(CNN) -- The U.N. peacekeeping chief says Syria is now in a civil war. Some experts agree with U.N. official Herve Ladsous that the war-torn country has reached that chilling milestone. Others say the country is hurtling in that direction. The conflict began in March 2011 when a fierce Syrian government crackdown on peaceful protesters morphed into a bloody government uprising. Stephen Biddle, Roger Hertog Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, said popular conversation about civil war tends to be dominated by images of the U.S. Civil War, and it conjures a vague picture of a "really bad conflict." But the rigorously defined scholarly meaning of civil war fits Syria now, just as it applied to Iraq last decade, he said.
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Scholars say Syrian conflict fits definition of a civil war
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Some analysts believe the trajectory is pushing Syria toward civil war
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Syria is unlike Libya last year and Lebanon in the 1980s, an analyst said
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President Bush didn't want "civil war" used to describe Iraq, one professor said
In @placeholder during the 1980s, the state collapsed and "we saw a proliferation of armed groups across society in multiple directions" in a society with no controlling authority, Heydemann said.