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Long persecuted as "heretics" by the much larger population of Sunni Muslims, some Alawites joined up with French colonial authorities. One religious minority group, Alawite Shia Muslims, in particular saw French colonialism as an opportunity. There are lots of countries whose borders were imposed by European imperialists that manage to do fine, but the point is that French colonialism set up modern-day Syria in a way that contributed to tension between ethnic and religious groups, which eventually became important for today's war. This territory was, and remains, quite ethnically and religiously diverse. Here is a key historical fact for understanding the Syrian crisis: Syria's borders were invented in large part by French colonialists, forcing together several disparate groups.Īfter World War I, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and out of its ruins France took control, roughly in 1920, of a stretch of Ottoman territory on the eastern Mediterranean, today known as Syria and Lebanon. Syrian demonstrators in 1936 calling for independence from France. 1923–1946: French imperialism and the ingredients for sectarianism It helps to start the timeline well before 2011, going back to the country's postcolonial roots and the 1976 fighting that one scholar calls the "first round" of today's war. The war has killed at least 250,000 and forced over half of the population from its homes, and is still raging. So what follows is a (relatively brief) guide to the events of the Syrian war, as well as the events that presaged it. Since it broke out, it has gone through several dramatic changes, each of which has made the geopolitics surrounding the conflict more fraught - and life worse for the Syrian civilians who suffer most. The roots of the Syrian civil war go back years before fighting began in 2011.

The war has included the crisis of 4 million refugees, symbolized by Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi, whose body washed up on the shores of Turkey in early September after his family attempted to make their way to Europe. This has come after a month in which Syria's war, raging since 2011, was at the center of global attention.

It said it was bombing ISIS - but it was really targeting opposition groups that are fighting Bashar al-Assad's regime (incidentally, they're also fighting ISIS).

On the last day of September, Russia officially began bombing targets in Syria.