The Best Syria Breakdown You'll Ever Hear - Thomas Small
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 37 minutes
Words per Minute
147.98285
Summary
After 13 years of civil war, the Syrian civil war is finally over. But what exactly happened? And how did it happen? To find out, we speak to Thomas Small, an expert on the Syrian conflict and a regular guest on the Conflicted Podcast.
Transcript
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so that the non-jihadist opposition would be discredited.
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That's the kind of guy we're dealing with, right?
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Both Iran and Russia realized that Bashar al-Assad
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was not any longer in any way a trustworthy ally,
00:00:41.780
Thomas Small of the Conflicted Podcast, welcome back.
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opened our phones, and we see Bashar al-Assad has been deposed.
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The Syrian civil war, well, I was going to say it's over,
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And you are one of our go-to people for that issue,
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So we want to talk to you about everything that's happened,
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But before we do, we thought it's always helpful
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to give us a very, very kind of surface-level context,
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So the easiest question in the world to answer.
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Things have changed around here since I was here last.
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It did look like an ISIS video last time you were here.
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Older listeners will remember that at the end of 2010,
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in December 2010, a man in Tunisia set himself on fire
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in protest against unfair treatment by the authorities there,
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and that fire rapidly spread across the Arab world.
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One of the places that the fire spread to was Syria,
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which in February of 2011, but really in March of 2011,
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They never coalesced into one place as they had in, for example, Egypt,
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where in Cairo, in Tahrir Square, we remember huge protests
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were calling on the long-term dictator there, Hosni Mubarak, to resign.
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That didn't really happen in Syria in the same way.
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They were scattered around the country, but they were organic protests.
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They broke out in Syria, really against a government,
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which now we see the images coming out of Syria now that the government has been toppled.
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A government of extraordinary brutality, really the worst government of all of those notoriously terrible totalitarian governments
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that the Arab world suffered across the 20th century.
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So they were fighting this government, and eventually the government did what it does and responded with violence to the protesters.
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Eventually, the violence turned off members of the army of the government, the Syrian army,
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who then defected from the army, joined the protest,
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then organized themselves into a kind of an opposition army, the Free Syrian Army, it was called,
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and clashes began between the government and the opposition.
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A military, a civil war broke out, really, at that point.
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Jihadism became a major problem in that conflict.
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I think people know, most of all, ISIS, the specter of ISIS grew up out of this conflict,
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causing problems not just there, but elsewhere, including in the West.
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Terrorist attacks, either directly or indirectly, related to ISIS, were carried out.
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The Russian state got involved militarily, as did the Iranian state,
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while proxies of other states, let's say, allied with the opposition, fought them.
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And in time, all the sides, more or less, came together
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to create a really astonishing coalition of erstwhile enemies to fight ISIS.
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And that pushed back ISIS and effectively defeated it,
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corralled it into one area in the middle, you know, around the Euphrates.
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And then, from that point onwards, more or less,
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things remained in a sort of stasis until two weeks ago.
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It's even saying it, though, I must say, guys, saying it like that,
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it's like I realize it's so oversimplified, what I've just said,
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because the Syrian civil war is the greatest story,
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just in terms of epic geopolitical political narratives,
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the greatest story, you know, in the last 50 years.
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And no doubt books will be written about it that will make for a very dramatic,
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And you've condensed probably 20 years' worth of study into one two-minute answer.
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But one thing you alluded to there, and I think it's anyone who's looked into this even for a moment
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It is a conflagration of, like, five or six different geopolitical actors in one place,
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So, again, this is going to be, you know, very difficult to summarize in the brief answer.
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But can you just give our listeners and viewers a brief overview of the other players
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who are coming in from the outside and what they all want from this?
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So you've got Russia, you've got Turkey, you've got the United States,
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and then maybe more generally the non-Qatar GCC states led, let's say, by Saudi Arabia mainly.
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So what do each of those different players want in Syria?
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That's one of the interesting things about the Syrian civil war.
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I think to answer that question, I have to say a little bit more about the Syrian government
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So the Syrian state was, you know, it was part of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years.
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Eventually, during the First World War, the Ottoman Empire collapsed,
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And in the wake of that collapse, the French were given a mandate over provinces of the Ottoman Empire
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that eventually coalesced into the modern nation state of Syria.
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In 1944, during the Second World War, that mandate, that state was wrested from the French,
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from Vichy France, and eventually emerged as an independent state, which was extremely unstable.
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And over the next 20 years, it suffered many, many coups,
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while at the same time, a very oppressive security apparatus was being built up.
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Nazis, to some extent, who had fled to Damascus after the Second World War.
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Communist, East German sort of communist operatives working really for Egypt,
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Syria, an oppressive security apparatus was being built up,
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which was already in place when Hafez al-Assad came to power there in 1970.
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He was the leader of the Ba'ath Party, which had come to power seven years earlier in a coup.
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But he took over the country and really upped its oppressive security apparatus further
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and turned Syria into a Ba'athist, that's a sort of vaguely left-wing,
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Marxist-Leninist, vanguard, revolutionary state, totalitarian, based on his power.
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And he established this state, which existed then until, you know, last week.
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So then in the year 2000, after Hafez al-Assad died, his son Bashar al-Assad came to power.
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Now, Bashar al-Assad is a fascinating character.
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The eldest son of Hafez al-Assad, who had been groomed to take over, his name was Basil,
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If you're a dictator, you want a son like Basil.
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And all eyes then shifted to the younger son, Bashar al-Assad,
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who at the time was in London, of all places, studying to be an eye doctor.
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And by all accounts was a soft-spoken, rather meek kind of guy, had not sort of spread around
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very widely in London that he was the son of a dictator in Syria.
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Now, at that point, something happened called the Damascus Spring,
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when all eyes thought maybe this new young, he was only in his early 30s,
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this new young president will change things in Syria.
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But then, in the context of 9-11 and the launching of the war on terror by the United States,
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the global coalition against the war on terror, Bashar al-Assad felt threatened because,
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The state of Syria had long been an ally of Iran.
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Iran now part of the axis of evil, according to the United States.
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When America invaded Iraq, Syria really thought maybe we are next.
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So, Bashar al-Assad started to play the games that his father had always played,
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playing regional actors against each other, employing, you know, terrorism
00:11:08.120
or supporting terrorist actors when it suited him to cause chaos.
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The same old story, as a result of which, in the mid-2000s, the country was sanctioned.
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It was very much kind of put out in the cold by the American-led world order.
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And that's where it stayed until around 2009-2010.
