A very helpful primer from Bill Moyers

Timeline: The BBC has an informative historical timeline spanning 95 years, from the end of the Ottoman Empire’s dominance to the deployment of chemical weapons last month. It’s a quick way to get oriented. 

Deep analysis: William Polk was a State Department analyst during the Kennedy administration. Over the Labor Day weekend, he penned an in-depth analysis of the crisis for The Atlantic. If you only have time for one long-read on Syria, this is the one.
A massacre resonates: One of the reasons Syria was believed to be immune from the uprisings of the “Arab Spring,” and one of the reasons the rebels see themselves in a life-and-death fight, can be summed up in a single word: Hama. In 1982, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, ordered an uprising in the city of Hama to be put down with extreme violence. Up to 30,000 people died. Reuters looked back at the bloodbath and spoke with some of the survivors. 

Climate war?: While it’s not a straight causal line, there is little question that an unrelenting drought induced by climate change combined with agricultural mismanagement and an existing refugee crisis to create a powder-keg in Syria. Writing in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Shahrzad Mohtadi details a story that’s gotten far too little attention in the mainstream coverage of the conflict. (Moyers & Company’s John Light interviewed Francesco Femia, director of the Center for Climate and Security, about this angle.) 

No white hats: Up until about a year ago, advocates of intervention in Syria’s civil war hoped that a relatively liberal government could replace the Assad regime. They pointed to the ideological moderates in the Free Syrian Army as a source for potential leaders. But since that time, the FSA has become sidelined by radical and violent Islamists from around the region. In Foreign Policy, Thomas Pierret, a lecturer in contemporary Islam at the University of Edinburgh and author of Religion and State in Syria: The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution, explains what happened. 

“Regional lynchpin”: Syria’s civil war is creating a regional crisis, dividing its neighbors and aggravating long-standing tensions. Benedetta Berti and Yoel Guzansky, two Israeli researchers, place the conflict into context as part of a regional power-struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and their respective allies for FPRI.

This article, Trying to Make Sense of Syria? Here’s Our Essential Reader, is syndicated from Moyers & Company and is posted here with permission.