From Schwartz Media.
I'm Ruby Jones.
This is seven am. On the streets of Damascus. Uniforms of Syrian army soldiers were strewn across the pavement as soldiers quickly changed into civilian clothes and fled the capital. It was a sign of the speed at which the rebel forces took over the country, triggering the end of the shah Alisad's brutal regime after thirteen years of civil war. As celebrations spread, the Syrian people faced the task of rebuilding a country now in the hands of rebel groups. Today.
Middle East correspondent for the Economist Greg Carlstrom on Syria's path forward and the implications for an increasingly unstable region. It's Thursday, December twelfth, So it seems like almost out of nowhere, the Assad regime in Syria has fallen, and the scenes in Damascus have been incredible to watch people toppling statues, mass celebrations. It all seems to have occurred at a remarkable speed. So can you talk me through the last week or so in Syria?
Remarkable? Really, This is a war that has gone on for thirteen years and then it came to its conclusion in less than thirteen days.
The more than decade old civil war in Syria appears to be reigniting, as rebel fighters breached Aleppo, Syria's second largest city, following a surprise large scale offensive this week.
There was a rebel offensive that began in northwestern Syria on November twenty seventh. It was led by a group called Hayat Tahirasham. They started what they said was meant to be a limited offense to push back the Syrian regime in northwest Syria. But at each stop along the way they found that regime troops just melted away. So the rebels reached Aleppo, Syria's second city. The regime didn't defend it. They pushed south to Hama, the next major
city to the south. Again there was no real defense and they just kept going.
And then how did the capital Damascus fall?
There was a bit of a race for the capital on Saturday night as these rebels from the south reached some of the southern suburbs of Damascus, and there were these very moving scenes in places like de Roya, which was a suburb of Damascus ten years ago that was subject to a brutal years long siege by the regime. People ended up eating grass because there was nothing else to eat. They came out into the streets. They welcomed
these rebel groups. They tore down statues of the posters of the president, and that was repeated over and over in the belt of Sourb surrounding Damascus.
Henly hen.
This man said they had been waiting for this day for fifty years, adding that they had been living in what he described as a prison, a quote big prison called Syria.
Hts reached the city uh The Syrian prime minister put out a videotape statement saying that he was still in the country and he was prepared to hand over power. There was no word from us at himself. He left that job to his prime minister. The Syrian army command told soldiers that the regime had fallen, and so they abandoned their posts, and people in Damascus said the streets were just lined with discarded Syrian army uniforms. People had taken off their uniforms and thrown them on the on
the street and gone home. And by Sunday morning a celebratory mood in the capitol. People came out to break into the presidential palace to look through Bashara Us on DVD collection, to do things that just two weeks ago would have seemed unimaginable for so many Syrians. The Syrian regime had simply collapsed.
Okay, well, tell me a bit more about the rebels who are now in control of the country and who's leading them.
HTS. This main group is an Islamist group al Qaeda's one time affiliate in Syria, but it broke with al Qaeda in twenty sixteen twenty seventeen and has become a much more moderate entity. In recent years, HTS has been running Idlib province in northwestern Syria, and so they set up what they called the Salvation Government. And in some ways this rebel government was better than the central government
in Damascus. It provided better basic services, you know, the electricity stayed on more regularly in Idlib than it did in Damascus. The economy was growing more in Ita Lib than in Dabascus. And they did this with help from Turkey, which provided some protection for these rebel held areas. But it was also, especially in the past couple of years, and increasingly authoritarian government. Many critics of Abu Muhammad al Jolani, the leader of HTS have disappeared into jails in northwestern Syria.
So there's a mix of feelings right now. I think when you talk to many Syrians, people of course thrilled, overjoyed in shock seeing the Assad regime gone, some of them hopeful about HTS, but some of them skeptical both that this group really has broken away from its more extreme Islamist roots and also worried that it will turn out to be its own flavor of authoritarian regime in Dabascus.
And a lot of that skepticism is around the motivations of the leader of the rebels, Abu Mohammad Ajulani. Can you tell me a bit more about him?
He's had the remarkable journey.
You you are still a specially designated global terrorists by the United States with a ten million dollar bounty on your head. Your group is a prescribed terrorist organization by the United States, by the UN, by the EU and others.
I say to people, don't judge by words, but by actions.
I believe the reality speaks for itself. He is someone who decades ago went to Iraq to fight the Americans, eventually came back to Syria, became involved in the fight against the Ussad regime in Syria, had a falling out with a colleague of his, Abba Baker Baghdadi, about ten or eleven years ago. Like that, he of course went
on to lead Islamic State. Jolani went on to lead a group that was then called the Nusra Front, which at times clashed with Islamic State, and that break from Islamic State and then subsequently his break from al Qaeda did a lot to put him in the position that
he is in today. And he's someone that for years when you spoke to people who know him in Syria, people who deal with him in Syria, they've always said that he's had his eye on eventually going back to Damascus, that he wasn't content with just running a rebel held administration in northwestern Syria. That you know, he had designs
on overthrowing the Ussel regime. Not many people took him seriously in recent years, but it turns out he built up a force in northwestern Syria that was able to do exactly that.
And the regime, the Alisad family, they have been in parents Syria for more than fifty years. How do you think that history is going to remember them? Not?