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The GCC, countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
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Basically, all the players in the region and in the world looked to Syria and to Bashar al-Assad
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and thought, we've got to rehabilitate relations with him and bring him back on side.
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And that's where things were in early 2011 when the Arab Spring arrived in Syria.
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So, initially, nobody wanted Bashar al-Assad to go.
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They thought, and Bashar al-Assad had given them to think this, that it was possible that
00:12:09.720
he was going to reform the country in a way that would preserve the integrity of the state
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of Syria, answer some of the demands that the protesters were leveling at the government.
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At the same time, one by one, many other Arab states had already fallen to the protests.
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Syria was the last major Arab country for the Arab Spring to come to.
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And so, the West, its eyes were all over the place.
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Saudi Arabia was dealing with Bahrain, where protests had happened and where the GCC sent
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So, Syria, in a way, was kind of not the focus of attention.
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And so, everyone was just hoping that Bashar al-Assad would reform.
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So, that's where the international community was at when the Arab Spring broke out.
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However, Bashar al-Assad and his state security apparatus responded with violence, continued
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to respond with greater violence, did not do much, did not really do anything really to
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They just returned to the old Hafez al-Assad playbook of attacking the Syrian people with
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Qatar, which had been a very big supporter of Bashar al-Assad, had turned against Assad
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and decided that they would, using Al Jazeera mainly, which is a Qatar-owned satellite news
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channel, that they would take advantage of the destabilization there, as they had in other
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places around the Middle East during the Arab Spring, to support the opposition to Assad,
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hoping that maybe, if they were supporting the opposition, that when the Assad government
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fell, they would be in prime position to have great influence in the country.
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And the United States finally, finally, came out and said, and Barack Obama, the president
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at the time, came out and said, Bashar al-Assad must go.
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It was clear that the Americans didn't really want Bashar al-Assad to go.
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They did not want the Syrian government to fall because of the chaos that would inevitably
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result from that, given that just across the border in Iraq, there was great instability
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The Iranian, you know, supported terrorist campaign that started against the American
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Given the fact that across the other border in Lebanon, there was great instability, largely
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as a result of chickenery by the Syrian government, which had always had a big role to play in
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Lebanon, Hezbollah causing problems, et cetera.
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Turkey has problems in that area with Kurdish terrorists.
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So nobody really wanted Bashar al-Assad to fall.
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So that's where things were, you know, by the end of 2011, beginning of 2012.
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That civil war was mainly, let's say, a legitimate civil war between a government and its army
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and opposition forces and its army, if you like.
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Jihadism had not yet played a big part in the war.
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And so everyone was basically waiting to see what would happen.
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Iran, which had long been an ally of the Assad regime, but which had tried to make a name
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for itself as a voice of the Arab people to bolster its own reputation in the Arab world,
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and so had largely supported the Arab Spring movements, especially as those movements were
00:16:00.980
more and more co-opted by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Arab Spring protest movements became
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more associated with Islamist revolutionary agitation, which aligned with Iran's own
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Iran found itself in a slightly tricky situation.
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Al Jazeera was broadcasting the brutal crackdowns, the brutal violence that was going on in Syria.
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Iran thought, do we want to be associated with this?
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But at the same time, if you remember, in 2009, inside Iran, a huge protest movement broke
00:16:40.160
out there, which the state cracked down very badly against.
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And so it knew how to snuff out, violently, protests.
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So behind the scenes, it was advising the Assad government on how to deal with the protesters
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And so eventually, Iran became openly supportive of the Assad regime and wanted to keep it in
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That especially became the case when jihadism did enter into the scene.
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One way it entered the scene for sure is that at one point, Bashar al-Assad released from the
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prisons of Syria, including and primarily the notorious Sednaya prison that we're all now
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seeing images from as the rebels liberate the prison and all these just really horrible
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scenes of unspeakable, like something out of, literally out of the concentration camps of
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The Sednaya prison had housed a lot of global jihadist fighters, which the regime wanted nothing
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Bashar al-Assad released them as he had previously released them 10 years earlier or so, or eight
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years earlier, so that they would go to Iraq and fight the Americans there.
00:18:00.240
He did the same thing again, only this time hoping that they would fight against his regime
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and therefore tar the opposition with the brush of jihadism.
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So he created a jihadist opposition to himself so that the non-jihadist opposition would be discredited.
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That's the kind of guy we're dealing with, right?
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Now, jihadism tends like a moth, like moths to a flame to attract other jihadists.
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And in Iraq in 2011, a new offshoot or a kind of reformed, a new version of an old enemy
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there of the United States, at least an enemy of the United States, which had been Al-Qaeda
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in Iraq, and then became known as the Islamic State in Iraq, sent to Syria.
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This is the sort of, the Syrian civil war is already happening.
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So Al-Qaeda, sorry, Islamic State in Iraq and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would
00:19:05.040
eventually become the notorious caliph of ISIS.
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He sent a Syrian man back to Syria to start their assail, an offshoot of Islamic State
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That man was known by the nom d'agir of Abu Muhammad al-Jolani.
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Now, flash forward, that is the man who now sits at the top of power in Syria.
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He came to Syria and set up, secretly, an offshoot of the Islamic State in Iraq there, known
00:19:41.520
as Jebhat al-Nusra, the Nusra or Victory Front, the Nusra Front.
00:19:48.280
For about two years, nobody knew what this outfit was.
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All they did know is that it was extremely effective on the battlefield, because the Syrians
00:19:57.560
who had been fighting in Iraq for all those years, fighting the Americans, fighting and
00:20:01.560
fighting the Iranian-backed militias there for all those years, they were sent with Jolani
00:20:06.640
to Syria, and they began fighting the regime very effectively, because they were battle-hardened
00:20:12.580
fighters, unlike all the other players in Syria.
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The Syrian army hadn't fought a war in decades.
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They weren't actually good at fighting the opposition.
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So suddenly, the introduction of Jolani and his men, again, whom no one knew who these
00:20:29.980
people were, they were a very sort of mysterious, shadowy organization, the Nusra Front, they
00:20:37.720
And so, outside actors initially supported them, from the Gulf mainly.
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Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates to some extent.
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They were supporting the Nusra Front, and other jihadist groups, and more and more jihadist
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Now, in 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi comes out and says, the Nusra Front is an ISIS or an ISI,
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And he says, and I announce now the formation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS.
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Well, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani in Syria said, well, no one told me about this.
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I don't want to be actually, you know, subservient to this guy.
