If you thought it was ugly at 75,000 dead, you haven't seen anything yet:
Hundreds of Syrians have fled coastal areas where activists say government forces have carried out massacres in a campaign of sectarian cleansing.
Video footage of mutilated and burned bodies, allegedly from the town of Baniyas, has been posted online.
Activists said at least 77 people - 20 from the same family - were killed, a day after 72 died in nearby al-Bayda.
If Assad is focused on a post-Syria Assad regime rather than pacifying all of Syria, he doesn't care to have any of the Sunni Arabs at all loyal to him. No, he just wants as few of them within his smaller borders as he can manage in order to make the smaller regime more secure.
Responsibility to Protect had a short life span (just in Libya) as an administration foreign policy doctrine.
UPDATE: Strategypage confirms the ethnic cleansing strategy:
Iranian advisors have apparently convinced the Assads that the best way to survive is to drive as many pro-rebels civilians as possible out of the country. The Iranian Quds Force specializes in teaching non-Iranians about how to use terror tactics and they have improved the tactics and training of existing Syrian secret police and helped select and train Syrian assault troops who can be depended on to slaughter civilians without any hesitation. ...
Assad forces, usually local Alawite militias, are driving Sunni Arabs (and any others whose loyalty to the Assads is in doubt) from the coastal region, which is being organized as a last refuge for pro-Assad Syrians.
We're closing on 80,000 dead in Syria without much need for anything fancy like poison gas in two years of fighting. At 5,000 dead per month, this is well past the worst months of the Iraq War (3,000+ dead in some months). And this pace was before the Assad regime really decided to alter the religious balance in his chosen rump state.
Now we'll see ugly.
