Syria is under one of the world’s most onerous sanctions regimes, intended to isolate deposed dictator Bashar Assad in response to more than a decade of human rights atrocities against his own people. Assad used disproportionate violence to shut down protests in 2011, prompting the Syrian Civil War, which at its peak featured ten different belligerent actors and created a vacuum for the Islamic State to build a “caliphate” centered around the northern city of Raqqa.
The civil war reached a somewhat dormant state after the collapse of the “caliphate” in 2017 that abruptly ended in November, when the al-Qaeda offshoot Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) attacked Assad forces in Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city. HTS rapidly seized control of Aleppo and marched deeper into Assad strongholds until reaching the outskirts of Damascus in early December, prompting Assad to flee to Russia and his regime to collapse. (Read More)
