TRIGGERnometry - The Best Syria Breakdown You'll Ever Hear - Thomas Small

00:00:00.760 So the Syrian civil war, how to simplify this?

00:00:04.940 Nobody really wanted Bashar al-Assad to fall.

00:00:07.300 They feared the chaos that would result.

00:00:10.060 So he created a jihadist opposition to himself

00:00:13.320 so that the non-jihadist opposition would be discredited.

00:00:17.680 Jesus Christ.

00:00:18.800 That's the kind of guy we're dealing with, right?

00:00:20.440 Yeah.

00:00:20.880 And that civil war lasted until last week.

00:00:25.540 Both Iran and Russia realized that Bashar al-Assad

00:00:29.140 was not any longer in any way a trustworthy ally,

00:00:32.860 not worth the billions, not worth the blood.

00:00:36.260 And so, let him go.

00:00:41.780 Thomas Small of the Conflicted Podcast, welcome back.

00:00:44.720 It's been so long since we had you on,

00:00:46.960 but Francis and I woke up a few days ago,

00:00:49.920 opened our phones, and we see Bashar al-Assad has been deposed.

00:00:53.200 The Syrian civil war, well, I was going to say it's over,

00:00:56.200 but I don't think it is.

00:00:57.580 No one knows what's going on, really.

00:01:00.040 And you are one of our go-to people for that issue,

00:01:04.320 on those issues.

00:01:05.720 So we want to talk to you about everything that's happened,

00:01:08.200 everything that might happen.

00:01:09.620 But before we do, we thought it's always helpful

00:01:11.600 just to get the basic ground facts established

00:01:14.180 about an issue before we delve into it.

00:01:17.360 So can you tell us first and foremost

00:01:19.640 about what has been happening in Syria

00:01:21.620 over the last 13 years now,

00:01:24.120 and perhaps before that,

00:01:25.080 to give us a very, very kind of surface-level context,

00:01:29.240 which is there's been a civil war going on.

00:01:32.580 Why has that been happening?

00:01:34.240 Okay.

00:01:34.600 So the easiest question in the world to answer.

00:01:37.200 Thank you, Constantin.

00:01:38.160 It's very nice to be back, by the way.

00:01:40.520 Things have changed around here since I was here last.

00:01:42.720 It was just a black room.

00:01:43.740 It did look like an ISIS video last time you were here.

00:01:46.020 It did.

00:01:46.040 It did.

00:01:46.620 That's why you looked more comfortable.

00:01:48.100 Yeah.

00:01:48.280 So the Syrian civil war, how to simplify this.

00:01:54.560 So it comes out of the Arab Spring.

00:01:57.620 Older listeners will remember that at the end of 2010,

00:02:01.080 in December 2010, a man in Tunisia set himself on fire

00:02:05.040 in protest against unfair treatment by the authorities there,

00:02:09.140 and that fire rapidly spread across the Arab world.

00:02:13.980 One of the places that the fire spread to was Syria,

00:02:17.300 which in February of 2011, but really in March of 2011,

00:02:22.280 protests began there, and the protests grew.

00:02:27.280 They were quite sporadic across the country.

00:02:29.440 They never coalesced into one place as they had in, for example, Egypt,

00:02:33.600 where in Cairo, in Tahrir Square, we remember huge protests

00:02:37.980 were calling on the long-term dictator there, Hosni Mubarak, to resign.

00:02:43.320 That didn't really happen in Syria in the same way.

00:02:45.800 They were scattered around the country, but they were organic protests.

00:02:50.060 They broke out in Syria, really against a government,

00:02:54.800 which now we see the images coming out of Syria now that the government has been toppled.

00:03:03.400 A government of extraordinary brutality, really the worst government of all of those notoriously terrible totalitarian governments

00:03:14.000 that the Arab world suffered across the 20th century.

00:03:16.920 So they were fighting this government, and eventually the government did what it does and responded with violence to the protesters.

00:03:30.060 And the violence spread.

00:03:33.120 The violence generated more protests.

00:03:37.580 Eventually, the violence turned off members of the army of the government, the Syrian army,

00:03:44.540 who then defected from the army, joined the protest,

00:03:48.320 then organized themselves into a kind of an opposition army, the Free Syrian Army, it was called,

00:03:56.780 and clashes began between the government and the opposition.

00:04:01.580 A military, a civil war broke out, really, at that point.

00:04:04.780 And that civil war lasted until last week.

00:04:11.020 And, you know, in the meantime, what happened?

00:04:14.580 My God, what didn't happen?

00:04:16.860 Foreign powers got involved on both sides.

00:04:21.480 Jihadism became a major problem in that conflict.

00:04:25.280 I think people know, most of all, ISIS, the specter of ISIS grew up out of this conflict,

00:04:33.260 causing problems not just there, but elsewhere, including in the West.

00:04:39.060 Terrorist attacks, either directly or indirectly, related to ISIS, were carried out.

00:04:45.300 The Russian state got involved militarily, as did the Iranian state,

00:04:50.420 while proxies of other states, let's say, allied with the opposition, fought them.

00:04:57.960 And in time, all the sides, more or less, came together

00:05:03.380 to create a really astonishing coalition of erstwhile enemies to fight ISIS.

00:05:11.580 And that pushed back ISIS and effectively defeated it,

00:05:16.040 corralled it into one area in the middle, you know, around the Euphrates.

00:05:19.480 And more or less snuffed it out.

00:05:23.280 And then, from that point onwards, more or less,

00:05:27.520 things remained in a sort of stasis until two weeks ago.

00:05:32.460 It's even saying it, though, I must say, guys, saying it like that,

00:05:35.440 it's like I realize it's so oversimplified, what I've just said,

00:05:38.400 because the Syrian civil war is the greatest story,

00:05:42.260 just in terms of epic geopolitical political narratives,

00:05:46.100 the greatest story, you know, in the last 50 years.

00:05:48.520 And no doubt books will be written about it that will make for a very dramatic,

00:05:53.120 if quite heartbreaking, reading.

00:05:55.880 So that, Precy, is a gross oversimplification.

00:05:59.120 It is.

00:05:59.620 And you've condensed probably 20 years' worth of study into one two-minute answer.

00:06:08.980 But one thing you alluded to there, and I think it's anyone who's looked into this even for a moment

00:06:15.680 couldn't possibly deny this.

00:06:18.300 It is a conflagration of, like, five or six different geopolitical actors in one place,

00:06:25.100 all acting in their own interests.

00:06:27.380 So, again, this is going to be, you know, very difficult to summarize in the brief answer.

00:06:32.500 But can you just give our listeners and viewers a brief overview of the other players

00:06:38.720 who are coming in from the outside and what they all want from this?

00:06:41.500 So you've got Russia, you've got Turkey, you've got the United States,

00:06:45.300 you've got Israel, and you've got Iran. 0.72

00:06:47.620 Have I missed any other big...

00:06:48.900 Well, and you have Qatar in the Gulf,

00:06:50.820 and then maybe more generally the non-Qatar GCC states led, let's say, by Saudi Arabia mainly.

00:06:57.740 So that's a big player as well.

00:06:59.580 So what do each of those different players want in Syria?

00:07:03.580 What do they want or what did they want?

00:07:05.240 What did they want?

00:07:05.940 Because interests change.

00:07:07.640 That's one of the interesting things about the Syrian civil war.

00:07:11.180 I think to answer that question, I have to say a little bit more about the Syrian government

00:07:15.020 that Bashar al-Assad was the president of.

00:07:18.120 So the Syrian state was, you know, it was part of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years.

00:07:27.080 Eventually, during the First World War, the Ottoman Empire collapsed,

00:07:31.040 was defeated by Britain and its allies.

00:07:34.600 And in the wake of that collapse, the French were given a mandate over provinces of the Ottoman Empire

00:07:42.260 that eventually coalesced into the modern nation state of Syria.

00:07:45.420 In 1944, during the Second World War, that mandate, that state was wrested from the French,

00:07:54.380 from Vichy France, and eventually emerged as an independent state, which was extremely unstable.

00:08:01.580 It was immediately unstable.

00:08:03.060 And over the next 20 years, it suffered many, many coups,

00:08:06.720 while at the same time, a very oppressive security apparatus was being built up.

00:08:12.840 Who built up that security apparatus?

00:08:15.120 Nazis, to some extent, who had fled to Damascus after the Second World War.

00:08:20.220 Communist, East German sort of communist operatives working really for Egypt,

00:08:26.480 which at one point united with Syria.

00:08:28.260 Syria, an oppressive security apparatus was being built up,

00:08:32.760 which was already in place when Hafez al-Assad came to power there in 1970.

00:08:39.480 He was the leader of the Ba'ath Party, which had come to power seven years earlier in a coup.

00:08:44.960 But he took over the country and really upped its oppressive security apparatus further

00:08:51.720 and turned Syria into a Ba'athist, that's a sort of vaguely left-wing,

00:08:59.220 Marxist-Leninist, vanguard, revolutionary state, totalitarian, based on his power.

00:09:07.540 And he established this state, which existed then until, you know, last week.

00:09:13.160 So then in the year 2000, after Hafez al-Assad died, his son Bashar al-Assad came to power.

00:09:18.680 Now, Bashar al-Assad is a fascinating character.

00:09:20.720 He was not the eldest son of Hafez al-Assad.

00:09:24.140 The eldest son of Hafez al-Assad, who had been groomed to take over, his name was Basil,

00:09:30.780 and he was the real deal.

00:09:32.500 If you're a dictator, you want a son like Basil.

00:09:34.960 He was, you know, he had down to his knee.

00:09:36.920 He was a real tough guy, right?

00:09:39.020 Sadly, in 1994, he died in a car crash.

00:09:41.940 And all eyes then shifted to the younger son, Bashar al-Assad,

00:09:45.420 who at the time was in London, of all places, studying to be an eye doctor.

00:09:50.720 And by all accounts was a soft-spoken, rather meek kind of guy, had not sort of spread around

00:09:58.680 very widely in London that he was the son of a dictator in Syria.

00:10:02.740 But, you know, the father came calling.

00:10:05.760 He was whisked home.

