Syria's War at Five Years in 60 Seconds, and How It Ended

Syria’s War After Five Years, Explained in 60 Seconds (2016)

By March 2016, Syria's war had lasted five years. What began in 2011 as peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad had become a multi-sided conflict involving the government, dozens of rebel groups, Kurdish forces, the so-called Islamic State and several foreign powers. Hundreds of thousands of people had been killed and millions had fled. The short video below, shared by humanitarian groups in early 2016, tried to compress those five years into a single minute.

This page explains what the video was summarising, what the situation looked like when it was made, and how the war went on to end for the Assad government in December 2024.

The 60-second video

The film, titled Syria Crisis: 5 years in 60 seconds, was circulated in January 2016 by aid organisations, including the United Church of Christ's One Great Hour of Sharing programme, under the hashtag #SyriaCrisis. Its maker is not clearly credited where it was shared, and UNICEF UK appears to have circulated a film with a similar title. The aim was simple: give people who had lost track of the news a quick way to grasp the scale of the suffering and to share it.

It appeared at the same moment as an unusual public plea. On 21 January 2016, the heads of UN agencies and more than 120 humanitarian organisations signed a joint statement titled "An appeal to end the suffering in Syria." It said some 13.5 million people inside Syria needed humanitarian assistance and that 4.6 million had fled to neighbouring countries and beyond.

How the war began

In March 2011, inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, Syrians began protesting against the government. Discontent was strong in poorer cities such as Daraa in the south. Assad's security forces met the demonstrations with lethal force, and by 2012 the protests had turned into an armed insurgency and then a full civil war.

The opposition was never one army. Defected soldiers, local militias, Islamist groups and jihadist factions fought the government and, at times, each other. In the north-east, Kurdish-led forces built their own self-governing region.

Five years in: the picture in 2016

By the time the video was made, several things had changed the war's course:

The rise of the Islamic State. In 2014 the group seized large parts of eastern Syria and western Iraq and declared Raqqa its capital. It later lost that territory to a US-led coalition and Kurdish-led forces in campaigns around Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor.
Chemical weapons. The 2013 sarin attack on Ghouta, near Damascus, was the deadliest chemical attack since the Iran–Iraq War. A later study attributed the overwhelming majority of documented chemical attacks in the war to the Assad government.
Foreign intervention. Iran and Hezbollah backed the government on the ground. Russia began airstrikes in September 2015 and helped the government recapture Aleppo in 2016. Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United States supported various rebel groups, and Turkey later sent troops into northern Syria.
A human catastrophe. In April 2016 the UN envoy said more than 400,000 people had been killed. Sieges cut whole communities off from food and medicine, and the refugee crisis reached Europe in 2015, when many Syrians made dangerous sea crossings to Greece.

What aid agencies were asking for

The January 2016 appeal did not take sides in the war. Its demands were humanitarian: unrestricted and lasting access for aid to everyone in need, pauses in fighting and monitored ceasefires so that food could be delivered and children could be vaccinated and go to school, an end to attacks on hospitals, schools and water supplies, freedom of movement for civilians, and the immediate lifting of all sieges by every party.

Videos like this one were part of the same effort. Their purpose was to keep public attention on a war that, after five years, many people in other countries had started to tune out.

How the war ended for Assad

The conflict continued for almost nine more years after the video. Front lines largely froze after 2020, with the government holding most of the country, rebels concentrated in Idlib in the north-west, Kurdish-led forces in the north-east and Turkish-backed groups along the border.

Then, in late 2024, rebel forces led by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham launched a rapid offensive. They took Aleppo, Hama and Homs, and on 8 December 2024 entered Damascus, ending more than five decades of rule by the Assad family. Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow, where he was granted asylum. HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa became the country's de facto leader and in January 2025 was appointed president of a transitional government.

The end of Assad's rule did not bring immediate peace. In March 2025 mass killings of Alawite civilians took place in coastal areas; the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported more than 1,600 civilians killed by pro-government militias. Later that year an insurgency developed among the Druze community in Suweida. Total deaths in the war are now estimated at well over 600,000, and millions of Syrians remain refugees or displaced inside the country.

Why the video still matters

Sixty seconds cannot explain a war, and the video does not try to. Its value is as a snapshot of how the world saw Syria at the five-year mark, when the worst of the fighting was still ahead and the outcome seemed impossible to predict. Watching it now, with the knowledge of how the Assad era ended, is a reminder of how long ordinary Syrians lived through the conflict and how much rebuilding is still needed.

If you want to help, established organisations such as UNHCR, UNICEF and the International Committee of the Red Cross continue to work with Syrians inside the country and in neighbouring states.

Sources: United Nations, 21 January 2016: An appeal to end the suffering in Syria; United Church of Christ, January 2016: #Syria Crisis: 5 years in 60 seconds; Wikipedia: Syrian civil war; AP via ClickOnDetroit, 8 December 2024: Syrian government falls to fast-moving rebels.

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