>>46148
I understand their line of thought on geopolitics but have to disagree that it's not a civil war. It is simultaneously a proxy war and civil war, as external powers are playing out their moves on the divisions within Syrian society. First of all, one has to wonder why the mainstream Syrian rebels are Islamists even though they were meant to be positively portrayed. There were real "moderate Syrian rebels" but they faded into irrelevancy. If the West had enough control over the rebels, they'd seek a primarily PR-friendly secular uprising. Having to ignore that Turkey and the Gulf states were supplying Islamists was a PR liability and doesn't make sense as an integral part of the strategy. There are two reasons it still happened: it's a lot easier to get international volunteers and funding for Islamist rebels, and the Islamists do have a power base in Syrian society, or else they wouldn't have become the mainstream lines of a long-lasting uprising.

See, for instance, East Ghouta, where the most powerful warlord was Zahran Alloush, son of a Salafist scholar and himself a Salafist religious leader who supported the Iraqi insurgents in the 2000s. He was a local and hailed from Douma, which is described as:
https://tcf.org/content/report/into-the-tunnels/
>a famously conservative city sometimes known as the City of Minarets. It is one of very few places in Syria and the wider Levant to be dominated by the Hanbali school of Sunni Islam, which predominates in Saudi Arabia, and this facilitated the spread of Salafi teachings.

But proper religious extremism is only one part of the rebellion's local base. Certainly there's also sectarianism but not theologically motivated, just plain ingroup and outgroup sentiment. And social class. Economic opportunity is concentrated in the hands of the nepotistic ruling clique and there's a lot of resentment. The war's geography does show a relation between religious demographics, socioeconomic standing and the location of loyalist and rebel strongholds. East Ghouta is a good example, as it's part of the poor suburbs which rapidly surrounded Damascus in the past decades.
>It was as if every driver of anti-regime resentment in the late Assad era had congregated on the outskirts of Damascus: political frustration, religious revanchism, rural dispossession, and downward social mobility.

Poverty in the big cities can be visualized through informal housing. Comparing a map of it in Damascus (ignoring darker red, which are later housing developments during the war) with another of the early uprising, there's a strong association. This is also notable in Aleppo's loyalist west and rebel east. There's a relationship between military control and political sentiment in an area. Although local populations lost faith in the rebels as time went on, the uprising was launched from the strongholds of anti-government sentiment and found support from them. This is why it was still a civil war.