Many wondered why Assad always insisted that everyone who opposed him was a thug and a terrorist. At the beginning this was obviously not true.
The Syrian revolution and civil war did not begin as primarily sectarian. It is to some extent a class struggle. ... The big protests in 2011 originated in the slums around the cities in the center of the country, where young men who had moved there for work from the countryside found themselves locked into long-term unemployment. ... Because the upper ranks of the ruling Baath Party are disproportionately dominated by the Alawite minority, and because so many discontented youth in the cities of the center are Sunni, the conflict took on a sectarian tinge. But its underpinnings are economic.
Some 60% of Syrians are Sunni Arabs, i.e., adherents of the Sunni branch of Islam who speak Arabic as their mother tongue. Sunni Arabs also predominate in Jordan and Egypt.
Large numbers of Syrian Sunnis are secularists, either nationalists or leftists, and not very observant. Many Syrian Sunnis still follow the tolerant, mystical Sufi form of Islam. Others have come under Saudi influence and are known as Salafis, but this is just a euphemism for Wahhabis, members of the intolerant and rigid form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia. A very small number of Sunnis have affiliated with al-Qaeda, but they have had the important battlefield victories in the north.
http://www.juancole.com/2013/09/americans-theyre-threaten.html
As many have observed the longer this conflict has gone on the more radicalized the opposition has become. It was not thus when the uprising began.
Perhaps Assad played on Russian fears of radical jihadists and portrayed everyone who opposed him as such to make sure that the Russians backed him without question.
Of course, the irony is that by backing Assad with an unending supply of weapons and diplomatic protection in the UN, Russia finds more danger from jihadists in Syria today than there was 2 1/2 years ago.
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