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I want to, I'm actually really dedicated to overthrowing Bashar al-Assad.
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Openly, Jolani denounced this and said, no, no, no, no, I'm independent.
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Now, he had paved the way for this by going over Baghdadi's head and speaking directly
00:21:48.520
to al-Qaeda central in the Afpac border and got them to agree to make him their direct
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At that time, Baghdadi was an affiliate of al-Qaeda.
00:22:03.240
But al-Qaeda was already realizing that this Baghdadi guy was pursuing a different aim from
00:22:10.300
So Jolani took advantage of that to get them to sanction him as an al-Qaeda branch on its
00:22:18.860
A lot of his fighters defected from him to ISIS.
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And then for years, a huge intra-jihadist war broke out in Syria between the Nusra Front,
00:22:35.940
And as we remember, ISIS came out on top for a long time.
00:22:42.360
It conquered huge swathes of territory, not just in Syria.
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It took the very important Iraqi city of Mosul, causing unspeakable death and destruction
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It was truly jihadism at its rock-bottom worst.
00:23:02.380
And that's where things were, let's say, in 2014, 2015.
00:23:05.780
But I just need to stop the story there because there are other players involved.
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If we rewind a couple of years, so now we have the Assad regime is attacking, the protesters
00:23:22.680
The Assad regime employs chemical weapons against the protesters.
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It became extremely controversial to say so amongst certain people in the West, especially people
00:23:38.320
who opposed any efforts to overthrow Assad for various reasons, either ideological or pragmatic.
00:23:45.700
A tendency arose to deny or downplay the chemical weapons that the Assad regime employed
00:23:56.580
I mean, we have now in the last two weeks seen the factories that produced the chemical weapons
00:24:05.380
But when Syria, when the Assad regime employed chemical weapons against the protesters, this
00:24:13.300
crossed the notorious red line that Barack Obama had stated very openly, that if chemical
00:24:19.720
weapons were employed on the battlefields of Syria, he said, then the United States would
00:24:23.760
have no choice but to intervene properly and militarily to remove Assad.
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Barack Obama chose not to live up to that red line.
00:24:34.460
And he allowed Bashar al-Assad to continue to prosecute his war against the opposition.
00:24:42.100
And that crossing the red line, allowing Bashar al-Assad to cross that red line, was a great
00:24:52.820
And I'll try to just open up the discussion a bit because America's role in the world is
00:25:01.240
something we have to understand to make sense of this.
00:25:03.740
And we all know now, so it seems, that America's role in the world generally is diminished from
00:25:09.620
where it stood in the great unipolar moment of the 90s and the 90s when there were no great
00:25:17.960
And America just seemed to straddle the globe doing whatever it wished, wherever it wished.
00:25:33.160
America's power was never as great as it thought and as its enemies thought.
00:25:38.760
America's power lay largely in its ability to project an image of untrammable power.
00:25:52.540
It took a knock at the financial crisis of 2008.
00:25:56.540
It took a knock when the Arab Spring broke out and so many American allies, like the president
00:26:02.800
And it really took a knock when Barack Obama allowed that red line to be crossed.
00:26:08.900
The world looked at America and realized, you know what?
00:26:13.300
It's not as powerful as we've been given to think.
00:26:17.340
It's not as willing to employ military power to achieve political aims, clearly because it
00:26:29.760
Suddenly, other players can get involved, especially Russia.
00:26:39.940
The Soviet Union had long been an ally of the Syrian government, of the Syrian state, even
00:26:49.000
But after Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970, that relationship became even closer.
00:26:53.940
And over the course of the 70s, the Soviet government achieved what every Russian government
00:27:04.380
had attempted to achieve for hundreds of years, a warm water port.
00:27:10.000
The classic geopolitical, geostrategic issue of Russia, achieving a warm water port.
00:27:17.420
And finally, Hafez al-Assad granted the Soviet Union a naval base off the city of Tartus on
00:27:25.700
And Russia had a naval base on the Mediterranean, which was extremely useful to Russia.
00:27:30.980
It allowed it to project power into the Mediterranean, especially across North Africa, where it had
00:27:37.220
Initially, Egypt in the 70s, before Egypt became an American ally.
00:27:40.900
There's countries like Algeria, countries like Libya, Muammar al-Gaddafi's, if you remember him, classic
00:27:49.340
So the naval base at Tartus was of great strategic importance to Russia and remained so.
00:27:57.080
And so in 2013, when Russia realized that America was not actually going to intervene militarily in
00:28:05.400
the Syrian civil war, not really, not with power, they thought, okay, we're going to do something.
00:28:12.280
And they had interests to defend, not only the naval base there, but an air base near the city
00:28:23.360
That intervention was decisive and extremely brutal.
00:28:27.660
The Russians usually, mainly by employing air power, bombarded Syrian cities that had been
00:28:36.260
captured by or were being contested by opposition fighters, really making no distinction whatsoever
00:28:42.320
between civilian neighborhoods and military targets.
00:28:46.040
It was really a kind of no-holds-barred situation.
00:28:48.440
The sort of strategy that we see Russia deploy elsewhere in Chechnya and now in Ukraine, etc.
00:28:53.960
So the Syrian opposition faced this brutal onslaught, while at the same time, the Wagner force
00:29:04.240
I don't want to go too much into the Wagner force.
00:29:06.580
It was a kind of militia group, a mercenary group, really, that was a private company run
00:29:25.260
So the Wagner group got involved providing about 1,000, I think 2,000, maybe at one point,
00:29:30.560
fighters on the ground, contributing to the Assad regime's fight mainly against ISIS,
00:29:36.180
which was growing, particularly the battles of Palmyra, a beautiful classical city in
00:29:44.640
Tremendous fighting went on there, and the Wagner group prevailed, managed to capture
00:29:48.780
Palmyra back from ISIS and lost a lot of fighters in the process.
00:29:53.620
It became their kind of Iwo Jima, really, Palmyra.
00:29:56.480
So that's how Russia got involved, and they continued to be involved until last week, when
00:30:03.040
suddenly they seemed not to want to be involved anymore.
00:30:11.040
At the same time that Barack Obama's red line was not properly policed, Iran also realized,
00:30:22.280
oh, I see, America, okay, America's not as strong as we were given to believe.
00:30:28.140
They upped their backing of Assad in a big way at that point, sending the notorious head
00:30:34.740
of the Quds Force, the section of the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the section
00:30:42.740
of the IRGC that projects Iranian power outward, the Quds Force, notorious outfit.
