The Syrian soldiers killed by Al Qaeda in Iraq, reflected the hardened sectarian animus spreading from the Syrian conflict, in which insurgents from the Sunni majority are battling to topple Mr. Assad and his Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/world/middleeast/islamic-state-of-iraq-says-it-killed-syrian-soldiers.html?ref=world&_r=0 Syria’s grand mufti referred to insurgents as ” a conspiracy of foreign enemies, including traitorous Arabs, Zionists and Westerners…sons of this nation who have been brainwashed and whose identities have been wiped and who are sitting with the French, British, Americans, asking them for weapons to destroy and dismantle Syria and to tear the Muslim and Arab world apart.”
“The war displays all the signs of a destructive stalemate,” Paulo Pinheiro, a Brazilian rights investigator told the Human Rights Council in the update. “Neither party seems able to prevail over the other militarily.”