What isn’t mentioned here or in any postings I’ve read so far is that both the U.S. and Russia have entered into a religious war between the Sunni sect and the Shiite sect of the Islamic religion that has been ongoing now since the 7th Century AD.
Russia’s obvious motive for taking part in this Muslim religious war on the side of Syria’s Shiite President Assad and Shiite Iran is clearly to establish Russian influence and control in the Middle East. The United States’ just as obvious motive for taking sides with the Syrian Sunni rebels who are attempting to remove Syria’s Shiite President from power and install a Sunni leader can only be attributed to Sunni Saudi Arabia’s influence within our government.
The fact that the Syrian Sunni rebels are almost indistinguishable from the Sunni ISIS/ISIL Jihadists who are also actively striving to remove Syria’s Shiite President and install Sunni leadership seems to be apparent to the Russians but obtuse to the U.S.
Your guess is as good as mine as to why these facts aren’t being openly discussed by our government spokesmen and our Main Stream Media.
Your analysis is fine as far as it goes, but it overlooks the fact that there are others involved besides the Alawites and Sunnis. Syria has a sizable Christian minority, which has always backed the Ba’athist government — Ba’athism being the only popular ideology among the Arabs that is actually secular, most Arab Christians in the Middle East, if they are political at all are Ba’athists — and most Syrian Christians are, like Russians, Orthodox.
During the Ottoman period, Russia acted as the protector of Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule by periodically saber rattling to force concessions from the Sultan. Church-State relations in Russian having returned to more or less the status quo ante the Bolshevik seizure of power, it is natural for Russia to return to the role of protector of the Middle Eastern Orthodox.