The Islamic State’s (ISIS) implosion throughout 2017 led in 2018 to the end of the strategic pause imposed by Russia on its ally (the regime of Bashar al-Assad) and on the regime’s main enemy (the rebels) through the Astana talks. Rebel-controlled de-escalation zones established at Astana became re-escalation zones one by one throughout the year as they fell to combined assaults by Russia, Iran, and the Assad regime. If 2016 saw the de facto division of Syria by foreign powers and 2017 its de jure partition, battlefield developments in 2018 were determined primarily not by force of arms but by diplomatic haggling behind the scenes by Turkey, Russia, Iran, and to a lesser extent the U.S., Israel, and Jordan.

January began with the Assad regime and its allies re-taking part of “greater Idlib” from Turkish-backed rebels and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an al-Qaeda-dominated alliance. Fears that the regime would seize all of Idlib proved unfounded when the Turkish military established a fourth observation post on February 5 in al-Eis, pre-empting further advances by Assad’s forces. On February 10, Syria’s ministry of defense declared an end to their Idlib operations.

As the regime offensive into greater Idlib entered its final stages, Russia evacuated its military personnel from the neighboring Kurdish canton of Afrin to clear the way for Turkey to invade and expel the People’s Protection Units (YPG) — a militia controlled by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) — in Operation Olive Branch on January 20. Without U.S. military support, the YPG was quickly and steadily steamrolled by Turkey and its rebel proxies in just 60 days.

Perhaps fearing demographic engineering by Turkey, the YPG used force to block Kurdish civilians from fleeing the Turkish onslaught; nonetheless, more than 100,000 civilians were displaced by the invasion. After Afrin was occupied, YPG resorted to a racist terror campaign targeting both Arab civilians and rebels. One of the only areas of Syria to remain untouched by seven years of war, the canton quickly degenerated into lawless nightmare as rebels looted, robbed, and killed with impunity and YPG’s terrorist insurgency only made matters worse for beleaguered civilians there.

With rebel-held greater Idlib cut in half and the creation of a contiguous Turkish-rebel buffer zone connecting Idlib to Aleppo governates, in late February the regime unleashed its wrath on Ghouta, the last rebel enclave near Damascus.

Poor and overwhelmingly Sunni, Ghouta was seized by rebels at the peak of their strength in 2012. The regime responded by imposing a years-long siege that blocked food and medicine from reaching tens of thousands of civilians and launched sarin gas attacks in August 2013, killing over 1,000 people. In the years that followed the chemical weapons massacre, rebel infighting between Army of Islam (Jaysh al-Islam) and Legion of Mercy (Faylaq al-Rahman) shrank the pocket, especially after Army of Islam strongman Zahran Alloush was killed in a 2015 Russian airstrike.

With rebels expelled from Aleppo and trapped elsewhere in de-escalation zones and ISIS on the run, the regime could finally muster enough manpower to storm Ghouta. The enclave’s non-layered defenses were leveled with ease by Russian firepower just as Aleppo’s were in 2016 and the pocket that stubbornly resisted regime advances for years was split up in a few weeks.

Divided into three pockets, Ghouta’s rebel factions sued for peace separately from one another. Legion of Mercy and Freemen of the Levant (Ahrar al-Sham) agreed to stop fighting in exchange for being displaced to rebel-held Idlib. Army of Islam held out for a deal with Russia to stay in place as a semi-autonomous police force under their supervision. On April 7, the Assad regime attacked Army of Islam with chemical weapons and the next day they capitulated, agreeing to be displaced. However, HTS refused to allow them into Idlib so they were dumped in Turkey’s northern Aleppo Euphrates Shield zone instead. In total, roughly 65,000 Ghouta residents were forcibly displaced.

The razing of Ghouta was the last major battle of the seven-year revolutionary war to oust Assad and the final chapter of Syria’s democratic revolution. Assad’s quick victory there — combined with the Trump administration’s decision to stop arming rebels in December 2017 and refusal to take military action aside from retaliating against the regime’s use of chemical weapons — destroyed what little morale remained among rebels to continue the armed struggle. In May, rebels in the Rastan, Homs governate de-escalation zone surrendered without a fight and roughly 4,000 people were displaced. When the regime moved into the Quenitra and Daraa de-escalation zone in June, only one rebel operations room resisted and even then only briefly. Assad’s forces advanced so quickly due to rebel defections and negotiated surrenders that 300 first responders known as White Helmets were trapped behind rapidly collapsing front lines, unable to escape to Israel despite arrangements to do so. Their imprisonment, torture, and execution by the regime in the months and years to come is all but certain given that the regime has begun eliminating ‘reconciled’ rebel leaders in the area.

