Syrians are marking 10 years since peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad’s government began in March 2011, touching on a popular uprising that quickly turned into a full-blown civil war.
Despite a decade of fighting and a broken country, al-Assad remains in power, thanks to military support from Iran and Russia, after killing nearly half a million people.
Ashraf al Homsi, a Syrian refugee from the Homs region, told Al Jazeera that the government forced the militants to fight in 2011.
“The system made us take up arms and turn the revolution into war…. it was no longer possible to resist guns with our scratches, ”he said.
The decade of war has wreaked havoc on Syria.
Millions have been pushed to poverty, and most can barely scratch together enough to get the next meal.
Deraa, the birthplace of Syria’s 2011 uprising, has been under the control of Assad’s forces since 2018.
Maysoun al-Masri, a Syrian activist, told Al Jazeera that he had almost broken down when Syrian government forces raised the flag in Deraa.
“The city had a high profile for the revolution. We had to give up our dreams. The international community of the Syrian people has failed, ”he said.
Today, more than half of the prewar population of 23 million is displaced, including more than five million refugees, mostly in neighboring countries.
Zeina Khodr of Al Jazeera said, reporting from the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon that the majority of Syrian refugees living in the country want to go home.
“According to the UN, nine out of 10 Syrian refugee families in Lebanon are poor and depend on support from the UN to survive,” she said.
“Although they want to go home, they don’t have much choice. They are afraid to go back because no security guarantees have been imposed by the Syrian government, ”she said.
“Indeed, the United Nations and the European Union believe that the outcome is not very helpful at this stage due to the lack of security guarantees for refugees.”
Sinem Koseoglu at Al Jazeera, reporting from Istanbul, said that the majority of about 4.5 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey have settled their lives in cities.
“Most of them don’t want to go back, because they’ve established their lives in those cities. They have jobs and their children go to schools here, ”she said.
“After spending five years in Turkey, refugees have a legal right to apply for Turkish citizenship.”
Today, Syria is economically destroyed and divided.
Armed groups control the northwestern region of Idlib, with Turkish-backed rebels controlling stretches along Turkey’s border.
US-backed Syrian Kurdish forces hold about a quarter of the country in the northeast while Assad controls the rest.
Throughout the conflict, Assad was able to shield Syrians in a government-held area from unbearable economic pain. Even if it was sometimes scarce, the state kept fuel, medicine and other supplies coming and the border money went up.
Now he has gained a decisive upper hand in the war with the help of Russia and Iran, his grip on areas under his control is unquestionable, and the uprising is largely crushed.
But the economy has collapsed at an alarming rate. It was hit by a double whammy of new, broad U.S. sanctions imposed last year and the financial recession in Lebanon, Syria’s main link with the outside world.
That proved too much, in addition to the rays of war, government corruption, other Western sanctions for years and the pandemic of coronavirus.
The UN says more than 80 percent of Syrians now live in poverty, and 60 percent are at risk of hunger. The frontier currency has fallen, now at 4,000 Syrian pounds to the dollar on the black market, compared to 700 years ago and 47 at the start of the conflict in 2011.