On Monday the world had a clear view of the top and bottom levels of war and the forces that drive history – namely world powers that play with smaller states and ordinary men, women and children, whose suffering launches them onto journeys of dehumanization that always end badly.

In Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the withdrawal of most Russian military forces from Syria. In Amman, the UNICEF regional representative released a report about the impact on children of the war in Syria.

This stark lesson in how history happens captures the hard realities of heartless foreign powers and helpless local citizens that have shaped the Arab world over recent decades. These top and bottom levels of war’s impact help us make sense of what has been happening in the Arab world for a long time now.

The Russian action is the easier to grasp. Big powers throw their weight around smaller countries whenever they need to make a point. That point can be related to domestic credibility, regional standing, global perceptions, genuine national strategic interests or just their sense of honor and respect that is calculated in the dead bodies of Syrians and many other helpless people in developing countries of the South.

For centuries, great powers and their armies have marched in and out of the Middle East at will, usually oblivious to what they leave behind, as the conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Iraq today confirm. Such wars are not only the result of big-power imperialism. In fact usually they can be traced to local dictatorships such as those of the Baath parties in Syria and Iraq that ravaged those societies.

The important report by UNICEF captured the street- and family-level picture of how societies disintegrate, as they weaken and finally shatter under the unbearable weight of years of warfare, siege, starvation, exile and death. The total helplessness and vulnerability of citizens reflect the combined consequences of the two great scourges of their existence: domestic dictatorships and foreign military interventions. As a dozen foreign and regional powers move in and out of Syria with their arms shipments and their own troops, the lasting damage can be measured in the criteria of human de-development and despair that UNICEF’s report mentioned: the lingering, even lasting, impact of war on Syria’s children.

The raw figures are bad enough, but they do not capture the full damage and future threats of what happens when large numbers of human beings are dehumanized in their own societies, often by their own government or people. The raw figures show that 3.7 million children born in Syria since the war started five years ago, including 306,000 refugees born in exile, have known only war, fear and displacement. Some 15,000 unaccompanied or separated children have crossed Syria’s borders in their desperate quest to stay alive.

Children under siege or in exile are being forced into marriage, for girls at the age of 11 or 12 years in some cases. Boys as young as 5 and 6 are working to scrape enough money to help their families stay alive. Some girl brides are reportedly giving birth at the age of 12 or 13. In the areas of heaviest conflict, virtually all children (98 percent of those examined) show signs of profound emotional or psychological distress. Once vanquished or minimized diseases such as polio, hepatitis A, measles and leishmaniasis have returned.

But the most troubling consequence of war is not just that it kills, degrades, or permanently scars people; it is that is spawns a cohort of emotionally disfigured youth whose loss of dignity often leads to destructive behavior that perpetuates violence. These youth first withdraw from normal social interactions, and subsequently often re-engage in society as hardened gang or militia members who join the war in order to regain a life and compensate for how the war ruined their lives. UNICEF’s medical surveys show that about one in five teenagers feel such high frustrations in their family situations.

This slow, steady, numbing dehumanization of young Syrians measured in hundreds of thousands of lives is mirrored in similar trends in other countries at war in the Arab world.

Most distressingly, this also occurs in marginalized areas of mass hopelessness and lack of life opportunities in peri-urban and rural regions of Arab countries not at war; this is what sparked the Arab uprisings five years ago, and keeps millions of men and women fighting for their lives and a better future for their children.