Well? You know, I think the main thing that they are going to be remembered for is these scenes over the past few days, these incredibly moving scenes of Syrians going into prisons like Saidnaya, the main prison outside of Damascus, where thousands, if not tens of thousands of people were held, and discovering these barbaric dungeons where people were held underground
for years, for decades. There have been families who thought their loved ones died in prison many many years ago, who are only now discovering that their relatives are still alive. At the USAD regime ran an industrial scale torture machine, and I think that, above all else is going to be what he is remembered for, just the absolute brutality
that both he and his father displayed towards Syrians. And for Bouchat, I think the fact that all of that over the past fifteen years was in service of keeping his regime in power for just a little while longer. But in the end, this regime collapsed under its own weight. Asad fled to Moscow, you know, forget standard fight. He didn't even say anything on his way out. He didn't even go over a message to his supporters, to his people. He just turned them round.
After the break. How the fall of the Assad regime is tipping the balance of power in the Middle East. Greg I want to ask about some of Siria's closest neighbors and allies. It's surrounded by Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, and Turkey, and it's long been seen as an important country in US and Russian foreign policy. So who benefits the most from the fall of Asad.
The biggest beneficiary I think is Turkey, which gave some support to HTS and then gave much more support to another group called the Syrian National Army in northern Syria. They are quite happy to see Asad gan. They will have a lot of influence in a post Asad Syria because it's likely that whoever comes to power will look
favorably on the Turkish government. So Turkey has now gained a lot of influence in Syria and they will want to use that to try to push back the Syrian Democratic Forces, the mostly Kurdish militia that holds power in the northeast of Syria near the Turkish border. So they're looking at this as a win for them. I think the biggest loser is Iran, which of course counted Asad as one of its closest allies as a key link in its so called axis of resistance. This network of
militias across the region. Not only has Iran now lost an ally in Asad, but they have lost a land route that they used to send weapons to Hesbalah in Lebanon. Many of those went across Syrian territory, and it's hard to imagine the next Syrian government being willing to let Iran use its territory in that way. So wins, which was already shrinking after the Israeli Hasabalda war over the past year, their influence has been further diminished.
Meanwhile, Israel has carried out air strikes in the country. It targeted Syrian military facilities that have long possessed chemical weapons and long range missiles.
Israel For Israel, it has over the past few days since the fall of US been carrying out very aggressive air strikes across Syria aimed at what it says are military targets, sites that used to be affiliated with Syria's chemical weapons program, or sites where the Syrian regime had long range missiles or other advanced weapons. Israeli troops have
also gone into Syria and seized patches of land. The Israeli argument is that they don't know who's going to come to power in Damascus, and they're concerned about that, and they want to make sure that this next government is not going to be able to threaten Israel. Now, there are some voices in Israel who are arguing that all of this is unnecessary fact counterproductive, that no rebel group over the past thirteen years in Syria has shown
any interest in fighting Israel. They've only wanted to fight the regime. And there are some people in Israel arguing that by starting on this very adversarial note with the next Syrian government, Israel is spoiling a potential opportunity to have a better relationship with Syria. But those arguments seem to be going unheeded within the top levels of Israel's political and military establishment.
So there's still many competing interests playing out. And it's in this context that the rebels have to actually establish a new system of governments in Syria. What do we know about their plans?
Very little, to be honest, I think you know, you can look at HTS and this Salvation government. They ran in Idlib in the northwest, which again was a reasonably competent government, but they are going to struggle to expand that government to cover all of Syria. Just don't have the capacity to do that. And Syria is a much more complicated, much more diverse place than Idlib province alone. So they are going to have to find some way
to work with other factions. To work with, for example, rebels in the south who are not part of HTS, who are not really in some cases part of any organized group, who just have their own localized grievances with the ASUD regime. They will have to find a way to work with the Kurds in the northeast. They will have to find a way to co opt the existing state institutions in Syria, which I don't think they want
to tear down altogether. So what we've seen over the past few days is a series of statements and declarations from HTS sort of all saying the right things about how they and their fighters should behave They've told their fighters not to loot, to protect public institutions and private property. They've tried to reassure women that no one will tell them how to dress. There won't be any compulsory Islamic dress code impos. Yesterday they issued a general amnesty for
Syrian soldiers who were conscripted into the army. All of that is good, All of that is exactly what many Syrians want to hear right now. So the initial signs are encouraging. But what sort of political system they're going to set up, how they're going to share power with other factions in Syria, all of that, I think it's much too early to say what they're planning to do.
How would you describe the national mood in Syria right now?
Joy and shock? You know, I think so many of the Syrians that I've spoken to over the past few days, their initial reaction was just disbelief. This is something that no one thought would happen. You know. People had given up. People inside of Syria had given up on the idea
that Asad was going to be overthrown. People outside of Syria, people who were displaced, who became refugees during the Syrian Civil War, never thought they were going to be able to go home and to wake up one morning and find that this regime that had been such a fixture of Syrian life, such an oppressive fixture of Syrian life for fifty four years had simply melted away in the middle of then A. People were in disbelief and I think it's a very very complicated mix of emotions right
now for so many people.
Greg, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you.
Also in the news today, Prime Minister Anthony Albanezi has pledged to spend one billion dollars on early education if Labor wins the next election. The pitch includes expanding childcare centers and removing the activity test so that all families earning up to five hundred and thirty thousand dollars can access a subsidy for three days a week. The Prime Minister says the coming budget update will show more than three billion dollars in childcare spending over four years, including
a pay increase for early educators. And in New Zealand, representatives of more than eighty Maori tribes are asking King Charles to intervene in Parliament of the government's proposed changes to the Treaty of Waitangi. Critics say the proposed amendments will roll back Maori rights, and the Collective of Maori tribal leaders are asking that the King ensure the government does not quote diminish the Crown's honor by breaching the terms of the historic treaty. I'm Ruby Jones. This is
seven am. See you tomorrow.