Before Syria's revolution, the dispute between most of the opposition and Bashar al-Assad, and before him, Hafez al-Assad, was political, not sectarian. The gripe most Syrians had was about the nature of rule, corruption, the confiscation of political freedoms, and the hijacking of the state for the benefit of the ruling family and foreign alliances that undermined its sovereignty.
When the revolution erupted in Syria in 2011, its demands were clear: freedom, democracy, the establishment of a state governed by institutions, and combating the corruption that had infiltrated all aspects of life.
The 14 years of the revolution and of the regime’s war against Syrians were not something that could easily be brushed aside. The Assad regime and its media machine worked with calculated malice to turn it into a sectarian war. As a result, most of those who were killed, tortured, displaced, and detained were from the Sunni community; that is not sectarian language but a cold reading of reality.
