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"Syria is the hub now in this region. It is the fault line, and if you play with the ground there you will cause an earthquake."

Bashar al-Assad was never meant to rule Syria. The second son of dictator Hafez al-Assad, he trained as an ophthalmologist in London and was recalled to Damascus only after his brother Bassel — the designated heir — died in a car crash in 1994. When Hafez died in June 2000, Bashar inherited the presidency at 34, initially raising hopes of reform with his 'Damascus Spring' — a brief relaxation of political restrictions — before reverting to the authoritarian model he had inherited. He married a British-born investment banker, Asma al-Akhras, and the couple gave interviews to Vogue and appeared in Western media as a modern, moderate face of the Arab world. When Arab Spring protests reached Deraa in March 2011, Assad chose brutal suppression over accommodation, unleashing security forces, deploying the army against civilians, and filling prisons with tens of thousands of detainees. As the uprising militarized, he reframed the conflict as a battle against foreign-backed terrorists, a narrative that served to justify escalating violence including chemical weapons attacks on civilian neighborhoods. With Russian and Iranian military support, Assad survived what appeared to be near-certain defeat in 2015 and had reconquered most of Syria's major cities by 2019. He remains in power, ruling over a shattered country under sweeping international sanctions, accused by the UN of crimes against humanity.

"Rush O Muslims to your state. Yes, it is your state. Rush, because Syria is not for the Syrians, and Iraq is not for the Iraqis."

Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri was born in Samarra, Iraq in 1971 and earned a doctorate in Islamic studies from the University of Baghdad. After the US invasion of Iraq, he became radicalized and was detained at Camp Bucca, a US detention facility, from 2004 to 2004 or 2009 — accounts vary — where he reportedly met and recruited other jihadists who would form the core of ISIS leadership. He assumed leadership of Al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2010 after a US airstrike killed its previous leaders, renaming the group the Islamic State of Iraq and gradually rebuilding it as US troops withdrew. When the Syrian civil war erupted, Baghdadi sent fighters across the border who established Jabhat al-Nusra before asserting ISIS's dominance over all jihadist factions in Syria, triggering a bitter split with Al-Qaeda. After ISIS seized Mosul in June 2014, Baghdadi appeared at the Grand Mosque in a black robe and turban to declare himself caliph — the first video footage most of the world had seen of him. At the height of the caliphate, he commanded an organization with territory, revenue, a bureaucracy, and an unprecedented global propaganda operation that inspired attacks on six continents. He was killed on October 27, 2019, in Barisha, Idlib, when US special operations forces raided his compound; he detonated a suicide vest as troops closed in.

"We have always said that we will help Syria fight terrorists. This is what we are doing."

Vladimir Putin's decision to intervene militarily in Syria in September 2015 was the most consequential foreign military deployment by Russia since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Putin framed the intervention as a counter-terrorism operation against ISIS, but its primary strategic goals were to prevent Assad's collapse — which Putin viewed as a dangerous precedent of Western-backed regime change — secure Russia's only Mediterranean naval base at Tartus, and demonstrate Russia's restored military power on the world stage. The intervention came months after Western sanctions over Ukraine had isolated Russia, and Syria provided a theater to rehabilitate Russia's international standing. Russian airstrikes, cruise missile launches, and the deployment of advanced air defense systems like the S-400 transformed the conflict's dynamics, enabling Assad's forces to retake Aleppo and other major cities. Putin also inserted Russia as an essential diplomatic broker, establishing the Astana process with Turkey and Iran as an alternative to the UN's Geneva track. Syria became Russia's live testing ground for new weapons systems and a showcase for its military-industrial complex's exports. By keeping Assad in power, Putin achieved his core objective of demonstrating that Russia was an indispensable actor in Middle Eastern affairs that the West could not ignore.

"We know that America has its interests. But we have our people. We will not let our people be slaughtered."

