Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Syrian security forces did not reach the targeted villages for several hours.  "The regime forces could have stepped in to prevent the attack or at least mitigate it once it happened," Dr Yahya said. "It's very easy for people to see this as a payback for them having not sided with the regime or for their attempt to take a neutral position in the conflict." Druze village massacre 

AS:  I take your point, and clearly Europe to did see, as you call it, a great ‘sorting-out’, but of course that term as you’re using it describes a set of  different processes – or, I should say, historical events and catastrophes – ranging from the Final Solution, the extermination of European jewry to the ethnic cleansing that took place at the very end of and in the aftermath of the Second World War. But what all these events share is that they’re are not a sorting-out of primordial identities so much as they are political events, driven by war, state interests, racial ideology, etc. And so to bring the conversation back to the Middle East, I think there is, unfortunately, a danger in the West’s conversation about sectarian warfare, to treat these identities as if they were primordial and as if this conflict that we’ve been seeing in Iraq and Syria is somehow natural, this sorting-out is a natural process, when in fact Syrian and Iraqi Sunni and Shia Muslims and Christians lived

Iraq's Shi'a clerics show no love for al-Assad

The Question of Sectarianism in Middle East Politics Over the centuries there have been many variations and mutations in the ‘orthodox’ as well as the sectarian formations, and the divisions only broke into conflicts when they were politicised into struggles for power or resources. For the most part, various Shi`ite sects lived quietly under Sunni rule, and were, mostly, left alone. Like elsewhere in the pre-modern world, communities were, typically, isolated in separate localities, except in the main cities  where they often occupied different quarters. Politicisation came with social conflicts, rebellions and geopolitical confrontations