Trying to portray the people who started this in a sympathetic manner is pretty vile. The article says "The price of loyalty"...yeah loyalty to a murderous brutal dictator.
If I was an Alawite in Syria, I'd just convert out of it. No way I want to be on the side of a brutal murderer like Assad.
What if you were devout and didn't want to convert out of it? There
are people out there with sincere religious convictions, though I know it's very hard for many lefties to comprehend
More generally, I'm really not convinced that the religious minorities would have been treated any better had there been a relatively swift and peaceful transfer of power. As the article indicates, sectarianism began to become apparent very very early on, before the situation had even devolved to all-out civil war. I'm also thinking of the Coptic Egyptians' experience as a parallel