00:30:49.380
Its head, Qasem Soleimani, was sent to Syria, and he teamed up with the head of Hezbollah,
00:30:57.520
a proxy group based in Lebanon that answers to its paymasters in Iran, and the head of Hezbollah,
00:31:02.920
Hassan Nasrallah, the late Hassan Nasrallah, and the head of the Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani,
00:31:09.600
the late Qasem Soleimani, they got together and they hatched a plan on how to really support
00:31:14.580
the Assad regime, to make sure the Assad regime would survive.
00:31:18.140
Now, in fact, the Ayatollah back in Tehran, Ali Khamenei, we think now on his deathbed,
00:31:25.340
although he's been on his deathbed for years, opposed this plan initially.
00:31:30.560
He thought, this is going to be very expensive, this is going to require a lot of manpower,
00:31:35.440
but Soleimani and Hassan Nasrallah together convinced him, no, we can do it, Hezbollah
00:31:40.560
fighters will ship in fighters from Afghanistan, we'll do whatever it takes, we're going to
00:31:46.140
And the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, said, go for it.
00:31:49.940
Over the next 10 years, the Iranian state spent about $30 billion in Syria supporting
00:31:56.840
Assad and IRGC trained and commanded forces were really, really merciless in their prosecution
00:32:12.660
I mean, really tremendous butchery that went on.
00:32:17.280
You know, I want to stop and just remind people, we're talking tremendous butchery.
00:32:20.680
They're discovering now that probably in the last 10 years, 100,000 Syrians were disappeared
00:32:27.160
by the regime, just disappeared, lost into prisons, tortured, killed, crushed by these
00:32:34.340
terrible machines they have that crush the bodies down, boiled in acid.
00:32:38.480
These are terrible things that are being revealed about this regime.
00:32:41.360
And the Iranian-backed forces were supporting the regime and played a big role in the regime
00:32:49.960
So that while the regime and all of these other players, including the opponents of the
00:32:55.220
regime, were working together in one part of Syria to fight ISIS, in the other part of
00:33:00.180
Syria, the regime backed by Hezbollah in Iran and helped from the air by Russia, were able
00:33:06.020
to take back a lot of land that had been lost to the opposition.
00:33:11.040
The city of Aleppo, the most populous city in Syria, historically its richest and most sort
00:33:17.080
of commercially important center, had been cut in two between the forces loyal to the
00:33:24.420
But in 2016, 2017, the government was able to take it back entirely.
00:33:30.380
And over time, forced all of the opposition forces, more or less, in that part of Syria,
00:33:36.460
the west, the northwest part of Syria, forced them into one governorate, Idlib governorate,
00:33:42.640
a smallish provincial city, Idlib, in northwest Syria that was the capital of a province, if
00:33:49.780
And basically, all of the different forces fighting the regime were pushed into this
00:33:54.660
Not all of them, but a lot of them, because we haven't even talked about the bloody Kurds.
00:33:58.060
I don't know if we'll be able to get to them, but they were fighting ISIS more than anyone
00:34:04.600
And they became a big ally of the United States.
00:34:06.300
They remain an ally of the United States for how long is open to question.
00:34:10.080
But the Sunni, let's say, Sunni opposition of Sunni Arab opposition of the regime was pushed
00:34:23.120
And now, in fact, I take it back, we do have to talk about the Kurds, because around that
00:34:28.040
time, another player intervened in a big way, Turkey.
00:34:33.480
Okay, so Turkey, very big, very powerful state to the north of Syria.
00:34:39.600
It has long prosecuted a counterterrorism campaign against a Kurdish nationalist group called the
00:34:47.700
PKK, who seek to achieve for the Kurdish nation, a nation state of their own.
00:34:54.540
The Kurds were the people above all peoples who, in the breakdown of the imperial powers
00:35:00.320
that occurred during the course of the First World War, were left without a nation state
00:35:05.780
Millions of Kurds were divided between the new states of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
00:35:12.000
In the 1920s, these Kurds, or some of these Kurds, were organized by the Soviet Union, and a Kurdish
00:35:21.580
Soviet was established as the Soviet Union was trying to expand its power.
00:35:27.020
Remember, the Soviet Union did expand into countries like Azerbaijan and Armenia.
00:35:31.160
You know, the Soviet Union was moving into that part of the world.
00:35:34.740
The Kurds were meant to be part of that process.
00:35:36.640
And in the course of which, they became committed Marxist-Leninists, and remained so even when
00:35:45.860
their dreams of creating a Soviet that would be part of the Union failed.
00:35:49.700
So there remained a kind of very well-organized, ideologically committed, very competent force
00:35:57.460
of revolutionary actors, Kurdish revolutionary actors, that pursued national liberation struggle.
00:36:04.880
So eventually morphing in, to some extent, into this group, the PKK.
00:36:10.460
Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar al-Assad, when he was in power, he had allowed PKK operatives
00:36:17.480
to use Syria as a base because Hafez al-Assad had an extremely bad relationship with Turkey.
00:36:23.740
It was part of the Assad state's policy to project its power into its neighbors, to flex its muscles.
00:36:33.400
And there was lots of squabbling over land, you know, the border and stuff.
00:36:41.680
And so the Kurds used Syria as a base to attack Turkey.
00:36:46.420
So that's in the background, when in 2016 and 2017, as a result of the anti-ISIS campaign,
00:36:55.580
Kurdish forces in the east of Syria, more or less allied to, and certainly inspired by
00:37:04.220
the PKK, grew in strength because they were themselves extremely valiant fighters against
00:37:11.280
And they were supported in a big way primarily by the United States in that effort.
00:37:15.420
So Turkey's looking on thinking, God, this is the last thing I want.
00:37:19.040
And Syria's, you know, it doesn't have a properly functioning state.
00:37:23.880
This threatens the national interests of Turkey, the empowerment of these Kurds.
00:37:29.500
So in 2017, Turkey invades Syria from the north and empowers a network of Sunni, mainly
00:37:41.040
Sunni, Arab, or Turkmen, because there are, you know, there are a very small minority of
00:37:47.040
Turkish-speaking Syrians, holdovers really from when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
00:37:52.600
A network of militant groups, some jihadists, some nationalists, then were, you know, allied
00:37:59.960
to Turkey to project Turkey's power into the north, creating a buffer zone from which
00:38:05.720
Turkey could control flows of PKK-aligned forces into Turkey.
00:38:10.680
That was what Turkey said, and could, you know, attack Kurdish forces in Syria.
