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

If you value honesty, integrity and diversity, all things that are increasingly lacking in established media, then consider supporting us at Trigonometry. As a member, you'll get ad-free and extended interviews, plus exclusive content. So, the Syrian civil war. How to simplify this?

Nobody really wanted Bashar al-Assad to fall. They feared the chaos that would result. So he created a jihadist opposition to himself so that the non-jihadist opposition would be discredited jesus christ that's the kind of guy we're dealing with right yeah and that civil war lasted until last week both iran and russia realized that basharl acid was not any longer in any way a trustworthy ally, not worth the billions, not worth the blood. And so, let him go.

Thomas Small of The Conflicted Podcast, welcome back. It's been so long since we had you on, but Francis and I woke up a few days ago, opened our phones, and we see Bash Al-Assad has been deposed, the Syrian civil war. Well, I was going to say it's over, but I don't think it is. No one knows what's going on, really. And you are one of our go-to people for that issue, on those issues.

So we want to talk to you about everything that's happened, everything that might happen. But before we do, we thought it's always helpful just to get the basic ground facts established about an issue before we delve into it. Can you tell us first and foremost about what has been happening in Syria over the last 13 years now and perhaps before that to give us very, very kind of surface level context, which is there's been a civil war going on. Why has that been happening?

Okay, so the easiest question in the world to answer. Thank you, Constantin. It's very nice to be back, by the way. Things have changed around here since I was here last. It was just a black room. It did look like an ISIS video last time. That's why you looked more comfortable. So the Syrian civil war, how to simplify this? So it comes out of the Arab Spring. Older listeners will remember that at the end of 2010, in December 2010.

a man in Tunisia set himself on fire in protest against unfair treatment by the authorities there, and that fire rapidly spread across the Arab world. One of the places that the fire spread to was Syria, which in February of 2011, but really in March of 2011, protests began there. And the protests grew. They were quite sporadic across the country. They never coalesced into one place as they had in, for example, Egypt, where in Cairo and Tahrir Square, we remember huge protests.

were calling on the long-term dictator there, Hosni Mubarak, to resign. That didn't really happen in Syria in the same way. They were scattered around the country, but they were organic protests. They broke out in Syria. really against a government which now we see the images coming out of Syria now that the government has been toppled, a government of extraordinary brutality.

really the worst government of all of those notoriously terrible totalitarian governments that the Arab world suffered across the 20th century. So they were fighting this government. And eventually the government did what it does and responded with violence to the protesters and the violence spread. the violence generated more protests. Eventually, the violence turned off members of the army of the government, the Syrian army, who then defected from the army.

joined the protest, then organized themselves into a kind of an opposition army, the Free Syrian Army it was called, and clashes began between the government and the opposition. a military, a civil war broke out really at that point. And that civil war lasted until last week. And, you know, in the meantime, what happened? My God, what didn't happen? Foreign powers got involved on both sides. Jihadism became a major problem in that conflict.

I think people know most of all ISIS, the specter of ISIS grew up out of this conflict, causing problems not just there, but elsewhere, including in the West, terrorist attacks. either directly or indirectly related to ISIS were carried out. The Russian state got involved militarily, as did the Iranian state, while proxies of other states, let's say allied with the opposition, fought them. And in time, all the sides more or less came together to create a really astonishing coalition of

erstwhile enemies, to fight ISIS. And that pushed back ISIS and effectively defeated it, corralled it into one area in the middle, around the Euphrates, and more or less snuffed it out. And then from that point onwards, more or less, things remained in a sort of stasis until two weeks ago. It's even saying, though, I must say, guys. Saying it like that, it's like I realized it's so oversimplified what I've just said because the Syrian civil war is the greatest story just in terms of...

of epic, geopolitical, political narratives, the greatest story, you know, in the last 50 years. And no doubt books will be written about it that will make for very dramatic, if quite heartbreaking reading. So that, Precy, is a gross oversimplification. It is. And you've condensed probably 20 years worth of study into one two-minute answer.

But one thing you alluded to there, and I think it's anyone who's looked into this even for a moment couldn't possibly deny this. It is a conflagration of like five or six different... geopolitical actors in one place, all acting in their own interests. So again, this is going to be very difficult to summarize in the brief answer, but can you just give our listeners and viewers a brief...

overview of the other players who are coming in from the outside and what they all want from this. So you've got Russia, you've got Turkey, you've got the United States, you've got Israel, and you've got Iran. Have I missed any other big... Well, and you have Qatar in the Gulf. And then maybe more generally, the non-Qatar GCC states led, let's say, by Saudi Arabia mainly. So that's a big player as well. So what do each of those different players want in Syria?

What do they want or what did they want? Because interests change. That's one of the interesting things about the Syrian civil war. I think to answer that question, I have to say a little bit more about the Syrian government that Bashar al-Assad. was the president of. So the Syrian state was, you know, it was part of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years. Eventually, during the First World War, the Ottoman Empire

collapsed, was defeated by Britain and its allies. And in the wake of that collapse, the French were given a mandate over provinces of the Ottoman Empire that eventually coalesced into the modern nation state of Syria. In 1944, during the Second World War, That mandate, that state was wrested from the French, from Vichy France and eventually emerged as an independent state, which was extremely unstable.

