 I'm Salvatore Babona, and today's lecture is the Syrian refugee crisis, timeline and dimensions. The Arab Spring began December 2010 with the self-immolation of a young Tunisian street vendor named Mohammed Bozizi, who had been driven to the point of desperation by arbitrary government and police harassment. The Arab Spring quickly spread to Egypt, where the supposedly rock-solid military dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak fell in the face of massive street protests, most famously in Cairo's Tahrir Square. But things went wrong in Libya, with the country split in two following the toppling of dictator Muammar Gaddafi, military repression returned in Egypt under the administration of Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, and Syria plunged into civil war. Five years later, Tunisia remains the only success story of the Arab Spring, and even the Tunisian success is qualified by continuing problems of terrorism and attacks, especially on Western visitors in Tunisia. Of course, the worst disaster to result from the Arab Spring has been Syria. The wave of protests known as the Arab Spring spread rapidly from Tunisia to engulf the entire Arab world. Every country of the Arab world, here shown in colors, was affected in one way or another. But the biggest changes occurred in Egypt, first in Tunisia, where there was a change of government, and there is now a more or less democratic, more or less peaceful transitioning government in Tunisia. In Egypt, where there was a democratic transition that was later reversed into a military dictatorship, Yemen, where there is an ongoing civil war that has not resulted in the kinds of refugee flows that have occurred in Syria, but nonetheless has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, and Libya, where the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi resulted in full-scale civil war, Western intervention, and now the country is roughly split in two between Eastern and Western Syrian governments based in Tripoli and Benghazi, and then of course Syria, which has been the worst case of severe civil war. Having seen the rapid toppling of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria responded much more aggressively to protests. Initially, it looked like Syria was going to go the way of Egypt. There were massive street protests with hundreds of thousands of people, like the one pictured here, with slogans in Arabic and in English for the international news telling Bashar al-Assad to get out of Syria. But in contrast to your Egypt, Syria exhibited many risk factors for civil war. Egypt is a unitary country with a single overwhelmingly dominant ethnic and religious group. Syria, by contrast, has a deep sectarian divide. The country is majority Sunni Muslim with a minority Shia Muslim sect, the Alawi, who are the governing class of Syria, and a large Christian minority, which has historically been protected or collaborated with the Alawi leadership of Syria. The government is thus an ethnic and religious minority government ruling over a majority Sunni population. One of the major implications of this is that any democratic transition in Syria resulting in majority rule in Syria would put the minority, Alawait and Christian populations at risk, but it would also result in a change in Syria's international relations. Currently, Syria under its current government, Bashar al-Assad, has been allied with Iran, the other main Shiite power in the Middle East. A change in government to a Sunni majority government would probably result in Syria as a whole reorienting towards Saudi Arabia and the countries of the Persian Gulf. There has also been a totalitarian government with a complete lack of civil society, a government that controlled all aspects of the economy, the military, and civil society organizations with no non-government civil society organizations. And making matters worse have been external entanglements in Syria. In Lebanon, Syria used to be the occupying power meddling in Lebanon's civil war, while now the power in Lebanon that was supported by Syria, the Hezbollah-Islamist movement, is now supporting the government of Syria in the Syrian civil war. There is also external involvement from Iraq. Iraq and Syria were actually united in a single country years ago. They shared for many years a single governing party, the Ba'ath Party. They're also close ties with Turkey. The area of Syria that is majority al-Awwait called Latakia, actually many people think should have been part of Turkey, not part of Syria, but agreements made between Britain and France at the end of World War I put Latakia in Syria rather than in Turkey. Russia is involved because there is a major Russian naval base in Latakia, Russia's only naval base in the Mediterranean Sea. And of course the United States and Iraq have been involved in the Syrian conflict as well. In addition, Syria has a very young population, median age, 24 years old, with very high youth unemployment. This chart here is a population pyramid of Syria. A healthy population pyramid with a stable birth rate at a replacement level of just over two children per woman would have both male and female population that's roughly similar across most age groups and only falling off in old age. Syria has a relatively high fertility rate and relatively high birth rate, at least it did until very recently. And as a result, you can see the population pyramid is skewed towards young men and young women who make up a very large portion of the