I honestly can not say I have a deep knowledge of the Syrian civil war except for a few things.
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Multiple groups including Isis and the Syrian army are involved, some of which are US backed
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Rojava and the Kurds seem genuinely unproblematic and cool, and are currently being attacked by Syria and Turkey, and their support was withdrawn by trump.
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The resulting refugee crisis is a big deal, etc etc. I’ve actually been fortunate enough to talk with several refugees as my mother works in local government helping sponsor them, and one family threw a party and invited us. The food was delicious, but I felt like asking a family who had just been reunited with a family member after years about the civil war would not be a good idea. So I can’t say I learned much from the conversations I’ve had.
I see lots of Assad memes. Is it ironic? Is it unironic? Is it a big critical support deal like Kim Jong un? What’s the consensus? Can someone educate me or?
Thanks.
The borders were drawn by Western imperialists specifically in order to destabilise the region. Hence four different countries getting a chunk of the ethnically Kurdish region, which has led to multiple attempts at ethnic cleansing, to take one very straightforward example. The ethnic diversity isn't the sole cause of the various issues in the Middle East, of course -- but it's a key factor that no Western intervention is going to fix. And, historically, it's been exploited by imperialist meddling via arming different religious & ethnic factions.
I'm not saying that different Middle Eastern ethnicities are forced to fight each other due to their backgrounds. I'm saying that, much like Northern Ireland/Catalonia/other Western conflicts along similar lines, there are a multitude of societal fault lines that coincide with the various ethnicities present in each country to a large degree.
(Somewhere to start reading for anyone with a cursory interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement)
Not to mention that the various Gulf micro-states like Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar were specifically fostered by the British, in combination with Saudi Arabia and Hashemite monarchist states such as Jordan and Iraq, to prevent a secular, nationalist pan-Arab state from gaining monopolistic control of the region's oil.