> Do you realise the scale of their sacrifice?
We have a saying in my language (Romanian): "The operation was successful, the patient is dead". Unfortunately (for those who had opposed him) in Syria's case even the operation was unsuccessful, as Assad is still in power, but the patient (Syria) is most certainly dead, or as close to death as one country can be.
Again, I don't know of any civil war "success story" in Europe and its surroundings from the last 100 years or so: the Spanish Civil War came with huge losses for both sides and led to a fractured society that is still there if you know where to look, similar thing happened to Greece (maybe in their case the fracture is smaller nowadays? can't tell as I don't know Greek and as such I can't read their media), the post-WW1 Civil War in present-day Ukraine was also not something to be proud of, to say nothing of the Yugoslav wars from the 1990s.