Al-Qa'ida, the second act: Syria’s secular uprising has been hijacked by jihadists

"Why has the Syrian uprising, whose early supporters demanded that tyranny should be replaced by a secular, non-sectarian, law-bound and democratic state, so totally failed to achieve these aims?"
Because Assad has plenty of weapons, but only the Islamic factions have had a regular supply of weapons. Cockburn continues the fantasy that the solution is to end the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Peace will come when Assad is gone, but that's not on Cockburn's agenda for Syrians at all. At least he's not among the genocide deniers, though his use of the kidnap of Razan Zaitouneh to discredit the whole idea of armed resistance is unreasonable.