The Assad regime in Syria is gone. We'll bring you all the details, how it happened, and what it means. First, I have some major news to share with you today: Starting in January, The Daily Wire will become an official partner of UFC. That's right, The Weekly Wire is stepping into the octagon with the world's premier mixed martial arts organization.
00:00:00.000Well, folks, the Assad regime in Syria is gone.
00:00:02.000We'll bring you all the details, how it happened, what it means.
00:00:05.000First, I have some major news to share with you today.
00:00:07.000Starting in January, Jeremy's Razors will become an official partner of UFC. That's right, The Daily Wire is stepping into the octagon with the world's premier mixed martial arts organization.
00:00:17.000More details coming up later in the show.
00:00:33.000Assad has fled to Moscow where he is being granted some sort of asylum because the Russians, of course, backed the Assad regime.
00:00:39.000There's a lightning campaign that basically came from nowhere.
00:00:42.000I want to show you a couple of maps so you understand exactly what's going on.
00:00:45.000Because when we talk about what's happening in Syria, what we have to understand is that Syria is an artificial creation post-World War I by the West, by the French, by the British.
00:00:55.000And because of that, like many other states in the Middle East, it is unworkable and has been unworkable for a very long time.
00:01:01.000You have a large number of groups of various religious belief systems, many of them unbelievably radical, many of them terrorists, all fighting one another.
00:01:11.000And the Assad regime was a secularist Ba'athist regime, like Saddam Hussein, with a wild left-wing view of economics.
00:01:19.000Essentially, it was just a fascist dictatorship engaged in mass human rights abuses at scale.
00:01:24.000Over the course of the Assad regime, some 12 million Syrians were displaced.
00:01:32.000The Syrian refugee crisis had massive ramifications for European politics.
00:01:37.000And that was driven by the civil war that happened in Syria between 2011 and just ended over the weekend, 2024.
00:01:44.000Although, as we'll see, I think the civil war is likely to continue for a long time to come.
00:01:49.000Because this is an unworkable patchwork of various groups in various areas of the country.
00:01:54.000But we'll start with the actual region because in order to understand what's going on in Syria, you have to understand that there are a lot of hands in Syria.
00:02:02.000A lot of different countries, a lot of different interests who had their hands in Syria.
00:02:06.000So let's look at the regional map of the Middle East so you understand where Syria is placed on the map.
00:02:11.000So the regional map of the Middle East, you will see that Syria is located alongside the Mediterranean Sea.
00:02:18.000It stretches all the way from Iraq in its east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west.
00:02:22.000The sort of southwestern border of Syria is Israel.
00:02:26.000The very tip of the southwest part of Syria borders Israel.
00:02:30.000Because Syria had repeatedly invaded Israel, in 1967, Israel won its war against Syria and ended up taking the Golan Heights.
00:02:37.000The Golan Heights have been annexed to Israel as recognized by the United States, specifically because they're being used as basically a vantage point from which to shoot into Israel.
00:02:51.000Syria has had a long-standing fraught relationship with Lebanon.
00:02:54.000Syria helped destroy Lebanon as a functioning Christian state in the Middle East.
00:02:58.000Back in the 1980s, Syria effectively just occupied Lebanon and stayed there all the way from the 1980s through 2005 and helped wreck the system in coordination with Hezbollah.
00:03:10.000Syria, the Assad regime, has been working in conjunction with Iran.
00:03:14.000As you can see on the map, Syria to its east is bordered by Iraq, and beyond that, Iran.
00:03:19.000And so Iran had a large influential swath of land, basically a Shia crescent of radicalism that stretched all the way from Iran across northern Iraq through Syria and to Lebanon.
00:03:31.000This giant chain of Islamic terror pushed by the Shia regime.
00:03:41.000It is governed by the Hashemite dynasty.
00:03:44.000It has always been a fragile state because, again, it is a monarchy in a region where its population does not share the same ethnicity as the actual kingdom.
00:03:53.000And 60-70% of the population of Jordan is Sunni Arab Palestinian and quite radicalized.
00:04:02.000And so, again, the entire Middle East is a basket case.
00:04:04.000And if you look to the north of Syria, what you see is Turkey, which has a major hand in what just happened over the weekend.
00:04:12.000It is run by Erdogan, who is a neo-Ottoman dictator.
00:04:16.000He turned Turkey from a functioning democracy and a member of NATO into a sort of radicalized Islamic state, not in the same mold as, say, the Taliban or in the mold of what's about to happen next in Syria, but in his own methodology.
00:04:31.000It is a militant Islamist state that supports Hamas.
00:04:34.000And that was supportive of many of the rebel groups that just drove their way through Syria.
00:04:38.000Okay, so that is where Syria is placed on the map.
00:04:40.000And because you can see its juxtaposition to all these places, you can also see there are a lot of interests involved.