It was immediately unstable, and over the next 20 years, it suffered many, many coups, while at the same time, a very oppressive security apparatus was being built up. Who built up that security apparatus? Nazis, to some extent, who had fled to Damascus after the Second World War. Communist, East German sort of communist operatives working really... For Egypt, which at one point united with Syria, an oppressive security apparatus was being built up, which was already in place when...

Hafez al-Assad came to power there in 1970. He was the leader of the Ba'ath Party, which had come to power seven years earlier in a coup. But he took over the country and really... upped its oppressive security apparatus further and turned Syria into a Ba'athist. That's a sort of vaguely left-wing Marxist-Leninist vanguard revolutionary state, totalitarian based on his power.

And he established this state, which existed then until last week. So then in the year 2000, after Hafez al-Assad died, his son Bashar al-Assad came to power. Now Bashar al-Assad is a fascinating character. He was not the eldest son of Hafez al-Assad. The eldest son of Hafez al-Assad, who had been groomed to take over, his name was Basil, and he was the real deal. If you're a dictator, you want a son like Basil. he was you know he had down to his knee he was a real tough guy right

Sadly, in 1994, he died in a car crash. And all eyes then shifted to the younger son, Bashar al-Assad, who at the time was in London, of all places, studying to be an eye doctor. by all accounts was a soft spoken rather meek kind of guy had not had not sort of spread around very widely in london that he was the son of a dictator in syria but

You know, the father came calling. He was whisked home. He was forced through the military. He was turned into a Syrian leader. And in 2000, he becomes president. Now, at that point... something happened called the Damascus Spring, when all eyes thought maybe this new young, he was only in his early 30s, this new young president will change things in Syria. And briefly, people thought that might happen. But then...

In the context of 9-11 and the launching of the war on terror by the United States, the global coalition against the war on terror, Bashar al-Assad felt threatened because, well, for obvious reasons. The state of Syria had long been an ally of Iran, Iran now part of the axis of evil according to the United States. Syria didn't know would it be next when America invaded Iraq. Syria really thought maybe we are next. So Bashar al-Assad started to play the games that his father had always played.

playing regional actors against each other, employing terrorism or supporting terrorist actors when it suited him to cause chaos. The same old story as a result of which in the mid 2000s, the country was sanctioned. It was very much. kind of put out in the cold by the american-led world order and that's where it stayed until around 20 2009 2010.

a rehabilitation effort began. People tried to reach out to Syria. Again, the West did. The GCC, countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Turkey did. Basically, all the players in the region and in the world. looked to Syria and to Bashar al-Assad and thought, we've got to rehabilitate relations with him and bring him back on side. And that's where things were in early 2011 when the Arab Spring arrived in Syria.

So initially, nobody wanted Bashar al-Assad to go. They thought, and Bashar al-Assad had given them to think this, that it was possible that he was going to reform the country in a way... that would preserve the integrity of the state of Syria, answer some of the demands that the protesters were leveling at the government. At the same time...

One by one, many other Arab states had already fallen to the protests. Syria was the last major Arab country for the Arab Spring to come to. And so the West... Its eyes were all over the place. It just basically couldn't, it just couldn't deal with Syria. It was dealing with Libya. It launched a war there. It was dealing with Egypt. A long-term dictator had already fallen. Saudi Arabia was dealing with Bahrain, where protests had happened and where the GC...

sent in troops to quell the protests. So Syria, in a way, was kind of not the focus of attention. And so everyone was just hoping that Bashar al-Assad would reform. So that's where the international community was at when the Arab Spring broke out. However... Bashar al-Assad and his state security apparatus responded with violence, continued to respond with greater violence, did not do much, did not really do anything really to reform things. They just returned to the old Hafez al-Assad playbook.

of attacking the Syrian people with violence. So by the end of 2011, things had changed. Turkey had turned against Bashar al-Assad. Qatar, which had been a very big supporter of...

Bashar al-Assad had turned against Assad and decided that they would using Al Jazeera mainly which is a Qatar owned satellite news channel that they would take advantage of the destabilization there as they had in other places around the Middle East during the Arab Spring, to support the opposition to Assad, hoping that maybe if they were supporting the opposition that when the Assad government fell, they would be in prime position to have great influence in the country.

And the United States finally, finally came out and said, Barack Obama, the president at the time, came out and said, Bashar al-Assad must go. This was relatively late. It was clear that the Americans didn't really want Bashar al-Assad to go. They didn't know what to do. They did not want the Syrian government to fall because of the chaos that would inevitably result from that, given that just across the border in Iraq.

There was a great instability as a result of the American invasion there, the Iranian, you know. supported terrorist campaign that started against the American troops there, etc. The country had devolved into chaos, given the fact that across the other border in Lebanon.