Mazloum Abdi, born Ferhat Abdi Şahin, is a Syrian Kurdish military commander who spent decades as a fighter for the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) in Turkey before becoming the pivotal US military partner in northeastern Syria. A veteran guerrilla commander who trained in PKK camps in the Bekaa Valley and spent years fighting Turkish security forces, he emerged as the leader of the YPG (People's Protection Units) in northern Syria as the civil war created a power vacuum that allowed Syrian Kurds to establish autonomous governance in the region they call Rojava. His alliance with the United States proved decisive in the war against ISIS; under his command, the SDF became the primary ground force that dismantled the caliphate, capturing Raqqa in October 2017 and eventually cornering the last ISIS holdout at Baghouz in March 2019. The partnership created a profound strategic tension: while the US considered the SDF its most effective anti-ISIS partner, NATO ally Turkey designates the YPG as a terrorist organization due to its PKK ties. In October 2019, President Trump abruptly announced a withdrawal of US forces from northeastern Syria, green-lighting a Turkish military offensive against Kurdish positions. Mazloum Abdi made the agonizing decision to pivot, reaching a deal with Assad and Russia to allow Syrian government forces into some Kurdish areas to deter the Turkish advance — a remarkable alignment of former enemies born of necessity.

"I say clearly that we are going to Syria. Not to support any political party, but to support the resistance."

Hassan Nasrallah has led the Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah since 1992, transforming it from a guerrilla organization into the most powerful non-state armed force in the Middle East. When the Syrian civil war began, Nasrallah initially denied Hezbollah's involvement, but by April 2013 he openly committed the organization to Assad's defense, deploying thousands of fighters who proved crucial in the battle for Qusayr — a strategic town near Homs — and later in the Aleppo campaign. Hezbollah's intervention was motivated by ideology (protecting the 'axis of resistance' against Israel), strategy (maintaining supply lines from Iran through Syria to Lebanon), and sectarian solidarity (Assad's Alawite minority has historic ties to Shia Islam). Nasrallah's Syrian gamble proved costly. Hezbollah lost thousands of fighters — estimates range from 1,500 to 2,000 killed — a significant toll for an organization of its size. Domestically, the decision deepened Lebanon's sectarian divisions and contributed to Sunni-Shia tensions that periodically boil over into violence. Yet strategically, Assad's survival — which Hezbollah's intervention helped secure — preserved the Lebanese group's critical supply corridors. Nasrallah himself has lived underground since 2006, rarely appearing in public and communicating via video link, making him one of the most security-conscious leaders in the world. He was killed by an Israeli airstrike on Beirut on September 27, 2024.

"The Quds Force is everywhere. We are the shadow army of the Islamic Republic."

Major General Qassem Soleimani was the commander of the Quds Force — the external operations branch of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — and the most powerful military figure in the Middle East outside of official state armies. In Syria, Soleimani served as Iran's on-the-ground strategic coordinator, flying personally to Damascus in the early days of the war to assess Assad's vulnerability and orchestrating the deployment of thousands of Iranian-backed fighters: Afghan Hazara Fatemiyoun, Pakistani Zainabiyoun, Iraqi Badr Organization, and Hezbollah units. He reportedly persuaded Putin personally to intervene militarily in 2015 after flying to Moscow for a secret meeting. Soleimani's Syria strategy was both military and demographic: besides defending Assad, Iran sought to entrench Shia-aligned communities along a corridor from Tehran to the Mediterranean, establishing influence that would survive any political settlement. He was filmed on the ground in numerous Syrian battles and became a revered figure in Iran, appearing in propaganda as the conquering general of the anti-ISIS campaign. His assassination by a US drone strike at Baghdad International Airport on January 3, 2020 — ordered by President Trump — removed the single most effective architect of Iranian regional influence and prompted Iran to launch missile strikes on US bases in Iraq in retaliation.

"Assad has not only written his own end, but he has written the end of his family and his regime."

