Syria after the war – DW – 12/22/2024

Seven million displaced people, half a million victims of war, hunger and poverty: after 14 years of civil war, Syria is in ruins. The cost of rebuilding the country will be enormous. DW has compiled some key data on the situation in Syria.

With an area of ​​about 185,000 square kilometers, Syria is about half the size of Germany. Around 24 million people live in the country, two-thirds of whom rely on humanitarian aid. Western Syria, in particular, is densely populated, but entire metropolitan areas around cities like Damascus, Aleppo, Hama and Homs now lie in ruins.

At least 140,000 buildings, including 3,000 schools, were either completely destroyed or severely damaged. The health system has also been greatly affected in much of the country. During the war, several human rights organizations reported that Russian and Syrian forces deliberately bombed many hospitals.

Estimates vary as to how much it will cost to rebuild the country, but it is clear that the total will be enormous – potentially as much as US$1 trillion. Reconstruction efforts could be even more complicated because Syria is heavily contaminated by landminesand the extent of the problem is not known. Of the more than half a million people killed during the war, 12,000 were killed by mines or unexploded ordnance. For years, Syria has been one of the three countries in the world most seriously affected by landmines.

Millions of refugees

Around 7 million Syrians live as internally displaced persons. The northwestern province of Idlib has become a place of refuge for millions of people fleeing Assad regime forces. At least 6 million more Syrians have fled abroad, the majority to neighboring Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. Germany also took in nearly 800,000 war refugees.

In Lebanon especially, the real number of Syrian refugees is probably much higher than the official figure. The United Nations estimates there are between 1 and 2 million Syrians in the country. The population of Lebanon itself is only a little over 5 million.

Return to a broken country

Many of them would like to return to their country of origin, but the future is still uncertain. After 14 years of war, the Syrian economy is broken.

The country’s GDP has virtually collapsed. Unemployment is high and those who work earn only a fraction of their pre-war income. At the same time, inflation has skyrocketed: it is now almost 30 times higher than in 2011. Today, almost all Syrians live below the poverty line defined by the World Bank. The German Red Cross reports that two-thirds of them live in extreme poverty.

Syria is fragmented

These problems are compounded by the current political uncertainty. We still do not know how the country will evolve. After overthrowing the Assad regime, the Islamist HTS militia took control of Damascus and began forming a transitional government.

The group’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, presents himself as a moderate. However, his organization is still classified as a terrorist group by many countries, including the EU.

Foreign powers will continue to fight for influence in Syria. Turkey and the militias it supports are fighting the Kurds in the north. The United States maintains a military base in the southeast, from which it can target positions of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group in the country’s sparsely populated east. The aim is to prevent a resurgence of ISIS.

Meanwhile, Israel has occupied parts of the demilitarized buffer zone near the Golan Heights in the southwest and carried out strategic bombings in Syria, partly out of fear that chemical weapons stockpiles could fall between bad hands.

Until recently, Russia maintained two strategically important military bases in the west of the country. We don’t know what will happen to them now. Iran, the Assad regime’s biggest supporter, is also trying to maintain its influence in the country as best it can.

Religious minorities are afraid

During Bashar Assad’s long rule, Syria was considered part of the so-called “Shiite Crescent” region, dominated by Iran – even though three-quarters of Syria’s population is Sunni, not Shiite, Muslim. Assad himself belongs to the Alawite sect, a distinct branch of Shiite Islam.

There are an estimated 2 to 3 million Alawites in Syria, many of whom now fear being labeled beneficiaries of the Assad regime and therefore persecuted. Officially, Syria is also home to more than 2 million Christians, although many of them have likely fled the country in recent years. They too are worried about the risk of religious persecution.

What will happen to the Kurds?

During the war, the Kurds managed to establish an effectively autonomous and self-administered zone in northeastern Syria, as they did in northern Iraq. Syria has nearly 3 million Kurds. In neighboring Turkey, there are up to 15 million.

Ankara is determined to prevent the creation of a Kurdish state. One of the main reasons given for opposing it is that “Kurdish terrorist militia fighters” could carry out attacks in Türkiye and take refuge in northern Syria. This is why the Turkish army and the Syrian militias it supports continued to attack the Kurdish regions of northeastern Syria, even after the fall of Assad.

At the very least, Turkey wants to establish a buffer zone controlled by its own military along the Syrian border. Ankara probably fears that Türkiye’s Kurds will demand autonomy, or even an independent state, if they can achieve this in neighboring countries.

With an estimated 25 to 30 million people worldwide, the Kurds are one of the largest ethnic groups without a state of their own. Their traditional homeland spans part of present-day Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Conflicts in this region have been simmering for more than a century, since the restructuring of the Middle East that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. It is therefore unlikely that political reorganization in Syria will bring lasting peace. in the northeast of the country.

This article has been translated from German.