There was great instability, largely as a result of chickenery by the Syrian government, which had always had a big role to play in Lebanon, Hezbollah causing problems, etc. So it was a powder keg part of the world. Israel's just there as well. long border with Turkey. Turkey has problems in that area with Kurdish terrorists. So nobody really wanted Bashar al-Assad to fall. They feared the chaos that would result. So that's where things were.

You know, by the end of 2011, beginning of 2012, the Syrian civil war had started. That civil war was mainly, let's say, a legitimate civil war. between a government and its army and opposition forces and its army, if you like. Jihadism had not yet played a big part in the war. And so everyone was...

basically waiting to see what would happen. Iran, which had long been an ally of the Assad regime, but which had tried to make a name for itself as a voice of the Arab people to bolster its own reputation in the Arab world, and so had largely supported the Arab Spring.

movements, especially as those movements were more and more co-opted by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Arab Spring protest movements became more associated with Islamist revolutionary agitation, which aligned with Iran's own Shia Islamist orientation, Iran found itself in a slightly tricky situation. Al Jazeera was broadcasting the brutal crackdowns, the brutal violence that was going on in Syria, the regime was perpetrating on the protesters. Iran thought, do we want to be associated with this?

But at the same time, if you remember, in 2009, inside Iran, a huge protest movement broke out there, which the state cracked down very badly against. And so it knew how to snuff out. violently protests so behind the scenes it was advising the Assad government on how to deal with the protesters based on its own experience doing so and so eventually Iran became openly supportive of the Assad regime and

wanted to keep it in place. That especially became the case when jihadism did enter into the scene. How did jihadism enter the scene? Very complicated question. One way it entered the scene for sure is that At one point, Bashar al-Assad released from the prisons of Syria, including and primarily the notorious Sednaya prison that we're all now seeing images from as the rebels.

liberate the prison and all these just really horrible scenes of unspeakable, like something out of literally out of the concentration camps of the Holocaust, terrible scenes. The Sednaya prison had housed a lot of global jihadist fighters, which the regime wanted nothing to do with. Bashar al-Assad released them as he had previously released them 10 years earlier or so, or eight years earlier.

so that they would go to Iraq and fight the Americans there. He did the same thing again, only this time hoping that they would fight against his regime and therefore tar the opposition with the brush of jihadism. So he created a jihadist opposition to himself so that the non-jihadist opposition would be discredited. Jesus Christ. That's the kind of guy we're dealing with, right? That's mental.

It's what happened. It's what happened. Now, jihadism tends like a moth, like moths to a flame to attract other jihadists. And in Iraq in 2011, a new offshoot or a kind of reformed, a new version of an old enemy there, of the United States at least, an enemy of the United States, which had been Al-Qaeda in Iraq. and then became known as the Islamic State in Iraq, sent to Syria. The Syrian civil war is already happening. So Islamic State in Iraq.

and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would eventually become the notorious Caliph of ISIS, he sent a Syrian man back to Syria to start their a cell an offshoot of uh islamic state in iraq there that man was known by the the nom daguerre of abu muhammad al jolani now flash forward That is the man who now sits at the top of power in Syria. So that was in late 2011, January 2012. He came to Syria and set up secretly...

an offshoot of the Islamic State in Iraq there, known as Jebhat al-Nusra, the Nusra or Victory Front, the Nusra Front. For about two years, nobody knew what this outfit was. All they did know is that it was extremely effective on the battlefield because the Syrians who had been fighting in Iraq for all those years, fighting the Americans, and fighting the Iranian-backed militias there for all those years, they were sent with Jolani.

to Syria and they began fighting the regime very effectively because they were battle-hardened fighters, unlike all the other players. in Syria. The Syrian army hadn't fought a war in decades. They weren't actually good at fighting the opposition. They were in fact peaceful protesters. So suddenly the introduction of Jolani and his men

Again, whom no one knew who these people were. They were a very sort of mysterious, shadowy organization, the Nusra Front. They began fighting very effectively. And so outside actors initially supported them. from the Gulf mainly, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates to some extent. They were supporting the Nusra Front and other jihadist groups, and more and more jihadist groups were proliferating. Now, in 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi comes out and says, the Nusra Front is...

an ISIS or an ISI, an Islamic State of Iraq, affiliate in Syria. And he says, and I announce now the formation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS. And I am the caliph of this new Islamic state. Well, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani in Syria said, well, no one told me about this. I don't want to be actually subservient to this guy. I'm a Syrian. He's not a Syrian. I want to... I'm actually really...

dedicated to overthrowing Bashar al-Assad. He's dedicated to starting up this caliphate. So there was a clash. Openly, Jolani denounced this and said, no, no, no, no, I'm independent. Now he had paved the way for this by going over... Baghdadi's head and speaking directly to Al Qaeda Central in the AFPAC border and got them to agree to make him their direct affiliate. At that time, Baghdadi was an affiliate of Al Qaeda.

