Syrian War All Began Seven Years Ago
TEXT: serious civil war has been raging for seven years. Here are the defining moments of CNN's coverage.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE REPORTER: 2011. They're chanting peaceful, peaceful around this massive Syrian flag. You will notice that some people have scarves on their face or other things. They're telling us that it is because they want to hide their identity. They're afraid that Syrian security forces if they see their image will come and detain them.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE REPORTER: 2012. On the road to Zabadani, it feels like we're entering a war. We cross to the anti-government side, follow Arab League monitors through twisting streets into the town center. After more than an hour, as the monitors inch their vehicles through the crowds, more and more press forward. They don't want the monitors from the Arab League to go, telling them soldiers will use their tanks to fire on the town as soon as they leave.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE REPORTER: 2013. A plowed over lot in the Damascus suburb of Zamalka, this is actually a mass grave with the bodies of many of those killed in last week's alleged chemical weapons attack. There's very little space left as one resident shows us and that space might soon be occupied with many unidentified bodies in the local field hospital. A lot of them children. Residents say the alleged chemical attack happened in the middle of the night, killing many in their sleep while others struggled to escape like 6-year-old Abdul. After the chemicals hit, they woke us up and told us to put masks on, he says. I told my dad I can't breathe. My father then fainted, and I fainted right after that.</s>NICK PATON WALSH, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: 2014. From the ground level inside the city, you can see what months of fighting has done, absolute devastation. It's almost impossible to imagine this city sustaining life at any time in the near future. But still the fighting persists. The shelling almost constant, so much of it caused by crude homemade devices like this. It is the graveyard that tells you about the near future and the more distant one. A trench dug for the dead they expect next to those they have already buried. Headstones from rubble. Again, a morbid playground.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE REPORTER: 2016. There was just an air strike here in the town of Ariha, so we're now driving very quickly. It's not clear yet what was hit, but we are hearing that there are still planes in the sky. (voice-over): Arriving on the scene, our team found chaos and carnage. The strikes on Ariha that day killed 11 people, among them a woman and two children. Rescue workers wasted no time in clearing away the rubble. And this ugly war, massacres have become routine.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE REPORTER: 2018. Yasa's tiny chest heaves with each breath. He was born during a week that even by Syria's ungodly standards was especially punishing. The hospital he was at was bombed. The footage from that night is a glimpse into the magnitude of the horror, the fear. Hanan watches her baby fight in one of the last remaining facilities where he even stands a chance. But what kind of a world are these babies fighting to live in?</s>ANDERSON: We get you to that raging war now, that of battlefield Syria, the carnage there still so raw. Right now, we are getting in these shocking live pictures. This, an exodus happening right now in an area right outside the capital pummeled for weeks. We'll explain more in a second. But if such pictures seem ordinary, then words seem to fall flat to describe what is going on. So why don't I give you a single number. A single number with two grim meanings. On today, exactly, Syria's war has erupted on for seven long years. Seven years of merciless fighting and through each of them, we 've worked out every seven minutes, a man, a woman, a child killed. That's as far as we know. The number could be higher. As ever, we are connecting the world for you on Syria. Ben Wedeman following every day of that war. He's in Beirut for you tonight. Jomana Karadsheh in Jordan. Why the hundreds of thousands of Syrians have fled there across the long border, the countries they share. So, let's start with you, Jomana. This war has gone on for so long that it's almost hard to remember how it all began. Remind us.</s>JOMANA KARADSHEH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, as you recall, Becky, the first couple of months of 2011 were just incredible. It seemed like that myth of the Arab strongman, the Arab regimes was being shattered by ordinary people. And so, you had that domino effect across the region. But when it comes to Syria, what is remarkable is what is actually considered to have been the spark of that uprising.</s>KARADSHEH (voice-over): It might be hard to believe this is how it all started. Peaceful protests demanding freedom and dignity. Even harder to believe why it all started. It was an active teenage defiance. 514-year-old boys did the unthinkable. They spray painted anti-regime graffiti on their school's walls.</s>MOUAWIYA SYASNEH, ARRESTED FOR GRAFFITI (through translator): My friends and I used to stand on the corner of our school and the police officer would prevent us from moving freely. We saw the demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt where they were writing freedom and down with the are regime. So, we wrote on the walls too.</s>KARADSHEH: Mouawiya Syasneh was one of the 15 boys rounded by the security forces in the city of Daraa. Their families protested, demanding their release.</s>SYASNEH: They took me at 4:00 a.m. during the dawn prayers. I was asleep. They woke me up, handcuffed me. They told my parents they will bring me back. It was a terrifying feeling. They took us to the police station where they tortured and beat us. They also break my friend's fingers.</s>KARADSHEH: As protests spread across the country, they were met with bullets. Violence escalated, and the country slowly descended into the seemingly endless civil war. The streets of Daraa old city, where it all began, now stands scarred. Years of battles have left this destroyed southern city split between the regime and opposition fighters. Daraa seems an abandoned city. Half its population is believed to have fled the war. Syasneh is now another boy of Syria's lost generation. Going to university, a distant dream for this rebel fighter who lost his father to the violence. If he could turn back time, he says he would spray paint that graffiti again.</s>SYASNEH: I don't regret what I did because we were only calling for freedom. It is the regime that turned it into a war, destroyed the nation, and killed the people.</s>KARADSHEH: How it all started, a chapter for the history books. Now, it's hard to imagine how it all ends.</s>KARADSHEH: And you know, Becky, for the past few months, Daraa has been relatively quiet. That's after that de-escalation agreement was reached between Jordan, Russia and the United States last summer. But over the past couple of days, we've received reports of airstrikes on Daraa. A very ominous sign people there are telling us for Daraa they feel that it might be next on the regime's list of territory, that shrinking territory that's under rebel control that the regime is reclaiming.</s>ANDERSON: Jomana is in Jordan for you tonight. Ben's in Beirut. And the Syrian government wants the world to see this video, Ben, of its softer kinder side, if you will. Its own state TV showing its own troops helping let people out of Eastern Ghouta. Here, one even carries a baby out to safety. But it's troops like those from the Syrian regime, supported by the Russians, who have been smashing the place to pieces for weeks now. That's why you're looking at what is an exodus feeling your screen. Some 10,000-people running for their lives within just hours. And so, the war, Ben, it seems, is far from over.</s>BEN WEDEMAN, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: No, this war, I think, one phase of it is slowly coming to an end, and that is the phase of the regime with the help of Russia, Iran, and others is to crush the opposition. But then we are moving quickly into another phase where you have on the ground in Syria, Turkish forces, American forces, Russian forces, Iranian forces in addition to Kurds who are independent from the government, supported by the United States, and the Syrian regime. And slowly we are seeing that the lines separating those foreign forces in Syria are becoming ever thinner. You had, for instance, earlier this year, that Israeli F-16 that was shot down by the Syrian forces. And so, as the opposition and ISIS are being crushed, you still have massive foreign forces in Syria who are very close to a hair trigger when it comes to conflict between them. It was described -- I heard it described this morning as a mini world war within Syria itself. It could be very much a part of that next phase. So yes, we're finishing one phase but the next one could be even more dangerous Becky.</s>ANDERSON: Appreciate it Ben, thank you. We have mapped out the war then into three arenas. Arena one where we just were the regime attacking rebels, the same true up near Idlib in the east arena two. That's where the war on ISIS has been playing out. Back towards the north, arena three, a fairly new extremely intense front in what is this multifaceted conflict. Well, in retrospect, it seems improbable, even inconceivable that soft spoken ophthalmologist who once practiced in London would go on to unleash one of the worst wars this century. We will profile the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad. Up next.