90 Seconds: Syria's conflict from the very beginning (Part 1)

Four years into the civil war in Syria, the situation grows more complicated. While certainly there are more immediate causes of the war are rooted in the past decade, some have argued that the seeds of Syria’s destruction were sown as far back as WWI.

How did this all start? In 90 seconds, Dania Akkad explains the Syrian conflict from the beginning.

During WWI, the secret Sykes-Picot agreement saw the Levant divided up into areas of British and French control. Instead of encouraging the formation of administrative institutions that would have prepared Syria for independence, the French promoted regional and ethnic fragmentation.

And after Syria became independent from France in 1946, it experienced a handful of coups, various short-lived presidents and decades of political instability. In 1970, Hafez Assad, a seized control of Syria in a coup. Over his 30 year rule, he brought stability to Syria, strengthening the private sector, building factories and major dam projects as part of what he called his ‘corrective movement’. But under his leadership, there was also severe repression and disappearances and, at the massacre of Hama, the deaths of at least 10,000 civilians. (Hama shot)

In June 2000, when Assad died there was hope that Syria’s underground movements for democracy and human rights could finally flourish publicly. In Bashar Assad’s first few months in power, in what was called the Damascus Spring, groups of civil society leaders and intellectuals met in forums, some even moved to create political parties. Political prisoners were freed and a notorious prison was closed. But the movement was fleeting. Within months, leaders of the Spring were imprisoned and it was clear that repression would continue in Syria.

But in February 2011, after uprisings had kicked off in Tunisia and Egypt, a group of school children wrote graffiti on a wall in the southern city of Daraa calling for the fall of Assad – and Syria’s uprisings began.

In mid-March, peaceful protests – not so much calling for the fall of Assad, but for the release of prisoners and political reforms – were held across the country. Then, on 18 March, police opened fired at the Daraa protest, killing demonstrators. In response to the growing unrest, Assad gave a critical speech on 30 March. He had been expected to make concessions to the protesters, but instead, blamed satellite channels and foreign conspirators for the uprisings.

Many protesters now started calling for Assad to fall. Over the next weeks and months, the government’s response to protests became more brutal. Hundreds of people were killed across the country. By July, a group of defected soldiers and officers announced that they had formed the Free Syrian Army.