True or not, nothing should surprise us these days.
For me it goes beyond this. This is civil war. We should not be involved unless Assad attacks outside his country’s borders.
But I suspect we and the Russians are intertwined in this thing much as the US was stuck in Vietnam. That is, it is not about Assad at all. It is about the winning superpower gaining great political strength and influence in the area. Syria is just the real estate on which that battle is being fought.
And we need to get out.