Remember that Syria is a secular country. Not an Islamic republic or aspiring to be one. Assad's family is apparently involved with the Alawite sect of Shia Islam, which some claim is not involved in any terrorist organisations. Seems he has a lot of support from Christians and many Sunni Muslims in Syria. The religious terrorists are largely Wahhabi sect of Sunnis.

The Yanks and others have long been trying to get rid of this government which acts in interests of Syrians rather than their own. The Russian intervention blatantly exposed what had been going on. A good analogy from an observer from a Middle Eastern country: Yanks are like someone who covertly sets fire to your house. They then come racing around pretending to help fight the fire. However, the real reason is to loot and try and set up opportunities for further theft in future. At least now with alternate news sources from the Western mainstream media and also the social media becoming readily available to millions of people thanks to the Internet, dirty deeds of governments and others can quickly gain wider exposure than ever before.

The situation in the Middle East is a great deal more complex than one would know from reading the mainstream press. The grossly oversimplified portrayals of Syria, the role of the Russians, the machinations of Saudi Arabia and Turkey and particularly the overarching ambitions of American hegemony are reflected in articles and comments such as the above. The role of Israel is a blank as far as most Australian commentators are concerned and the appalling tripe of Singer on this website is only one of many examples.

Can I respectfully suggest a little further reading for those who wish to challenge their biases and presumptions? Start with Hersh's two recent articles in the London Review of Books , 17 April 2014 and 7 January 2016. Then read Robert Kennedy Jnr's Syria: Another Pipeline War published on EcoWatch 25 February 2016.

Having absorbed their information by all means feel free to comment again on Syria and the wider Middle East. Please spare us your views in the meantime.

Hi Cherful,

How far back do you want to go ? Syria's history is pretty limitless, with a multitude of ethnic groups who have been there for yonks (as in most peasant societies), and countless invasions from every direction: the first r4ecorded battle between two powers was fought there between the Hittites and the Egyptians more than 3,300 years ago. Maybe one ay, some organisation will set to work compiling two encyclopedias: (a) the history of Syria's ethnic groups; and (b) the historical account of battles fought in what is now Syria.

So we probably have to take Syria as it is now, in 2016:

* in terms of religion, mostly Sunni, with a minority who are Shi'ite, of which a minority are Alawite, and a minority of Christians (of many denominations), Druse, Yazidi, et5c., etc.;

* in terms of ethnicity, Syrians/Syriacs, Kurds, Turkmens, Greeks, Turks, Cypriots, Egyptians, Bedouin, Arabs, Azeris, Armenians, Palestinians, etc. etc.

That's how it is in peasant societies: a multitude of semi-independent villages with histories going back thousands of years, and the overlay of the legacy of conquests, refugee flights, migrations and colonisations. That's the reality they have to come to terms with. But each group is usually too weak and jealous of its 'special rights' to come together to challenge the power of the dominant groups, which currently happen to be based on a secular group of Alawites, necessarily exerting a dictatorship over all other Syrians.

A bit like a dozen omelettes thrown together, all inextricably bound by history and geography and fated to sort out their problems together, sooner or later.

Joe

Loudmouth
Thanks for your interesting historical portrait of Syria,
A complicated picture indeed.

I really wish we didn't have to be involved in it.

With satellite TV in these modern times
It is easy to be swayed by one or two graphic
Pictures beamed into our lounge rooms
without the media doing any real research into
what is really behind it all.

So the West blunders into these conflicts and ends up
With egg on their face.

Scrambled eggs,

It doesn't eggsactly, set a good eggsample

Sorry, couldn't resist, the egg jokes