World War III is here
In the beginning, the revolution was not televised. In Damascus in early 2011, small groups of protesters gathered in the ancient souk each Friday. They would wave placards and chant anti-regime slogans before melting away again among the shoppers to avoid the secret police. With the media, internet and phone lines controlled by the Syrian regime, news of what was happening in the souk was slow to reach the outside world.
These demonstrations looked trivial compared to what was happening elsewhere. The Arab Spring was well underway in Tunisia and Egypt, where dictators had been deposed, and in Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi was losing his four-decade grip on power. Most Middle East experts believed Syria, which had been ruled by the Assad family since 1971, would be immune to the revolution sweeping the region. Bashar al-Assad stood out among the ageing Arab autocrats as a polished, fresh face: London-educated, married to a glamorous Brit, and superficially popular with his people. Some Syrians believed he would respond to the unrest by reforming. When I travelled to Damascus in late March 2011, I found Syrians scared to talk about what was happening in the souk, but cautiously optimistic that their country could soon change for the better.
Behind Assad’s slick veneer, though, the regime was brutal, shored up by its feared intelligence network and the torture meted out in its prisons. Most of those first protesters were arrested and disappeared into the dungeons, never to reappear. Assad didn’t reform; he cracked down. By the end of 2011, unrest had spread across the country, regime snipers were firing on civilian demonstrations, and rebel groups formed in the rural regions were coalescing into the Free Syrian Army.
In Libya, Nato launched operations to enforce a UN-imposed arms embargo, eventually leading to Gaddafi’s death at the hands of a rebel mob. It was clear to leaders in Washington, London and Brussels that it would be far harder to dislodge Assad. The Syrian regime, though insular, was entwined in the wider geopolitical map. Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, had aligned his country with the Soviet Union, which trained the Syrian army, and established a naval base at Tartus, on the Mediterranean Sea. The relationship continued after Hafez’s death in 2000, and Tartus remained a Russian outpost. Bashar al-Assad also maintained strong ties with Iran.
As the Syrian revolution escalated, Tehran and Moscow swung into action to protect Assad and their interests inside his country. Russia used its position on the UN Security Council to block resolutions against Assad, while Iran mobilised its proxy militias to support him on the battlefield. In time, both would send their own militaries into Syria to prop up Assad’s army, while the rebel groups received backing from countries including the US, UK, Turkey and Qatar. Within a year, the scrappy protests in the souk had turned into an all-out proxy war that pitched two global axes against each other for the first time in a generation.
Over the following decade the consequences rippled across the globe – through the mass movement of refugees, the spread of violent extremism and the trafficking of money, drugs and weapons, sparking and fuelling other conflicts and deepening the distrust between the West and a rival alliance centred around Russia, Iran and China. By the time Assad was deposed in December 2024, those trends had culminated in the crisis now facing Europe. Truth and the media had been weaponised, and Western sanctions had catalysed the formation of economic blocs that allow rogue states to trade regardless. Cryptocurrency had undermined the dominance of the US dollar.
Today, Russia is waging a full-scale war in Ukraine and threatens to attack Nato members, something that would have been unthinkable in 2011. Crises lead each day’s news; the risk of a nuclear strike or accident is no longer the stuff of history books and disaster films, but a present danger. European governments are beginning to prepare their citizens for war or cyber-attack with emergency drills and advice to stockpile supplies; some are bringing back military service. The president of the US is a disrupter who starts wars at will and commands the world’s biggest military power. Much analysis now focuses on whether, and when, a new global conflict might erupt. But it has already started, and is being fought through methods that first emerged in Syria’s civil war. The protests in Damascus in 2011 were the spark that lit the fuse for a far wider war, which Europe cannot seem to escape.
When the Syrian revolution started, the narratives around it were relatively simple. The Western media framed it as an uprising against the autocratic tyranny of Assad, while the countries allied with Syria presented it as a Western colonialist project. By early 2013, however, al-Qaeda had become one of the strongest rebel factions on the battlefield, and Isis was seizing areas from the more moderate rebels. As the armed opposition collapsed into infighting and extremism, the US pulled back its support. From then on, the story of the Syrian revolution shifted; it was no longer about a fight for democracy, but about black-flagged jihadists, foreign fighters and refugees heading for Europe. Those narratives were stoked by a Russian-backed misinformation operation that framed even civilian organisations such as the White Helmets, the UK-backed search and rescue force, as jihadists. The revolution was now all over social media, in Isis’s slick propaganda videos and misinformation posts propagated by Moscow’s troll farms.
Putin was honing misinformation as a weapon that he would then go on to wield elsewhere, but in Syria it also masked a far bigger story. The war was the first major conduit for the Russian leader’s growing belligerence towards the West. It also kick-started the formation of a new rival geopolitical bloc. In theory, US and EU sanctions cut off Assad’s regime from global trade and financial systems, but, unlike the embargoes imposed on Libya, there were plenty of powerful countries willing to break them. Russia and Iran continued shipping oil and weapons to Syria, while China provided goods such as electronics and solar panels to its consumer market. Belarus and North Korea also sold weapons to Assad.
In 2013, Putin used the pretext of anti-corruption and pro-European protests in Ukraine to occupy eastern parts of the country, and a year later Russia annexed Crimea. The West extended its sanctions to Moscow and to Iran, too, after Donald Trump dismantled the US’s nuclear deal with Tehran in 2018. By then, the anti-Western bloc was developing alternative methods of trading. One was the Mir payments system, established by the Russian central bank in 2015 as an alternative to Mastercard and Visa; banks in countries including Iran and Venezuela joined, as well as in the unrecognised and embargoed territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which have been occupied by Russian forces since 2008.
