".... The truth is we do not know much about what is happening inside Syria — just as we knew and know little about Libya, where, now that Gadhafi is dead, “the show is over” for the western audience. Journalists who (courageously) enter Syria are seldom in a position to check the hearsay they must forward as breaking news to deadline. As an old editor, it distresses me to see things as specific as body counts reported, from places where there are no disinterested observers.
It should also be remembered that all governments, even the most angelic, try to maintain order. When rebels seize bastions in Homs or elsewhere, overpowering local authorities, of course the state’s soldiers will go in. To present the Syrian regime’s defensive efforts, as if it were shelling for the sheer gratuitous pleasure of demolishing old towns, is to overstate the case for the opposition.
We have received little hints that indeed, al Qaeda and other terrorist Islamists are engaged in that opposition. The very existence of a “Free Syrian Army,” in support of a “Syrian National Council” suggests the violence is not confined to one side; and many of the victims of this violence are likely to be (as in Libya, again) unarmed people loyal to the regime, who become targets for vengeance when the regime’s soldiers are out of reach....
Christians were as common in Syria as in Egypt, before their numbers were immensely swelled by refugees from Iraq — well over a million fleeing up the Euphrates River valley, from anti-Christian persecution by Iraq’s Islamists. By now, there could be more than four million Christians within Syria’s borders.
When the Assad regime falls, it will be open season on them, on the Alawites, and all the other minorities."
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