AL-NAYRAB, Syria >> For years, Syria’s civil war has been a largely frozen conflict, the country effectively carved up into areas controlled by the Damascus government of President Bashar Assad, various opposition groups and Syrian Kurdish forces.

But as the conflict entered its 14th year on Friday, observers say violence has been on the rise again while the world’s attention is mostly focused on other crises, such as Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

In the village of al-Nayrab in the northwestern, opposition-held enclave of Idlib, Ali al-Ahmad burns olive branches in a stove to keep his partially destroyed house warm.

He has been living in the damaged house, struck in a recent round of shelling by government forces. Still, it’s in better condition than many of the surrounding houses that were reduced to rubble. When a new round of bombing starts, al-Ahmad leaves for a while to stay in one of the nearby displacement camps until the situation calms and he can return and repair the damage.

“We return for a day or two, then they start shelling us,” he said. “We leave for a few days, then return to our village to find our homes destroyed.”

The U.N.-backed body known as the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria said this week that since October, the country has seen the worst wave of violence since 2020.

The war, which has killed nearly half a million people and displaced half the country’s pre-war population of of 23 million, began as peaceful protests against Assad’s government in March 2011.

The protests — part of the Arab Spring popular uprisings that spread across much of the Middle East that year — were met by a brutal crackdown, and the revolt quickly spiraled into a full-blown civil war, which was further complicated by the intervention of foreign forces on all sides of the conflict, as well as a rising militancy, first by al-Qaida-linked groups and then the Islamic State group until its defeat in 2019.

Russia, along with Iran, became Assad’s biggest ally in the war, Turkey backed an array of Syrian opposition groups while the United States supported Syrian Kurdish forces in the fight against IS. Israel has carried out airstrikes targeting the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Iranian forces in Syria.

Over the years, the battlefields became stalemated in the war-ravaged nation.

The recent surge in violence began with a drone strike on a military academy graduation ceremony in government-held city of Homs in October that killed dozens.

Syrian government and allied Russian forces then launched a bombardment of the opposition-held northwest that hit “well-known and visible hospitals, schools, markets and camps for internally displaced persons,” the commission said.