Not sure but it seems Assad wasn't lying when he said he was afraid of the terrorists when the Arab Spring reached Syria. Back then, was he aware of ISIS or ISIL and thinking of them at the time? When the Spring reached Syria, Assad cracked down with deadly force.
Another factor in all the strife there is in Syria is the drought that has caused migration from parched farmland to cities, where unrest was able to foment. The politically correct euphism for the effects of overpopulation these days is environmental damage from human activity. Part of this damage is termed climate change. Droughts, even if they are natural cycles are sometimes even blamed on climate change.
I've never seen anything as over-hyped as the so-called "Arab Spring". It was kind of a mix both of social-media and Western wishful-thinking, I guess. A relatively small group of young university educated people in the Arab countries took to Twitter and similar media, creating the impression that they were a mass movement in favor of Western-style freedoms and democracy. In real life, I suspect that they were never more than a small percentage of most of their countries' populations.
That social-media blitz played into a lot of preexisting Western fantasies about how most people in the Muslim world longed to be like us. The Obama administration (and Hillary Clinton) totally swallowed it. So did Cameron and the Europeans. So we see them overthrowing Qaddhafi in Libya and cheering on (and pushing behind the scenes to bring about) the fall of Mubarak in Egypt. It was supposed to be the end of tyrants in the Middle East and the rise of young progressive democratic regimes.
Interestingly, it was exactly the same mistake that Bush and Blair made in Iraq. Bush and Blair assumed that when Saddam was overthrown, US and British troops would be welcomed as liberators, that free and democratic elections could be set up in a few months, and American and British troops would be home within a year. They assumed that a new Westernized democratic and progressive Iraq would become a beacon to the whole region and oppressive kings and tyrants would fall right and left, just as communism fell in 1990.
It was exactly the same expectation that Hillary, Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy had when they took Qaddhafi down in the expectation that young Arab Spring 'progressives' would replace him.
What happened in real life was that when the tyrants were overthrown, power vacuums were created and it was typically the radical Islamists on the Arab street that stepped into the void, not the Westernized 'progressives' who turned out to have always been something of an illusion. (Except in Tunisia, perhaps, the jury's still out on that one.)
In Iraq we see Saddam and the subsequent US occupation replaced by ISIS and radical Shi'ite militias supplied by Iran. In Libya, we have a failed state with every town run by its own brutal little militia, many of them religious fanatics, engaged in a Somalia-style war of all-against-all. In Egypt we saw the rather secular Mubarak military dictatorship replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, then replaced by another secularist military dictatorship.
The lesson from all this is that the tyrants, the military-connected dictators, aren't the worst things that can happen in these countries. There's a huge segment of the population that really wants to return the Muslim world back to the dark ages. (Quite literally, they idealize the early Islamic community in the 7th century as rightly guided by God himself.) ISIS isn't an aberration, it's an expression of what many Middle Eastern Muslims want.
So that's the context in which we find Syria and Bashir Assad. Assad is a certifiable tyrant, brutal and authoritarian. So the Obama administration and the Europeans knee-jerked themselves (Bush-style) into supporting what they imagined was a secular progressive popular opposition to him, something that never really existed except on social media and in their fantasies. Obama and Cameron talked about launching airstrikes to overthrow Assad, then backed off from that when their own people didn't support a new war. But Obama's still using the CIA and the US military to support a fanciful "Free Syrian Army" behind the scenes and is still doing whatever he can to weaken Assad.
So once again, we have the West doing all it can to create another Middle Eastern power-vacuum, another void into which the Islamists can step, this time in Syria. The rhetoric in the American press and in publications like the Economist insists that the only way to fight ISIS is to eliminate the only armed force on ISIS' western flank that's capable of fighting them, the Syrian army. Yet Obama insists that he won't get dragged into another war and won't send in US combat troops to take the Syrian army's place. So who does he imagine will fight ISIS on the ground??
It's just stupid, worse than anything Bush and Cheyney thought up in 2003. Nothing about US or European policy concerning Syria makes any sense.
Personally, I'm inclined to agree with Vladimir Putin. As noxious as Bashir Assad is, we should be supporting him as the only power in Syria in any position to fight ISIS, suppress the Nusra Front (al Quaida) and bring stability to the country. Without Assad, Syria would just be another Libya/Somalia-style failed state ruled by a horde of Islamist militias, either that or incorporated into ISIS' savage new dark-ages "Caliphate".
Of course Washington feels that it has to placate Saudi Arabia and Turkey, whose primary concern isn't ISIS, but rather the Sunni/Shi'ite contest and standing up to Iran. They see Assad's Alawite sect as being Shi'ite (it is, but very unlike the Shi'ism that dominates Iran) and Syria as part of Iran's growing sphere of influence over the fertile crescent. So Turkey and Saudi Arabia won't suppport the US against ISIS (who are fellow Sunnis hostile to Iran) unless the US does something to get rid of Assad. And since we won't get deeply involved militarily ourselves, we need Turkey and Saudi Arabia to do some of the heavy lifting for us. That's the bargain. So we continue in our efforts to push Assad out, with no real thought about what would replace him.