A devastating drone strike hit a military college graduation in Syria in the last week of September. At least 80 people were killed by a drone “carrying explosive ammunition,” the New York Times reported. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group monitoring the overall conflict, estimated deaths to be at around 100, with more than 125 injured. While no group has officially taken responsibility for the attack, the Syrian government alluded to U.S.-backed Kurdish Syrian forces as the culprits. In response, Syria sent out artillery strikes of its own to several towns, though interestingly none of these were located in U.S.-backed areas.

Syria will “respond with full force and decisiveness to these terrorist organizations,” the government said.

Before analyzing the current situation, it’s important to look at Syria’s volatile recent history. Syrians rose up in 2011, as part of the wider Arab Spring, to try to oust then-current dictator Bashar Al-Asad and bring in a democracy. However, the uprising spiralled into a larger conflict after the government reacted to the peaceful protests with violence. Thus, the Syrian Civil War began, fought by regime loyalists against the “rebel” anti-government populace, the former supported by countries such as Russia and Iran while Turkey and Jordan supported the latter. The U.S., meanwhile, began operations in the country in 2014 to fight ISIS militants who were trying to form a caliphate in the region. Neither the loyalists nor the “rebels” wanted to cede territory to fighters of the Islamic State, so both sides independently fought them as well.

On top of all this, the Kurdish people (one of the largest ethnic groups in the whole Middle East) declared governmental sovereignty over areas of the country they controlled in 2014, emerging as yet another stakeholder in this conflict. In addition to the military strikes and battles for survival they faced as part of their struggle for independence from Syria, the Kurds also heavily fought ISIS on the Turkish border, which got them backing from the U.S. This is the group the Syrian government has blamed for the September attacks. Since the outbreak of the conflict, Syria’s rhetoric has tried to portray pro-independence Kurds as a new form of the Kurdistan Workers Party (P.K.K.), an internationally-designated terrorist group (recognized as such also by the U.S.) which Syria has been fighting “for decades.”

The way Syria has been handing the aftermath of the September strike is only another example of how dysfunctional the state has become over the last decade. In addition to fights over territory control between the above-mentioned stakeholders who emerged in the initial conflict, many internal conflicts have blanketed the overall war, and heavy international intervention has made the situation even more complicated.

Conflicts between two viewpoints, or even three, have enough history and nuances attached to be complicated to put to rest, but the many perspectives connected to this issue makes picking a “morally correct” side extremely difficult. Take the September military graduation bombing, for example. With so many dead, Syria reserves the right to strike. But the government has already terrorized its own people, murdering and torturing people of all ages and genders using chemical weapons. Any self-justification from the Assad regime for its actions rings hollow when it has been bombing its own hospitals. At the same time, what if it was a different rebel group that sent the drone? What if the response was aimed at innocent people? As noted above, some of the anti-Assad rebels in Syria belong to internationally reviled terrorist groups, including ISIS, but also offshoots of Al-Qaeda. In conflicts like this, one can never definitively know if a retaliatory strike is attacking the exact perpetrators of an attack, and it is difficult to know who is truly struggling for freedom and justice and who has innocent blood on their hands. That’s why the Syrian conflict is such a problem for world peace. While politicians, leaders, and power-hungry groups act violently to support their own agendas, real citizens on the street experience terrible violence with no justice.