ISIS was kind of a branch of Al-Qaeda, but Al-Qaeda was already realizing that this Baghdadi guy was pursuing a different aim from them. So they didn't really like him. So Jelani took advantage of that to get them to sanction him as an Al-Qaeda branch on its own. Now that put him in a huge problem. A lot of his fighters defected from him. to ISIS. They supported Baghdadi. And then for years, a huge intra-jihadist war broke out in Syria between the Nusra Front, ISIS.

Other jihadist organizations, they were all fighting each other. And as we remember, ISIS came out on top for a long time. It grew. and grew it conquered huge swathes of territory not just in syria it took the very important iraqi city of mosul causing unspeakable death and destruction as it went. We all remember the images. It was truly jihadism at its rock bottom worst. Unspeakable brutality.

And that's where things were, let's say, in 2014, 2015. But I just need to stop the story there because there are other players involved. Other things were happening. If we rewind a couple of years, so now we have the Assad regime is attacking, the protesters is attacking these new jihadist actors. The war is becoming very violent. The Assad regime employs chemical weapons. against the protesters. This happened. It became extremely controversial.

to say so amongst certain people in the West, especially people who opposed any efforts to overthrow Assad. for various reasons, either ideological or pragmatic, a tendency arose to deny or downplay the chemical weapons that the Assad regime employed against its enemies. They did employ these chemical weapons. That's clear.

We have now in the last two weeks seen the factories that produce the chemical weapons laid bare. We'll talk about this later. Israel has destroyed them. But when Syria... when the acid regime employed chemical weapons against the protesters this crossed the notorious red line that Barack Obama had stated very openly that if chemical weapons were employed on the battlefields of Syria, he said, then the United States would have no choice but to intervene properly and militarily to remove Assad.

Barack Obama chose not to live up to that red line. He allowed Bashar al-Assad to continue to prosecute his war against the opposition. And that crossing the red line, allowing Bashar al-Assad to cross that red line was a great turning point. in the history of recent years. And I'll try to just open up the discussion a bit because America's role in the world is something we have to understand to make sense of this.

We all know now, so it seems, that America's role in the world generally is diminished from where it stood in the great unipolar moment of the 90s and the 90s. there were no great powers to rival it at all and America just seemed to straddle the globe doing whatever it wished wherever it wished that was never really true as we saw in Iraq

certainly didn't achieve much there. Afghanistan, didn't achieve much there. America's power was never as great as it thought and as its enemies thought. America's power lay largely in its... ability to project an image of untrammable power. Well, that took a knock in Iraq. It took a knock at the financial crisis of 2008.

It took a knock when the Arab Spring broke out and so many American allies, like the president of Egypt, were toppled. And it really took a knock when Barack Obama allowed that red line to be crossed. The world looked... at america and realized you know what it's not as powerful as we've been given to think it's not as willing to employ military power to achieve political aims clearly because it

doesn't believe that that will work. That changes perception. Suddenly, other players can get involved, especially Russia. So Russia... had long been involved in Syria. The Soviet Union had long been an ally of the Syrian government, of the Syrian state, even before Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970.

But after Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970, that relationship became even closer. And over the course of the 70s, the Soviet... government achieved what every Russian government had attempted to achieve for hundreds of years. a warm water port the classic geopolitical geostrategic issue of russia achieving a warm water port and finally

Hafez al-Assad granted the Soviet Union a naval base off the city of Tartus on the Mediterranean. And Russia had a naval base on the Mediterranean, which was extremely useful. to Russia. It allowed it to project power into the Mediterranean, especially across North Africa, where it had many allies. Initially Egypt in the 70s, before Egypt became an American ally.

countries like Algeria, countries like Libya, Muammar al-Gaddafi's, if you remember him, classic Colonel Gaddafi's state. So the naval base at Tartus was of great strategic importance to Russia. and remained so. And so in 2013, when Russia realized that America was not actually going to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war, not really, not with power, they thought, okay.

We're going to do something. And they had interests to defend, not only the naval base there, but an air base near the city of Latakia, also on the west coast of Syria. So they did intervene. That intervention was decisive and extremely brutal. The Russians usually... mainly by employing air power, bombarded Syrian cities that had been captured by or were being contested by opposition fighters.

really making no distinction whatsoever between civilian neighborhoods and military targets. It was really a kind of no-holds-barred situation. The sort of strategy that we see Russia deploy elsewhere in Chechnya. and now in Ukraine, et cetera. So the Syrian opposition faced this brutal onslaught while at the same time, the Wagner force got involved in Syria.