population, people under 20 and under 24 years old, in fact half the population is under 24 years old, and youth unemployment is extremely high in Syria as it is across the Middle East. As a result, there were an enormous number of young people with no jobs who are a prime population to start a revolution or to fight in a civil war, and that's of course exactly what has happened. Civil war in Syria broke out in late 2011 as a result of severe regime repression of what were for the most part peaceful protests demanding the resignation of Bashar al-Assad. The protests started in January and February 2011. By August and September of 2011, the government was routinely firing on protesters indiscriminately killing dozens of protesters at a time with very violent police tactics. In 2012-2013, this became an all-out civil war with areas of Syria, entire areas of Syria escaping government control. At one point, the government mainly controlled the area in the immediate surroundings of Damascus, the capital, and Latakia, the Alawite homeland in the northwest of the country. The Syrian government then staged a counter-offensive. It was accused of using chemical weapons in the war in its counter-offensive. Most international observers agree that the Syrian government did in fact use chemical weapons. In September 2013, there was a deal to have all of Syria's chemical weapons exported and destroyed by the United States and its allies. This deal was brokered between the United States and Russia. Russia at the time was trying to prevent a Western intervention in the Syrian civil war. In 2014, the Syrian civil war entered a new phase with the emergence of the Islamic State Group. Now, Islamic State goes under many names, IS or ISIS, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIL, Islamic State in Iraq, and the Levant. All of these are the same group. Islamic State is a splinter group from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda group. It was at one point a semi-independent arm of al-Qaeda, now clearly an independent group that is much, much larger than al-Qaeda ever was, controlling large amounts of Syria and Iraq. Here you see in gray the area controlled by ISIS. You can see immediately why it is called ISIS, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, because here is Iraq and the gray area of Iraq is controlled by ISIS, and here is Syria with the gray area of Syria controlled by ISIS. This map also shows the many different groups in control of areas of Iraq and Syria. I'll just point out that the purple here is controlled by the Iraqi central government. The orange areas or yellow areas here of northern Iraq and northern Syria are controlled by Kurdish separatist groups or groups seeking Kurdish autonomy in the north of Iraq and Syria. It's also worth pointing out that the majority of the world's Kurdish people live in Turkey, which is just north off this map, and so you can see why Turkey might be concerned about separatism among Kurdish populations in Syria and Iraq. The Syrian Civil War is now extraordinarily complicated, with many competing powers involved, both internal and external. First is the official Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. This is supported externally by Russia, which as I said has a military alliance with Syria, including a Russian naval and air base in Latakia. The Syrian government is also supported by Iran, which is reported to have sent irregular troops or volunteers to fight on the Syrian government side. Also by the government of Iraq, which has not sent troops, but is broadly speaking friendly to the government of Syria. The current government of Iraq is a Sunni-dominated government, which has some sympathy with Sunni-dominated Syria. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia Islamist group, also supports the government of Syria from across the border in Lebanon, and has sent regular army units to Syria to fight alongside the Syrian government. There's also a mainstream, quote unquote, or moderate, quote unquote, opposition supported by the United States, European Union, and Turkey. I put mainstream and moderate in quotation marks because there are at least a dozen of these opposition groups that broadly go under the label Free Syrian Army, but no one really speaks for them as a collective. This group is highly heterogeneous, and it's difficult to say whether or not they would truly be moderate if they won the war and were in a position to govern Syria. A third group are the Kurdish separatists of northern Syria and northern Iraq. These are supported by the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq and broadly supported by the United States. But these Kurdish rebels in northern Syria are being attacked by Turkey. Despite the fact that Turkey is a U.S. ally and member of NATO, Turkey strongly resists any idea of an autonomous Kurdish state in northern Syria and northern Iraq. And thus, while the United States is supporting Kurdish forces and often using its air power to support Kurdish forces in northern Syria, Turkey may be at the same time using its air power to resist Kurdish forces, making for a very complicated situation. Then fourth is the fundamentalist or Islamist opposition to the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. These are rebel groups who Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states like the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait consider mainstream opposition groups. They have organized armies, but they are often fighting