[account266928]

Made an account for this. Like another commenter said, you certainly won't get a cross section of "Syrians" here, and even I as a diaspora born in America to Syrian Christian parents can only loosely proxy the "Syrian Response." It's split -- some relatives and family friends have hated Assad for ages before the war (e.g. someone they knew was "arrested", they got property essentially taken from them, etc.)

Overall, though, there's a lot of fear. Just recently family of mine were going to visit for medical/humanitarian reasons, but now won't any time soon. We all know people there who've been struggling economically for years with the sanctions, but there's a different feel when this sort of ambiguous future violence looms. I'd disagree with other commenters stereotyping "most Syrians are celebrating", it does vary with a spectrum of wanting "stability" and wanting "freedom". farkanoid's stuff about torture and the mukhabaraat (never seen that mentioned in English!), can somewhat confirm, but am personally further away from that since I haven't been to Syria since the war started. The most definitive thing to say is the variance in Sryians' responses is not completely explained by their ethnicity or religion, and that just like any political people, their feelings come less from geopolitical simulations and staring at battle maps, more from their history and connections.

I'm not qualified to give predictions. I mostly wrote this comment to demonstrate that there are sort of Syrians on this website, not to give detailed political analysis. And finally, the sample you see here ARE sort of the "elite" that aprilthird2021 mentioned -- my people are Christian doctors, and farkanoid's Alawite relatives I'm guessing are more well off than the median.