00:38:18.140
And so that's where things lay when, at the end of 2016, in the early 2017, ISIS was, let's
00:38:27.760
The great battle of Mosul in Iraq came to an end, one of the largest urban warfare campaigns
00:38:36.240
in history, largely uncommented on at the time.
00:38:39.480
People did not know that this huge global coalition of people were prosecuting such a
00:38:46.700
And brutality to the degree that we've seen more recently in Gaza, that kind of, to uproot
00:38:52.680
a deeply embedded Islamist terrorist organization from a city.
00:38:58.140
And that's, so that's where things lay when that campaign kind of came to an end.
00:39:01.440
What remained of ISIS were corralled into prisons on the other side of the Euphrates in Syria,
00:39:06.600
where they still exist, tens of thousands of them.
00:39:15.120
Russia has positions from its bases in the west.
00:39:18.160
Iran has positions all over the country supporting the regime.
00:39:21.180
America has bases in the east and in the south, where he'd prosecuted against ISIS.
00:39:27.300
Qatar, from the Gulf, has been supporting financially a lot of the Sunni jihadist groups that have
00:39:35.620
So that's where things were in 2017, when a process started in Kazakhstan, the Astana process
00:39:45.280
it's called, where these major players, primarily Turkey, Russia, and Iran, with the Assad government
00:39:50.880
and some opposition representatives, came together to start sorting out a solution.
00:39:56.340
This process resulted in something like a ceasefire, something like a ceasefire, and everything
00:40:08.280
And for five years, more or less, they remained so.
00:40:20.480
You remember that man who was sent by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to start a franchise of the Islamic
00:40:27.940
state in Syria, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, he was called.
00:40:32.060
Let's talk about al-Jolani, because he's now sitting in Bashar al-Assad's seat in Damascus,
00:40:39.600
Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, that's not his real name.
00:40:43.240
His real name is Ahmed al-Shar'ah, Ahmed al-Shar'ah, his nom de guerre al-Jolani, that means man
00:40:52.240
from the Golan Heights, that's what that name means.
00:40:56.320
His father's family come from the Golan Heights, which during the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel
00:41:03.520
captured from the Syrians, a strategically very important position.
00:41:08.820
It looms above the lowlands, stretching off into the Levant, so it's very strategically
00:41:15.460
And in 1974, in a negotiated process with Hafez al-Assad, Israel withdrew a bit from the Golan
00:41:22.060
Heights, a bit, creating a demilitarized buffer zone there, which is now in the news because
00:41:27.680
a few days ago, Israel took that buffer zone along with some other strategically powerful
00:41:34.900
So, Ahmed al-Shar'ah is from that part of the world.
00:41:38.420
His father is from that part of the world and had been a political activist opposed
00:41:43.060
to the Assad regime in the name of Nasserism, a different form of Arab nationalism.
00:41:48.640
He had been imprisoned by the regime as a result of this.
00:41:51.520
He went into exile where he, at one point in Jordan, teamed up with the PLO and was a little
00:41:57.300
bit more influenced by the sort of new left revolutionary ideology of the PLO, Yasser Arafat's organization.
00:42:04.240
Eventually, eventually, he made his way to Riyadh, where he got a job as an oil engineer and where
00:42:14.100
So, Ahmed al-Shar'ah, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, was born in Riyadh in 1982.
00:42:21.680
I think that means a lot, actually, when we talk about the future of Syria.
00:42:25.120
When he was eight years old, the family moved back to Damascus.
00:42:29.680
His father, it seems, kind of gave up political activism.
00:42:32.380
He grew up in a relatively prosperous neighborhood in Damascus, a middle-class neighborhood.
00:42:36.740
Now, when the Second Intifada broke out in 2000, this is when Ariel Sharon, the former prime
00:42:50.620
He went and visited the Temple Mount in a much-publicized way, which sparked off a long, sort of, prepared
00:42:57.900
for and gestating uprising by the Palestinians against the Israelis.
00:43:01.680
This Second Intifada, which predated 9-11 by six months or so, energized the Muslim world,
00:43:12.280
the Arab world, especially, because it was being broadcast on the first proper satellite news
00:43:18.740
channel in Arabic that allowed, for the first time, Arabs to be sort of singing from the same
00:43:24.980
news hymn sheet, going over the heads of national broadcasters, Al Jazeera.
00:43:31.680
This created a huge wave of support for the Palestinians and for their cause and for Islamist
00:43:40.800
opposition voices in the world, including one, Osama bin Laden, who was then living in a cave
00:43:50.580
So, Ahmed Ashara, this man, this boy, he's 18, 19 now.
00:44:03.580
He becomes more spiritually kind of interested, more politically interested.
00:44:08.640
And then in 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, he went, along with lots of Syrians,
00:44:20.140
He spent time in Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison where Americans tortured detainees.
00:44:28.400
At some point, it's not exactly clear when, he encountered Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was
00:44:38.720
But when he was released, he rapidly rose up the ranks and became a lieutenant of Abu Bakr
00:44:51.560
He and a huge number of jihadist forces have been forced into Idlib province, where, to
00:45:08.000
And then in 2016, he broke with al-Qaeda publicly.
00:45:11.100
He stated, we are no longer affiliated with al-Qaeda, and we no longer support al-Qaeda's
00:45:20.600
We are a nationalist, Islamist, jihadist movement.
00:45:24.500
We are only interested in Syria and in overthrowing the Assad regime and creating in its place a just
00:45:39.160
He tried to communicate this new sort of position.
00:45:43.680
His group was no longer affiliated with global jihad.
00:45:48.640
His group and he himself remained on various terrorist watch lists.
00:45:53.140
There's a $10 million bounty on his head by the United States.
00:45:57.700
My colleague on the conflicted podcast, Eamon Dean, who really knows these things, revealed
00:46:03.020
on our podcast that over the last 10 years, various al-Qaeda-affiliated operatives who went
00:46:13.460
to the Idlib area to meet up with al-Julani and his movement, now renamed Hizp al-Tahrir
00:46:22.340
al-Sham, HTS, the Organization of the Liberation of the Levant, HTS, al-Qaeda would send operatives
00:46:31.040
to him to, you know, maybe try to mend fences, try to help him, whatever.
00:46:36.160
However, these al-Qaeda operatives who were visiting Idlib, affiliated with HTS and its
00:46:42.420
predecessor, were weirdly being picked off one by one by American drone attacks, other
00:46:52.660
Weirdly, as I say, my colleague Eamon Dean knows that this is because already at that
00:46:59.840
point, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, the reformed al-Qaeda operative, now a nationalist, was
00:47:09.880
feeding information to the CIA or other such organizations about al-Qaeda figures to help
00:47:21.200
He didn't want anything to do with them anymore.