00:04:44.000So, for example, the Russians, very, very interested in Syria because they wanted to secure ports on the Mediterranean Sea in Syria, which they actually did with the acquiescence of the Assad regime.
00:04:55.000So among the foreign players who were involved in Syria, Iran, which was using it as a thoroughfare and propping up the Assad regime, Russia, which was using it As a base and propping up the Assad regime.
00:05:04.000Turkey, which did not like the Assad regime, and also was attempting to make its own incursions into Syria because a lot of people in Syria are Kurds.
00:05:15.000And the Turks don't like the Kurds in the same way they don't like the Armenians.
00:05:18.000And so they've been attempting to kill the Kurds, in fact, in the middle of all of this chaos in Syria.
00:05:23.000They've been launching airstrikes on civilian areas in Kurdish areas of Syria.
00:05:27.000And the border of Israel, Israel wants to defend itself and make sure that it is not the victim of yet another land incursion from Syria.
00:05:34.000So Syria, as you can see, geopolitically is just a mess.
00:05:37.000Okay, that is not even getting into the internal politics.
00:05:39.000That's just where it is in the Middle East.
00:05:41.000Okay, now we get to the situation in Syria today.
00:05:45.000So the map of Syria today shows that it is split into a bunch of different territories.
00:05:51.000So as you can see from this particular map, and this one comes courtesy of the New York Times, a fine map, this map shows a series of separate territories.
00:06:01.000So you have certain opposition groups, That are in the south of Syria, bordering the Golan Heights and bordering Jordan.
00:06:09.000Some of those are radical Sunni Islamists.
00:06:14.000Druze are a different group who are, again, they're Sunni Muslims, but they tend to be significantly less radical than many of the other Sunni Muslims in the area.
00:06:25.000Meanwhile, you have the main rebel coalition, which is located...
00:06:29.000In the northwest of Syria, that main rebel coalition is run by a person named al-Jolani.
00:06:38.000As we'll get to in a moment, al-Jolani is in fact a radical and probably an al-Qaeda and ISIS-affiliated terrorist.
00:06:52.000Meanwhile, if you look to the northeast region, You'll see that the Kurds are in control of a large swath of that area.
00:06:59.000That didn't used to be under the control of the Kurds.
00:07:01.000That used to be under the control of ISIS. ISIS was very much located in that area.
00:07:04.000There are prisons holding tens of thousands of ISIS prisoners in those Kurdish areas.
00:07:08.000So, after the Assad regime fell, the United States has been launching airstrikes in these ISIS kind of hotbeds in the Kurdish area of Syria in order to prevent ISIS from reconstituting.
00:07:21.000Turkey, as you can see from this map, also has taken over huge swaths of the north of Syria.
00:07:27.000So that is the map of Syria as it currently stands.
00:07:31.000So now I want to go through what has happened over time with these various forces.
00:07:36.000So if you look at the governmental forces and their allies, for example...
00:07:41.000The governmental force and their allies in 2014. So the civil war broke out in 2011. We'll go through a brief timeline of the civil war in Syria and how it ended.
00:07:49.000And then we're going to talk about what happened with each of these various groups over the course of the war.
00:07:52.000So in 2011, a civil war broke out in Syria.
00:07:56.000That was one of the spillover effects of the so-called Arab Spring.
00:07:59.000Bashar Assad cracked down on the protesters.
00:08:02.000He labeled them all Sunni al Qaeda affiliates.
00:08:04.000Some of them certainly were Sunni al Qaeda affiliates, not all of them.
00:08:07.000He began using harsher and harsher tactics.
00:08:09.000The United States, the EU, the Arab League soon introduced sanctions targeting senior members of the Assad regime.
00:08:15.000Meanwhile, on the other side of that, Iran and Russia decided that they were going to continue to support and indeed increase their support For Bashar Assad, by September 2011, organized militias on the one side, backed by the EU, the US, the Arab League, are at total war with the Assad regime.
00:08:31.000And remember, there's a big debate in the United States at the time over what level of support to grant to these rebels, because, again, many of these rebels were al-Qaeda affiliates, and not all these groups are the same.
00:08:42.000By 2012, Syrian rebels were gaining control of some segments of Syria, including the second biggest city in Syria after Damascus called Aleppo.
00:08:49.000You'll remember Aleppo talked a lot about in 2012. Assad was fighting back.
00:08:55.000Now again, Assad was the enemy of many in the West, but also of Turkey, of Saudi, of Qatar as well.
00:09:02.000Qatar played sort of a weird role here because Qatar was supporting many of the rebels, but at the same time, Qatar is sort of a caspa of Iran.
00:09:08.000As usual, Qatar is on all sides of every issue.
00:09:10.000In August of 2012, Barack Obama, then President of the United States, famously suggested that if Bashar Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, meaning Syrians, that would be a red line that would result in U.S. backing, heavier U.S. backing for the Syrian rebels.
00:09:25.000Hey, well then, in 2013, Syria did use chemical weapons.