I don't want to go too much into the Wagner force. It was a kind of militia group, a mercenary group, really, that was a private company run by Vladimir Putin's former chef. It's a very strange, only in Russia, really. We talked about Pregosian on the show. The late Evgeny Pregosian. So the Wagner group got involved providing about a thousand, I think two thousand, maybe at one point, fighters on the ground.

to the Assad regime's fight mainly against ISIS, which was growing, particularly the battles of Palmyra, a beautiful classical city in the center of the desert. You know, tremendous fighting went on there and the Wagner group prevailed. managed to capture Palmyra back from ISIS and lost a lot of fighters in the process. It became their kind of Iwo Jima, really, Palmyra. So that's how Russia got involved, and they continued to be involved until...

last week when suddenly they seemed not to want to be involved anymore. We might talk about why that is later. So that's Russia. At the same time that Barack Obama's red line was not properly policed, Iran also realized, oh, I see America. Okay. America is not as strong as we were given to believe. It's not going to intervene. Okay. They upped.

their backing of Assad in a big way at that point, sending the notorious head of the Quds Force, the section of the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The section of the RGC that projects Iranian power outward, the Quds Force, notorious outfit. Its head, Qasem Soleimani, was sent to Syria and... He teamed up with the head of Hezbollah, a proxy group based in Lebanon that answers to its paymasters in Iran, and the head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah.

the late Hassan Nasrallah and the head of the Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, the late Qasem Soleimani, they got together and they hatched a plan on how to really support the Assad regime, to make sure the Assad regime would survive. Now, in fact... The Ayatollah back in Tehran, Ali Khamenei, we think now on his deathbed, although he's been on his deathbed for years, opposed this plan initially. He wasn't inquired, he wasn't quite sure. He thought, this is going to be very expensive.

This is going to require a lot of manpower. But Soleimani and Hassan Nasrallah together convinced him, no, we can do it. Hezbollah fighters will ship in fighters from Afghanistan. We'll do whatever it takes. We're going to support. the Assad regime. And the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei said, go for it. Over the next 10 years, the Iranian state spent about $30 billion in Syria. supporting Assad and IRGC trained and commanded forces were really, really merciless in their prosecution of Assad's.

counter-revolutionary aims. I mean, really tremendous butchery that went on. I want to stop and just remind people, we're talking tremendous butchery. They're discovering now that probably in the last 10 years, 100,000 Syrians were disappeared by the regime, just disappeared, lost into prisons, tortured, killed, crushed by these terrible machines they have that crush the bodies down.

boiled in acid. These are terrible things that are being revealed about this regime. And the Iranian-backed forces were supporting the regime and played a big role in the regime growing and growing in strength. So that while... The regime and all of these other players, including the opponents of the regime, were working together in one part of Syria to fight ISIS. In the other part of Syria, the regime backed by Hezbollah and Iran and helped from the air.

by Russia were able to take back a lot of land that had been lost to the opposition. The city of Aleppo, the most populous city in Syria, historically its richest and most sort of commercially important center, had been

cut in two between the forces loyal to the regime and the opposition forces. But in 2016, 2017, the government was able to take it back entirely. And over time... forced all of the opposition forces, more or less, in that part of Syria, the west, the northwest part of Syria, forced them into one governorate, Idlib governorate, a smallish provincial city, Idlib.

in Northwest Syria, that was the capital of a province, if you like. And basically all of the different forces fighting the regime were pushed into this province. Not all of them, but a lot of them, because we haven't even talked about the bloody Kurds. I don't know if we'll be able to get to them, but...

They were fighting ISIS more than anyone else, valiantly, and they became a big ally of the United States. They remain an ally of the United States for how long is open to question. But the Sunni, let's say, Sunni opposition of... of sunni arab opposition of the regime was pushed into idlib province and there it was in 2017 more or less there

And now, in fact, I take it back. We do have to talk about the Kurds because around that time, another player intervened in a big way, Turkey. Okay, so Turkey, very, very big, very powerful state to the north of... of Syria. It has long prosecuted a counter-terrorism campaign against a Kurdish nationalist group called the PKK, who seek to achieve for the Kurdish nation. nation-state of their own the kurds were the people above all peoples who

in the breakdown of the imperial powers that occurred during the course of the First World War were left without a nation state of their own. Millions of Kurds were divided between the new states of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. In the 1920s, these Kurds or some of these Kurds were organized by the Soviet Union and a Kurdish Soviet was... was established as the Soviet Union was trying to expand its power. Remember, the Soviet Union did expand into countries like Azerbaijan and Armenia.

You know, the Soviet Union was moving into that part of the world. The Kurds were meant to be part of that process and in the course of which they became committed Marxist-Leninists. and remained so even when their dreams of creating a Soviet that would be part of the Union failed. So there remained a kind of very well organized, ideologically committed, very competent force of...

revolutionary actors, Kurdish revolutionary actors that pursued national liberation struggle, eventually morphing to some extent into this group, the PKK. Hafez al-Assad. the father of Bashar al-Assad, when he was in power, he had allowed PKK operatives to use Syria as a base. because Hafez al-Assad had an extremely bad relationship with Turkey. It was part of the Assad state's policy to flex its, to project its power into its neighbors, to flex its muscles. And there was...

lots of squabbling over land, you know, the border and stuff. They weren't friends at the time. And so the Kurds used Syria as a base to attack Turkey. So that's in the background. when in 2016 and 2017, as a result of the anti-ISIS campaign, Kurdish forces in the east of Syria more or less allied to and certainly inspired by the PKK grew in strength because they were themselves extremely valiant fighters against ISIS and they were supported.

in a big way, primarily by the United States in that effort. So Turkey's looking on thinking, this is the last thing I want. And Syria doesn't have a properly functioning state. It's basically a basket case. This threatens.

the national interests of turkey this the empowerment of these kurds so in 2017 turkey invades syria from the north and empowers a network of sunni mainly sunni arab or turkmen because there are you know there are a sub very small minority of turkish-speaking syrians holdovers really from when it was part of the ottoman empire a network of militant groups, some jihadists, some nationalists, then were allied to Turkey to project Turkey's power into the north, creating a buffer zone from which...

