What to do when there aren't any good guys? Bashar al-Assad if a fucking monster ...

[Turborama]

14. OK, I went and found the article I think you mean.

I can't see anything about "the treatment of girls seeking an education and women in general", though. With regards to who we should be supporting and the beating with pipes, I did find thins, though...

=snip=

For many Aleppo residents weary of the months of chaos after the takeover of their neighborhoods by unruly rebel fighters who have looted homes and shaken down civilians, the authority is welcomed as an attempt to restore order. The Hayaa has won plaudits for targeting some of the city’s most notorious rebel battalions, and one of its top leaders, a Jabhat al-Nusra commander known as Abu Omar, was killed in a confrontation this week with one of them.

=snip=

With President Bashar al-Assad showing no sign that he is prepared to give way, the Islamists gaining ground in the areas he no longer controls and Western countries still refusing to arm more-moderate battalions, “Jabhat al-Nusra will grow stronger and stronger,” said Mohammed Najib Banna, an Islamist jurist who belongs to a rival effort to set up a judiciary in Aleppo that has been eclipsed by the Hayaa.

=snip=

In the dingy storefront in one of the Aleppo neighborhoods where activists still organize regular peaceful protests against the regime, Ibrahim, widely known by his nickname, Abu Mariam, dismissed the beating he received as “nothing.”

It didn’t hurt, he said, because the pipe was thin, “like the ones used in a toilet. It was just a reprimand, a way of saying, ‘Don’t do it again.’ ”

And it won’t happen again, he said, because he and his fellow activists have since made peace with the local Islamist protesters whose attempts to usurp a demonstration by Ibrahim’s group prompted him to toss aside their flag.

Here's the link if you want to add it to the OP... http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/islamic-law-comes-to-rebel-held-syria/2013/03/19/b310532e-90af-11e2-bdea-e32ad90da239_story.html

I was following the Syria revolution from the beginning and took a break as real life took over. IMO if we were going to do it, that is when we should have been supporting the revolutionaries. Unfortunately, in the meantime, some of the vacuum seems to have been filled with religious militants.