“after his country was expelled in 2011 for its brutal crackdown on peaceful pro-democracy protests during the Arab Spring.”
LOL... The CIA using Facebook -created- the peaceful protests that were the precursor to ISIS. It started as far back as Bush. Wikileaks posted the documents where the local Ambassador was cultivating separatist groups to exploit.
Remember back to that time. Assad was the most liberal (in the classical sense) of any leader in the middle east. In Syria you could be a Christian, any kind of Moslem, and yes, they had two remaining Synagogues. Women could travel, hold jobs, divorce, check into a hotel, drive a car, get an education, and dance to music on Latakia beach while drinking a glass of Syrian made wine.
Nowhere else in the middle east was even close. So the State Department, CIA, and USAID got busy.
The destruction we created in Syria is hard to measure. The refugee flood into Europe, the arms smuggling from Syria, the flood of migrants to Africa, ISIS, the need to flood in large numbers of Iranian soldiers to fight our rebels, and hundreds of thousands dead.
Right On Brother.