Syria – recent concerns

The people of Syria face a very uncertain future. Civil war has engulfed the country for the past two and a half years, leaving at least 125,835 dead and five million internally displaced, and causing a mass exodus of two million Syrians to other countries. The seven million affected represent a third of Syria’s population. According to monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, those killed include 41,000 civilians (including 6,000 children and 4,000 women), 41,000 government fighters and 23,000 rebel fighters. It is believed that 5,000 people were killed in September 2013 alone, underlining the fact that international efforts to destroy Syria’s chemical stockpile cannot stem the bloodshed adequately, since the majority of casualties are caused by conventional weaponry.

Syria is a mosaic of ethnic and religious groups, with a Sunni majority. The ruling family is from the Alawite minority sect; and the Assad regime, whose initial brutality against unarmed protestors precipitated the descent into full scale civil war, has not been averse to playing on the sectarian fears of ethnic and religious minorities as and when it suited it, in order to manipulate other minorities into supporting it. The civil war began as a bid by rebel forces to oust Assad, but an increasing number of militant Islamist groups have infiltrated the country. This has led many to fear that the conflict has not only become the arena of preference for international jihadi elements, but is also increasingly becoming subsumed into a wider conflict between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims in the region. The November 2013 bombing near the Iranian Embassy in Lebanon, in which 23 lost their lives, including the Iranian Cultural Attaché;1 and the subsequent firing of mortars into Saudi Arabia by an Iraqi Shi’a Al-Mukhtar Army militia;2 have further stoked these tensions.

Download the full report 355 KB