00:10:07.180 He was forced through the military.

00:10:08.700 He was turned into a Syrian leader.

00:10:11.600 And in 2000, he becomes president.

00:10:14.560 Now, at that point, something happened called the Damascus Spring,

00:10:19.500 when all eyes thought maybe this new young, he was only in his early 30s,

00:10:24.120 this new young president will change things in Syria.

00:10:27.000 And briefly, people thought that might happen.

00:10:29.960 But then, in the context of 9-11 and the launching of the war on terror by the United States,

00:10:35.440 the global coalition against the war on terror, Bashar al-Assad felt threatened because,

00:10:41.160 well, for obvious reasons.

00:10:43.500 The state of Syria had long been an ally of Iran.

00:10:48.660 Iran now part of the axis of evil, according to the United States.

00:10:52.900 Syria didn't know would it be next. 0.90

00:10:55.480 When America invaded Iraq, Syria really thought maybe we are next.

00:10:59.160 So, Bashar al-Assad started to play the games that his father had always played,

00:11:04.520 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.

00:11:11.180 The same old story, as a result of which, in the mid-2000s, the country was sanctioned.

00:11:17.940 It was very much kind of put out in the cold by the American-led world order. 0.53

00:11:22.980 And that's where it stayed until around 2009-2010.

00:11:30.720 A rehabilitation effort began.

00:11:32.900 People tried to reach out to Syria.

00:11:35.020 Again, the West did.

00:11:36.460 The GCC, countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

00:11:39.880 Turkey did. 0.87

00:11:41.400 Basically, all the players in the region and in the world looked to Syria and to Bashar al-Assad

00:11:46.300 and thought, we've got to rehabilitate relations with him and bring him back on side.

00:11:50.980 And that's where things were in early 2011 when the Arab Spring arrived in Syria.

00:11:57.880 So, initially, nobody wanted Bashar al-Assad to go.

00:12:03.660 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

00:12:14.420 of Syria, answer some of the demands that the protesters were leveling at the government.

00:12:22.860 At the same time, one by one, many other Arab states had already fallen to the protests.

00:12:28.740 Syria was the last major Arab country for the Arab Spring to come to.

00:12:34.200 And so, the West, its eyes were all over the place.

00:12:38.160 It just basically couldn't deal with Syria. 0.85

00:12:41.320 It was dealing with Libya.

00:12:42.380 It launched a war there.

00:12:43.280 It was dealing with Egypt. 0.80

00:12:44.860 A long-term dictator had already fallen.

00:12:46.840 Saudi Arabia was dealing with Bahrain, where protests had happened and where the GCC sent

00:12:51.440 in troops to quell the protests.

00:12:53.080 So, Syria, in a way, was kind of not the focus of attention.

00:12:56.480 And so, everyone was just hoping that Bashar al-Assad would reform.

00:13:00.300 So, that's where the international community was at when the Arab Spring broke out.

00:13:05.200 However, Bashar al-Assad and his state security apparatus responded with violence, continued

00:13:10.880 to respond with greater violence, did not do much, did not really do anything really to

00:13:16.180 reform things.

00:13:17.280 They just returned to the old Hafez al-Assad playbook of attacking the Syrian people with 1.00

00:13:22.300 violence.

00:13:22.680 So, by the end of 2011, things had changed.

00:13:27.280 Turkey had turned against Bashar al-Assad.

00:13:30.780 Qatar, which had been a very big supporter of Bashar al-Assad, had turned against Assad

00:13:35.560 and decided that they would, using Al Jazeera mainly, which is a Qatar-owned satellite news

00:13:41.080 channel, that they would take advantage of the destabilization there, as they had in other

00:13:45.080 places around the Middle East during the Arab Spring, to support the opposition to Assad,

00:13:51.100 hoping that maybe, if they were supporting the opposition, that when the Assad government

00:13:54.420 fell, they would be in prime position to have great influence in the country.

00:14:00.060 And the United States finally, finally, came out and said, and Barack Obama, the president

00:14:07.020 at the time, came out and said, Bashar al-Assad must go.

00:14:09.440 This was relatively late.

00:14:11.880 It was clear that the Americans didn't really want Bashar al-Assad to go.

00:14:17.180 They didn't know what to do.

00:14:18.160 They did not want the Syrian government to fall because of the chaos that would inevitably

00:14:23.240 result from that, given that just across the border in Iraq, there was great instability

00:14:29.800 as a result of the American invasion there.

00:14:31.800 The Iranian, you know, supported terrorist campaign that started against the American 0.86

00:14:37.620 troops there, et cetera.

00:14:39.280 The country had devolved into chaos.

00:14:41.840 Given the fact that across the other border in Lebanon, there was great instability, largely

00:14:47.520 as a result of chickenery by the Syrian government, which had always had a big role to play in

00:14:52.640 Lebanon, Hezbollah causing problems, et cetera.

00:14:54.920 So it was a powder keg part of the world.

00:14:57.400 You know, Israel's just there as well.

00:14:58.800 There's a long border with Turkey.

00:15:01.520 Turkey has problems in that area with Kurdish terrorists.

00:15:04.400 So nobody really wanted Bashar al-Assad to fall.

00:15:07.820 They feared the chaos that would result.

00:15:10.840 So that's where things were, you know, by the end of 2011, beginning of 2012.

00:15:17.100 The Syrian civil war had started.

00:15:19.880 That civil war was mainly, let's say, a legitimate civil war between a government and its army

00:15:26.300 and opposition forces and its army, if you like.

00:15:30.980 Jihadism had not yet played a big part in the war.

00:15:35.760 And so everyone was basically waiting to see what would happen.

00:15:40.680 Iran, which had long been an ally of the Assad regime, but which had tried to make a name

00:15:48.940 for itself as a voice of the Arab people to bolster its own reputation in the Arab world,

00:15:54.500 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

00:16:06.480 more associated with Islamist revolutionary agitation, which aligned with Iran's own

00:16:14.100 Shia Islamist orientation.

00:16:17.580 Iran found itself in a slightly tricky situation.

00:16:22.860 Al Jazeera was broadcasting the brutal crackdowns, the brutal violence that was going on in Syria.

00:16:27.160 The regime was perpetrating on the protesters.

00:16:30.400 Iran thought, do we want to be associated with this?

00:16:33.700 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.

00:16:43.320 And so it knew how to snuff out, violently, protests.

00:16:48.640 So behind the scenes, it was advising the Assad government on how to deal with the protesters

00:16:53.780 based on its own experience doing so.

00:16:55.500 And so eventually, Iran became openly supportive of the Assad regime and wanted to keep it in

00:17:03.280 place.

00:17:04.240 That especially became the case when jihadism did enter into the scene.

00:17:09.100 How did jihadism enter the scene?

00:17:11.520 Very complicated question.

00:17:13.220 One way it entered the scene for sure is that at one point, Bashar al-Assad released from the

00:17:20.000 prisons of Syria, including and primarily the notorious Sednaya prison that we're all now

00:17:25.700 seeing images from as the rebels liberate the prison and all these just really horrible

00:17:31.840 scenes of unspeakable, like something out of, literally out of the concentration camps of

00:17:36.120 the Holocaust. 0.58

00:17:37.280 Terrible scenes.

00:17:39.940 The Sednaya prison had housed a lot of global jihadist fighters, which the regime wanted nothing 0.51

00:17:49.320 to do with.

00:17:50.520 Bashar al-Assad released them as he had previously released them 10 years earlier or so, or eight

00:17:56.920 years earlier, so that they would go to Iraq and fight the Americans there. 0.95

00:18:00.240 He did the same thing again, only this time hoping that they would fight against his regime

00:18:05.080 and therefore tar the opposition with the brush of jihadism.

00:18:12.560 So he created a jihadist opposition to himself so that the non-jihadist opposition would be discredited.

00:18:20.280 Jesus Christ.

00:18:21.360 That's the kind of guy we're dealing with, right? 0.96

00:18:23.380 That's mental.

00:18:25.160 It's what happened.

00:18:26.060 It's what happened.

00:18:26.600 Now, jihadism tends like a moth, like moths to a flame to attract other jihadists.

00:18:32.800 And in Iraq in 2011, a new offshoot or a kind of reformed, a new version of an old enemy

00:18:43.180 there of the United States, at least an enemy of the United States, which had been Al-Qaeda

00:18:47.120 in Iraq, and then became known as the Islamic State in Iraq, sent to Syria.

00:18:55.640 This is the sort of, the Syrian civil war is already happening.

00:18:58.340 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.

00:19:08.160 He sent a Syrian man back to Syria to start their assail, an offshoot of Islamic State 0.99

00:19:17.180 in Iraq there.

00:19:18.580 That man was known by the nom d'agir of Abu Muhammad al-Jolani.

00:19:24.220 Now, flash forward, that is the man who now sits at the top of power in Syria.

00:19:28.940 So that was in late 2011, January 2012.

00:19:33.540 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.

00:19:52.940 All they did know is that it was extremely effective on the battlefield, because the Syrians 1.00

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.

00:20:16.080 The Syrian army hadn't fought a war in decades.

00:20:18.520 They weren't actually good at fighting the opposition.

00:20:21.320 They were, in fact, peaceful protesters.

00:20:22.840 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

00:20:35.200 began fighting very effectively.

00:20:37.720 And so, outside actors initially supported them, from the Gulf mainly.

00:20:42.960 Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates to some extent.

00:20:45.520 They were supporting the Nusra Front, and other jihadist groups, and more and more jihadist

00:20:51.560 groups were proliferating.

00:20:54.280 Now, in 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi comes out and says, the Nusra Front is an ISIS or an ISI,

00:21:03.560 an Islamic State of Iraq, affiliate in Syria.

00:21:06.300 And he says, and I announce now the formation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS.

00:21:12.560 And I am the caliph of this new Islamic State.

00:21:17.860 Well, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani in Syria said, well, no one told me about this.

00:21:23.740 I don't want to be actually, you know, subservient to this guy.

00:21:26.800 I'm a Syrian.

