A picture is worth thousand words and these pictures will tell you the enormity of destruction conflict and war have brought in once a beautiful country called Syria.
At least 11 million people have been driven from their homes and roughly 320,000 killed as of October 2015.
Millions of refugees somehow managed to make it to European countries where they are not welcomed any more.
An estimated 2.5 million children have been forced from their homes in war-driven country.
As the Syrian conflict refuses to end, one-in-three Syrian refugee children have never known anything but war and flight.
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, (ISIS), a brutal jihadi group with dreams of regional and global conquest made Syria a continued battle ground to no end.
A confusing international strategy, a brutal regime, and a turbulent Middle East drove Syria to become a hell on earth.
Since 1970, Hafez Assad and his son and successor, Bashar al Assad, have turned Syria into one of the world's most thorough police states.
According to a report in Business Insider, “The Assads secured their rule through violence: 20,000 people were killed when Hafez Assad crushed an Islamist uprising in the city of Hama in 1982. Syrian militarily occupied Lebanon in the 1990s, meddling in the politics of their polyglot neighbor and helping the terrorist group Hizbollah become the country's most dominant force.”
It all began on March 18, 2011 when Syrian government forces killed six people during a peaceful protest in Dara'a.
The ‘stability’ that the Assads had supposedly been so effective at fostering was rapidly exposed as a fraud.
It became a regular phenomenon in Syria as massacres of protestors were frequent occurrences by the end of April, and by summer the country was engaged in a full-blown civil war.
This led jihadist fighters from the Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra — as well as Al Qaeda in Iraq to take advantage of the disturbance in the region.
Al Qaeda in Iraq later changed its name to the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS.
It was predicted during the crisis of late 2011 and early 2012, how bad things would get.
Here are some before and after pictures of Syrian cities that were destroyed in the on-going war