Cryptocurrency was also vital as it also operates outside the control of Western regulators. In 2019, in Transnistria, another Russia-backed, unrecognised territory in Moldova, I found huge cryptocurrency farms established by Putin’s cronies, while in annexed Crimea, plans were under way to establish a crypto university, where sanctioned states could learn how to use the technology to dodge embargoes. Another unrecognised territory proved a useful backstop for Russians (and Iranians) who found themselves unable to deposit their assets in Europe. The northern part of Cyprus, separated from the south since the island’s 1974 civil war, is a self-declared sovereign state recognised only by Turkey, and a black hole for trafficking and money laundering. There, in the once-sleepy coastal village of Yeni Iskele, huge, newly built luxury apartments are marketed on billboards written in Cyrillic and Farsi scripts.
Throughout the 2010s, the two geopolitical blocs also began facing off in other proxy conflicts. In Libya, which had collapsed into civil war, Russia backed the eastern-based forces of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, while the West recognised the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity as the country’s legitimate administration. That pattern repeated in other theatres – from the Caucasus to Africa – as old Cold War lines were redrawn. Putin also began projecting Russian influence into the most combustible parts of Europe. In Bosnia and Kosovo, fragile states still recovering from the conflicts of the 1990s, Moscow has been patronising ethnic Serb politicians. They include Milorad Dodik, the leader of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska region, who has repeatedly threatened to secede from the country, a move that would reignite tensions and possibly even conflicts across the Balkans. Putin has meddled in Kosovo, a majority Albanian country with a Serb minority, by stoking tensions at its border with Serbia itself.
Syria’s blowback also undermined Europe through the refugee crisis, which brought more than a million asylum seekers into the EU between 2015 and 2016. The crisis bolstered pro-Brexit politicians in the UK, and left the bloc dealing with internal squabbles even as it should have been focusing on the bigger security threats it faced from outside. Putin, and Turkey’s strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, realised that refugees could be weaponised, and both have directed asylum seekers towards Europe since then.
The conflict also forged dividing lines within the EU and Nato. The Czech Republic, an EU member state, kept relations with Assad even as Brussels imposed sanctions on his regime, while others pushed for the EU to restore its ties with Damascus. Turkey’s relationship with both alliances soured as Erdoğan nurtured a friendship with Putin and turned away from his European allies.
By the time Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, two rival blocs had been established. On one side, Nato, newly relevant again and facing a tangible front line with Russia, even as it was weakened from within. On the other, Putin and the alternative alliance he has galvanised. Iran, China, Venezuela, North Korea, Belarus and others are joined primarily by their antipathy to the West, and their rejection of the so-called rules-based order. Overnight, it seemed, not only Ukraine but also the whole continent was at war. But for a decade, the West had been ignoring the warning signs and conflagrations that were mounting around Europe’s fringes.
Suddenly, there are multiple crises facing Europe: everything, everywhere, all at once. The threat of a Russian attack on Nato soil is so grave that the Baltic states have begun constructing a new version of a Maginot Line to fend off an invasion; a Russian drone strike on an apartment block in Romania in May only highlighted the threat. Iran has launched drone attacks at a UK base on Cyprus and sent missiles towards Turkey in retaliation for the US and Israel’s attacks. In the skies above the Black Sea, there have been repeated near misses between RAF and Russian fighter jets. Any mistake or attack could tip the balance into a full-blown wider conflict. Trump’s return to the White House has complicated matters further, as he often appears to be hacking away at Nato from within.
In place of the post-World War II settlement, ad hoc and often unreliable systems are emerging. Turkey has capitalised on Erdoğan’s relationship with Putin to position itself as a key mediator in the Ukraine conflict – yet its commitment to Nato often seems shaky. In the months after the Ukraine invasion, Erdoğan blocked Sweden and Finland’s accession to the alliance, leveraging his veto power to gain concessions for himself. Qatar is positioning itself as a mediating power, particularly over the war in Gaza, but maintains ties with Hamas and other extremist groups.
Syria, meanwhile, sits in the eye of the storm it created. Its new leader, the former Islamist rebel Ahmed al-Sharaa, has swivelled the country away from Tehran and towards the West, but has resisted pressure from Trump to join in his war in Iran. War has left Syria shattered and its people exhausted. There is little appetite in Damascus for any new upheavals, no matter how imperfect the new regime may be.
Elsewhere the effects of Syria’s war continue to reverberate. They were felt first in Europe’s hinterlands, the in-between places and borders where broader tensions always manifest first. Now, the conflict is spreading to other parts of the peripheries: in the Baltics, Poland and Romania, where the danger of a Russian attack is ever present, and in Georgia, where a pro-Kremlin government is moving away from the West. Europe’s attention has shifted to the threat of an all-consuming conflict still to come. But it is in these places, in the small wars and proxy conflicts, that a Europe-wide battle is already being fought. And the roots of it go back to 2011, to those tiny first protests in the Damascus souk.
Hannah Lucinda Smith is the author of Hinterland: Journeys through Europe’s Unfinished Frontiers (Profile)
[Further reading: Lawless in Gaza]
