Syria's war: Who is fighting and why

Syria's war is mess.

After 6 years, the conflict is divided between four sides,

each side with foreign backers.

And those foreign backers don't even agree with each other on who they are fighting for

and who they are fighting against.

And now, Syria’s use of chemical weapons has provoked President Donald Trump to directly

attack Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

This is a major development, because, up until now,

the US has only been focused on fighting ISIS.

To understand the criss-crossing interventions and battle lines in Syria today, and how it

got this way, it helps to go back to the beginning of the conflict

and watch to see how it unfolded.

The first shots in the war were fired, in March 2011, by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad against

peaceful Arab Spring demonstrators.

In July the protesters

start shooting back,

and some Syrian troops even defect from the Syrian army to join them.

They call themselves the Free Syrian Army and the uprising becomes a civil war.

Extremists from around the region and the world start traveling to Syria to join the rebels.

Now, Assad actually encourages this by releasing jihadist prisoners to tinge the rebellion

with extremism and make it harder for foreign backers to support them.

In January 2012, al-Qaeda forms a new branch in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra.