Syria weakens after 8 years of war

Syria has been torn by civil war for 8 years since protests began on March 15, 2011 after the eruption of the so-called Arab Spring. Syria has become a bastion of terrorists attracting takfiris from the over the world.

Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, spokesman of ISIS, announced the foundation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria on June 29, 2014.

For over four years, ISIS has devastated Syria. In the meantime, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces are launching a security campaign against ISIS in Syria.

However, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said: “We must not wrongly think, as happened in the last year, that the war is over. I say this not just to citizens but also to officials”.

“We have this romantic view sometimes that we are victorious. No. The war is not over,” Assad said.

The United States said its sanctions aim to isolate Syria’s leadership and its supporters from the global financial and trade systems in response to atrocities, including use of chemical weapons. The government denies using such weapons.

The United Nations’ Commission of Inquiry on Syria said government forces had perpetrated 32 of 37 chemical attacks, including the use of chlorine and sarin, it had reported during the war.

In November, Washington warned of significant risks for parties involved in petroleum shipments to Syria and published a list of vessels that had delivered oil to the country since 2016. It warned against “deceptive shipping practices.”

Syria has been facing economic difficulties tdespite military victories won with help from Iran and Russia. While these allies have supplied critical firepower, they have offered little in the way of aid to rebuild cities devastated by a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and driven half of Syrians from their homes.

The West will not help before a political settlement. But Assad is in no mood to make concessions, having beaten his enemies back to a corner of the northwest which is now in the sights of government forces.

According to the United Nations, the conflict has produced more than 5.6 million Syrian refugees and 6.1 million internally displaced people. More than 13 million people inside Syria require humanitarian assistance, including nearly six million children, according to the UN.

US President Donald Trump’s decision in December to withdraw all US forces raised the possibility of Damascus recovering the Kurdish-led region where those forces are deployed but that prospect has faded with some US troops now expected to stay.

Though it looked like some of his Arab foes were ready to break the diplomatic ice with Assad a few months ago, US pressure put the brakes on further rapprochement. Momentum to get Syria back into the Arab League has ebbed.