The spark was lit in March 2011 when a group of young boys were arrested and cruelly tortured for daubing walls in the southern Syrian city of Daraa with anti-government graffiti.
The level of violence being exerted by the state indicates that they are on the cusp of losing control
A year and a half on, a once peaceful uprising against President Bashar al-Assad inspired by the Arab Spring revolts against other autocratic regimes has descended into brutal civil war with no endgame in sight, analysts say.
Men, women and children are trapped in bombed-out towns, people are struggling to find food or medical supplies to treat the sick and wounded, while the grim cycle of shelling and air strikes and fighting claims scores of lives daily.
“There are a lot of people who say that we must avoid civil war in Syria. I believe that we are already there for some time now. What’s necessary is to stop the civil war and that is not going to be easy,” new peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said, describing it as the “cruellest kind of conflict”.
The International Committee of the Red Cross began treating the conflict as a civil war more than a month ago, when the fighting dramatically escalated, reaching the capital Damascus and the main northern city of Aleppo.
The death toll has risen alarmingly, with a divided international community powerless to act to stop the bloodshed. It has surged from 2,200 in August 2011 to more than 23,000 now, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, while the UN puts the figure at around 17,000.
As the conflict grinds bloodily into its 18th month, the regime is resorting to even heavier fire power against the rebels, a motley collection of fighters, military defectors and Islamists groups loosely united as the Free Syrian Army.
They are concentrated in the northwestern provinces of Aleppo and Idlib and Deir Ezzor in the Far East and parts of the central Homs province.
Activists are reporting increasing attacks from the air by regime forces, alongside relentless daily shelling and sniper attacks in the rebel strongholds, particularly in Aleppo.
The government warned last month that Aleppo should brace for the “mother of all battles” but has failed to dislodge opposition fighters from many districts of Syria’s second city and is battling pockets of opposition even in the capital and other parts of the country.
“The level of violence being exerted by the state indicates that they are on the cusp of losing control,” a top Western military officer with experience in Afghanistan and Iraq said.
The regime has already been dealt major body blows with the defection of former Prime Minister Riad Hijab and high-profile general Manaf Tlass, while a string of generals has fled to Turkey to join the rebellion.
Mr Assad also lost his defence minister and three other top security officials in a bomb attack last month claimed by the FSA.
“The regime cannot ‘win’, nor can it survive indefinitely,” Yezid Sayigh, a senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Centre, said in a commentary.
Mr Hijab said after fleeing to Jordan the regime only controls 30 per cent of the country and had “collapsed militarily, economically and morally”, while there is talk of further high-profile defections to come.
Mr Assad, from the minority Alawite sect, insists he is fighting for the very future of Syria in the face of a foreign “terrorist” plot aided by the West and regional rivals, including Sunni powerhouse Saudi Arabia.
In a sign of the increasingly sectarian nature of the conflict, activists say there has been a spate of tit-for-tat kidnappings and cold-blooded executions by rival Sunnis and Alawites.