Turkey could control flows of PKK aligned forces into Turkey. That was what Turkey said and could, you know, attack Kurdish forces in Syria. So that's why Turkey got involved. And so that's where things lay when at the end of 2016, in the early 2017, ISIS was, let's say, defeated. The great battle of Mosul in Iraq came to an end.

one of the largest urban warfare campaigns in history, largely uncommented on at the time. People did not know that this huge global coalition of people were prosecuting such a brutal war in Mosul. and brutality to the degree that we've seen more recently in Gaza, that kind of to uproot a deeply embedded Islamist terrorist organization from a city.

And so that's where things lay when that campaign kind of came to an end. What remained of ISIS were corralled into prisons on the other side of the Euphrates in Syria, where they still exist, tens of thousands of them. What's going to happen to them? Turkey has positions in the north. Russia has positions from its bases in the west. Iran has positions all over the country supporting the regime. America has bases in the east and in the south where he'd prosecuted against ISIS.

Qatar from the Gulf has been supporting financially a lot of the Sunni jihadist groups that have now been forced into Idlib province. So that's where things were in 2017 when a process started in... Kazakhstan, the Astana process it's called, where these major players, primarily Turkey, Russia, and Iran,

with the Assad government and some opposition representatives came together to start sorting out a solution. This process resulted in something like a ceasefire, something like a ceasefire and everything kind of kind of calmed down by 2019. And for five years, more or less, they remained so. Okay, now. We have to shift focus to Idlib province. You remember that man who was sent by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to start a franchise of the Islamic State in Syria, Abu Muhammad.

Al Jolani, he was called. Let's talk about Al Jolani, because he's now sitting in Bashar al-Assad's seat in Damascus, surprising everyone. Abu Muhammad Al Jolani, that's not his real name. the Namdaghir, his real name is Ahmed al-Shar'ah. His Namdaghir, al-Jolani, that means man from the Golan Heights, that's what that name means.

His father's family come from the Golan Heights, which during the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel captured from the Syrians, a strategically very important position, looms above. the lowlands stretching off into the Levant, so it's very strategically important. And in 1974, in a negotiated process with Hafez al-Assad, Israel withdrew a bit from the Golan Heights, a bit.

creating a demilitarized buffer zone there which is now in the news because a few days ago israel took that buffer zone along with some other strategically powerful positions so Ahmed al-Shar'ah is from that part of the world, his father is from that part of the world, and had been a political activist opposed to the Assad regime in the name of Nasserism, a different form of Arab nationalism.

He had been imprisoned by the regime as a result of this. He went into exile, where he at one point in Jordan teamed up with the PLO and was a little bit more influenced by the sort of new left. revolutionary ideology of the PLO, Yasser Arafat's organization. Eventually, he made his way to Riyadh, where he got a job as an oil engineer.

and where his son was born, Ahmed. So Ahmed al-Shara, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, was born in Riyadh in 1982. He's a millennial. I think that means a lot, actually, when we talk about the future of Syria. When he was eight years old, the family moved back to Damascus. His father, it seems, kind of gave up political activism. He grew up in a relatively prosperous neighborhood in Damascus, a middle-class neighborhood.

When the Second Intifada broke out in 2000, this is when Ariel Sharon, the former prime minister of Israel, made a big... He went and visited the Temple Mount in a much publicized way, which sparked off a long sort of prepared for and gestating uprising by the Palestinians against the Israelis.

Second Intifada which predated 9-11 by six months or so Energized the Muslim world the Arab world especially because it was being broadcast on the first proper satellite news channel in Arabic that that allowed for the first time Arabs to be sort of singing from the same news hymn sheet over going over the heads of national broadcasters Al Jazeera This created a huge wave of support for the Palestinians and for their cause and for Islamist opposition voices in the world, including one.

Osama bin Laden, who was then living in a cave in Afghanistan. So Ahmed Ashara, this man, this boy, he's 18, 19 now. He's watching Al Jazeera. It is... inspiring him to get involved. He starts going to the mosque more regularly, he becomes more spiritually kind of interested, more politically interested. And then in 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, he went along with lots of Syrians to Iraq to fight the occupying forces there.

He was imprisoned. He spent time in Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison where Americans tortured detainees. He was eventually released. At some point, it's not... It's not exactly clear when he encountered Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was also in prison. He may have met him in prison. He may have already known him. We're not quite sure. But when he was released, he rapidly rose up the ranks and became...

a lieutenant of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who then sent him to Syria. So that's his background. Now we're in 2017. He and a huge number of jihadist forces have been forced into Idlib province. Where? To some extent, they begin fighting each other. He has come out. He came out in 2016. He already broke with Baghdadi, remember. He didn't want to be a part of ISIS. And then in 2016, he broke with Al-Qaeda publicly. He stated...

