Which countries have been involved in the war and why?

A surprising advance by Syrian rebels ended Bashar al-Assad’s decades-long rule, when opposition forces seized the capital and forced the president to flee on December 8.

The overthrow followed a 13-year civil war, which began after Assad crushed pro-democracy protests, killing more than half a million people and displacing millions more, and involving international powers and their proxies. .

The world is now watching how Syria’s political landscape is shaping up after the overthrow of the Assad family’s half-century rule.

Among those with vested interests in the conflict and the future of the country are, on the one hand, Russia and Iran – which supported Assad – and, on the other, the United States and Turkey, which supported different rebel groups.

Here we explore how those countries, along with Israel, have played a role in Syria and could continue to do so.

During the Syrian civil war, Turkey has supported opposition forces – mainly the Syrian National Army (SNA) – by providing them with weapons and military and political support.

Syria’s northern neighbor has been primarily concerned about Use the rebels to contain the Kurdish YPG militia.which Türkiye accuses of being an extension of a Kurdish rebel group banned in the country. Türkiye also wants the estimated three million Syrian refugees living in its country to return home.

The YPG is the largest militia of another rebel group, the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance.

During the war, Turkish troops and allied rebels seized extensions of territory of these groups along Syria’s northern border.

Türkiye has also been involved politically. In 2020, Türkiye and Russia negotiated a ceasefire to stop a government attempt to retake Idlib, the rebel stronghold in the northwest.

Idlib has been administered since 2017 under a so-called government by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), who led the rebels who eventually overthrew Assad.

Many believe the offensive could not have occurred without Türkiye’s blessing. Türkiye has denied its support for HTS.

Meanwhile, the conflict in northern Syria continues: when Assad fell, the SNA launched a separate attack on areas controlled by the SDF.

Russia already had a decades-long relationship with the Assad government and had military bases there before the civil war.

In 2015, Russia launched an air campaign and sent thousands of troops to support the Assad regime.

InsteadRussia received 49-year leases on an air base and a naval base, which provided crucial hubs in the eastern Mediterranean for transferring military contractors in and out of Africa.

But waging war in Ukraine from 2022 worried Assad’s ally, contributing to the Syrian army’s swift defeat by rebel groups in late November and early December.

Assad and his family were granted asylum in Moscow after fleeing Damascus, Russian media reported.

After pro-democracy protests in Syria in 2011 were forcefully suppressed, then-US President Barack Obama criticized the Assad government, but the US only became militarily involved to combat the Islamic State (IS).

A US-led global coalition has carried out airstrikes and deployed special forces since 2014 to help the Kurdish-led SDF rebel alliance capture territory once held by IS militants in the northeast.

After the fall of the Assad government, the US government he said he made dozens of airstrikes against IS camps and operatives in central Syria to ensure that IS could not take advantage of the unstable situation.

However, President-elect Donald Trump, who will take office in January, He called Syria a “disaster” The United States should stay out of it. When Trump was president in 2019, he withdrew U.S. troops from Syria, a move his officials gradually rejected.

The United States currently has about 900 troops in Syria.

Iran and Syria they have been allies since the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979. Syria supported Iran during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

During the Syrian civil war, Iran is believed to have deployed hundreds of troops and spent billions of dollars to help Assad.

Thousands of Shiite Muslim fighters armed, trained and financed by Iran – mostly from the Lebanon-based Hezbollah movement, but also from Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen – have also fought alongside the Syrian army.

But, like Russia, Hezbollah has been weakened by the conflict with Israel in Lebanon, which likely hastened the decline of the Syrian army.

Israel shares a border with Syria. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel seized the Golan Heights, about 60 kilometers (40 miles) south of Damascus, from Syria, before annexing it in 1981. The annexation is not recognized by the UN or by many other countries.

Israel has carried out air strikes against Targets linked to Iran in Syria during the war, although it rarely acknowledges such attacks.

Since rebels overthrew Assad, Israel has carried out hundreds of attacks throughout Syria. Targets include Syria’s military infrastructure, naval fleet and weapons production sites.

Israel said it is acting to prevent weapons from falling “into the hands of extremists.”

Israeli forces too He took over the demilitarized buffer zone. in the Golan Heights and may have strayed into nearby Syrian territory.

BBC Verify geolocated an image of an IDF soldier standing just over half a kilometer beyond the buffer zone, inside Syria, on a hillside near the village of Kwdana.