No, it absolutely wasn't. If you at least acknowledge the crimes the Assad regime has inflicted on us for decades, then you'd understand the oppression and built up rage bubbling beneath the surface against him. It's no different than the rage built up against Saddam's very own Baathis criminal regime in Iraq.
Our opposition and motivation to actually go out and demonstrate against his brutal regime was drawn out of courage of other oppressed Muslims rising up across the rest of the Arab world, it was organic for us, not orchestrated or organized by anything more than our own hatred for his torture and crimes he committed against us for generations.
Months afterwards, when they regime tried to put the demonstrations out the only way it knows, and has done successfully in the past, by massacring thousands of protesters and disappearing many of the demonstrators and their families, the civil war started, and it was all domestic at the beginning. Later as it dragged on into months and years, then all the foreign actors started piling in one after another. Everyone and their mother decided to participate at some point, but it was always driven by domestic opposition and mass uprising by ordinary Syrians that had enough of his brutality.
But at it's inception, if you deny that Syrians had serious mass grievances against the Assad regime for decades of unspeakable crimes against us, especially but not exclusively agains the majority Muslims, and were extremely self motivated to overthrow him at any possible chance, then you are mistaken. This entire propaganda smear campaign thats been waged against us that it was all just an Israeli plot, as if Assad was a great regime that was just and highly popular all this time, and it was really just the evil Jews and Americans that orchestrated a small rebellion to overthrow him out of nowhere, is just insulting and tiresome.
