@AngeloJohnGage For 50 fucking years, we have been trying to get rid of this dictatorship. Not a single family who didn't lose someone either killed directly, under torture, or disappeared and I am not talking recently. For 50 fucking years, you didn't exist, didn't know, or didn't give a shit. @AngeloJohnGage Now all the sudden, you have discovered Syria & shaped your opinion based on what you read and heard recently from the media who only started to cover Syria to give you the stories you want to hear, the stories that sells. Terrorist, ISIS, Jihadists...
They barely went beyond

Aftermath of Soleimani death:
- Iran will look with suspicion at everyone it works with in Iraq & Syria, especially Syrian troops & militias, expect less cooperation, more friction.
- Iranian troops & militias will treat all the locals where they are stationed as possible spies - It was a heavy blow to Iran. it took years and a host of unrepeatable favorable circumstances to build up the Soleimani legend, and for him to grow his influence and establish personal deep ties with many actors in the ME. No replacement will be able to replicate his success.

When the unrest in Hamah started, the regime worries wasn't Hamah itself, as few hundreds, even thousands, of anti government rebels, armed only with small arms and confined to a small geographical location are not going to pose any serious existential threat to the regime. The regime's worry was about the unrest spreading to nearby towns and villages and across Syria in a time when most of the population was not happy about the rampant regime corruption and its heavy-handed, intrusive، and increasingly sectarian policies.

Assad, the father, created a class of Syrian loyalists who, after witnessing & participating in countless war crimes including in Hamah, became convinced that not only brute force and extreme violence is acceptable to maintain the regime, but it is necessary & does actually work Members of this class were instrumental in the regime response to the current crises, pushing that exact narrative that worked for them in the past: only the use of shear unimaginable violence is the best and only way to deal with the unrest and subdue the unhappy population.

I paid a bribe,as usual,to have my passport stamped with the Syrian "exit" stamp without issues, after spending summer in Syria a while back(pre 2011) getting ready to leave Syria and go back to my university. I went to the Immigration and Passport services to pick up my passport They stated calling out the names of those whose passports are ready. To my surprise, I wasn't one of them. I approached the employee and asked him about my passport. After knowing my name, he asked me to hold down and went to talk to another person standing in the back.