00:21:27.660 He's not a Syrian. 1.00

00:21:28.780 I want to, I'm actually really dedicated to overthrowing Bashar al-Assad.

00:21:33.920 He's dedicated to starting up this caliphate. 0.99

00:21:36.760 So there was a clash.

00:21:38.680 Openly, Jolani denounced this and said, no, no, no, no, I'm independent.

00:21:41.740 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

00:21:54.780 affiliate.

00:21:55.800 At that time, Baghdadi was an affiliate of al-Qaeda.

00:22:00.200 ISIS was kind of a branch of al-Qaeda.

00:22:03.240 But al-Qaeda was already realizing that this Baghdadi guy was pursuing a different aim from 0.59

00:22:08.060 them.

00:22:08.360 So they didn't really like him.

00:22:10.300 So Jolani took advantage of that to get them to sanction him as an al-Qaeda branch on its

00:22:14.640 own.

00:22:16.360 Now, that put him in a huge problem.

00:22:18.860 A lot of his fighters defected from him to ISIS.

00:22:22.100 They supported Baghdadi. 0.52

00:22:23.700 And then for years, a huge intra-jihadist war broke out in Syria between the Nusra Front,

00:22:31.320 ISIS, other jihadist organizations.

00:22:34.020 They were all fighting each other.

00:22:35.940 And as we remember, ISIS came out on top for a long time.

00:22:40.580 It grew and grew.

00:22:42.360 It conquered huge swathes of territory, not just in Syria.

00:22:46.040 It took the very important Iraqi city of Mosul, causing unspeakable death and destruction

00:22:51.960 as it went.

00:22:52.980 We all remember the images.

00:22:54.000 It was truly jihadism at its rock-bottom worst.

00:23:00.020 Unspeakable brutality.

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.

00:23:09.240 Other things were happening.

00:23:10.240 If we rewind a couple of years, so now we have the Assad regime is attacking, the protesters 0.96

00:23:17.600 is attacking these new jihadist actors.

00:23:19.840 The war is becoming very violent.

00:23:22.680 The Assad regime employs chemical weapons against the protesters.

00:23:28.680 This happened.

00:23:30.160 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

00:23:51.020 against its enemies.

00:23:53.620 They did employ these chemical weapons.

00:23:55.320 That's clear.

00:23:56.580 I mean, we have now in the last two weeks seen the factories that produced the chemical weapons 0.96

00:24:01.300 laid bare.

00:24:02.920 We'll talk about this later.

00:24:03.860 Israel has destroyed them. 0.82

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.

00:24:29.620 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 0.98

00:24:49.020 turning point in the history of recent years.

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

00:25:15.860 powers to rival it at all.

00:25:17.960 And America just seemed to straddle the globe doing whatever it wished, wherever it wished.

00:25:23.860 That was never really true, as we saw in Iraq.

00:25:28.220 Certainly didn't achieve much there.

00:25:29.780 Afghanistan didn't achieve much there.

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.

00:25:48.180 Well, that took a knock in Iraq.

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 1.00

00:26:01.740 of Egypt, were toppled.

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

00:26:23.860 doesn't believe that that will work.

00:26:26.320 That changes perception.

00:26:29.760 Suddenly, other players can get involved, especially Russia.

00:26:35.720 So Russia had long been involved in Syria.

00:26:39.940 The Soviet Union had long been an ally of the Syrian government, of the Syrian state, even

00:26:45.780 before Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970.

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

00:27:24.240 the Mediterranean.

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

00:27:35.880 many allies.

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 0.51

00:27:47.020 Colonel Gaddafi's state.

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

00:28:18.320 of Latakia, also on the west coast of Syria.

00:28:21.480 So they did intervene.

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 0.94

00:29:01.280 got involved in Syria.

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

00:29:12.360 by Vladimir Putin's former chef.

00:29:15.680 It's a very strange, only in Russia, really.

00:29:19.540 We talked about Pregosian on the show.

00:29:21.420 Yeah, Pregosian.

00:29:21.960 The late.

00:29:22.820 The late Evgeny Pregosian.

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

00:29:41.660 the center of the desert.

00:29:44.640 Tremendous fighting went on there, and the Wagner group prevailed, managed to capture 0.99

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.

00:30:05.880 We might talk about why that is later.

00:30:07.700 So that's Russia. 0.81

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.

00:30:26.700 It's not going to intervene.

00:30:27.640 Okay.

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.

00:31:28.720 He wasn't inquired, he wasn't quite sure.

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 0.99

00:31:44.600 support the Assad regime.

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

00:32:08.440 of Assad's counter-revolutionary aims.

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

00:32:47.800 growing and growing in strength.

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

00:33:22.620 regime and the opposition forces.

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

00:33:48.980 you like.

00:33:49.780 And basically, all of the different forces fighting the regime were pushed into this

00:33:53.920 province.

00:33:54.660 Not all of them, but a lot of them, because we haven't even talked about the bloody Kurds. 1.00

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

00:34:03.300 else, valiantly.

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

00:34:17.440 into Idlib province.

00:34:18.880 And there it was in 2017, more or less there.

00:34:23.120 And now, in fact, I take it back, we do have to talk about the Kurds, because around that 0.93

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 0.97

00:35:00.320 that occurred during the course of the First World War, were left without a nation state

00:35:04.820 of their own.

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. 0.84

00:36:33.400 And there was lots of squabbling over land, you know, the border and stuff.

00:36:38.500 So they weren't friends at the time.

00:36:41.680 And so the Kurds used Syria as a base to attack Turkey. 0.65

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

00:37:10.620 ISIS.

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.

00:37:22.300 It's basically a basket case.

00:37:23.880 This threatens the national interests of Turkey, the empowerment of these Kurds. 1.00

00:37:29.500 So in 2017, Turkey invades Syria from the north and empowers a network of Sunni, mainly 0.99

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 0.83

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.

00:38:15.340 So that's why Turkey got involved.

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 0.93

00:38:26.500 say, defeated.

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

00:38:44.340 brutal war in Mosul.

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.

00:39:09.520 What's going to happen to them?

00:39:11.520 And Turkey's has positions in the north.

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

00:39:32.860 now been forced into Idlib province.

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

00:40:02.960 kind of, kind of calmed down by 2019.

00:40:08.280 And for five years, more or less, they remained so.

00:40:14.740 Okay.

00:40:15.580 Now, we have to shift focus to Idlib province.

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,

00:40:37.400 surprising everyone.

00:40:39.600 Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, that's not his real name.

00:40:42.620 It's a nom de guerre.

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. 0.57

00:41:08.820 It looms above the lowlands, stretching off into the Levant, so it's very strategically

00:41:13.820 important.

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

00:41:33.020 positions.

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

00:42:12.080 his son was born, Ahmed.

00:42:14.100 So, Ahmed al-Shar'ah, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, was born in Riyadh in 1982.

00:42:19.820 He's a millennial.

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 0.75

00:42:45.500 minister of Israel, made a big move.

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, 1.00

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

00:43:48.080 in Afghanistan.

00:43:50.580 So, Ahmed Ashara, this man, this boy, he's 18, 19 now.

00:43:56.180 He's watching Al Jazeera.

00:43:57.920 It is inspiring him to get involved.

00:44:00.960 He starts going to the mosque more regularly.

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, 0.82

00:44:14.560 to Iraq to fight the occupying forces there.

00:44:18.480 He was imprisoned.

00:44:20.140 He spent time in Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison where Americans tortured detainees.

00:44:26.280 He was eventually released.

00:44:28.400 At some point, it's not exactly clear when, he encountered Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was

00:44:34.540 also in prison.

00:44:35.460 He may have met him in prison.

00:44:36.640 He may have already known him.

00:44:37.780 We're not quite sure.

00:44:38.720 But when he was released, he rapidly rose up the ranks and became a lieutenant of Abu Bakr

00:44:46.500 al-Baghdadi, who then sent him to Syria.

00:44:47.920 So that's his background.

00:44:50.060 Now we're in 2017.

00:44:51.560 He and a huge number of jihadist forces have been forced into Idlib province, where, to

00:44:58.640 some extent, they begin fighting each other.

00:45:01.200 He has come out.

00:45:02.500 He came out in 2016.

00:45:04.060 He already broke with Baghdadi, remember.

00:45:05.860 He didn't want to be a part of ISIS.

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

00:45:17.600 strategy of global jihad.

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 0.99

00:45:32.480 Islamist state for Syria.

00:45:34.580 That became their ambition.

00:45:36.560 He did the rounds.

00:45:38.140 He worked the news.

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.

00:45:48.380 Okay.

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.

00:45:55.860 It remains there.

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

00:46:50.020 American counterterrorism efforts.

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

00:47:18.060 America get rid of them. 0.76

00:47:19.860 It served his purposes.

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.

00:47:28.880 Okay, maybe he had.

00:47:30.940 I don't know.

00:47:31.440 We can talk about that later.

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

00:47:53.920 own global jihadist ambitions, whatever.

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.

00:48:20.100 They set up ministries.

00:48:21.880 When the COVID-19 crisis broke out, they created a vaccination program.

00:48:29.840 They imposed social distancing.

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.

00:48:40.520 Now, was he or is he a liberal?

00:48:43.540 No.

00:48:43.980 No.

00:48:45.040 Were there some protests?

00:48:47.620 Was anyone opposed to what the Salvation Government and HTS were doing there?

00:48:52.240 Oh, yes.

00:48:53.500 Was there a prison system there?

00:48:55.140 Oh, yes.

00:48:56.100 Was torture going on in that prison system?

00:48:58.840 It seems that that was the case.

00:49:00.520 So I do not want to pretend like he set up a little Switzerland or something there in Idlib

00:49:05.060 province.

00:49:05.520 Not at all.

00:49:06.080 But he did provide effective governance, certainly compared to what the Syrian people had been 1.00

00:49:12.660 experiencing during the war and even before.

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

00:50:03.240 by a now vaguely moderate Islamist government.

00:50:08.360 You can see that this became a kind of crucible for what Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, Ahmad al-Shar'ah, 0.78

00:50:14.700 thought might be feasible for all of Syria.

00:50:19.120 Okay?

00:50:19.460 So this transformation occurred.

