I don't know a lot about the situation, but it really seems like corruption to me. I bet Asad is just doing a money/power grab to let Russia dig around in his country. I fear that he wants to clear out the dissidents so Russia can have a "stable" foreign base. Proxy war stuff.

In the end this is probably a response to the Israel obsession of Reagan-loving US Republicans. There is a really weird culture in the US that if you're not utterly insane about Israel you're an anti-Semite, but if you look back at the history, it seems pretty clear that while the some religious books claim the land for Jews, there were people who actually held that land at the time. Anyway kind of off topic, but yeah I feel like Syrian war prob has a lot to do with proxy war corruption.