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Syria policy was one of the most complex and contradictory of any actor in the conflict. Initially hoping Assad's fall would install a Sunni Muslim Brotherhood-aligned government friendly to Ankara, Turkey opened its borders to both refugees and fighters, allowing jihadists including ISIS recruits to transit into Syria in the conflict's early years. Turkey hosted, funded, and armed a range of rebel factions and provided the Idlib province sanctuary that allowed the opposition to survive Assad's reconquest of major cities. At the same time, Erdoğan was obsessed with preventing the establishment of a Kurdish autonomous zone on Turkey's southern border, viewing the Syrian Kurdish YPG as an extension of the PKK — the Turkish Kurdish militant group fighting inside Turkey. This dual objective — supporting Sunni rebels while destroying Kurdish forces — put Turkey in direct tension with the United States, which relied on Kurdish SDF fighters as its primary anti-ISIS ground force. Turkey launched multiple military operations inside Syria: Operation Euphrates Shield (2016–17), Olive Branch (2018), and Peace Spring (2019), targeting Kurdish positions and carving out Turkish-controlled buffer zones in northern Syria. Turkey's interventions prevented a definitive Kurdish autonomous state while prolonging the conflict and complicating every diplomatic initiative. By 2023, Erdoğan had reversed course on Assad, pursuing normalization with Damascus as he sought to arrange the repatriation of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees in Turkey — a domestic political liability.

"They can take away our freedom, our lives — but they can never take away what we have already documented. The truth belongs to the dead."

Razan Zaitouneh was Syria's most prominent human rights lawyer before the revolution, defending political prisoners and documenting cases of torture and arbitrary detention under the Assad regime for over a decade at considerable personal risk. When the uprising began in 2011, she co-founded the Violations Documentation Center (VDC), one of the earliest and most systematic efforts to record killings, arrests, and atrocities committed by all parties to the conflict. Working from hiding inside Syria even as colleagues fled abroad, she helped organize local coordination committees that became the backbone of the civilian opposition and maintained communication with the outside world from besieged areas. She was awarded the Sakharov Prize by the European Parliament in 2011 and the Anna Politkovskaya Award in 2013. On December 9, 2013, a group of armed men burst into the VDC office in Douma, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus, and abducted Zaitouneh along with her husband Wael Hamada, colleague Samira Khalil, and activist Nazem Hammadi — an event known as the 'Douma Four' kidnapping. Responsibility was attributed by opposition activists and international investigators to Jaysh al-Islam, a powerful rebel Islamist faction led by Zahran Alloush that controlled Douma. Despite years of international pressure, their fate remains unknown. Zaitouneh's abduction by a rebel faction underscored the tragedy of the Syrian opposition: the forces nominally fighting for freedom also perpetrated grave human rights abuses.

"Dear world, we are in a very dangerous situation. Planes are bombing us. We are going to die."

Bana Alabed was a seven-year-old girl living in rebel-held East Aleppo when her mother Fatemah created a Twitter account in September 2016 to document their lives under siege. With her mother typing and translating, Bana described the terror of airstrikes, the loss of friends, the closure of her school, and her desperate desire for peace — reaching an audience of hundreds of thousands worldwide. Her tweets, raw in their simplicity, cut through the geopolitical abstractions of the Syria debate and gave the conflict a human face recognizable to people in any country: a child who loved books, feared bombs, and wanted to go back to school. J.K. Rowling, moved by Bana's tweets, sent her e-books of the Harry Potter series after Bana said she was sad because her books had been destroyed in the bombing. In December 2016, as East Aleppo fell to government forces, Bana and her family were evacuated to Turkey. Her story became a symbol of both the civilian suffering in Aleppo and the power of social media to humanize war to global audiences, drawing criticism from Syrian government supporters who claimed the account was staged propaganda, and support from humanitarian organizations that used her story to advocate for civilian protection. She later published a memoir, 'Dear World,' and met world leaders including Turkish President Erdoğan and Queen Rania of Jordan. Her story illustrates how a child's voice from a phone in a bombed apartment could command more global attention than years of diplomatic communiqués.