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. 0.55

00:50:38.940 We have to normalize relations with him.

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.

00:51:18.820 It was just fixed.

00:51:20.280 Turkey definitely wanted a solution to be found.

00:51:24.280 They had invaded the country. 0.76

00:51:25.680 They'd created this buffer zone.

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? 1.00

00:51:43.100 It was happening in Turkey.

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.

00:52:04.460 A solution needed to be found.

00:52:06.520 And so Erdogan, working together with the Gulf and these other actors, was reaching out to Assad.

00:52:11.340 Let's get around the table.

00:52:14.180 President Assad now, and ultimately I don't know what was going on inside his head.

00:52:21.360 No one probably knows.

00:52:22.640 Those who do know might be dead now.

00:52:25.220 Maybe one day we'll find out.

00:52:26.480 We can only guess.

00:52:27.340 But President Assad began to play, once again, the sort of games that the Assad regime always played. 0.69

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.

00:52:52.960 You cause chaos around yourself.

00:52:55.180 Everyone's confused.

00:52:56.620 Well, you're never ultimately bending your own egoic kind of structure.

00:53:02.360 That was sort of in play.

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?

00:53:35.300 They're on either sides of this war.

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.

00:53:50.040 They were like, what's this guy doing?

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. 0.76

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. 0.90

00:54:32.000 That his own regime's ability to prosecute the civil war, to project power, was extremely limited.

00:54:40.040 The Syrian army had suffered great attrition.

00:54:43.300 There had been a lot of desertion from it.

00:54:45.140 The whole regime depended on Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia to stay afloat. 0.71

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. 0.51

00:55:06.900 That's what he was hoping.

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.

00:56:33.000 These captagon tablets have shown up here.

00:56:35.580 Captagon, which is a very, very harmful amphetamine.

00:56:39.400 It kind of deranges the mind.

00:56:40.860 It's a very bad drug.

00:56:42.820 And since the fall of the regime, these captagon factories have been revealed. 1.00

00:56:47.680 They've been destroyed.

00:56:48.440 You can see images.

00:56:49.440 Millions of pills, you know.

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.

00:57:04.560 It's a big part of the story.

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.

00:57:16.320 And he could say, well, okay, you help me out.

00:57:18.380 I'll take the drugs away.

00:57:19.560 So that's another dimension to this amazing story.

00:57:22.480 Okay.

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. 0.97

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. 0.88

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.

01:00:32.400 Now, Julani is independent of Turkey.

01:00:34.540 A lot of reports say that HTS is Turkish-backed.

01:00:39.780 That can be overstated.

01:00:41.320 It's very independent.

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.

01:00:51.340 So they have a close working relationship.

01:00:53.080 They have a shared enemy in Bashar al-Assad.

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.

01:01:21.620 Julani's no fool.

01:01:22.920 He looks out at the region. 0.85

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.

01:02:07.200 They said, this is our chance.

01:02:08.480 Let's go for it.

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.

01:02:29.680 Okay, we'll go on.

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.

01:02:54.960 So they got to Hama before you knew it.

01:02:59.140 They'd taken it as well.

01:03:00.640 On to the next city, Homs.

01:03:01.900 Meanwhile, the Kurdish forces over in the east looked up and thought, what's going on?

01:03:08.100 Let's go.

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.

01:03:23.620 We haven't talked about them.

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.

01:04:25.580 What were they protesting against?

01:04:27.620 At the time, they were protesting against terrible mistreatment at the hands of the notorious Muhabbarat of the Syrian state, 0.78

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. 0.83

01:04:53.020 Terrible things.

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.

01:05:04.200 But that was their initial goal.

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. 0.87

01:05:14.060 And the regime just faded away.

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.

01:06:00.060 Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, who now says,

01:06:02.360 The war is over, the time for nom's daguerre are over.

01:06:07.460 I am Ahmed al-Shar'ah.

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,

01:07:07.520 and I now understand what's going on.

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,

01:07:21.040 in that he's a jihadist, yet a pragmatist,

01:07:25.400 which is an interesting combination.

01:07:28.200 Can we talk about that a little bit?

01:07:29.540 Let's talk about that.

01:07:31.000 I mean, try to imagine.

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.

01:07:47.240 None at all.

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.

01:07:59.400 I don't know if that's really true.

01:08:01.540 He says that it's true.

01:08:02.980 I don't know if that's true.

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.

01:08:12.100 I'm supporting, I don't really know.

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.

01:08:23.660 So I'm glad about that.

01:08:25.320 I don't know about what has taken over in its place and what will emerge.

01:08:30.780 I really don't know.

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.

01:08:47.680 He goes to Iraq.

01:08:48.640 He fights from 2003 to 2024.

01:08:54.520 That's 21 years of constant fighting, including a stint in Abu Ghraib and other black sites in Iraq.

01:09:03.440 So he has really seen it, right?

01:09:06.620 But what has he seen?

01:09:07.780 He's seen Al-Qaeda fail.

01:09:11.500 ISIS really fail.

01:09:13.880 ISIS's failure was really fundamental because it revealed just how sick global jihadism is

01:09:20.260 when taken to its logical extent.

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,

01:09:41.240 you know what?

01:09:41.640 I'm a Syrian. 1.00

01:09:43.320 I hate this fucking Assad regime. 1.00

01:09:47.400 I want the Assad regime to fall. 1.00

01:09:49.880 That's what I want.

01:09:50.960 And frankly, this global jihadism thing doesn't seem to be working.

01:09:58.620 He's now in his late 30s.

01:10:00.400 He's in his early 40s.

01:10:01.980 He's changing.

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,

01:10:11.260 no doubt your views have changed.

01:10:12.760 Maybe you're more of a pragmatist or a realist or a middle-aged man.

01:10:17.120 It's what happens.

01:10:18.780 So maybe that's what's happened to Jolani.

01:10:21.540 He's just grown up.

01:10:23.140 He wants to be effective, i.e. a pragmatist.

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.

01:10:39.940 But does he want to fight America?

01:10:42.840 Does he want to support suicide bombers blowing up the Manchester arena? 0.97

01:10:48.920 Does he want to cut off people's heads in the public square 0.91

01:10:52.180 and everyone's filming it on their phones? 0.96

01:10:53.800 Does he want that?

01:10:55.160 Maybe he knows that doesn't work.

01:10:58.060 That leads to disaster.

01:11:00.120 So maybe he is now pragmatic.

01:11:02.680 Makes sense to me.

01:11:03.840 Let me push back on two things you said there.

01:11:05.820 Number one, whatever Mohammed al-Jolani was doing in his 20s,

01:11:09.220 it's not the same as what Francis did.

01:11:11.080 I can promise you that.

01:11:12.600 More unspeakable acts of horror.

01:11:15.160 I only know a tiny fraction of what Francis got up to in his 20s.

01:11:19.540 But the second thing that, look,

01:11:22.240 this is just a question from somebody who doesn't know anything.

01:11:25.500 But I went on my Twitter the other day

01:11:29.260 and I saw a clip of a statue of Hafez al-Assad

01:11:33.320 being pulled down by ropes

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.

01:11:45.000 And so have you.

01:11:46.360 Saddam Hussein statues.

01:11:47.120 Saddam Hussein statues.

01:11:49.120 And a moderate jihadi from ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

01:11:57.260 Like, that's a hard sell.

01:12:00.320 I know.

01:12:00.960 I know.

01:12:01.680 I mean...

01:12:02.040 That's a hard sell to me.

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.

01:12:10.400 We don't know what that means.

01:12:12.680 Well, we know one of those guys who's your co-host on Conflicted, right?

01:12:15.820 Eamon Dean, former Al-Qaeda guy,

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...

01:12:23.960 Pretty reasonable.

01:12:24.560 Yeah, he's wrong about some things, obviously.

01:12:28.780 So it can happen.

01:12:30.460 But I think for Eamon, it was like he left that entire space.

01:12:35.620 Whereas this guy won.

01:12:37.460 He's now in charge of a country.

01:12:39.500 Yeah, but he is in charge of that country,

01:12:41.860 having really, in the crucible of Idlib, changed.

01:12:45.880 I mean, he did change.

01:12:48.020 He had to become more pragmatic.

01:12:50.600 Absolutely.

01:12:51.340 And it paid dividends for him.

01:12:52.900 He realized that by becoming less extreme,

01:12:56.840 he could enter into alliances with other people.

01:13:00.940 The Islamist movement, the jihadist movement,

01:13:02.680 was constantly splitting into factions.

01:13:04.620 They were fighting each other because no one was extreme enough.

01:13:07.700 We know how radicals work.

01:13:09.760 Radicalism tends to split off into these different...

01:13:12.880 I know, who's more radical?

01:13:14.340 You're not radical enough.

01:13:15.360 Oh, I'm fighting.

01:13:16.640 He saw that happen.

01:13:17.620 He overcame that.

01:13:18.700 And he got all of those players united around one umbrella.

01:13:22.260 That's an achievement.

01:13:23.440 He created the Syrian Salvation Government,

01:13:25.860 which provides governance to a land.

01:13:28.480 Technocratic, competent governance.

01:13:30.220 He shifted HTS's sort of whole...

01:13:36.080 It's sort of...

01:13:37.000 What's the word?

01:13:37.780 It's practice of militancy away from a battlefield militancy

01:13:42.260 towards a policing kind of militancy,

01:13:45.280 becoming themselves a counterterrorism outfit,

01:13:48.700 using all the tools of modern counterterrorism

01:13:51.100 to snuff out cells of ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Idlib.

01:13:54.680 He did that.

01:13:55.360 So he will have seen that this works.

01:14:00.040 And now he has taken the country.

01:14:03.240 ISIS didn't take the country.

01:14:05.700 Al-Qaeda hasn't taken a single country in 30 years 0.81

01:14:09.580 of trying very hard to do so.

01:14:12.440 So he might be thinking,

01:14:14.860 well, pragmatism is what works.

01:14:19.020 You're talking about pragmatism that works.

01:14:21.560 This is a very unpleasant question

01:14:24.120 and deals with an unpleasant truth about the Middle East.

