Last week, the conversation surrounding Syria took a different turn when the Syrian government, prompted by Russia, agreed to enter talks regarding the surrender of its  chemical weapons stockpile. This is an attempt to avert President Barack Obama’s desire for airstrikes on Syria.

“Life, actual daily life, stopped a while ago, “ said Ralph Khayat a sophomore at St. Edward’s University who left his home in Aleppo, Syria in June 2012.

 If this diplomatic approach works, it would lift one worry from the minds of the Syrian people according to Khayat. 

“I’m so glad we are trying to solve this in a peaceful way. I think it is a method that often gets overlooked,” Jorge Roque, a sophomore at St. Edward’s University, said.

Most of Khayat’s friends and relatives, like many others, have already left Syria. The many Syrians who still remain, in Khayat’s view, are simply surviving.

“The conditions are just not livable anymore. There is no security. There is nothing,” Khayat said.

Khayat lived as part of a Christian minority in a largely Muslim country.  However, despite the sectarian conflicts prevalent on the news now, Khayat remembers many different religious groups living peacefully in Syria.

“I am a minority in my own home. I have never felt like it,” Khayat said. “Syria was very tolerant of the religions. Two years ago, before any of this, I felt like there was no discrimination whatsoever. I could never have expected this to happen,” Khayat said.

According to Khayat, before the war, there was no real sense that the country was divided by its varying religious beliefs.

“Sure, Syria is a country where the majority of people are Muslims, but the Christians that are there have been there for millennia,” Khayat said. “Everyone has just been living together, and it was fine.”

What had started out as a rebellion against an authoritarian government has turned into a war filled with different factions with many different ideologies.

“Everyone that was against the president, that was for the president, that was for the revolution, was saying this should happen. Most of the people that I know that had that stance, have changed their minds now,” Khayat said. “This is not what any Syrian person would have wanted.”

Many of the factions, such as Hezbollah based in Iran, are not Syrians  but have joined  the war. With the Russian government supplying Bashar al-Assad with arms and anti-air weaponry, the Americans contemplating an air strike and the Syrian rebels not having a single unified group; the war  feels as if it has been taken over by foreigners.

“This is just chaos right now, not a revolution,” he said. “Everyone is fighting their wars in Syria.”

According to James Payne,  a freshmen studies professor who is covering Syria in class, transitions like the one in Syria are not usually “neat and smooth and nice.”

“The country is destroyed. Two million refugees and, internally, six million are in Syria but are displaced from their homes,” Payne said.

Payne’s freshmen studies class is called Politial Controversies.

Even if the war were to end, the people of Syria will have a long way to go. The overthrow of the Assad regime will not necessarily lead to a new form of government that the people will be happy with. There are different rebel groups within the war that are pursuing different outcomes.

“They may not be wanting to create a wonderful democratic country,” Payne said. “You are talking about profound systemic change and that is messy.”