00:47:22.940
It also helped him to project this rebrand, to prove that he had changed.
00:47:33.620
What he definitely did in Idlib was became an effective politician and state builder.
00:47:40.640
First, he prosecuted an intense war against remaining al-Qaeda-affiliated groups there,
00:47:47.600
remaining ISIS-affiliated groups there, other jihadist groups that remained committed to their
00:47:56.160
However, he managed to either defeat them or to co-opt them so that eventually the whole
00:48:01.880
of the province, more or less, was being dominated by HTS and a civilian governmental
00:48:08.800
organization, the Syrian Salvation Government, which HTS founded to govern Idlib province
00:48:16.700
according to the rules of 21st century technocracy.
00:48:21.880
When the COVID-19 crisis broke out, they created a vaccination program.
00:48:31.520
They did all the things that all the governments of the world were doing.
00:48:34.880
And this was this former al-Qaeda guy and his Salvation Government governing the province.
00:48:47.620
Was anyone opposed to what the Salvation Government and HTS were doing there?
00:49:00.520
So I do not want to pretend like he set up a little Switzerland or something there in Idlib
00:49:06.080
But he did provide effective governance, certainly compared to what the Syrian people had been
00:49:16.480
Meanwhile, more and more Syrians are moving into Idlib.
00:49:20.640
Opposition people sort of forced there to flee the regime so that this tiny province,
00:49:26.300
suddenly its population bulged to four and a half million people.
00:49:31.040
Three million Syrians from outside the province were moving there.
00:49:35.040
And Syrians from all over Syria were mixing together, united in opposition to the regime,
00:49:41.800
divided in all sorts of other ways, religion, ethnic, et cetera, in the way that Syria has
00:49:46.180
always been divided, but united in their opposition to the regime.
00:49:49.980
This caused a powerful kind of galvanizing effect, creating, strengthening a Syrian national
00:49:57.080
identity where all together, all Syrians, all against this terrible regime, overshadowed
00:50:08.360
You can see that this became a kind of crucible for what Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, Ahmad al-Shar'ah,
00:50:20.920
Okay, now, to explain what's happened more recently.
00:50:26.640
About two years ago, the world kind of, again, came together and thought,
00:50:32.060
okay, let's bring Bashar al-Assad and his regime back in from the cold.
00:50:41.440
As early as 2018, the United Arab Emirates reopened its embassy in Damascus.
00:50:47.920
So that was really the first sign that maybe some kind of accommodation could be reached
00:50:52.800
and that Bashar al-Assad could survive and his regime live on.
00:50:57.400
There were many efforts to achieve this on all sides.
00:51:01.400
The United States participated in these efforts.
00:51:03.540
The Gulf participated in these efforts in a big way.
00:51:06.640
Saudi Arabia especially was animated to somehow get things right with Syria again.
00:51:14.380
Because it seemed that the whole war was in stalemate.
00:51:20.280
Turkey definitely wanted a solution to be found.
00:51:27.060
They were supporting these groups to attack the Kurds and other enemies.
00:51:31.020
But they had also had millions of Syrian refugees pour into their country,
00:51:35.120
which was causing electoral problems for President Erdogan.
00:51:38.480
Can you imagine a situation where lots of immigrants caused political problems on the ground?
00:51:45.220
The very successful political party that President Erdogan leads,
00:51:50.180
pressure was being put on it by the opposition because you've got to sort out this immigration problem.
00:51:57.120
At the same time, anti-Syrian attitudes were on the rise in Turkey.
00:52:00.840
The Syrian refugees themselves could tell that they were less and less welcome.
00:52:06.520
And so Erdogan, working together with the Gulf and these other actors, was reaching out to Assad.
00:52:14.180
President Assad now, and ultimately I don't know what was going on inside his head.
00:52:27.340
But President Assad began to play, once again, the sort of games that the Assad regime always played.
00:52:35.280
Working with all sides, double crossing one ally for other allies,
00:52:41.340
trying to create a sort of a basic confusion while remaining fixed and stubborn in his own ambitions.
00:52:49.700
He's a sort of narcissistic kind of projection situation going on.
00:52:56.620
Well, you're never ultimately bending your own egoic kind of structure.
00:53:04.700
So, long-time allies, supporters, backers of Assad, Iran and Russia, saw that Bashar al-Assad was allowing himself to be wooed by Saudi Arabia and other regional actors towards the normalization of relations.
00:53:26.500
Now, throughout all of the civil war period, as people know, Saudi Arabia and Iran were locked in what's called like kind of a Middle Eastern Cold War, right?
00:53:36.920
So, Assad, inclining towards a Saudi attempt to normalize relations with him, was looked upon with some disapproval by Tehran, Hezbollah, and Russia.
00:53:51.240
At the same time, Turkey is reaching out to Assad saying, let's get around the table, let's get around the table.
00:53:57.660
And Assad was refusing to do so because he had these maximalist demands that Turkey withdraw all of its troops before he meet with them or that the amount of the buffer zone that Turkey was allowed to maintain would be limited beyond what was feasible.
00:54:13.180
He just was playing silly buggers and not getting around that table.
00:54:17.400
So, his allies, Iran and Russia, were already a little bit annoyed with Assad and questioning how trustworthy he was, knowing all the time that without them, he was nothing.
00:54:32.000
That his own regime's ability to prosecute the civil war, to project power, was extremely limited.
00:54:45.140
The whole regime depended on Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia to stay afloat.
00:54:51.340
And yet Assad was hoping, by playing this weird game, to change that dynamic so that he would be supported by Saudi Arabia, let's say maybe even the West, in one big move, which would also allow him to keep Syria as one nation state under his totalitarian rule.
00:55:07.660
There's another dimension to this part of the story that is extremely interesting and just adds another layer of intrigue to the whole Syrian civil war thing.
00:55:17.020
So, when Assad begins to incline towards Saudi, thinking, okay, Saudi wants normalization, I can use that desire for my own ends here, he brings to the table some leverage.
00:55:32.000
And that is because one thing that happened over the last 14 years is that desperate for money, suffering from sanctions of all kinds, bleeding treasure on the battlefields of the civil war, desperate for money, the Syrian regime, in collusion with Hezbollah mainly, has become a huge narcotics trafficker.
00:55:54.000
The largest drug baron in the Middle East, particularly by trading, smuggling, captagon tablets, which are manufactured in factories in Syria and in Lebanon, into the Gulf.
