Syrians are deeply split after years of warfare, survey finds

[Sally]

I think most of us would like to see some kind of negotiated peace instead of a battle to the end where tens of thousands more would die.

Syrians are deeply split after years of warfare, survey finds
BY ROY GUTMAN

McClatchy Foreign StaffFebruary 18, 2015

• ISTANBUL — As the United Nations’ special envoy for Syria is reporting progress toward a cease-fire in embattled Aleppo, a new surveysuggests that divisions in the country have deepened and few civilians on either side see much hope in a negotiated settlement.
  
  The sampling of views across the political spectrum may not encourage the efforts of U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura, who told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that President Bashar Assad has agreed to suspend air and artillery attacks on Syria’s biggest city in a six-week truce. Opponents and backers of Assad said they favored a fight to the finish.
  
  “We must follow through and end the rule of this tyrannical regime,” said a 27-year-old Sunni opponent of Assad from Aleppo. A 55-year-old Damascus woman who backs Assad had a similar sentiment. “The fighting must continue until the Syrian army takes its victory,” she told an interviewer.
  
  Yet there were points of agreement across the spectrum. Regime opponents and backers agreed that Syria shouldn’t be partitioned, and everyone opposed the Islamic State, including those living in cities the group controls.
  
  The survey takers also said they’d found less skepticism about the Free Syrian Army, the umbrella name for U.S-backed rebels, than a previous survey last year did. “Many of the doubts regime opponents held about the Free Syrian Army (FSA) last year have dissipated,” wrote the survey’s author, Craig Charney. “Now, views of the rebel army are almost entirely positive, despite the reported setbacks that it has encountered in the field. Respondents described the FSA as the ‘real army’ and the best hope against the regime.”
  
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[william the wie]

Russia will own the Med if this keeps up.