01:14:26.680 But there was a moment at one point

01:14:29.440 where Assad maybe flirted with a more liberal

01:14:32.420 kind of approach to governance,

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

01:14:41.540 were only, I think, 12% of the population.

01:14:43.900 The Alawites, the minority of them. 1.00

01:14:45.960 Absolutely.

01:14:47.120 Is the reality, unpleasant as it may be,

01:14:50.360 that you need a strong man in order to hold Syria together

01:14:55.360 with all of these disparate groups

01:14:57.640 who, to put it bluntly, hate each other?

01:15:03.260 You know, I don't want to say you need a strong man.

01:15:08.280 That argument has been levelled so many times

01:15:12.140 and one result of that argument is that

01:15:15.420 so many Arab countries, so many Muslim countries

01:15:18.560 have languished under the rule of strong men

01:15:21.240 on the belief that that's what they deserve.

01:15:24.500 That's the only kind of governance that they can have.

01:15:27.440 I don't really like that argument.

01:15:28.520 I certainly don't know if that's the case.

01:15:32.900 However, I do know that historically speaking,

01:15:38.040 Syria has been more often than not 1.00

01:15:40.840 a zone of great power conflict.

01:15:44.900 No question.

01:15:46.040 Until the French mandate was established in Syria,

01:15:50.920 no single government had governed,

01:15:53.820 no political organization had governed

01:15:56.120 that particular land mass at all.

01:15:59.600 I'm talking, you know, go back to the Bronze Age 0.99

01:16:02.540 and that part of the world has always been caught

01:16:05.360 between empires, usually between empires

01:16:08.500 based in Anatolia, i.e. Turkey, Egypt,

01:16:12.340 and Mesopotamia and Persia.

01:16:13.940 So usually, I mean, that's one thing to understand

01:16:16.980 about the Syrian civil war,

01:16:18.140 that what we've seen play out in the last 14 years,

01:16:20.200 it's horrible.

01:16:22.120 Is it historically unprecedented?

01:16:24.760 Sadly, it is not.

01:16:26.440 What makes it historically unique

01:16:28.860 is the degree of technological sophistication

01:16:32.340 that was brought to bear in the conflict.

01:16:34.220 But the history of Syria is full of this kind of conflict,

01:16:38.060 periods of relative stability

01:16:40.100 based on other powers propping up

01:16:43.020 some kind of system there,

01:16:44.560 then that collapsing as the great powers shift.

01:16:47.440 So I would like to answer it that way.

01:16:50.500 I'm not saying that what Syria needs is a strong man.

01:16:53.360 I don't know that.

01:16:54.300 But I do know that Syria, 0.94

01:16:56.460 its geography alone,

01:16:57.860 not to mention its demographic diversity,

01:17:01.220 suggests that there is no easy solution

01:17:06.840 to creating a functioning nation state there

01:17:10.760 that absent a strong center.

01:17:15.040 Now, I think there's a great challenge there

01:17:18.700 for it to be achieved.

01:17:20.520 If that answer is fair.

01:17:21.260 No, no, that does answer the question.

01:17:23.060 And it's very interesting as well

01:17:24.580 because the more you read about Syria,

01:17:27.220 the more you realize all of these different wars,

01:17:30.460 which you didn't think would have an impact,

01:17:33.360 are all interconnected.

01:17:35.060 Absolutely.

01:17:35.660 The fact that Russia got dragged,

01:17:37.560 well, invaded Ukraine,

01:17:39.460 impacted Syria

01:17:40.660 because Russia can no longer provide

01:17:44.020 as much military and financial support

01:17:45.880 to Syria and to the Assad regime

01:17:47.980 because they were fighting that war with Ukraine.

01:17:51.180 It's all linked.

01:17:51.760 You're right.

01:17:52.140 I mean, I think that to some extent

01:17:53.700 that has been exaggerated.

01:17:56.080 Some Russian material had been relocated

01:17:59.920 to fight the war in Ukraine,

01:18:02.720 but not that much.

01:18:04.820 Certainly, Vladimir Putin's position

01:18:07.060 is weaker than it was two years ago

01:18:09.780 as a result of his invasion of Ukraine.

01:18:13.920 But I think more to the point

01:18:15.560 is what I said before,

01:18:16.880 that both Iran and Russia realized

01:18:19.660 that Bashar al-Assad was not any longer

01:18:22.240 in any way a trustworthy ally,

01:18:24.360 not worth the billions,

01:18:26.400 not worth the blood to support,

01:18:28.420 that he was going to betray them.

01:18:30.480 And so, let him go.

01:18:33.540 Well, speaking of the great power games

01:18:35.360 in this context,

01:18:36.380 what's interesting is,

01:18:37.780 I suppose, for Russia,

01:18:39.400 it was the port and the air base.

01:18:41.180 Are they going to lose that now?

01:18:42.400 Have they lost that now?

01:18:43.340 They haven't lost it.

01:18:44.180 It seems like back-channel negotiations

01:18:47.200 have been opened up.

01:18:49.640 I don't know when they opened up with HTS.

01:18:51.440 You know, HTS is now effectively

01:18:53.500 the government of Syria.

01:18:54.660 So, they will be talking

01:18:55.460 to all the great players.

01:18:57.220 Of course, they will be.

01:18:58.280 I mean, Western powers

01:18:59.800 are in a particularly difficult position

01:19:02.000 because HTS is a prescribed

01:19:03.580 terrorist organization.

01:19:05.220 And Ahmed Ashara,

01:19:07.100 as he now wishes to be known,

01:19:08.380 still has a $10 million bounty on his head.

01:19:10.520 So, it's difficult for countries

01:19:12.280 like the United States,

01:19:13.560 the UK, France, etc.,

01:19:15.000 to directly talk to him.

01:19:17.040 They will be talking to him

01:19:18.520 via their intelligence agencies

01:19:20.520 underground,

01:19:21.480 so as not to be seen

01:19:22.200 to be dealing with them,

01:19:23.120 until this thorny issue

01:19:24.980 of whether or not HTS remains

01:19:27.140 a prescribed terrorist organization

01:19:28.640 can be sorted out.

01:19:30.600 Well, based on what you...

01:19:31.660 But Russia, it does seem,

01:19:35.140 has been negotiating

01:19:37.260 with HTS behind the scenes.

01:19:38.740 And at the moment,

01:19:39.840 it seems that they have secured

01:19:41.260 their two bases from...

01:19:45.260 The regime doesn't seem

01:19:46.240 to be attacking them.

01:19:47.980 The Israeli government,

01:19:49.760 the Israeli regime...

01:19:50.640 I always wonder about regime

01:19:51.720 and government.

01:19:52.780 Regime is tipped.

01:19:54.040 I know, it's funny.

01:19:54.880 The Israeli regime,

01:19:56.080 as soon as Damascus fell,

01:19:57.640 as we all know,

01:19:58.500 immediately launched

01:19:59.340 a devastating air assault

01:20:02.120 against former Syrian regime

01:20:05.000 military installations

01:20:05.980 across the country,

01:20:07.220 sinking its navy.

01:20:08.740 Destroying the chemical weapons 0.61

01:20:10.800 factories that,

01:20:12.220 despite the UN,

01:20:13.320 despite agreeing to do so

01:20:14.900 with the UN,

01:20:15.420 the Assad regime

01:20:15.960 had not destroyed.

01:20:17.100 Destroying, basically,

01:20:18.400 what remained of Syria's 0.69

01:20:19.960 military capabilities,

01:20:21.000 just destroyed it.

01:20:22.440 But they didn't attack,

01:20:23.780 obviously,

01:20:24.420 the Russian bases.

01:20:25.380 So they, you know,

01:20:26.380 it seems that HTS,

01:20:28.680 you know,

01:20:28.880 you think,

01:20:29.240 okay, Jelani,

01:20:30.060 do I really want

01:20:30.940 to provoke a fight

01:20:31.880 with Russia?

01:20:32.440 Why?

01:20:32.980 It's kind of,

01:20:33.920 might be useful to me

01:20:34.820 to keep Russia on side 0.95

01:20:35.820 in this period going forward

01:20:37.280 when I need

01:20:38.000 as many supporters

01:20:39.200 as I possibly can

01:20:40.140 to put together

01:20:40.780 a new Syria.

01:20:41.720 So I think Russia's position 0.83

01:20:43.280 is more or less secure there.

01:20:44.840 It remains to be seen,

01:20:45.760 but that's what I think.

01:20:46.540 What a game.

01:20:47.380 I mean,

01:20:47.600 these two forces

01:20:49.600 were literally

01:20:50.600 at each other's throats.

01:20:53.160 You know,

01:20:53.800 that's pragmatism for you.

01:20:54.820 That's incredible.

01:20:55.920 That's pragmatism for you.

01:20:57.080 If you forget about

01:20:58.320 all the human suffering

01:20:59.240 and misery,

01:20:59.780 which of course we mustn't,

01:21:00.740 but if you just step back

01:21:01.680 and look at the geopolitics

01:21:02.820 of this,

01:21:03.540 that's just like,

01:21:04.460 okay,

01:21:05.360 let's start from this now

01:21:07.240 and we'll go and...

01:21:08.300 It's good that you bring that up

01:21:09.220 because, you know,

01:21:10.120 Jelani himself

01:21:10.800 can be as pragmatic

01:21:11.560 as he likes.

01:21:12.480 The question is,

01:21:13.280 is he able to determine

01:21:14.860 exactly how

01:21:15.760 the foot soldiers

01:21:17.040 of HTS

01:21:17.980 and its allies

01:21:19.020 behave on the ground

01:21:20.060 now that they've spread out

01:21:21.060 across the country?

01:21:22.300 Does he have the ability

01:21:23.680 to make sure

01:21:24.720 that they don't

01:21:26.020 start causing

01:21:26.680 lots of problems

01:21:27.680 hunting down Alawites 1.00

01:21:29.360 and killing them? 1.00

01:21:30.420 I mean, 0.99

01:21:30.800 the regime is not,

01:21:32.980 it has announced

01:21:34.680 some blanket amnesties.

