There Is No More Syrian Government

Tobias Schneider, War on the Rocks
It is the fiction of a national regime upheld by Assad that drives the worst abuses of this war, that obliges Alawite kids from the coastal mountains and the plains of Hama to fight their own countrymen in distant corners of a country long fractured into smaller fiefdoms beyond the reach of the state. The United States should not be complicit in this pretension. The Syrian state is gone for good. At this point, a quick decapitation might be preferable to a drawn-out implosion.