On Thursday, following the publication of gruesome images of the victims of an apparent chemical attack on civilians, reports surfaced that President Donald Trump ordered a missile attack on a base in Syria. The reports follows a week in which President Trump responded to an alleged chemical weapons attack by dictator Bashar al-Assad by noting it “crossed many red lines” and had changed his thinking on Syria. The President refused to elaborate earlier in the week on how he would approach the six-year-old civil war and the sprawling web of armed factions fighting each other within Syria’s borders, likely in part due to the complex nature of the fighting. The Syrian Civil War is not being fought solely between Assad’s soldiers and anti-Assad rebels, but by a diverse cast of characters staking their territorial claims in isolated regions of the country, sometimes failing to interact with each other at all, and their patron nations looking to stake a claim in the heart of the Middle East. At least ten major armed groups, including the armies of at least five sovereign nations, have entered the fray in Syria. Governments: Bashar al-Assad/The Government of Syria The Syrian army is the official sovereign military