01:21:36.000 For example,

01:21:36.960 soldiers who were conscripted

01:21:38.660 into the Syrian army,

01:21:39.860 largely forcibly so,

01:21:41.080 and most of them

01:21:41.560 are in fact Sunnis anyway.

01:21:43.480 But the Alawites 0.99

01:21:44.960 who were really affiliated

01:21:46.440 with the regime,

01:21:47.080 particularly those

01:21:47.740 associated with

01:21:48.560 the security apparatus,

01:21:49.820 there has not been

01:21:50.720 an amnesty against them.

01:21:52.700 They have been found,

01:21:53.660 already executions

01:21:54.620 have occurred.

01:21:56.240 You know,

01:21:56.420 and there are reports,

01:21:57.540 Christian communities

01:21:58.460 in Syria,

01:21:59.900 of which there are,

01:22:00.500 you know,

01:22:00.680 there are lots

01:22:01.360 of Christians in Syria.

01:22:02.900 Are they worried?

01:22:04.080 It seems that they're worried.

01:22:05.440 Can this be overstated?

01:22:07.340 It seems that

01:22:08.000 it can be overstated.

01:22:09.360 It serves the purposes

01:22:10.320 of some actors

01:22:11.160 to inflate

01:22:12.380 the anxiety

01:22:13.000 of minority groups,

01:22:14.140 to discredit

01:22:15.260 the government.

01:22:16.240 You know,

01:22:16.480 it's hard to know exactly,

01:22:17.880 but certainly,

01:22:19.000 religious minorities

01:22:19.860 will be wondering,

01:22:21.280 at the very best,

01:22:22.820 what does this mean?

01:22:23.780 Does this mean

01:22:24.300 returning to a form

01:22:26.440 of governance

01:22:26.980 that governed

01:22:27.880 this part of the world

01:22:28.900 for over a thousand years,

01:22:30.840 where a Sunni Muslim state

01:22:34.480 governed more or less

01:22:36.400 according to traditional

01:22:37.620 Sharia law,

01:22:38.700 and Sharia law

01:22:39.340 is really a process

01:22:40.320 more than a law code,

01:22:42.880 and where Christians...

01:22:44.340 It's your vibe.

01:22:44.900 Where Christians 0.95

01:22:47.700 and other minorities

01:22:48.840 are allowed

01:22:50.320 a great deal

01:22:51.380 of self-governance,

01:22:52.920 but very much

01:22:54.600 as second-class citizens,

01:22:57.180 they'll be wondering,

01:22:58.760 is it a return to this?

01:23:00.480 Some of them

01:23:01.240 might be wondering,

01:23:02.620 well,

01:23:03.220 on balance,

01:23:04.540 maybe that's better

01:23:05.460 than the secular,

01:23:08.060 totalitarian,

01:23:09.640 leftist,

01:23:10.780 nationalist regime

01:23:11.700 of the Assad family,

01:23:12.960 which was,

01:23:14.260 as we all see now,

01:23:15.720 a real horror show.

01:23:16.840 They might be thinking that.

01:23:17.980 And one final question

01:23:19.540 before we wrap up,

01:23:21.680 for me,

01:23:22.180 is it seems

01:23:23.080 that if you are right,

01:23:25.380 which you may or may not be,

01:23:26.560 as you yourself say,

01:23:27.300 about this guy

01:23:28.080 becoming more of a pragmatist

01:23:29.600 and governing in that way...

01:23:31.380 I'm not saying that.

01:23:32.180 I don't know.

01:23:33.120 That's why I mentioned

01:23:34.900 that you may or may not know.

01:23:37.420 But let's say

01:23:38.180 that we take that

01:23:39.620 as a possibility.

01:23:42.180 It would make sense

01:23:43.420 for the West

01:23:44.060 to drop its terrorist designations

01:23:46.500 and to try and,

01:23:47.640 as you said yourself,

01:23:49.040 it's quite clear

01:23:49.820 that he's already been working

01:23:50.980 with the Americans

01:23:52.020 to eliminate...

01:23:52.640 Seems to be so, yeah.

01:23:53.540 ...at least what Eamon thinks.

01:23:56.920 And then the question

01:23:58.080 for me is,

01:23:59.240 well,

01:23:59.560 I don't know

01:24:00.000 if the cause of global jihad

01:24:01.420 has entirely been destroyed

01:24:04.160 in this process.

01:24:04.980 And so if this guy

01:24:06.740 becomes a moderate,

01:24:08.640 is he going to face

01:24:09.920 an insurgency

01:24:10.840 from the non-moderates

01:24:12.240 who are still around

01:24:13.340 in the region

01:24:14.000 who think,

01:24:15.280 oh, this guy

01:24:15.740 doesn't go far enough?

01:24:16.740 No, no, no.

01:24:17.080 We need a global insurgency.

01:24:19.420 We need...

01:24:21.140 You know,

01:24:21.500 if I'm Iran,

01:24:22.200 I'm thinking,

01:24:22.840 well,

01:24:23.180 we need some jihadis here 0.99

01:24:25.680 to go and attack Israel, 0.99

01:24:26.820 for example, right?

01:24:28.360 Well, if you're Iran right now,

01:24:29.360 you're thinking,

01:24:30.260 Jesus,

01:24:30.680 we really got to

01:24:31.460 lick our wounds here.

01:24:32.420 They are really on the back.

01:24:33.420 Sure.

01:24:34.120 But what I'm saying

01:24:35.020 is there are still people

01:24:35.920 in that region

01:24:36.640 to whom the global jihadist

01:24:38.460 worldview is very appealing.

01:24:40.540 It's true.

01:24:41.260 So first of all,

01:24:42.800 let me respond

01:24:44.180 to what you said

01:24:44.700 about whether or not

01:24:45.600 HTS should be removed

01:24:47.200 from the prescribed

01:24:48.320 terrorist group list.

01:24:50.640 If I were

01:24:51.460 president-elect

01:24:53.640 Donald Trump,

01:24:54.920 I would think,

01:24:55.980 well,

01:24:56.840 this is a way

01:24:57.760 of getting some leverage

01:24:59.180 over HTS

01:25:00.420 around any negotiation

01:25:01.800 moving forward

01:25:02.540 about the future

01:25:03.220 of Syria.

01:25:03.800 I can use

01:25:04.940 the prospect

01:25:05.560 of being removed

01:25:06.700 from that list

01:25:07.400 as a means

01:25:08.380 of getting some concessions

01:25:09.480 from Jolani

01:25:10.680 moving forward.

01:25:12.200 So that's probably

01:25:13.200 what I would do

01:25:14.320 if I was the United States

01:25:15.180 at the moment.

01:25:16.120 As for global jihadism,

01:25:18.240 more generally,

01:25:19.560 the most proximate threat

01:25:22.680 to Syria

01:25:24.220 from that point of view

01:25:25.120 are the pockets

01:25:26.340 of ISIS

01:25:26.920 that remain

01:25:27.800 in the country,

01:25:29.040 including those

01:25:29.700 tens of thousands

01:25:30.420 of ISIS prisoners

01:25:31.320 prisoners in prison

01:25:32.300 on the other side

01:25:32.960 of the Euphrates.

01:25:34.320 So if,

01:25:36.800 as is possible,

01:25:38.740 Turkey

01:25:39.120 allows for

01:25:41.820 a diminishment

01:25:43.140 of Kurdish

01:25:44.060 power in Syria,

01:25:47.180 Kurds now 0.96

01:25:47.660 who have been

01:25:48.420 governing

01:25:48.780 that part of Syria

01:25:50.100 with the Americans

01:25:51.140 in order to keep

01:25:52.180 ISIS down,

01:25:52.900 if that is somehow

01:25:54.040 upset,

01:25:54.580 maybe there could be

01:25:56.180 a resurgence

01:25:56.860 of ISIS.

01:25:58.260 ISIS is absolutely

01:25:59.880 still devoted

01:26:01.100 to its own caliphate.

01:26:02.980 And Jolani

01:26:03.780 and HTS

01:26:04.660 on social media

01:26:05.600 and other things

01:26:06.300 by ISIS supporters

01:26:07.720 and ISIS members

01:26:08.480 themselves

01:26:08.920 has been subjected

01:26:09.960 to great criticism

01:26:11.080 like,

01:26:11.520 oh, 0.98

01:26:11.600 this guy's a traitor, 0.99

01:26:13.000 you know, 1.00

01:26:13.120 he's a traitor 0.99

01:26:13.540 to the cause, 0.95

01:26:14.120 et cetera.

01:26:14.380 So that exists.

01:26:16.020 I think one of the reasons

01:26:17.560 that Israel

01:26:18.640 launched its devastating

01:26:20.600 assault against

01:26:21.540 what remained

01:26:22.180 of the Syrian

01:26:23.080 armed forces'

01:26:23.680 armaments

01:26:25.920 and bases

01:26:26.820 and things

01:26:27.440 was probably done

01:26:29.540 in,

01:26:30.060 you know,

01:26:30.400 collusion with

01:26:31.000 not just the United States

01:26:31.980 but maybe a lot

01:26:32.720 of regional actors.

01:26:34.400 Israel can tend 1.00

01:26:35.180 to do things

01:26:36.160 that other people

01:26:36.700 don't want to do

01:26:37.560 to help ensure

01:26:39.300 that if ISIS

01:26:39.980 does,

01:26:40.580 you know,

01:26:40.940 come back,

01:26:41.380 they don't get a hold

01:26:42.000 of that material.

01:26:42.820 So I think that's part

01:26:43.960 of what's going on there.

01:26:45.400 But if we zoom out

01:26:46.300 and look at global jihadism

01:26:47.580 more generally,

01:26:49.860 and this is the most

01:26:50.620 important thing,

01:26:51.420 really,

01:26:51.780 to realize,

01:26:52.380 that if you're

01:26:53.920 still stuck

01:26:54.800 in September 11th,

01:26:57.940 2001 thinking

01:26:59.700 when the global

01:27:01.240 war on terror

01:27:01.980 was launched

01:27:02.800 as a result

01:27:03.920 of those terrorist

01:27:04.720 attacks

01:27:05.220 and the invasion

01:27:06.860 of Afghanistan

01:27:07.420 happened

01:27:07.960 and the invasion

01:27:08.580 of Iraq happened

01:27:09.460 and, you know,

01:27:10.040 black sites were set up 0.98

01:27:11.040 and all that,

01:27:11.660 that whole thing,

01:27:12.920 zero, dark, 30,

01:27:13.860 all of that time,

01:27:15.560 if you're still

01:27:16.340 in that headspace,

01:27:17.340 you've got to get out

01:27:18.360 of it.

