The spillover of the Syrian Civil War is the impact of the Syrian Civil War in the Arab world. Since the first protests during the Arab Spring, the increasingly violent Syrian Civil War has been both a proxy war for the major Arab powers and Iran, and a potential launching point for a wider regional war. Fears of the latter were realized when the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a Sunni Muslim militant group and former al-Qaeda affiliate, established itself in Syria in 2013, and by mid-2014, had combined both the Syrian Civil War and the Iraqi insurgency into a single conflict. The Spillover of the Syrian Civil War is often dubbed as the Arab Winter.