We are no longer affiliated with Al-Qaeda and we no longer support Al-Qaeda's strategy of global jihad. We are a nationalist Islamist jihadist movement. We are only interested in Syria. and in overthrowing the Assad regime and creating in its place a just Islamist state for Syria. That became their ambition. He did the rounds. He worked the news. He tried to... communicate this new sort of position. His group was no longer affiliated with global jihad. Okay.

His group and he himself remained on various terrorist watch lists. There's a $10 million bounty on his head by the United States. It remains there. My colleague on the conflicted podcast, Amon Dean, who really knows these things, revealed on our podcast that over the last 10 years various al-qaeda affiliated operatives who went to the Idlib area to meet up with al-Julani and his movement now renamed.

Hizb al-Tahrir al-Sham, HTS, the Organization of the Liberation of the Levant, HTS. Al-Qaeda would send operatives to him to, you know. maybe try to mend fences, try to help him, whatever. These Al-Qaeda operatives who were visiting Idlib, affiliated with HTS and its predecessor, were weirdly being...

picked off one by one by American drone attacks, other American counterterrorism efforts. Weirdly, as I say, my colleague Amon Dean knows that this is because already at that point, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, the reformed Al-Qaeda operative, now a nationalist, was feeding information to the CIA or other.

such organizations about Al-Qaeda figures to help America get rid of them. It served his purposes. He didn't want anything to do with them anymore. It also helped him to project this rebrand, to prove.

that he had changed. Okay. Maybe he had. I don't know. We can talk about that later. What he definitely did in Idlib was became an effective politician and state builder. First... he prosecuted an intense war against remaining al-qaeda affiliated groups there remaining isis affiliated groups there other

jihadist groups that remained committed to their own global jihadist ambitions, whatever, he managed to either defeat them or to co-opt them so that eventually the whole of the province, more or less, was being dominated by HTS and a civilian governmental organization, the Syrian Salvation Government, which HTS founded to govern Idlib province.

according to the rules of 21st century technocracy. They set up ministries. When the COVID-19 crisis broke out, they created a vaccination program. They imposed social distancing. They did all the things that all the governments of the world were doing. And this was this former Al-Qaeda guy and his salvation government governing the province. Now.

Was he or is he a liberal? No. Were there some protests? Was anyone opposed to what the Salvation government and HTS were doing there? Oh, yes. Was there a prison system there? Oh, yes. Was torture going on in that prison system? It seems that that was the case. So I do not want to pretend like he set up a little Switzerland or something there in Idlib province, not at all. But he did provide...

effective governance, certainly compared to what the Syrian people had been experiencing during the war and even before. Meanwhile, more and more Syrians are moving into Idlib, opposition people. sort of forced there to flee the regime so that this tiny province suddenly its population bulge to four and a half million people. Three million Syrians from outside the province were moving there. And Syrians from all over Syria were mixing together, united in opposition to the regime.

divided in all sorts of other ways, religion, ethnic, et cetera, in the way that Syria has always been divided, but united. in their opposition to the regime. This caused a powerful kind of galvanizing effect creating, strengthening a Syrian national identity. We're all together, all Syrians, all against this terrible regime. overshadowed by a now vaguely moderate Islamist government. You can see that this became a kind of crucible for what Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, Ahmad al-Shar'ah, thought

might be feasible for all of Syria, okay? So this transformation occurred. Okay, now to explain what's happened more recently. About two years ago, the world kind of, again, came together and thought, okay, let's bring Bashar al-Assad and his regime back in from the cold. We have to normalize relations with him.

As early as 2018, the United Arab Emirates reopened its embassy in Damascus. So that was really the first sign that maybe some kind of accommodation could be reached and that Bashar al-Assad could survive in his regime. live on. There are many efforts to achieve this on all sides. The United States participated in these efforts. The Gulf participated in these efforts in a big way. Saudi Arabia especially was animated.

to somehow get things right with Syria again. Because it seemed that the whole war was in stalemate. It was just fixed. Turkey definitely wanted a solution to be found. They had invaded the country. They'd created this buffer zone. They were supporting these groups to attack the Kurds and other enemies. But they had also had millions of Syrian refugees pour into their country, which was causing...

electoral problems for President Erdogan. Can you imagine a situation where lots of immigrants cause political problems on the ground? It was happening in Turkey. The very successful political party that President Erdogan leads was being... you know, pressure was being put on it by the opposition because...

You got to sort out this immigration problem. At the same time, anti-Syrian attitudes were on the rise in Turkey. The Syrian refugees themselves could tell that they were less and less welcome. A solution needed to be found. And so Erdogan... working together with the Gulf and these other actors was reaching out to Assad. Let's get round the table. President Assad now. And ultimately, I don't know what was going on inside his head.