00:56:08.920
Saudi Arabia especially has been targeted for years by the Syrian regime for captagon penetration, and Saudi Arabia has been languishing under a big drug problem as a result.
00:56:19.040
It's a huge issue. Millions and millions and millions and millions of hard cash flow into Syria, have been flowing into Syria, rather, to support the regime there from the Gulf and other places, including the West.
00:56:35.580
Captagon, which is a very, very harmful amphetamine.
00:56:42.820
And since the fall of the regime, these captagon factories have been revealed.
00:56:50.780
So it's a whole other dimension of the story that the Syrian regime and the brother of Bashar al-Assad, Maher al-Assad, is like the kingpin of overseeing this drugs cartel, effectively.
00:57:06.380
And when Bashar al-Assad was inclining towards the Saudis, he could bring this as leverage because he was basically causing a huge minority of Saudis to become addicted to drugs.
00:57:19.560
So that's another dimension to this amazing story.
00:57:23.100
That was where, that was more or less the state of play, more or less, when last year on October 7th, I don't know if you heard about it.
00:57:30.380
Hamas launched an incursion into southern Israel, which invited Israel to launch a devastating counter strike on Gaza, which reopened the Arab-Israeli crisis in a new way.
00:57:46.240
And led to Israel really flexing its muscles, projecting its power, and over the following year, crushing Iran's network of proxies in the neighborhood.
00:58:02.200
In August, most spectacularly, Hezbollah, which was the largest non-state militia in the world.
00:58:10.620
Lots of fighters, lots of armaments, very sophisticated, battle-hardened by this point because they had fought like devils for Bashar al-Assad on the battlefields of Syria.
00:58:22.120
So they were no, you know, they were no shrinking violets or whatever the expression is.
00:58:28.800
And yet, as we saw, one by one, Israel assassinated the leadership, including the leader himself, Hassan Nasrallah.
00:58:36.480
The exploding pagers took out the mid-ranking cadres all in one go.
00:58:40.620
It was this kind of astonishing thing to witness, very much weakening Iran's ability to project power in the region.
00:58:48.040
This opened up a period of ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Lebanon, between Israel and Hezbollah.
00:58:56.800
Those negotiations finalized on the 27th of November.
00:59:02.380
Part of the conditions of the negotiations was that the ceasefire did not apply to Syria.
00:59:08.720
So Hezbollah operatives in Syria were not safe from any Israeli attack based on the ceasefire.
00:59:18.840
That's an important kind of point because that morning, surprising the world, an offensive began, launched from Idlib province in northwestern Syria,
00:59:30.580
led by Abu Muhammad al-Julani and HTS against Aleppo, in the direction of Aleppo, this big northern city.
00:59:39.600
In October, it is known, the plans for this offensive were discussed with President Erdogan of Turkey and the security apparatus there
00:59:51.620
with the hopes that maybe the Turkish-aligned forces along the north, you know, in that bit that Turkey controls,
01:00:00.940
would join in on the offensive to get some land back.
01:00:05.860
You know, you can imagine Erdogan considered it, that would increase his negotiating position with Bashar al-Assad.
01:00:12.840
But at the same time, Bashar al-Assad had been so intransigent against meeting him at the negotiating table,
01:00:18.340
Erdogan might have thought, this is just going to make him even less willing to come.
01:00:22.540
So in October, the Turks nixed the idea and sort of put the idea on ice, basically told Julani, don't do this.
01:00:34.540
A lot of reports say that HTS is Turkish-backed.
01:00:42.400
Julani is his own man, though, you know, he works closely with Turkey,
01:00:46.640
especially because HTS controls the border with Turkey in that part of Syria.
01:00:54.840
But in October, Julani decided to heed Erdogan's sort of advice or whatever, his command, and okay, they put it on ice.
01:01:05.520
At the same time, from the summer, Russia had been prosecuting a renewed bombing campaign in Idlib against civilian populations.
01:01:13.540
Again, this increased in October, creating this need, really, I think, in Julani's mind, like, we've got to do something.
01:01:24.060
He knows that Iran has been weakened by Israel in the preceding year.
01:01:28.600
He knows that a ceasefire agreement is being negotiated between Hezbollah and Israel.
01:01:34.760
He doesn't want to launch his attack before that ceasefire is agreed because he doesn't want anyone to perceive him as supporting Israeli interests.
01:01:45.220
But the day that the ceasefire was announced, his forces move in.
01:01:50.480
For three days, HTS made these phenomenal gains, and then, on the 30th of November, three days later, the Turkish-backed forces began their move.
01:02:02.580
So it seems quite clear that Julani and HTS acted alone.
01:02:09.780
Now, before anyone could catch their breath, Aleppo had fallen.
01:02:13.440
This is the city that had been fought over inch by inch for years, you know, with tremendous carnage, and the death toll, the stupendous death toll, suddenly fell as Bashar al-Assad's forces just withdrew.
01:02:31.240
They continued on to the next city down the M5 highway corridor, Hama.
01:02:35.840
Hama had been, in 1982, subjected to an extraordinary attack by the Assad government attacking the Muslim Brotherhood there, killing in one week 40,000 Assyrian civilians, the biggest single massacre of Arabs in the last hundred years.
01:03:01.900
Meanwhile, the Kurdish forces over in the east looked up and thought, what's going on?
01:03:08.960
They started to push from the east towards the west, taking more territory as well.
01:03:14.560
Finally, in the south of the country, south of Damascus, rebel forces there, which had long been a player in the Syrian civil war.
01:03:24.500
At one point, they were funded and armed by Israel, who supported them to create a buffer zone against the regime for them.
01:03:32.640
They were coordinated by Jordan to some extent, America, which had a base in the south a bit further to the east.
01:03:38.320
And it is now known into which HTS had put cells, operatives, kind of creating some organization between the north and the south in that way.
01:03:49.740
They rose up and began an offensive towards Damascus.
01:03:58.200
Those southern rebels reached Damascus first and the Bashar al-Assad regime fell away.
01:04:08.200
There was a sweet justice in this because it was in the southern city of Deirah in February and March of 2011, where the Arab Spring first started.
01:04:18.800
And it was against those protesters that the Assad regime had first violently responded.
01:04:27.620
At the time, they were protesting against terrible mistreatment at the hands of the notorious Muhabbarat of the Syrian state,
01:04:35.860
the intelligence operatives who would kidnap their teenage boys, rape them, castrate them, dump the bodies in garbage cans to make sure everyone knows who was really in charge.
