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On November 11, the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces was established in Qatar, supposedly to lead the struggle against Bashar el-Assad. While not an insignificant event, the truth is that these exiled dissidents now have very little influence over the uprising. With Syria in a state of civil war since about a year, opposition leadership has drifted away from the politicians and diplomats, into the hands of guerrilla leaders.
Among these armed groups, things are taking a nasty turn, with the uprising’s sectarian character growing more apparent by the day. The regime is dominated by Syria’s religious minorities, particularly Assad’s own Alawite sect, while the vast majority of revolutionary activists hail from Sunni Arab majority. The exiled opposition retains a small number of Christian, Alawite and Druze leaders, but there is far less pluralism among demonstrators and rebels inside Syria; the armed resistance is almost exclusively Sunni Muslim.
This does not imply that all rebels are religiously motivated, since Syria’s sectarian dynamics are more a question of familial background than one of personal faith. But Islamism is gaining ground rapidly within the armed movement, as rebels grasp for ways to stake out their identity, formulate an ideological discourse, and privately seek solace with God. By November 2012, the ideological spectrum of Syria’s armed movement had narrowed to one ranging from apolitical Sunni conservatism or rural sufism, across the Muslim Brotherhood’s ikhwani Islamism, to the rigid ultra-orthodoxy of salafism. There was little or no room for secular ideologies...
http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/?p=16910