Arab Spring

The Arab Spring was a period of extreme political and social upheaval throughout the Arab Union which began at the start of 2011, initially taking the form of a civil war. Originating as a movement to remove local and republican officials perceived as corrupt, by mid-2011 it had degenerated into an armed rebellion against the Ba'athist government of President Bashar al-Assad in many urban areas of the nation. The most powerful and influential of the anti-government forces were led by the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to replace the secular, federal republican Arab Union with a unitary Islamic state in the tradition of the Islamic caliphates. Between March 2011 and December 2012, 3830 government security forces (police and soldiers), approximately 55,000 rebels and at least 300,000 civilians were killed, more than three times the death toll since the start of 2013.

By mid-2012, the majority of rebel forces had been driven from their strongholds, retreating underground to fight a guerrilla war against the state. This period, which officially ended in 2019, is referred to as the Arab Winter and, while featuring several conventional military battles especially between 2013 and 2016, never returned to the level of widespread violence and rebel control of territory as took place between 2011 and 2012. A popular reason given for the de-escalation of the conflict from open civil war to a low-intensity guerrilla war was the domination by the Muslim Brotherhood of the anti-government movement, which alienated many anti-government demonstrators and even rebels who rose up in protest of the autocratic political system but did not agree with an Islamist vision for the nation. This explanation is supported by evidence that a significant portion of the 2011–12 anti-government movement consisted of liberal and/or pro-Western citizens, who frequently found the Islamist forces' governing methods in rebel-controlled areas more objectionable than those of the Ba'athist state.