attack finished she was found wrapped in Ahmad’s arms.
“We were supposed to be going home the next day,” Suheer said. “My husband never saw his daughter again.”
One woman’s rescue from Isis
26 December 2015: When a family in Raqqa heard a young Iraqi Yazidi woman crying after she was captured by Isis, they spent months plotting to free her – then put their own lives on the line to save a desperate stranger.
The family posed as would-be slave owners to buy Azeru, then pretended to despise her while they nursed her back to health and hunted desperately for surviving relatives hundreds of miles away.
“When they bought me, the whole world couldn’t contain my happiness,” Azeru said. “They gave my life back to me.”
A smuggler who specialised in slipping Yazidi girls across the border took her to Turkey; from there she rejoined her family in Sinjar, Iraq. Her sister is still missing.
The war shattered the rescuing family too. But exiled from their home and with all their savings gone they do not have regrets, said Noor, one of the sisters and a university student, who is now a refugee in Turkey. The only thing she misses is her studies, and Isis had halted those anyway.
Refugee exodus from the battle for Aleppo
12 February 2016: The war for Aleppo had stayed far enough from their home in the centre of the city for Umm Khaled and her family to hope that, somehow, they could survive it unscathed.
That changed in February, when bombs that had long been directed away from Aleppo’s ancient heart, crashed into the building next to them. “That’s when we knew we had to leave,” she said. A Russian blitz launched amid peace talks had made Aleppo one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Myriad forces with disparate loyalties now more difficult to comprehend or navigate than at any point during the war stalked the edges of the city.
Khaled made it to a Turkish refugee camp but 30,000 were camped out on the Syrian side of the border – most too poor to even contemplate the 10-hour trek across the mountains for which the 18 members of her extended family had each paid $500.
All those who had made it to Turkey spoke of a sense of abandonment as regime forces advanced on Aleppo. “We have been warning of this day for two years,” said Ahmed Othman, another new arrival in the camp. “No one listened. And that’s because no one cared.”
