As the war in Syria enters its second decade, the human scale of the catastrophe is difficult to comprehend. Shocked by the security service’s torture of children who had graffitied the words ‘Down with the regime’ on a wall in the city of Daraa in 2011, nationwide demonstrations rose up against Bashar al-Assad’s tyrannical government. When I ask my now-exiled Syrian colleagues what life was like under the Assad family, they struggle for historical parallels before agreeing that, for them, it resembled Stalin’s Soviet Union and North Korea (a regime the current president’s father, Hafez Al-Assad, looked to for inspiration).

During the Arab Spring of 2010–12, as one after another of the region’s ageing kleptocrats fell, many Syrians felt they could throw off the shackles of the Assad family that had come to power in a military coup in 1971. The Syrian opposition threatened to overwhelm Damascus, only to be driven back by Russian airpower and Iranian ground troops; it was also undermined by internal division.

The United States, under President Barack Obama, committed to ending the ‘forever wars’, was wary of another potential Middle Eastern quagmire. Obama doubted the ability of an opposition coalition of ‘farmers and pharmacists’ to take on the Syrian government, with its Russian and Iranian backers. Under Donald Trump, the focus, for want of a better term, of US policy was on combating the perceived threat of extremism rather than on the state-based terrorism of Assad. Despite the suffering of civilian populations, in John Bolton’s words Syria was little more than a ‘strategic sideshow’ to US administrations. But in the brutal struggle for Syria’s future, torturing children was just the beginning.