Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"As noted above, by late 2016 over half a million people had died in the violence, and countless additional thousands were reported to be incarcerated or missing. This conflict has also displaced at least 12 million people— around 8 million forced to relocate within Syria and more than 4 million others who fled the country for the squalid refugee camps of neighboring Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon (Fig. 6-10). Internationally, even though the murderous Assad regime has been almost universally condemned for perpetrating the worst humanitarian crisis of our time, it continues to receive steady (if tacit) support from Russia, Iran, and China. As discussed earlier, it did not take ISIS long to enter the fray in Syria, and soon its own brutalities reached a level that undercut international criticism and opposition to the Syrian regime. . . . Even more than in Iraq, it is extremely difficult to imagine a future restoration of Syria as an integrated national territorial state." [Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts, 17th Edition, p. 258-9]