01:27:19.160 The world has moved on.

01:27:20.980 The jihadists

01:27:21.700 have moved on.

01:27:23.180 This is, you know,

01:27:23.920 a younger generation

01:27:25.280 of jihadists

01:27:25.980 have come to the fore.

01:27:26.820 This is the millennial

01:27:27.680 jihadists now, right?

01:27:29.040 They have seen the mistakes

01:27:30.620 that the older generation made.

01:27:32.360 They have seen how

01:27:33.340 every jihadist effort 0.89

01:27:36.080 got bogged down

01:27:37.540 in either

01:27:38.020 inner jihadist fighting

01:27:39.660 or were crushed

01:27:40.960 by other forces,

01:27:42.840 the Americans,

01:27:43.580 the French,

01:27:44.160 whatever.

01:27:44.420 So there's a transformation

01:27:47.300 generally.

01:27:48.220 We see this

01:27:48.780 across the Sahel,

01:27:50.420 that strip of land

01:27:51.960 south of the Sahara desert,

01:27:53.540 which has seen

01:27:54.160 a lot of terrorist fighting,

01:27:55.540 names like Boko Haram

01:27:56.620 and other,

01:27:57.380 you know,

01:27:57.600 Al-Qaeda

01:27:57.980 in the Islamic Maghreb

01:28:00.160 and all these groups.

01:28:01.400 They are undergoing

01:28:02.940 transformations themselves

01:28:04.660 a bit like

01:28:05.320 what we've seen

01:28:06.000 in HTS

01:28:06.960 as their ambitions

01:28:07.780 become more

01:28:08.740 regional,

01:28:10.000 more local,

01:28:10.800 and it's about

01:28:11.360 getting territory,

01:28:13.460 governing that territory.

01:28:15.120 In a way,

01:28:15.920 a return

01:28:16.620 to the status quo

01:28:18.060 ante

01:28:18.640 because that part

01:28:20.420 of the world

01:28:20.940 was largely determined

01:28:22.740 by the extent

01:28:24.040 to which

01:28:24.560 a warlord

01:28:25.420 of some kind

01:28:26.240 illuminated by

01:28:27.760 the light of Islam

01:28:28.940 would be able

01:28:30.040 to grab some territory

01:28:31.600 and govern it

01:28:32.800 more or less justly.

01:28:34.480 That's how it worked.

01:28:35.600 So it seems

01:28:36.360 to be returning

01:28:37.200 to that model.

01:28:39.540 Global jihad, 0.99

01:28:40.400 you know,

01:28:41.920 how inspiring

01:28:43.740 is it now?

01:28:44.560 It really

01:28:44.940 was not successful.

01:28:46.900 If you look,

01:28:47.380 where are the successes?

01:28:48.600 The Taliban 0.89

01:28:49.100 now control

01:28:50.160 Afghanistan again. 0.54

01:28:51.460 They survived.

01:28:52.700 But the Taliban 0.81

01:28:53.220 was not a force

01:28:54.080 of global jihad.

01:28:55.440 They wanted

01:28:55.980 to govern Afghanistan.

01:28:57.420 They're a more 0.98

01:28:58.020 or less

01:28:58.420 Pashtun-aligned

01:29:00.160 Islamist group.

01:29:02.060 You know,

01:29:02.300 they wanted Kabul.

01:29:03.240 They wanted to govern

01:29:03.760 that part of the world.

01:29:04.520 Okay.

01:29:05.040 They were a problem

01:29:05.840 for the United States

01:29:06.640 because they supported

01:29:07.560 global jihadist actors

01:29:08.680 like Al-Qaeda,

01:29:09.320 but they themselves,

01:29:10.660 they sit there

01:29:11.420 in Afghanistan.

01:29:12.600 They've survived.

01:29:14.080 Okay.

01:29:14.540 That's interesting.

01:29:15.820 Now in Syria, 0.85

01:29:16.760 another example.

01:29:18.100 So global jihad itself

01:29:19.860 might be on the way out

01:29:21.720 as pragmatic nationalist jihad

01:29:26.180 becomes more the norm.

01:29:28.620 But then you start

01:29:30.540 having to ask yourself,

01:29:31.580 well,

01:29:31.680 what do these words mean now?

01:29:32.900 What ideology

01:29:34.960 are you opposing

01:29:36.260 if you're opposing

01:29:37.160 efforts

01:29:40.480 through the use

01:29:42.220 of a combination

01:29:43.320 of the military

01:29:44.200 and political institutions

01:29:46.700 creating Muslim state 0.65

01:29:49.020 institutions?

01:29:50.680 Like,

01:29:50.840 what are you opposing then?

01:29:52.480 Are you opposing

01:29:53.280 the will of the majority

01:29:56.320 of Middle Easterners?

01:29:57.340 I mean,

01:29:57.640 it's hard to know.

01:29:58.960 I mean,

01:29:59.380 do you see what I mean?

01:30:00.980 It's very hard to know.

01:30:02.720 I think

01:30:03.180 what is certainly true

01:30:04.800 is that the Middle East,

01:30:06.640 let's say Syria,

01:30:08.300 suffered from

01:30:09.280 very top-down,

01:30:11.860 progressive,

01:30:13.160 secular,

01:30:14.200 modern governance.

01:30:15.260 That's what

01:30:15.920 the Assad regime was.

01:30:17.840 It was not

01:30:18.560 the result

01:30:20.140 of the will

01:30:20.880 of the people.

01:30:21.980 It was a fascistic

01:30:23.140 kind of totalitarian,

01:30:25.060 authoritarian regime

01:30:25.900 imposed from above,

01:30:26.820 inspired by the West.

01:30:28.420 It was not Islamist.

01:30:29.740 It was not,

01:30:30.220 it was Western.

01:30:31.760 You know,

01:30:32.020 the Ba'ath Party

01:30:33.000 was inspired

01:30:34.540 by nationalist,

01:30:36.320 romantic nationalist, 0.99

01:30:38.040 crazy, 0.99

01:30:38.580 you know, 0.62

01:30:38.980 rhetoric from Europe.

01:30:40.240 So,

01:30:41.180 the Middle East

01:30:41.760 had that kind of

01:30:43.480 imposed from above.

01:30:44.920 Now,

01:30:45.060 it wasn't liberal.

01:30:46.880 I don't know where

01:30:47.880 in the Middle East

01:30:48.400 a liberal regime

01:30:49.240 imposed from above

01:30:49.980 has worked

01:30:50.500 or has even been tried,

01:30:51.720 frankly.

01:30:53.420 You know,

01:30:53.680 the only liberal-ish

01:30:55.260 regime

01:30:55.700 in the Middle East

01:30:56.760 is Israel.

01:30:58.020 But we know

01:30:58.760 that its liberalism

01:31:00.180 is compromised

01:31:00.820 because of its security

01:31:01.920 situation

01:31:02.540 and all the problems

01:31:04.560 there.

01:31:06.260 But apart from that,

01:31:09.000 liberalism

01:31:09.780 has not been

01:31:10.480 a big goer

01:31:11.120 in that part

01:31:11.560 of the world

01:31:11.980 because Islam

01:31:13.040 is there.

01:31:14.440 Islam is not liberal. 1.00

01:31:17.180 Liberalism

01:31:17.820 is not just

01:31:19.440 reality.

01:31:22.200 You know,

01:31:22.480 it's not just

01:31:23.940 common sense.

01:31:26.100 It is

01:31:26.360 an ideological structure

01:31:28.000 that requires

01:31:29.720 faith in it

01:31:30.880 for its power.

01:31:33.060 And,

01:31:33.380 you know,

01:31:33.840 that's the thing.

01:31:34.700 Someone like Jolani

01:31:36.100 thinks

01:31:38.000 that Islam 0.98

01:31:39.540 is

01:31:40.560 what you think

01:31:42.680 liberalism is,

01:31:44.120 just the way

01:31:45.080 things are.

01:31:46.360 A political system

01:31:47.800 that corresponds

01:31:48.520 to reality.

01:31:50.760 There is a God.

01:31:52.620 God,

01:31:52.980 you know,

01:31:53.280 God will provide

01:31:54.660 security,

01:31:55.800 justice,

01:31:56.160 and wealth

01:31:56.540 for those nations

01:31:57.960 that are governed

01:31:59.040 according to his will.

01:32:00.600 This isn't,

01:32:01.240 for him,

01:32:01.820 you know,

01:32:02.860 a kind of

01:32:03.380 religious belief

01:32:05.160 that exists

01:32:05.820 in his own heart

01:32:06.760 separate from

01:32:07.400 some secular space

01:32:08.600 that,

01:32:09.260 where there,

01:32:09.580 that's not how

01:32:10.080 he sees the world.

01:32:10.780 For him,

01:32:11.340 that's just true.

01:32:13.540 And liberalism,

01:32:14.420 in his view,

01:32:15.040 is the radical

01:32:17.240 ideology

01:32:18.000 that is ungrounded

01:32:19.620 from reality

01:32:20.420 because it denies God,

01:32:21.740 it denies objective morality,

01:32:23.300 and he looks

01:32:24.040 and it leads to

01:32:24.840 the atomization

01:32:25.540 of society,

01:32:26.520 the decline of family,

01:32:28.220 the decline of neighbors.

01:32:29.060 Look,

01:32:29.380 so I'm just saying that

01:32:30.740 where does that leave us?

01:32:32.560 I don't know.

01:32:32.980 Right now in Syria,

01:32:34.020 a terrible

01:32:36.660 totalitarian regime

01:32:38.220 has fallen.

