Not a civil war.

Such is the superficial understanding of the U.S., Israeli, Turkish, Jordanian, Saudi, Qatari, French, British, German, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, Spanish, and Star Wars Federation war on Syria that it’s blithely asserted even now that there war there is a “civil war.” Even four years ago the U.S. State Department was reporting on foreign involvement Syria:

Ironically, prior US government official threat assessment studies seem to be in agreement that Damascus has fundamentally faced a largely al-Qaeda fueled foreign terrorist insurgency over these past years of war.

The US State Department’s own 2014 Country Report on Terrorism confirms that the rate of foreign terrorist entry into Syria over the past years has been unprecedented among any conflict in history:

“The rate of foreign terrorist fighter travel to Syria — totaling more than 16,000 foreign terrorist fighters from more than 90 countries as of late December — exceeded the rate of foreign terrorist fighters who traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, or Somalia at any point in the last 20 years.”

And these figures were merely from the 2014 report, and likely reflect lower estimated numbers than the reality.

But regardless of what some analysts have described as "Syria's 'endless insurgency' problem, we actually find ourselves in rare agreement with the Washington Post, that Assad "is most certainly 'here to stay' (it must have pained WaPo greatly to have to write those words). He has clearly long outlasted nearly each and every political leader in the West who once called for his ouster.^[1]

There are Chinese Uighurs in Idlib Governate and the U.S. has over 2,000 troops at various bases training and supporting non-Syrian Arab Government forces. The French have military bases in Syria. None of these are there at the request of the Syrian government. It’s been reported (1:47:37 mark of podcast) that tunnels into Syria existed before the start of this war indicating meticulous outside preparation for operations against Syria and giving the lie to the idea that this was all about a spontaneous uprising to throw off the shackles of a tyrannical regime.

Notes
^[1] "'Here To Stay' - Assad Declares It's The Americans Who Must Leave Syria." By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, 6/1/18 (formatting removed).