It all started in 2011 when Syrians burst out int he street protesting against a regime that have been running the country just like a mafia runs their network.
Me and my family fled Syria over 20 years ago but I still have a lot of relatives in Syria going from cousins to uncles and a lot of friends that I had to leave behind at the time. The reason we fled include political reasons and the very poor quality of life. No matter how much you hear from people telling you " everything was good in Syria until the revolution" I have to tell you that's what you hear from people that either where very fortunate people close to the assad mafia or just within the heart of damascus. The sad truth is we held a very poor quality of life, both my parents were teachers and earnt the equivalent of $50 us A MONTH! Yes you read this right, 50 bucks a month for teaching in syria.
You may wonder how we live with 50$ a month? Struggling is the most appropriate word. The price of life was really low so we could make it on a daily basis with enough food and water to keep on going. The assads are known to keep all the big oil revenue to them and their little fortunate circle. This has always been the case in Syria , despite people thinking that Syrians always lived good under the assads regime , this is completely false.
Basically an accumulation of this and the tens of thousands of political prisoners that were held by the assads brought up what we know today as the Syrian revolution. Now ill get to the main story, the death of one of my cousins.
In 2011 , after the revolution started with protesters asking for reforms assad started acting violently toward the protesters. Many soldiers started defecting since they could not bare with this senseless violence and this major defecting create a big whole in the Syria army. Bashar Al Assad started sending out his thugs to every single family having children old enough to hold a gun forcing them to join his military and do the dirty work of brutalizing any peaceful protesters in the street. This has led Syria to what it is right now and this has also led my cousin to his unfortunate death.
My cousin being in Syria was forced to join the military , he was like many thousands of other Syrians threatened by the regime thugs that his family would not be in security unless he "protect" his country. In 2016 my cousin was sent on a mission where he was commanded to go and fight what Assad has been calling extremist groups. Don't get me wrong there are extremist groups in Syria but there are also civilian militias that were created in the early revolution to stand up to the barbarism of the government. My cousin refused to fight against his own people and ended being killed by his own general. They covered his death by saying he died from a car accident just like they have been doing with thousands of other soldiers that either wanted to flee the murderous Syrian regime or just did not want to fight and kill their own Syrian brothers. We received the full story from one of his friends in the military, he couldn't do a thing or he would be dead by now and would not even be able to report to us, his family, what happened with him.
Many people watch the Syrian conflict and have no idea what's going on. The war in Syria is a very dirty war but there is one thing that I can firmly confirm, it has never been about terrorists just about government interests. The main reason for government backing Assad and for others standing against him is not the well being of Syrians it's for their own benefit.