It has now been over a decade since Syria erupted into civil war. The uprising was spontaneous and spread like wildfire. Within weeks, President Bashar Assad had lost control over huge swaths of Syrian territory. The Assad family’s demise appeared inevitable. Rather than flee, however, Assad increased the brutality.

Neither fighting nor atrocities in Syria were random. Both sides fought for control over Homs, a small city literally at the crossroads of the country: Whichever faction controlled Homs could control commerce across Syria. Meanwhile, both Assad and the radicalized opposition sought to cleanse regions along sectarian or ethnic lines. The Syrian air force focused its assaults on Sunni population centers in order to change the demography of the Sunni heartland. Turkish-backed forces pursued a similar strategy of demographic transformation as they sought to pursue an ethnic cleansing in Syrian districts along the Turkish frontier of their native Kurdish populations.