00:09:29.000Assad used chemical weapons in the suburbs of Damascus, killing hundreds of people on August 21st, 2013. The West backed down U.S., France, and the U.K. That red line was totally false.
00:09:39.000And basically, Barack Obama ended up handing control of Syria to the Russians.
00:09:44.000The Russians said they would get rid of the chemical weapons there, which obviously didn't happen.
00:09:49.000Even this weekend, Israeli Air Force operations were bombing chemical weapons factories in Syria to prevent them from falling into the hands of al-Qaeda, ISIS, radical Islamist, radical Sunni Islamist terrorists.
00:10:00.000Well, by the end of 2013, Sunni terrorists are totally in lead of the opposition.
00:10:06.000Okay, so whatever sort of moderate elements there were to the anti-Assad rebellion were basically gone.
00:10:11.000This was the same year that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, founded ISIS, which was the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria, right?
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00:13:23.000The combined effect of U.S. assaults on ISIS under Donald Trump by 2017, by Kurdish forces in the north of Syria, and by Bashar Assad start to have a severe impact on ISIS. So ISIS's ideological rivals, including one called the Nusra Front, decided to merge into a group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which will henceforth be known as HTS. HTS becomes pretty important to the story.
00:13:50.000The leader of HTS is this al-Jolani character, who, as we say, was a member of both al-Qaeda and ISIS, and then broke off and formed HTS and started fighting ISIS. Okay, so they captured territory that was held by ISIS in the area of Idlib.
00:14:05.000Idlib is in sort of the northwest of the country.
00:14:07.000And when we fast forward, you'll see that that was the base from which these rebels then just took over the rest of the country or at least the population centers of the country over the course of the last week.
00:14:15.000So 2017-2018, the U.S. and our allies began actually striking Syrian government weapons depots after the use of chemical weapons.
00:14:23.000The rebels were pushed back into Idlib.
00:14:25.000Russia and Turkey established a buffer zone between the Idlib rebels and the Assad forces.
00:14:30.000But that rebel territory ended up being controlled by the Turkey-backed HTS. So HTS, again, is this offshoot, this breakaway group from ISIS and from Al-Qaeda.
00:14:39.000And they end up being backed by Turkey.
00:14:52.000Okay, so again, welcome to the Middle East where there are no good solutions, there are only problems.
00:14:56.000It's a rough region of the world and there are a lot of bad people fighting a lot of other bad people as a general rule.
00:15:03.000Now, after that comes to a bit of a close, Assad is then ushered back into the Arab League.
00:15:08.000Assad is seen as somewhat legitimate again.
00:15:10.000And things seem to sort of shift into low-grade civil war mode.
00:15:15.000And here is where we can take a look at the maps again.
00:15:18.000So if you look at the government forces just before all of this happened, what you'll see is in 2014, the government forces controlled large swaths of eastern Syria, Including places like Aleppo and Hama and Homs and Damascus.
00:15:33.0002017, they controlled a very similar area.
00:15:39.000They controlled an enormous amount of area, like more area than they had controlled back in 2014, including incursions into Idlib, which was, again, a heavily Sunni terror, al-Qaeda offshoot, ISIS, Turkey-backed group.
00:15:54.000Okay, so Syria seemed to be, the Assad regime seemed to be in pretty good position at the beginning of 2024. Okay, now take a look at the opposition forces.
00:16:03.000Okay, so what you can see is the opposition forces here.
00:16:19.000And that was the case all the way up until 2024. So opposition forces have shrunk all the way down to Idlib.
00:16:25.000And now take a look at ISIS. So ISIS, as we say, was in eastern Syria.
00:16:29.000And then it was basically shrunk over the course of the American-led war against ISIS. Work with the Americans in that.
00:16:39.000And the Assad regime was also pushing against ISIS. So ISIS once held up to a third of Syria.
00:16:45.000In 2015, they held large swaths of the north.
00:16:47.000These areas are now held by Kurdish forces and the Turks who came into Syria and created their own very, very large buffer zone that they now occupy because, again, they hate the Kurds.
00:16:56.000So 2015, 2016, 2017, you see ISIS shrinking, shrinking, shrinking.
00:17:00.000By 2018, they basically have like a couple of areas they hold in eastern Syria.
00:17:12.000What you see is that the Kurds controlled some border areas near Turkey in 2014. That grows in 2017, grows in 2019. By 2024, a large swath of northeastern Syria is controlled by the Kurds, who again are friendlier to the west, friendlier to the United States, friendlier to Israel.
00:17:30.000So the Kurds, if there are good guys in Syria, the Kurds are the closest thing to the good guys in Syria.
00:17:36.000And maybe some of the Druze in the south of Syria.
00:17:38.000And finally, Turkish forces who have had a major outsized impact.
00:17:42.000Okay, so the Turks controlled a relatively small area.
00:17:48.000An area of sort of northwestern Syria in 2017. They increased that to large swaths of the border by 2020. Those are controlled by Turkish military operations.
00:18:00.000Okay, fast forward to 2024. So, the Assad regime basically has no money.
00:18:05.000Okay, the Assad regime, because again, it is a Ba'athist dictatorship, With nothing to trade and has been engaged in a civil war for 13 years, their currency is effectively worthless.
00:18:15.000Like right now, if you take a look at the actual currency of Syria versus the American dollar, right now $1 goes for 16,000 Syrian pounds or 16,000 Syrian lira, as the case may be.
00:18:31.000And it's been dropping fast because, again, nothing gets produced over there.
00:18:52.000Turkey would prefer that its own ambitions extend into Syria.
00:18:57.000Israel is sort of indifferent about Assad because Israel sees that Assad is still upholding mostly kind of the buffer area in the Golan Heights, which extends to Mount Hermon, which again goes into Syria.
00:19:10.000It's kind of a high point regionally in terms of geography.
00:19:13.000You can see from the top of Mount Hermon down into Damascus.
00:19:15.000So Israel is sort of divided on Assad.
00:19:17.000On the one hand, they don't like Assad because he is used as a tool and a proxy by Iran.
00:19:22.000On the other hand, they understand that if Assad goes, a Sunni Muslim dictatorship is likely to follow.
00:19:52.000And Russia has an interest in upholding Assad because Assad has a deal with them where Russia gives them weaponry, Russia gives them forces, Russia gives them all sorts of resources, and in return, they have access to some coastal bases in Syria.
00:20:17.000250 are pulled into Gaza and are still being held in the terror tunnels.
00:20:23.000And then Hezbollah in Israel's north, Lebanon, right?
00:20:27.000They start firing thousands of missiles over the course of a year into northern Israel.
00:20:31.0008,000 to 10,000 rockets and missiles into northern Israel, clearing out Israel's north.
00:20:36.000So, over the course of the subsequent year, Israel proceeds to take out Yahya Sinwar and virtually all of Hamas' military resources.
00:20:45.000Beginning in October of this year, Israel totally devastates Hezbollah, totally devastates it.
00:20:50.000They launch the beeper attacks, followed by the radio attacks, followed by a full-scale air campaign against all of Hezbollah's weaponry, followed by a ground invasion of Lebanon in order to push Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon.
00:21:02.000They kill the leadership of Hezbollah, including Hassan Nasrallah, who is the chief leader, not only a charismatic figure, but a leader in operations.
00:21:09.000And they're also doing operations in Syria to prevent Syria from being used as a thoroughfare for Hezbollah resources.
00:21:15.000Okay, so Iran is getting absolutely shellacked.
00:21:19.000Meanwhile, Russia is being absolutely shellacked.
00:21:22.000Russia is bogged down in this war that it declared in Ukraine in February 2022. They're losing hundreds of thousands of people over there.
00:21:29.000There's an enormous amount of material.
00:21:31.000They simply don't have the money or the capacity to uphold the Assad regime.
00:21:36.000So, as a byproduct of both the Ukraine war, so Russia can't come to Assad's aid, but mostly as a result of Israel chopping off the arms of the Iranian octopus in places like Syria, in places like Lebanon, in places like Hamasistan, because of that, Iran cannot uphold the Assad regime.
00:21:54.000And so, after Israel's October offensive against Hezbollah, which again was a governing party in Lebanon and has now been pretty much devastated, and was also a force on behalf of Assad, Assad had no allies to call upon.
00:22:07.000The legs of the stool upon which his regime was standing got kicked out from underneath him.
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00:25:05.000What happened here is that Turkey, backing HTS, backing many of these Sunni Muslim terrorist groups, hating the Assad regime and wishing to expand its own sphere of influence into Syria, backed HTS in taking advantage of the chaos of caused by Iran's withdrawal and Russia's withdrawal.
00:25:21.000And HDS then took over large swaths of Syria.
00:25:25.000Okay, so who are sort of the big winners and who are sort of the big losers here?
00:26:18.000That's what happens when you F around with a first world country.
00:26:21.000If you F around with the United States on September 11th, we destroy your forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
00:26:26.000Regardless of what comes after, that's what happens.
00:26:29.000And if Iran decides they're going to launch a multi-front terror war against Israel, Israel will hit back and hit back hard.
00:26:37.000And the Iranian regime is in serious trouble right now.
00:26:41.000They've failed on every possible front.
00:26:43.000And with the Trump administration coming in and presumably increasing sanctions on the Iranian regime, the Iranian regime is going to have one of two choices.
00:26:50.000Either they're going to have to cut some sort of deal with the West, in which they abandon their nuclear efforts, and presumably move towards some form of non-tyranny, or they're going to be forced to collapse.
00:27:01.000Because I can promise you that the state of Israel is not going to sit around waiting to see what Iran does next with its nuclear weapons, not after Israel already took out their air defenses.
00:27:38.000Again, they can be happy that the Iranian regime has lost power to use Syria as its tool, but the people replacing that regime are al-Qaeda jihadists and ISIS jihadists.
00:27:49.000In fact, here is some video of some of the rebel fighters talking about what comes next.
00:27:58.000They're saying that they're thanking Allah by his exalted power, the one who has helped us, neither by our strength.
00:28:04.000Here is the home of Islam, here is the Levant.
00:29:05.000I mean, like, truly a brutal dictator, truly a brutal person.
00:29:07.000Also, not a lot of good solutions, as it turns out, in the Middle East.
00:29:11.000Because, for example, the Assad regime, much friendlier to Christians in Syria than presumably this new Sunni Islamic terror group will be.
00:29:20.000Now, again, it's possible that the Druze will be sort of a repository of pro-Christian feeling in the south of Syria, about 10% of the population of Syria is Christian.
00:29:41.000So, his name is Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, and he apparently boarded a bus in Damascus in March 2003, heading across the desert to Baghdad with fellow volunteers eager to repel the looming American invasion of Iraq.
00:29:52.000This is according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:29:53.000When he returned home in 2011 after a five-year stint in an American-run prison camp in Iraq, it was as an emissary of ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
00:30:01.000He arrived in Syria with bags full of cash and a mission to take the extremist movement global.
00:30:05.000Last week, 42-year-old Jelani triumphantly entered Aleppo, Syria's second-largest city, as the leading commander of the Turkish-backed rebel force dominated by his group, HTS. Unexpected and swift, his victory marks one of the most dramatic moments in the Middle East that had no shortage of drama.
00:30:23.000So, he is currently doing things to try and appear moderate.
00:30:26.000He's issued edicts to his men ordering the protection of Christians and Shihids demanding that his men not exact retribution.
00:30:31.000He said, in the future, Syria, we believe diversity is our strength, not a weakness.
00:30:34.000He's obviously playing for American aid and for the EU audience.
00:30:39.000Guys, don't give money to people who are members of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. It's a bad idea.
00:30:44.000The Taliban said the exact same things when they took over in Afghanistan, and now it's back to being a Taliban hellhole.
00:30:52.000A Christian woman in Aleppo said, quote, the day they took over Aleppo before seeing them, I felt like the Titanic was sinking.
00:30:58.000But then she said everyone was shocked because they were treating us nicely.
00:31:07.000So, this guy was born Ahmed Hussein Al-Sharaa.
00:31:10.000He adopted the Namdegar Jolani, a reference to his family's roots in the Golan Heights.
00:31:14.000He says that his family was from the Golan Heights.
00:31:17.000And then in 67, when Syria attacked Israel and they lost the Golan Heights, then his family lost what land they had in the Golan Heights.
00:31:24.000One of the big questions for Israel is going to be whether Jelani tries to, again, direct these rebel fighters against Israel.
00:31:29.000If that happens, Israel will unleash its military power on those rebel fighters.
00:31:32.000One of the things that's been happening here is that the gap that's been left by the Iranian power in the region is now being filled by the Turkish power in the region.
00:31:39.000And again, Turkey is allied with Hamas.
00:31:41.000Turkey, again, it's unbelievable they're a NATO member, and there should be significant ramifications for Turkey's abject siding with terrorists across the region.
00:31:50.000Turkey is a nefarious power in the region now.
00:31:53.000And they are very heavily militarized.
00:31:56.000In any case, al-Jelani broke with ISIS in 2012, and then he broke with al-Qaeda in 2016. And this guy's got a hell of a CV. He's got a hell of a resume.
00:32:05.000And then he's fought both organizations.
00:32:07.000And according to the Wall Street Journal, he steered the HTS away from the transnational jihadist movement that is more interested in waging war on America and the West and sees national borders in the Muslim world as an artificial construct imposed by infidel colonialists.
00:32:20.000Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
00:32:26.000He says him and his group's break with Islamic State and Al-Qaeda is very genuine.
00:32:29.000They haven't been part of these entities longer than they were with them.
00:32:31.000It's now been essentially eight and a half years they've forsworn global jihad.
00:32:35.000Instead, they're focusing in squarely on Syria.
00:32:40.000But even according to the Wall Street Journal, they are a blend of Islamism and nationalism that is closer to the Afghanistan's Taliban and Palestinian Hamas, which sounds kind of bad.
00:32:50.000And so, as it turns out, there are no good answers in the Middle East.
00:32:54.000So, what exactly is going to come next here?
00:32:58.000Well, if the Biden administration is idiotic, then they certainly won't do what they are talking about.
00:33:03.000So the Biden administration apparently is now discussing the possibility of taking HTS off the terror list.
00:33:11.000There's a $10 million bounty, by the way, on Aljelani's head from the U.S. State Department because he is a terrorist.
00:33:17.000And it turns out releasing terrorists from Gitmo, he was actually in Gitmo, turns out it's a bad strategy as a general rule.
00:33:23.000A senior administration official said, quote, it's kind of a broad kaleidoscope of groups.
00:33:26.000I think we have to be smart and also very mindful and pragmatic about the realities on the ground.
00:33:31.000He said, HTS is saying the right things.
00:33:33.000So far, they're doing the right thing.
00:34:02.000The Syrian Interim Government and Syrian National Army, who are essentially Turkish interests in Syria, controlled by the Turkish Armed Forces.
00:34:09.000To the Syrian Salvation Government and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, who are the radical Islamists who just took control of Damascus.
00:34:15.000The Syrian Free Army, which is an American-backed force that originally operated on the Syrian-Jordanian border.
00:34:21.000They don't hold a ton of territory at this point.
00:34:27.000That would be the Rojava SDF. That's the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.
00:34:32.000And they are by far the most pro-Western group in the region.
00:34:37.000And finally, the Southern Operations Room, who again is a coalition of Sunni and Druze groups in South Syria, they too are sort of pro-Western.
00:35:36.000For a complimentary consultation, call today, 1-800-958-1000, or visit their website at tnusa.com slash shapiro.
00:35:44.000That's 1-800-958-1000, or visit tnusa.com slash Shapiro today.
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00:35:56.000Today, we are announcing something that demonstrates this in no uncertain terms.
00:35:59.000Jeremy's Razors, led by my friend and co-CEO Jeremy Boring, is joining forces with the ultimate fighting championship, UFC, the most dominant mixed martial arts organization on planet Earth.
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00:36:40.000Alrighty, so what comes next over here?
00:36:42.000Well, again, the people in the Middle East who have absolutely demonstrated their strength over the course of last year, the Israeli government, obviously the IDF, and the Turks.
00:36:55.000Right now, again, when it comes to Israel, Israel only wants to guard its border.
00:36:58.000And so they've extended that border outward to the other side of the Hermon Mountain, which was sort of the Syrian side of the border zone.
00:37:06.000And they're doing that in order to prevent Syrian rebels, these radical Sunni Islamist groups who are allied with Hamas, from moving up on the Israeli border.
00:37:14.000Meanwhile, the Turks are encroaching heavily into the territory of Syria.
00:37:20.000So those are sort of the big developments.
00:37:23.000On its part, Benjamin Netanyahu put out a statement suggesting correctly that it was Israel that kicked out one leg of the support for the Assad regime by taking out the Iranian proxies throughout the region.
00:37:34.000This is a historic day for the Middle East.
00:37:38.000The collapse of the Assad regime, the tyranny in Damascus offers great opportunity, but also is fraught with significant dangers.
00:37:48.000This collapse is a direct result of our forceful action against Hezbollah and Iran, Assad's main supporters.
00:37:55.000It set off a chain reaction of all those who want to free themselves from this tyranny and its oppression.
00:38:01.000But it also means we have to take action against possible threats.
00:38:04.000One of them is the collapse of the Separation of Forces Agreement from 1974 between Israel and Syria.
00:38:15.000The Syrian army abandoned its positions.
00:38:17.000We gave the Israeli army the order to take over these positions to ensure that no hostile force embeds itself right next to the border of Israel.
00:38:27.000This is a temporary defensive position until a suitable arrangement is found.
00:38:32.000Equally, we send a hand of peace to all those beyond our border in Syria, to the Jews, To the Kurds, to the Christians, and to the Muslims who want to live in peace with Israel.
00:38:44.000We're going to follow events very carefully.
00:38:47.000If we can establish neighborly relations and a peaceful relations with the new forces emerging in Syria, that's our desire.
00:38:55.000But if we do not, we'll do whatever it takes to defend the state of Israel and the border of Israel.
00:39:04.000Now, again, it is worth noting, this is a very small piece of territory that Israel is currently moving into in order to defend its own border, as opposed to, say, the Turkish territory, which constitutes an 8,835 square kilometer buffer zone in the north of Syria.
00:39:18.000Again, the Turks are the ones who are really benefiting from all of this.
00:39:21.000Also because they're attempting to provide a strategic Islamic counterweight to the Saudis.
00:39:25.000The Saudis are very nervous about all of this because, you know, whenever you have a radical Sunni Muslim group that rises in the Middle East, the threat is to try and radicalize the Saudi population.
00:39:35.000So the Saudis have said that they don't want outside interference here.
00:39:39.000They put out a statement saying the kingdom affirms its support for the brotherly Syrian people and their choice, but also appealed for concerted efforts to preserve the unity of Syria and the cohesion of its people so as to prevent it from falling into chaos and division.
00:39:49.000Jordan, for its part, again, is threatened because Jordan has a very long border with Syria as they close their border crossing into Syria as well.
00:39:56.000A Syrian army source told Reuters, armed groups have been firing at Syria's Nassib border crossing into Jordan.
00:40:01.000So Jordan is worried about this as well.
00:40:05.000The answer, as usual in the Middle East, is probable chaos.
00:40:09.000So Simon Sebag Montefiore, who's a historian of the region writing at the Free Press, he says, Russia, which had been promised to share of the Ottoman Near East, had fallen under Bolshevik rule.
00:40:29.000They left Britain and France under the ambitious liberal imperial pioneers David Lloyd George and George Clemencow, who called their new provinces mandates as confirmed by the League of Nations.
00:40:38.000Britain was given a new entity called Iraq and another named Palestine.
00:40:41.000Today, that would be Israel, the Palestinian Authority territories, and the Kingdom of Jordan.
00:40:47.000Initially, Paris planned to divide its mandate into smaller states.
00:40:50.000For the Maronite Christians, that would become Lebanon, the Druze, the Alawites, and the Sunnis in Damascus.
00:40:56.000The Kurds were promised their own state that was prevented by Turkey in 1922-23.
00:41:00.000In the end, the French decided against creating several smaller states and instead created Lebanon to be ruled by their Maronite Christian allies in partnership with Sunnis and Druze and also Syria.
00:41:08.000And both these states are completely unworkable.
00:41:10.000In fact, the only states that were created by the British and French mandates that still exist as actual states are Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan.
00:41:20.000And the Kingdom of Jordan is basically being held up by allies at this point.
00:41:23.000It turns out that all of the various ethnic groups, all of the various rivalries between them, have torn apart virtually every other state that was artificial lines drawn in the sand by the British and the French in the aftermath of World War I. As Montefiore says, the failure of all these states, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, are just part of a wider instability created by the failure of many of the post-imperial, post-colonial states formed by the Great Powers after 1945 in the Middle East and Africa in the 1960s.
00:41:51.000Many of the latter will either degrade into chaotic warlands and exurgencies ruled not by states but by militias, become protectorates of new colonial powers like China, or survive as federalized states made up of autonomous entities.
00:42:04.000He says Syria may emerge as a single state tolerant of its many ethnic minorities, but that is very unlikely, or it may be further federalized into autonomous entities ruled by the Kurds, the Alawites, and a central sector under Sunni rule, hopefully not of repressive Islamists.
00:42:17.000Each will be protected by or dominated by outside powers.
00:42:20.000This may just be the start of another round of civil war.
00:42:21.000Turkey already has its army in its Turkish-occupied zone, plus its own Syrian proxy militia in Syria, and of course it's friendly with HTS.
00:42:29.000Israel may develop its own relationship with the Kurds and the Druze.
00:42:32.000Russia will probably depart, but it will probably try and retain its enclave along the Mediterranean coast.
00:42:38.000Al Jelani will either try to remake himself as a Syrian leader for all sects or stay true to the diehard Islamism of his career with disastrous results for all Syrians.
00:42:46.000As far as the United States, and it's very far away from the United States, the United States' interests are generally going to be relegated to very small interests.
00:42:55.000Like, for example, preventing the rise of ISIS again.
00:42:58.000Which would mean, as the United States has been doing, bombing ISIS bases or preventing jailbreaks from ISIS jails in the Kurdish areas of Syria.
00:43:07.000The United States does not have large-scale interests at stake in Syria.
00:43:09.000It means arming up allies to make sure that there's not another full-scale invasion of Israel, for example, via the Golan Heights.
00:43:15.000The Trump administration is already going to do that.
00:43:17.000The Trump administration does not want to get involved.
00:43:19.000And I think that President Trump is totally right not to want to get heavily involved there because it's an absolute, as we say, cluster F.
00:43:25.000President Trump put out a statement saying Assad is gone.
00:43:29.000His protector, Russia, Russia, Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was not interested in protecting him any longer.
00:43:33.000There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place.
00:43:35.000They lost all interest in Syria because of Ukraine, where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead in a war that should never have started and could go on forever.
00:43:42.000Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success.
00:43:48.000Likewise, Zelensky and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness.
00:43:50.000They've ridiculously lost 400,000 soldiers and many more civilians.
00:43:53.000There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin.
00:43:56.000Too many lives are being so needlessly wasted.
00:44:05.000As far as Trump's suggestion via Truth Social that the United States does not have large-scale interests in getting involved with Syria, that is true.
00:44:13.000The United States has small-scale interests that I think are going to be extremely limited and should be extremely limited to, for example, making sure that there is an incursion over Israel's borders or that Jordan doesn't fall, which would be quite bad, or that the Kurds don't get overwhelmed by the Turks.
00:44:26.000And a lot of the pressure on Turkey, which I think is going to be the main job of the Trump administration in the region because Turkey is getting incredibly aggressive, a lot of that is going to be done diplomatically and economically.
00:44:36.000So when President Trump says, stay out, I think he means it, and I think he should mean it.
00:44:41.000He put out a second statement, by the way, along these lines.
00:44:44.000This is a little bit earlier, saying, quote, opposition fighters in Syria in an unprecedented move have totally taken over numerous cities in a highly coordinated offensive and are now on the outskirts of Damascus, as this is before.
00:44:55.000Russia, because they're so tied up in Ukraine, with the loss of their 600,000 soldiers, seems incapable of stopping this literal march through Syria, a country they've protected for years.
00:45:02.000This is where former President Obama refused to honor his commitment of protecting the red line in the sand, and all hell broke out with Russia stepping in.
00:45:08.000Now they are, like possibly Assad himself being forced out, it may actually be the best thing that can happen to them.
00:45:12.000There is never much of a benefit in Syria for Russia other than to make Obama look really stupid.
00:45:16.000In any event, Syria is a mess, but is not our friend.
00:45:19.000The United States should have nothing to do with it.
00:45:46.000We should identify who our closest allies are in the region, say the Kurds and the Druze.
00:45:50.000We should provide them with arms to defend themselves.
00:45:53.000We should allow Israel the ability to defend its own border.
00:45:56.000We should prevent the Turks from killing the Kurds by arming the Kurds, not by getting directly involved in any of this stuff and by putting economic pressure on Turkey.
00:46:59.000There are places in the Middle East where, theoretically, democracy could flourish.
00:47:03.000Actually, one of those, ironically, is Iran, where the Persian population and the population of Iran more generally is much more Western friendly and much more friendly to the ideas of democracy.
00:47:27.000But again, the addiction to getting involved in every hand and every pie, the left addictions, they get involved and they don't stay involved long enough to actually see the thing through.
00:47:36.000It's always the worst available answer to all of these problems.
00:47:40.000Joe Biden stumbled out to a podium and barely was able to read off a teleprompter.
00:47:44.000Here's his statement on the Assad regime falling.
00:47:51.000After 13 years of civil war in Syria, More than half a century of brutal authoritarian rule by Bashar Assad and his father before him.
00:48:02.000Rebel forces have forced Assad to resign his office and flee the country.
00:48:07.000We're not sure where he is, but there's word that he's in Moscow.
00:48:12.000At long last, the Assad regime has fallen.
00:48:17.000Hilariously, this schmuck then got up and suggested that that was because of his action in Ukraine and allowing Israel to fight its terrorist enemies.
00:48:24.000He's been slow-walking aid in both places, in both places, while attempting to negotiate with the Iranians.
00:48:29.000The utter gall of Joe Biden and the Obama foreign policy team.
00:48:33.000Remember, it was in mid-2023, like just before October 7th, that Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, declared that Joe Biden had created a peaceful Middle East.
00:48:48.000Assad, one of the most evil dictators in modern times, not only deserves to go, he deserves to die.
00:48:52.000I mean, for the amount of human suffering and carnage she has created, one of the worst people on earth, Bashar Assad.
00:48:57.000Also, the people replacing him suck and are probably Sunni Islamist terrorists, affiliates with al-Qaeda and ISIS. And anybody who's counting on them to become moderate democratic liberals or something, you're high on your own supply.
00:49:26.000The big untold story here has very little to do with Syria.
00:49:29.000It has to do with as Iranian power wanes, as Iran is driven out of Lebanon, as they're driven out of Syria, as they're driven out of Yemen, which they will be, as they are driven out of wide swaths of Iraq, as this happens, The Iranian regime is in serious trouble and they're either going to have to figure out a way to move forward that does not involve the development of nuclear weapons or they're going to find themselves on their last legs as well.
00:49:51.000And as far as Russia, Russia was proved weak here.
00:50:08.000You don't want chemical weapons falling into the hands of al-Qaeda and ISIS affiliates.
00:50:12.000Back in 2007, when George W. Bush was president, the Israeli military blew up a nuclear facility created by the North Koreans in Damascus or created by Damascus in Syria.
00:50:22.000Would it have been better if there were nuclear weapons there?
00:50:24.000Right now, nuclear proliferation in this area of the world tends to be a really, really bad thing.
00:50:41.000By the way, as far as the Abraham Accords, which is one of the chief foreign policy priorities for the Trump administration, this very much favors the Abraham Accords because the Saudis are very much afraid of this new Sunni Islamist terrorist regime that is likely arising in Syria.
00:50:54.000And so they're very likely to side with the Israelis, with Jordanians, with the Egyptians in trying to prevent the rise of a rival terror-backing power in the Middle East.
00:51:06.000In just one second, we'll get to President Trump, who traveled over to France to take part in the reopening of Notre Dame, which was reconstructed after a giant fire.
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00:51:19.000Folks, have you heard of the audience have you heard of the audience effect?
00:51:44.000It's a fascinating psychological phenomenon where people behave differently when they know they're being watched.
00:51:48.000They become more guarded, more self-conscious, and even without explicit supervision, the mere sense of being observed can fundamentally limit our freedom of expression.