01:04:54.180
They had risen up against the regime in 2011, initially not calling for its downfall, simply asking the president to defang the Muhabbarat.
01:05:06.760
So there was some sweet justice that it was the rebel militias from that part of the country that arrived first in Damascus.
01:05:17.520
Bashar al-Assad was spirited away by a plane to Moscow, where he and his family now live, probably in some luxury.
01:05:23.060
And later that same day, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani and HTS arrived in Damascus as well.
01:05:31.580
And very quickly and very effectively, as they had done, city by city, first in Aleppo, then in Hama, then in Homs,
01:05:39.740
immediately taking the city and immediately putting there the civilian governance structure that they had already perfected in Idlib province.
01:05:47.500
They were ready, one by one, handing over governance to a civilian technocratic body, the Syrian salvation government, and indeed in Damascus as well.
01:06:02.360
The war is over, the time for nom's daguerre are over.
01:06:09.720
He has handed over the running of the government to a civilian outfit led by a man, Muhammad Bashir.
01:06:18.000
He's now, he's the new prime minister of Syria.
01:06:21.020
Ahmed al-Shar'ah himself presides over now a transition process, which he says will be completed by March 2025,
01:06:29.000
or a new constitution, a new Syrian state will now come into being.
01:06:39.200
That is my best attempt to explain what's happened in Syria over the last 14 years.
01:06:48.200
I'm sure, I know, I've left a lot out and people who have been following the civil war with great detail will think,
01:06:54.600
but what about this, what about that, or this is not true, you know, but that's my best attempt.
01:06:59.000
You know, first of all, it's fantastic, and I feel myself that I'm very much illuminated as to everything that's happening,
01:07:11.140
The thing that I find very interesting is the character of al-Jolani,
01:07:15.100
who is very different to what we would think of as a jihadist,
01:07:34.920
First of all, I don't want at all to suggest that I know anything about what's going on inside al-Jolani's head,
01:07:44.240
and I have no idea what's going to happen in Syria.
01:07:48.060
I don't know if al-Jolani is, in fact, now a moderate Islamist,
01:07:52.720
maybe more like a Muslim Brotherhood kind of person than like a Osama bin Laden-inspired global jihadist kind of person.
01:08:04.080
So, you know, what I'm going to say now is me, I'm going to speculate now about this,
01:08:08.040
but I don't want anyone to think that I'm supporting Abu Muhammad al-Jolani.
01:08:13.880
I don't feel in a way that I have a dog in the fight.
01:08:16.260
I am glad that Bashar al-Assad's regime is gone because it was the worst, the worst regime.
01:08:25.320
I don't know about what has taken over in its place and what will emerge.
01:08:31.720
But let's try to imagine, we can put ourselves in Abu Muhammad al-Jolani's head.
01:08:36.660
And he was 19, 20, 21, when he was radicalized by the events that were unfolding at that time,
01:08:44.320
the Second Intifada, 9-11, et cetera, the invasion of Iraq.
01:08:54.520
That's 21 years of constant fighting, including a stint in Abu Ghraib and other black sites in Iraq.
01:09:13.880
ISIS's failure was really fundamental because it revealed just how sick global jihadism is
01:09:22.580
ISIS was the best advertisement against global jihadism that anyone could have ever conceived.
01:09:28.060
Many Muslims, who might have flirted with global jihadism before,
01:09:33.040
recoiled in horror when they saw really what it meant.
01:09:36.680
So Abu Muhammad al-Jolani is watching all this happen and saying,
01:09:50.960
And frankly, this global jihadism thing doesn't seem to be working.
01:10:03.200
You know, people change, especially from their...
01:10:05.460
I mean, what were you doing when you were in your early 20s?
01:10:07.900
And now, over all the last years, meeting people, learning new things,
01:10:12.760
Maybe you're more of a pragmatist or a realist or a middle-aged man.
01:10:26.680
He wants to govern Syria according to the governmental system
01:10:33.300
that he feels provides the greatest degree of justice,
01:10:36.460
which is, of course, an Islamic system in his mind.
01:10:42.840
Does he want to support suicide bombers blowing up the Manchester arena?
01:10:48.920
Does he want to cut off people's heads in the public square
01:11:05.820
Number one, whatever Mohammed al-Jolani was doing in his 20s,
01:11:15.160
I only know a tiny fraction of what Francis got up to in his 20s.
01:11:22.240
this is just a question from somebody who doesn't know anything.
01:11:35.320
and people celebrating and throwing shoes and whatever.
01:11:39.540
And I went, I'm not very old, but I've seen this movie before.
01:12:03.640
And I don't even think we know exactly what it would mean
01:12:06.580
to be a moderate Islamist former global jihadist.
01:12:12.680
Well, we know one of those guys who's your co-host on Conflicted, right?
01:12:18.100
and then turned double agent and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:12:20.500
And now a pretty reasonable guy who does a podcast instead of, you know...
01:12:30.460
But I think for Eamon, it was like he left that entire space.
01:12:41.860
having really, in the crucible of Idlib, changed.
01:12:56.840
he could enter into alliances with other people.
01:13:04.620
They were fighting each other because no one was extreme enough.
01:13:09.760
Radicalism tends to split off into these different...
01:13:18.700
And he got all of those players united around one umbrella.
01:13:37.780
It's practice of militancy away from a battlefield militancy
01:13:51.100
to snuff out cells of ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Idlib.
01:14:05.700
Al-Qaeda hasn't taken a single country in 30 years
01:14:24.120
and deals with an unpleasant truth about the Middle East.
01:14:34.660
but then realised, looked at the lie of the land,
01:14:38.460
looked at the fact that the people he represented
01:14:50.360
that you need a strong man in order to hold Syria together
01:15:03.260
You know, I don't want to say you need a strong man.
01:15:15.420
so many Arab countries, so many Muslim countries
01:15:24.500
That's the only kind of governance that they can have.
01:15:46.040
Until the French mandate was established in Syria,
01:15:59.600
I'm talking, you know, go back to the Bronze Age
01:16:02.540
and that part of the world has always been caught
01:16:13.940
So usually, I mean, that's one thing to understand
01:16:18.140
that what we've seen play out in the last 14 years,
01:16:34.220
But the history of Syria is full of this kind of conflict,
01:16:44.560
then that collapsing as the great powers shift.
01:16:50.500
I'm not saying that what Syria needs is a strong man.
01:17:27.220
the more you realize all of these different wars,
01:17:47.980
because they were fighting that war with Ukraine.