with the mainstream or moderate opposition groups supported by the United States and European Union. Finally, there is Islamic State and other terrorist organizations who are supported by nobody else. No external group or internal groups really support Islamic State. In fact, many of Islamic State fighters don't even come from Syria at all. Many of them are jihadists who have come from around the world, including Europe and the United States, to go fight in Syria for the creation of a new fundamentalist Islamic State. In particular, many Saudis, Saudi Arabians, support Islamic State both financially and as volunteers, despite the fact that the Saudi government does not itself support Islamic State. Of course, Islamic State has perpetrated the most horrific atrocities in Syria, both against people, very severe rule and application of arbitrary and very bloody laws, like they are notorious for beheadings and cutting off of hands of people. But in addition to this, they have also desecrated historical sites in both Syria and Iraq, blowing up pre-Islamic temples and architecture from the region's ancient past. So the Islamic State has been reviled by everybody in the region, so there's been a ceasefire since February 2016, but that ceasefire has not included Islamic State. As a result, even though there's nominally a ceasefire in Syria, there's still an enormous amount of conflict, most recently the city of Palmyra in central Syria being retaken by the Syrian government from Islamic State fighters. As a direct result of five years of civil war in Syria, roughly half of Syria's 23 million people have fled their homes. The number of people living away from their homes comes to 10.6 million, and that's just the number who have been counted. 6.5 million people are internally displaced within Syria, people who've left their homes and their home cities to live elsewhere because they either feared Islamic State or feared the Syrian government or feared the Syrian rebels. Really everybody has been shifting to try to get to a place where they feel they won't be terrorized by the armed groups who are occupying it. And then 4 million people, 4.1 million, have become external refugees by fleeing across Syria's international borders. The situation is so severe that nearly 300,000 people have even fled to Iraq. Now in the rest of the world, Iraq is hardly considered the place you would go to looking for safety, but Syria is so unsafe that at least some 300,000 people consider Iraq safer than staying in Syria. Credible estimates of the number of deaths in Syria range up to 470,000 people died in this civil war. As a percentage of the population that's astronomical, it is some 2% of the entire population of Syria being direct casualties in the war. And of course the war is not yet over. Now around 1 million people have sought asylum in Europe. In the context of 10.6 million displaced people, it's clear that the percent who are actually going to Europe is relatively small, around 10% of the total number of people displaced in the conflict over the last five years. The 1 million Syrians who have made it to Europe are the ones who are most in the news, but they represent a relatively small burden compared to 1 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, which itself only has a population of 4.5 million, and 2 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, which has a population of just 57 million. By contrast, the European Union has a population of 400 million, has received only 1 million refugees, and the European Union is of course much, much richer than Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, or any other of the countries that have received Syrian refugees. In fact, most of the world's international refugees are not to be found in rich countries like those in Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. The vast majority of the world's international refugees are hosted by relatively poor countries with a big concentration in the Middle East. Now note the data in this chart are from 2014, and thus don't reflect the big surge of Syrian refugees into Turkey. But even at the end of 2014, there were already 1.5 million refugees in Turkey, mostly from Syria and Iraq, 1.5 million refugees in Pakistan, mostly from Afghanistan, more than a million refugees in Lebanon, mostly from Syria and Palestinians from the Palestinian conflicts with Israel, another million in Iran, mostly from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Jordan has over half a million refugees. The number of refugees in the region is astronomical compared to the number that are hosted in countries like the United States, Germany, and Australia. Key takeaways. Syria possessed multiple risk factors for civil war, including religious divides, totalitarian governments, and a very young population with high rates of youth unemployment. More than 10 million people have been displaced so far in the Syrian civil war, over 4 million externally and over 6 million internally within Syria. And finally, most of the world's refugees, including refugees from Syria, are hosted by relatively poor Middle Eastern countries. The big wave of 1 million refugees to the European Union is really the first big wave of refugees to hit developed rich countries, rather than being isolated in relatively poor countries outside the gaze of the world's media. Thank you for listening. You can find out more about me at SalvaturbaBonus.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter on global affairs.