With three out of four de-escalation zones conquered, in July the Assad regime felt secure enough to begin releasing the names of tens of thousands of civilians murdered in its prisons during the previous seven years. (Torture and execution of civilians was a major driver of the 2011-2012 protests which frequently began as funerals for victims.) The regime also drastically increased the pace of prisoner executions; no need to keep inmates alive as bargaining chips without any rebels left to trade captives with. Thus, Assad’s victories ending the war on his terms led to more rather than less killing and displacement.

In August, an ominous military build-up by Assad’s forces near Idlib spurred intense diplomacy by Turkey, Russia, Iran, and the U.S. to avert an offensive that threatened to drive millions of new refugees towards Turkey. The rumored offensive never materialized but the build-up produced a new agreement between Turkey and Russia to establish a demilitarized zone around the observation posts manned by both nations.

The completion of Syria’s partition into three zones by foreign powers in 2018 ended the hot war between Assad and anti-Assad rebels and began a kind of cold war instead. Much like the 1953 armistice on the Korean peninsula, there is no comprehensive long-term political solution settling outstanding issues like political reform, the fate of 55,000 civilians stranded in the desert at Rukban refugee camp, or the Kurdish question. Instead, the emergent post-war Syrian political order is a patchwork of ad hoc improvisational arrangements and agreements by and between foreign stakeholders and their domestic proxies.

The fragile, tenuous nature of these arrangements was dramatically exposed and disrupted by U.S. President Donald Trump’s impulsive decision during a December 14 phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to rapidly withdraw all American troops from Syria. America’s surprise exit produced a scramble by all sides to partition YPG territory and put Turkey’s goal of establishing a rebel-dominated buffer zone across most of the north within reach. Such a zone would make it harder for PKK/YPG to launch cross-border attacks.

Turkey notwithstanding, the big winner of Trump’s precipitous withdrawal is the Assad regime which stands to gain almost all YPG territory with minimal hassle because the PKK has always preferred peaceful coexistence over confrontation with Damascus. (After sheltering PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan [Apo] for years, Assad ejected him from Syria in 1998 in a bid to improve relations with Turkey. The PKK may be hoping for a restoration of this cozy relationship in order to attack their common enemy, the Turkish occupation.)

Although the regime of Bashar al-Assad survived the popular uprising-turned-revolutionary war, it did so at the price being transformed. Assad was forced to surrender as significant amount of his sovereignty to Russia, Turkey, the U.S., and Iran, the latter of which has led to dozens of Israeli airstrikes on a now-regular basis. One of the cruel ironies of the revolution is that it created slightly more space for pro-regime loyalists to complain and even protest, although this situation is fleeting and transient at best. Sporadic protests and skirmishes also occur in the ex-rebel areas of Daraa where the 2011 revolution was born and where the vast majority of fighters decided against fleeing to Idlib, but these are the last dying embers of a once-mighty conflagration rather than an enduring feature of the post-war political landscape.

The war’s other survivors were also transformed — anti-Assad rebels are now little more than Turkish vassals and PKK’s YPG has no independent strength without U.S. boots on the ground.

What little of the 2011 revolution lives on does so at the mercy of Turkey and HTS, neither of which are known for tolerating criticism or dissent. HTS’s assassination of Idlib protest organizer and civilian activist Raed Fares in November threw into sharp relief just how far the struggle for a free Syria was pushed off-course and degenerated into an existential struggle just to live another day.

At bottom, Syria’s revolutionary war was a class war between an Alawite-dominated fascist kleptocracy and an almost exclusively Sunni rebellion by impoverished rural proletarians and small proprietors. Bashar al-Assad’s neoliberal ‘reforms‘ enriched the urban classes at the expense of the countryside, producing the tinderbox that exploded in 2011. Assad’s neoliberalism by barrel bomb produced the following class consequences:

13 million Syrians now rely on U.N. aid and 6 million of them are “food insecure.”

The majority of Syria’s population (73%) now live in cities whereas in 2011 it was evenly divided between urban and rural areas.

Property belonging to the 5 million Syrians who fled the country and 6 million internally displaced is being seized by the regime and divided among its cronies in what may prove to be the greatest theft of wealth from the working classes since communist regimes imposed forced collectivization upon peasantries in the 20th century.

Syria in 2018 is far from free, but than it was at the start of the uprising. It will fall to future generations to finish the fight their predecessors began if the decades between the 1982 Hama massacre and the 2011 protests are anything to judge by.

Revolutionary War Round-Ups: