Assad was secular. But he was never supposed to rule, his older brother was trained for that, while he basically lived as a lib international student in london - in fact he became a “darling of the west” like Al-jolani, Putin, Orbán, and Erdoğan once were. He pursued neoliberal economic tactics which caused popular unrest, inflamed by the west and combined with the desturction of iraq created ISIS, since Syria was part of the “Shia Crescent”, countries friendly to Iran (somewhat), and also pro-russian, syria became a major supply hub for hamas/hezbollah.

During the civil war he had surrender a lot of political capital towards russia, which was very unpopular, so russians could basically save syria from being conquered by ISIS, the kurds under the SDF refused to ally with Assad and turned towards the us which started siphoning the oil and actually even build a massive base inside syria. So Syria was left without its oil revenue, sanctioned, depopulated, destroyed and its independence severely compromised. Bad turned to worse, as Assad stop paying his generals basically and lacked founds and access to world markets to rebuild itself, with the turks invading and occupying parts in the north and creating their own militias from al-Qaida factions. Then the Ukraine war happened, distracting russia basically and so Israel and Turkey did their thing and launched an invasion of the hollowed syrian state - It was the last major obstacle before the genocide of palestine could be finished.

Of course you had “leftist” crying about evuuul assad and celebrating his fall, then shaming “tankies” for being hecking problematic (hassan the streamer is an famed example). Now once again the “tankies” were right again (as they always are, were and will be)

it depends what you mean exactly by less oppressive. Do you mean of minority ethnic and religious groups ?

Why things are going bad, I don’t think there is one single comprehensive answer. The closest is probably that the country has undergone a devastating and long war for 14 years, and many of the events of this war had sectarian elements which agitated sectarianism in the population. That’s the closest thing to factual I can give.

My own analysis is that the imperial core saw the agitation of sectarian violence as the best way to “disable” syria (in the sense of disabling its struggle against israel and other imperialist aims), similar to how they did Iraq and Lebanon, and I think a lot of sectarian propaganda probably came in with foreign funding. But that’s just my own reading.

Sectarian propaganda combined with war leads to sectarian interpretations of the war and hence agitations. Sectarian violence only leads to more sectarian violence, agitating the other side, and it is just a runaway effect from there.