Christian men have been fighting in the multi-layered conflict - either alongside Kurdish militias or alongside relatively secular rebel factions, or government forces.
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Profile: Syria's ruling Baath Party - BBC News - 0 views
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Syria's beleaguered Christians - BBC News - 0 views
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was a Christian, and Christians rose to senior positions in the party, government and security forces
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Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch Gregorios III Laham said last year that more than 1,000 Christians had been killed, entire villages cleared, and dozens of churches and Christian centres damaged or destroyed.
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if President Assad is overthrown, Christians will be targeted and communities destroyed as many were in Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003.
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Understanding Syria: From Pre-Civil War to Post-Assad - The Atlantic - 0 views
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So it is important to understand how their “social contract”—their view of their relationship with one another and with the government—evolved and then shattered.
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Nationalists took this diversity as a primary cause of weakness and adopted as their primary task integrating the population into a single political and social structure.
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or Hafez al-Assad, the secular, nationalist Baath Party was a natural choice: it offered, or seemed to offer, the means to overcome his origins in a minority community and to point toward a solution to the disunity of Syrian politics
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small group gathered in the southwestern town of Daraa to protest against government failure to help them
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All observers agree that the foreign-controlled and foreign-constituted insurgent groups are the most coherent, organized, and effective
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a whole generation of Syrians have been subjected to either or both the loss of their homes and their trust in fellow human beings.
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BBC News - Arab uprising: Country by country - Syria - 0 views
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Opposition supporters began to take up arms, first to defend themselves and then to oust loyalist forces from their areas.
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dropped an article giving the ruling Baath Party unique status as the "leader of the state and society"
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Iraq divisions undermine battle against IS - BBC News - 0 views
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More than in any other country, Iraq's future is intimately bound up with the fate of self-styled Islamic State (IS).
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But even if initially successful, such an ambitious project, indeed, any further moves to oust IS, could go badly wrong if the foundations are not sound
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The IS fighters were able to lodge so easily in the Sunni Arab heartlands because the people there had been largely alienated by the sectarian policies and practices of the Shia Arab-dominated Baghdad government under Nouri al-Maliki, who was finally prised out of the prime minister's office in August 2014.
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gislation to empower the Sunnis by devolving security and financial responsibilities to the provinces has not happened.
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Nor have measures to reverse the persecution of former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, or the random arrests, detentions, and to assuage other Sunni grievances.
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he US, who have about 3,500 military personnel training and advising Iraqi government forces on the ground, also seems to be aware that military muscle is not enough.
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If that process continues and the militants are defeated, the way Iraq fits together - if it does - will be decided by who pushes them out, and how the resulting vacuum is filled.
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Some residents may still see IS - about 85% of whose fighters in Iraq are believed to be Iraqi - as their protectors against an Iranian-backed, Shia-dominated Baghdad government.
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When the Iraqi army collapsed like a house of cards in the face of the IS eruption in June 2014, it was a motley array of hastily-assembled Shia irregulars, loosely banded into the Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilisation) that prevented the militants reaching Baghda
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Ramadi gave a boost to the embattled Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi.He has scant support even from his own Shia Daawa party, and is seen across the board by Sunni, Shia and Kurdish politicians as weak, hesitant, lacking in leadership and unable to stand up to the militias.But there was a down-side to the Ramadi victory too: heavy destruction, and the displacement of the entire population.
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Nor can the formula that finally and slowly worked in Ramadi simply be applied at Mosul. It took government forces with coalition backing seven months to regain Ramadi. Mosul is 10 times bigger.
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He omitted to mention coalition air support, which would also clearly be crucial to the campaign.Some Iraqi analysts believe outside ground forces would also be needed. US military leaders, while reticent, clearly want to up the pace and have not ruled out more boots on the ground. In the absence of serious moves towards national reconciliation, one senior government figure also saw a campaign to retake Mosul as a vital way of forging national unity.