How Syria’s war turned Middle East power game on its head

The Syrian uprising started with a modest aim: to protest against the detention and torture of young revolutionary activists who had written slogans on a wall. Of all the Arab Spring movements, it seemed the one most likely to fizzle out without trace.

Yet a decade on, the fire sparked by those first protests has not only consumed Syria, now a husk of the country it once was, but spread out across the entire region, breaking old alliances, forging new ones and establishing centres of ascendant power that are likely to last a generation or more.

Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Cairo, the cities that once formed the political and cultural heart of the region, feel increasingly like backwaters, while decision-making has shifted to the peripheries.