In Syria, there is still a sizeable, & perhaps decisive part of the Syrian population that supports, or at least doesn’t resist Assad's rule!'

"...In Syria, a visit here makes clear there is still a sizeable — and perhaps decisive — part of the Syrian population that supports, or at least doesn’t resist, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's rule, although the opposition often gets more media attention. Some worry about losing jobs ... Some dread the Iraq scenario: sectarian bloodletting and chaos. Others fear what might come after Assad: a change in the balance of power between the United States and Iran; a foreign-backed carving up of Syria; and they fear an extremist Sunni Muslim government bent on ridding the country of its Christian and Druze minorities, and a campaign of killing and/or forced relocation of Assad’s Alawite brethren.....
The proliferation of arms in residential neighborhoods by masked men casually dressed in civilian clothes has reinforced perceptions among those skeptical of the FSA. The spray-painted anti-Assad slurs all over the capital’s walls and shops have made the city unsightly; neighborhoods have been destroyed following the fighting in, and subsequent FSA retreat from, those areas. Increased reports of the FSA’s violent treatment of Alawites and pro-regime Syrians are all causes for concern......
“They talk about wanting democracy, but I am now too scared to even voice my opinion in public for fear I’ll be called a collaborator and be killed,” a 60-year old retired schoolteacher, named Obeyda, told me over a coffee in her living room in Muhajirin in late July. She used to be very critical of the regime but now she’s more critical of the FSA. .....
Even within the conservative Sunni community there is fear of Islamic extremists. In late July, I met a Syrian woman in her early 30s named Kadijeh. She told me how Islamists distribute calendars in her neighborhood of Al Kadam, in Damascus, that blamed the Assad regime for women’s “immoral” dress. Kadijeh, who works as a maid, wore a headscarf pinned tightly at the chin and a long overcoat.
“I don’t want an Islamist regime taking over here, that would be a disaster,” Kadijeh told me, before relaying unconfirmed “stories she had heard” of Alawite women being abducted, raped and killed by the FSA. She said the FSA fighters are rumored to call their religious scholars in Saudi Arabia for spiritual guidance in the commission of such crimes. 
A part of Syria’s population is sufficiently persuaded by the government’s assertion that violence in the country is a result of “armed terrorists” who have infiltrated Syria at the behest of “foreign conspirators” that they consider the regime’s use of violence unpleasant but justified. These people say the goal is to split Syria apart, and they cannot bring themselves to condemn the regime, instead blaming parents who bring their children to protests — to “get shot and killed” — for fueling violence in the country....
For some people in Syria, the fear of foreign intervention and of a weak country without Assad has made them reluctant to admit the abhorrence of the regime’s actions during the conflict, superseding the notions of freedom and democracy for which elements of the FSA say they are fighting for, and which Syrian opposition activists say they are pushing for.
Those who formerly ridiculed the propaganda found on the government’s official television stations, refusing even to believe the weather forecasts, now look to it as the standard-bearer of “truth” in the face of the “anti-Syrian and biased Western news coverage.”
....... America’s controversial Mideast policies and its bloody “democratization” of Iraq — a country still reeling from mass murder and bombings a decade after its own Baathist regime fell — does little to assuage these fears. In addition, there are concerns that Syria’s support for Lebanon’s Hezbollah will be withdrawn following the regime’s collapse..."