Author: Hiba Dlewati and Nawar Oliver
Hiba Dlewati is a print and multimedia journalist from Damascus, Syria and the assistant managing editor of Syria Deeply. Born in Michigan and raised in Syria, she currently lives in Beirut. She has worked as a freelance producer covering the ongoing war in Syria and ensuing refugee crisis in Turkey and Europe, and completed a National Geographic Fulbright Digital Storytelling Fellowship sharing in-depth stories from the Syrian diaspora in Jordan, Turkey and Sweden. Nawar Oliver is a military researcher and a military mapper and analyst at Omran Center, a think-tank based in Istanbul. His work is focused on military developments in the MENA region and the various groups fighting in Syria. He is on Twitter at @nawaroliver.

Foreign intervention and the many proxy groups fighting on all sides of the conflict in Syria have further polarized the war and complicated the rules for accountability when it comes to civilian protection. (More…)