The spillover of the Syrian Civil War was the impact of the Syrian Civil War in the Arab world and beyond. Since the first protests during the Arab Spring, the increasingly violent Syrian Civil War has been both a proxy war for the major Middle Eastern powers, Turkey 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 Salafi Jihadist militant group and alleged former al-Qaeda affiliate, established itself in Syria in 2013, and later combined with the War in Iraq into a single conflict the following year. The spillover of the Syrian Civil War is often dubbed the Arab Winter.