“The Kurds did OK under Assad.”
Yea, there is nothing like being an oppressed minority in what is truly your own land (the Kurds were there long before any Arabs or any Turks - they have been there since before Christianity as well). Assad, like the Ottomans, is just another in a long line of occupiers.
FAR better than under Turkey or Iran.
No comparison.
“The Kurds did OK under Assad.”
But keep in mind that Assad’s Ba’ath Party is a racially based political movement, based on the supremacy of Arabs (which Kurds ain’t).
The Syrian Ba’ath are the last ruling Party on Earth, explicitly based on the ideological principles of the Nazi Party - Socialism based on race rather than class. The Irai Ba’ath actually carried out a genocidal campaign against Kurds (the Anfal Campaign), which they modeled on the Nazi Einsatzgruppen genocide operation on the Eastern Front.
In practice, race is becoming a more dominant “narrative” to justify (or just rhetorically persuade/incite) collectivist dictatorships in China and among the American Left. But for the Syrian Ba’ath Party, it is their explicit reason for being. It would be very very hard (not impossible) for them to reform their most fundamental pillar.