Divergent Endings: A Comparative Analysis of Conflict Termination in the Syrian and Yemeni Civil Wars

Arjit Kandalai

doi:10.70528/IJLRP.v7.i7.2330

Divergent Endings: A Comparative Analysis of Conflict Termination in the Syrian and Yemeni Civil Wars

Author(s)	Arjit Kandalai
Country	United States
Abstract	The Syrian and Yemeni civil wars are conventionally analysed together. Both originated in the political ruptures of 2011, both drew Iran and the Gulf monarchies into sustained proxy competition, both generated humanitarian emergencies of exceptional severity, and both were repeatedly described as intractable. By 2026 their trajectories have sharply diverged. Syria’s war terminated abruptly in December 2024, when an eleven-day offensive led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham collapsed a government that had survived thirteen years of insurgency, and the country entered a contested five-year transition under President Ahmed al-Sharaa. Yemen’s war has neither ended nor resumed: frontlines between the Houthi movement and the internationally recognized government have remained substantially frozen since the truce of April 2022, while the most consequential violence of 2025 and 2026 occurred within the anti-Houthi coalition rather than across the principal cleavage. This article applies a structured focused comparison across five analytic dimensions—conflict origins, patterns of internationalization, humanitarian consequences, extremist exploitation, and termination dynamics—to explain the divergence. It argues that the decisive variable was not the intensity of violence, the depth of sectarian division, or the sophistication of mediation, but the relationship between each principal belligerent and its external patrons. The Assad government had become almost wholly dependent on Russian air power and Iranian-directed ground forces; when both patrons were degraded and distracted in 2024, the regime’s capacity to resist collapsed within days. The Houthi movement, by contrast, exercises indigenous territorial control and derives its cohesion from domestic sources, rendering it substantially insensitive to fluctuations in external support. The article further argues that Yemen’s stalemate is sustained by the fragmentation of the anti-Houthi coalition, which has produced no unified counterparty capable of concluding a settlement, and concludes that externally dependent regimes are vulnerable to sudden collapse while territorially rooted insurgencies are not—an asymmetry with implications for how internationalized civil wars are expected to end.
Keywords	civil war; conflict termination; Syria; Yemen; proxy conflict; internationalized civil war; humanitarian crisis; transitional governance; Middle East politics; comparative case study
Field	Sociology > Administration / Law / Management
Published In	Volume 7, Issue 7, July 2026
Published On	2026-07-31
DOI	https://doi.org/10.70528/IJLRP.v7.i7.2330

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Divergent Endings: A Comparative Analysis of Conflict Termination in the Syrian and Yemeni Civil Wars

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