Its no so much that Assad was protecting Christians as that he wasn’t targeting them.
Which meant, by comparison, for Christians he was their de facto protector.
The mercenaries recruited to fight against Assad, on the other hand, the Al Nusra, Al Qaeda, and ISIS jihadis, slaughtered Christians in their spare time.
It takes real incompetence to turn Assad into the good guy, but our Obama State Department, allied with the Turks, have done it.
They are all, the groups you mentioned, “head choppers” and the friends of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, plus far too many others.
After 9/11 people in power may have targeted the Al-Qaeda organization and its leaders like Bin Laden but the broader jihadist movement ended up being recruited as mercenaries to overthrow governments in Libya and Syria.
The Uniparty Bush-Clinton types need to answer for this.