01:32:40.740 A possibly

01:32:42.100 moderate

01:32:43.020 Islamist regime

01:32:44.840 has taken over

01:32:46.500 and is going

01:32:48.320 to try

01:32:49.040 to create

01:32:50.580 a more just

01:32:52.160 government

01:32:53.080 for the Syrian people

01:32:54.340 according to

01:32:56.060 its own lights.

01:32:57.400 And in that effort

01:32:58.700 is already

01:32:59.800 reaching out

01:33:00.460 to possible

01:33:01.240 partners,

01:33:02.100 including

01:33:02.520 in the West.

01:33:04.020 So all we can hope

01:33:06.120 without deciding

01:33:07.400 in advance

01:33:08.000 that this is impossible,

01:33:09.460 all we can hope

01:33:10.440 is that cool heads

01:33:11.960 and

01:33:13.280 pragmatic

01:33:14.680 solutions-based

01:33:16.140 thinking prevails,

01:33:17.560 that Syria 0.82

01:33:18.880 does not,

01:33:19.920 as is very possible,

01:33:21.200 devolve once again

01:33:22.100 into civil war

01:33:23.620 as various factions

01:33:24.660 based on ethnicity,

01:33:26.920 sect,

01:33:27.260 whatever,

01:33:27.780 fight each other,

01:33:28.980 and that

01:33:29.780 malign,

01:33:30.900 more or less malign,

01:33:31.780 external actors

01:33:32.520 don't intervene again

01:33:33.780 to serve

01:33:34.860 their own national

01:33:35.580 interests.

01:33:36.000 That's what we can

01:33:36.540 hope for.

01:33:37.120 That's what I hope

01:33:37.780 for.

01:33:38.460 Because I lived in

01:33:39.120 Syria for a year

01:33:39.880 in the Nautis.

01:33:41.040 I loved the country

01:33:41.960 when I was there.

01:33:43.020 It's been heartbreaking

01:33:43.700 for all of us

01:33:44.500 who love the country

01:33:45.560 to see what's gone

01:33:46.960 on there

01:33:47.400 all these years.

01:33:49.240 And so

01:33:49.920 we can just hope

01:33:51.320 that moving forward

01:33:52.080 a just solution

01:33:54.300 that is

01:33:54.940 the true expression

01:33:56.160 of all the people,

01:33:56.820 all the Syrian,

01:33:57.720 all the peoples

01:33:58.360 of Syria's will 0.87

01:33:59.640 comes to triumph there.

01:34:02.500 So before we head

01:34:04.480 on over

01:34:05.300 to Substack

01:34:06.680 where our viewers

01:34:07.820 and listeners

01:34:08.500 get to ask

01:34:09.460 their questions

01:34:10.360 to you,

01:34:11.240 the final question

01:34:12.000 is always the same.

01:34:12.980 What's the one thing

01:34:13.620 we're not talking about

01:34:14.680 that we really should be?

01:34:16.600 Before Thomas answers

01:34:17.760 the final question,

01:34:18.840 at the end of the interview,

01:34:20.060 make sure you click

01:34:20.860 the link in the description,

01:34:22.560 go to our Substack

01:34:23.560 where you'll be able

01:34:24.440 to see this.

01:34:25.660 Is there an example

01:34:26.420 of a Muslim-dominated

01:34:27.380 government that moved

01:34:28.240 from a radical

01:34:28.960 Islamist stance

01:34:29.980 to a more moderate

01:34:30.860 non-jihadist one?

01:34:32.500 We haven't talked

01:34:33.320 about what this

01:34:33.840 means for Israel.

01:34:35.000 What does this

01:34:35.580 mean for Israel?

01:34:36.860 What is the probability

01:34:37.640 that this fighting

01:34:38.620 might spread

01:34:39.400 outside the borders

01:34:40.500 of Syria?

01:34:41.480 Well, you asked me

01:34:42.540 this question

01:34:43.180 six years ago

01:34:44.200 or whenever it was

01:34:44.980 I was last on the show

01:34:46.460 and I think

01:34:48.020 people were listening

01:34:48.900 because my answer

01:34:49.660 then was

01:34:50.140 what we're not

01:34:50.660 talking about

01:34:51.380 enough is religion,

01:34:53.640 the importance

01:34:54.500 of religion

01:34:55.180 and the possibility

01:34:56.460 that religion

01:34:57.760 might be true.

01:34:59.540 That's what I said

01:35:01.380 that we, you know,

01:35:01.920 often at the time

01:35:02.900 it seemed that

01:35:04.120 no one ever

01:35:04.940 was stopping

01:35:05.600 to consider

01:35:06.200 the possibility

01:35:07.160 that religion

01:35:08.280 might be

01:35:09.400 at least corresponding

01:35:10.720 to something

01:35:11.280 that is true

01:35:12.080 about the nature

01:35:12.880 of reality.

01:35:14.040 I think in the last

01:35:14.940 five years

01:35:15.340 there's been a big

01:35:16.040 change in that regard

01:35:17.960 and more and more

01:35:19.020 people are beginning

01:35:20.540 to take religion

01:35:21.600 more seriously.

01:35:22.600 As I talked about

01:35:24.620 last time

01:35:25.220 I, as a young man

01:35:26.780 converted to

01:35:27.760 orthodox Christianity

01:35:29.240 I spent time

01:35:30.160 in monasteries

01:35:31.140 in Greece

01:35:31.580 and in Egypt

01:35:32.780 and places

01:35:33.460 learning that

01:35:35.040 more ancient tradition

01:35:36.720 ancient contemplative

01:35:38.700 tradition of Christianity

01:35:39.740 I feel confident

01:35:43.220 that religion

01:35:44.520 does correspond

01:35:45.580 to what is true

01:35:46.680 about the nature

01:35:47.360 of reality

01:35:48.020 and I'm glad

01:35:49.360 that people

01:35:49.860 are talking about it more

01:35:51.300 and now

01:35:52.540 shameless plug

01:35:53.520 I'd like to say

01:35:54.740 that if anyone

01:35:55.600 is interested

01:35:56.260 in learning more

01:35:58.320 about the ancient

01:35:59.780 intelligent

01:36:00.600 psychologically

01:36:01.440 illuminating

01:36:02.660 contemplative tradition

01:36:03.780 of Eastern Christianity

01:36:05.220 I have started

01:36:06.600 a substack

01:36:07.360 called

01:36:08.120 Life Sentences

01:36:09.320 where I

01:36:10.660 offer

01:36:11.540 audio podcast

01:36:12.440 readings

01:36:13.180 reading through

01:36:13.860 ancient mystical texts

01:36:15.380 and offering commentary

01:36:16.580 to make those texts

01:36:18.160 more explicable

01:36:19.300 and I also write pieces

01:36:20.400 about

01:36:20.820 theological

01:36:21.940 more spiritual

01:36:22.900 psychological themes

01:36:24.540 that's

01:36:25.880 wisdomreadings.substack.com

01:36:29.000 wisdomreadings.substack.com

01:36:32.040 if you're

01:36:33.260 as I say

01:36:33.780 if

01:36:34.140 as I think

01:36:35.240 is the case

01:36:35.900 your listeners

01:36:36.820 and people

01:36:37.380 like your listeners

01:36:38.100 are lending

01:36:39.520 a more

01:36:40.260 interested

01:36:40.980 and engaged

01:36:41.580 ear

01:36:41.980 to religious things

01:36:43.380 and maybe

01:36:43.660 particularly

01:36:44.080 Christianity

01:36:44.640 you won't find

01:36:46.040 someone

01:36:47.160 rolling up

01:36:48.320 his sleeves

01:36:48.680 and getting

01:36:49.060 into the

01:36:49.520 down and

01:36:49.900 dirty 0.99

01:36:50.140 of Christianity 0.84

01:36:51.220 as much

01:36:51.640 as life

01:36:52.540 sentences

01:36:52.960 so I

01:36:53.260 recommend that

01:36:53.860 well I

01:36:54.380 really hope

01:36:54.820 you write

01:36:55.200 about some

01:36:55.680 of this

01:36:56.020 stuff

01:36:56.280 on your

01:36:56.540 I really

01:36:56.920 should

01:36:57.140 I will

01:36:57.680 I will

01:36:58.120 I will

01:36:58.500 I really

01:36:59.080 do hope

01:36:59.480 because I

01:36:59.860 think there's

01:37:00.260 a huge audience

01:37:00.880 for that

01:37:01.180 people would

01:37:01.700 love to

01:37:02.320 get

01:37:02.740 because

01:37:03.040 you sat

01:37:03.660 down

01:37:04.000 we asked

01:37:04.400 you one

01:37:04.700 question

01:37:05.040 you gave

01:37:05.320 a 50

01:37:05.760 minute

01:37:06.040 perfect

01:37:06.540 answer

01:37:07.000 that is

01:37:08.400 one of the

01:37:08.840 most illuminating

01:37:09.620 things I've

01:37:10.140 ever heard

01:37:10.520 on the

01:37:10.820 subject

01:37:11.120 so

01:37:11.420 well thank

01:37:11.800 you for

01:37:11.980 the opportunity

01:37:12.640 constant

01:37:13.240 and Francis

01:37:14.020 it was great

01:37:14.660 to have you

01:37:15.100 on

01:37:15.300 but we've

01:37:15.980 got more

01:37:16.420 because we're

01:37:17.080 going to

01:37:17.220 head on over

01:37:17.580 to

01:37:17.760 Substack

01:37:18.180 where Thomas

01:37:18.660 is going

01:37:18.960 to answer

01:37:19.300 your questions

01:37:20.060 if no single

01:37:23.220 group can

01:37:23.760 control Syria 0.73

01:37:24.600 then fighting

01:37:25.200 will break out

01:37:25.800 between these

01:37:26.320 tribes factions

01:37:27.060 and warlords

01:37:27.760 what is the

01:37:28.580 probability that

01:37:29.300 this fighting

01:37:29.900 might spread

01:37:30.680 outside the

01:37:31.560 borders of

01:37:32.000 Syria

TRIGGERnometry - December 15, 2024

The Best Syria Breakdown You'll Ever Hear - Thomas Small

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