Americans destabilized the region is the point. Assad would have contained the threat from ISIS had there not been outside help to ISIS. Syria's crisis was manufactured and Americans bear immense responsibility for it.
Highly speculative. There is no way to know how the civil war there would have developed without US/Russian involvement and Assad could have been toppled already.
It is not a civil war, nor was it ever, it is a US allied war on Syria and always has been. Russia is in no way implicated in the early development of the war.
It is not a stretch to believe the trained army of the sovereign State of Syria could have put down a local insurgency. A reasonable person ought to think it a given.
That is an ignorant comment. Please read up on the history of what happened in Syria:
Syrian Civil War - Wikipedia
Americans destabilized the region is the point. Assad would have contained the threat from ISIS had there not been outside help to ISIS. Syria's crisis was manufactured and Americans bear immense responsibility for it.
I thought the Syrian people who wanted freedom started the war along with the authoritarian Assad who did not want them to have much freedom.
That's only the way it looks on the surface to the casual observer.
That's the way it looks to the informed observer ...
"The Syrian war grew out of the unrest of the 2011 Arab Spring and escalated to armed conflict after President Bashar al-Assad's government violently repressed protests calling for his removal."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Civil_War
I'm not sure that Wikipedia is the definitive source but it is serviceable I suppose. The USG was actively seeking regime change in Syria as far back as '06. The Arab uprisings themselves, which were no coincidence, were used by the USG as a springboard to achieving their aims. Al Qaeda in Iraq was actively fighting the Syrian government from the outset of the protests.
The Assad government opposed the U.S.'s
2003 invasion of Iraq. The
Bush administration undertook to destabilize the regime by increasing sectarian tensions, showcasing and publicising Syrian repression of radical Kurdish and Sunni groups and financing political dissidents.
[152] Assad also opposed the
Qatar-Turkey pipeline in 2009. A classified 2013 report by a joint U.S. army and intelligence group concluded that the overthrow of Assad would have drastic consequences; the opposition supported by the
Obama administration was dominated by
jihadist elements. According to
Michael T. Flynn, the then-director of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, the report was ignored by the U.S. administration.
[152]