First of all, he’s not nutty. It’s just that, like his father and other ME/African dictators he simply doesn’t care about civilians, including women and children, from the “other side”, meaning sunnis.
Assad and his tribe are fighting for their very survival. If Assad loses, they’re finished and pretty much face extermination. This of course doesn’t justify genocide and his gassing of women and children, but I’m just saying how things stand - it’s simply cold, brutal logic that’s foreign to Western sensibilities.
Another inconvenient fact is that Syrian Christians, who threw their lot with Assad because they had no other option, are on the sunni " kill them all" list.
That’s why Arab Christians are extremely angry at the US, as they believe US foreign policy is aligned with Saudi interests, which includes extermination and/or ethnic cleansing of “infidels” everywhere.
To illustrate how Assad’s regime is considered an anomaly in the ME, here’s a excerpt from Wikipedia:
In 1970 Air Force General Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite, took power and instigated a “Correctionist Movement” in the Ba’ath Party. The coup of 1970 ended the political instability which had existed since independence. Robert D. Kaplan compared Hafez al-Assad’s coming to power to “an untouchable becoming maharajah in India or a Jew becoming tsar in Russia—an unprecedented development shocking to the Sunni majority population which had monopolized power for so many centuries”. In 1971 al-Assad declared himself president of Syria, a position the constitution at the time permitted only for Sunni Muslims. In 1973 a new constitution was adopted, replacing Islam as the state religion with a mandate that the president’s religion be Islam, and protests erupted. In 1974, to satisfy this constitutional requirement, Musa as-Sadr (a leader of the Twelvers of Lebanon and founder of the Amal Movement, who had unsuccessfully sought to unite Lebanese Alawites and Shiites under the Supreme Islamic Shiite Council) issued a fatwa that Alawites were a community of Twelver Shiite Muslims.
Under the authoritarian, secular Assad government, religious minorities were tolerated more than before but political dissidents were not. In 1982, when the Muslim Brotherhood mounted an anti-government Islamist insurgency, Hafez Assad staged a military offensive against them known as the Hama massacre.
In Hama Hafez killed up to 40k Sunnis. Sunnis duly noted their casualties and raised their sons to remember and wait for the chance to strike back against the Alawite heretics - and they got the chance 32 years later.
Also from Wikipedia:
In 1936, six Alawi notables fearing persecution of their religion, petitioned the French colonialists not to merge their Alawi enclave with the rest of Syria, insisting that “the spirit of hatred and fanaticism embedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims against everything that is non-Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the Islamic religion.” According to Worth, later fatwas declaring Alawi to be part of the Shia community were by Shia clerics “eager for Syrian Patronage” from Syria’s Alawi president Hafez al-Assad who was eager for Islamic legitimacy in the face of the hostility of Syria’s Muslim majority.
So the only difference, as I stated before, is that Assad Jr. is less competent at killing people, otherwise he would have efficiently quashed the Sunni protests like his father - with mass murder and Soviet-style purges.
There are many reasons why Syria exploded now - radicalization of the Sunni majority, economic problems in the inefficient socialist economy, but the main reason is that the collapse of the Soviet Union left Syria without a major power to prop them up.
Assad and the Baathist Party enthusiastically embraced socialism in the 60ies, partially because it was trendy in the Arab world and partly to get Soviet backing.
When USSR collapsed, Syria was left out in the open, with the Sunnis slowly sharpening their proverbial knives for the big showdown with Alawite heretics.
So the secular Assad family suddenly declared themselves super religious and remembered that they’re a rogue Shiite sect - they were desperately looking for allies and who was available? The Shiite power Iran.
Iranians weren’t too thrilled about accepting into their fold rogue heretics, but as they themselves were numerically and economically inferior to the Sunnis and collapsing under the sanctions they were willing to put religious differences aside, as there aren’t any other potential allies.
At the start of the Syrian civil war, Assad’s Army showed themselves spectacularly incompetent - remember, it’s not that Assad Jr. is more bloodthirsty than his father, it’s just that he’s not good at effectively killing people.
Press ganged Sunni conscripts started deserting Assad’s Army and the Alawites suffered catastrophic losses - allegedly up to a third Alawite military age men were killed. So the regime lashed out like all regimes do when facing imminent collapse - by killing civilians, either with chlorine or barrel bombs.
Seeing the collapse of the regime, Iran immediately dispatched Hezbollah fighters and the Revolutionary Guard to prop up Assad and his Alawites. And that’s where we stand now…