No one probably knows. Those who do know might be dead now. Maybe one day we'll find out. We can only guess. But President Assad began to play once again the sort of games that the Assad regime always played. working with all sides, double crossing one ally for other allies, trying to create a sort of a basic confusion while remaining.

Fixed and stubborn in his own ambitions is a sort of narcissistic kind of projection situation going on. You cause chaos around yourself. Everyone's confused. Well, you're never ultimately bending your own egoic kind of... structure. That was sort of in play. 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. 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 there on either sides of this war. So Assad inclining towards a Saudi attempt to normalize relations with him. was looked upon with some disapproval by Tehran, Hezbollah and Russia. They were like, what's this guy doing?

At the same time, Turkey is reaching out to Esed saying, let's get around the table, let's get around the table. And Esed 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. He just was...

playing silly buggers and not getting around that table. 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. That his own regime's ability to prosecute The civil war to project power was extremely limited. The Syrian army had suffered great attrition. There had been a lot of desertion from it. The whole regime depended on Iran.

Hezbollah and Russia to stay afloat 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. That's what he was hoping. 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.

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He brings to the table some leverage 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, 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. 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. It's a huge issue. 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. These Captagon tablets have shown up here. Captagon, which is a very, very harmful amphetamine. It kind of deranges the mind. It's a very bad drug. And since the fall of the regime, these captagon factories have been revealed. They've been destroyed. You can see images, millions of pills. 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. It's a big part of the story. 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. And he could say, well, okay, you help me out, I'll take the drugs away. So that's another dimension to this amazing story.

Okay, 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, 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. 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. In August, most spectacularly Hezbollah, which was the largest non-state militia in the world. 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. So they were no shrinking violets or whatever the expression is. And yet, as we saw, one by one, Israel...

assassinated the leadership, including the leader himself, Hassan Nasrallah. The exploding pagers took out the mid-ranking cadres all in one go. It was this kind of astonishing thing to witness, very much weakening Iran's ability to project power. in the region. This opened up a period of ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Lebanon, between Israel and Hezbollah. Those negotiations finalized on the 27th of November.

Part of the conditions of the negotiations was that the ceasefire did not apply to Syria. So Hezbollah operatives in Syria were not safe from any Israeli. attack based on the ceasefire. That's an important kind of point because that morning, surprising the world, an offensive began, launched. from Idlib province in northwestern Syria, led by Abu Muhammad al-Dulani and HTS against Aleppo, well, in the direction of Aleppo, this big northern city.

In October, it is known, the plans for this offensive were discussed with President Erdogan of Turkey and the security apparatus there, with the hopes that maybe the Turkish aligned. forces along the north, in that bit that Turkey controls, would join in on the offensive to get some land back. You can imagine Erdogan considered it, that would...

That would increase his negotiating position with Bashar al-Assad. But at the same time, Bashar al-Assad had been so intransigent against meeting him at the negotiating table, Erdogan might have thought, this is just going to make him even less willing to come. So in October... The Turks nixed the idea and sort of put the idea on ice, basically told Jolani, don't do this.

Now, Jolani is independent of Turkey. A lot of reports say that HTS is Turkish backed. That can be overstated. It's very independent. Jolani is his own man. Though he works closely with Turkey, especially because HTS controls the border with Turkey in that part of Syria. So they have a close working relationship. They have a shared enemy in Bashar al-Assad. But in October...

Jolani decided to heed Erdogan's sort of advice or whatever his command and okay they put it on ice at the same time from the summer. Russia had been prosecuting a renewed bombing campaign in Idlib against civilian populations. Again, this increased in October, creating this need really, I think, in Jolani's mind, like we've got to do something.

Jolani's no fool. He looks out at the region. He knows that Iran has been weakened by Israel in the preceding year. He knows that a ceasefire agreement is being negotiated between Hezbollah and Israel. 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. But the day that the ceasefire was announced, his forces move in.

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. So it seems quite clear that Jolani and HTS acted alone. They said, this is our chance. Let's go for it. Now, before anyone could catch their breath, Aleppo had fallen. This is the city.

that had been fought over inch by inch for years with tremendous carnage and the death toll, stupendous death toll, suddenly fell as Bashar al-Assad's forces just withdrew. Okay, we'll go on. They continued on to the next city down the M5 highway corridor, Hama. 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. They got to Hama before you knew it. They'd taken it as well. On to the next city, Homs. Meanwhile, the Kurdish forces over in the east... looked up and thought, what's going on? Let's go. They started to push from the east towards the west, taking more territory as well. Finally, in the south of the country, south of Damascus,

rebel forces there, which had long been a player in the Syrian civil war. We haven't talked about them. At one point, they were funded and armed by Israel, who supported them to create a buffer zone against the regime for them. coordinated by Jordan to some extent, America, which had a base in the south a bit further to the east. 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, they rose up and began an offensive towards Damascus. Those southern rebels reached Damascus. first and the Bashar al-Assad regime fell away. 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. And it was against those protesters that the Assad regime had first violently responded.

What were they protesting against? At the time, they were protesting against terrible mistreatment at the hands of the notorious muhabarat of the Syrian state, the intelligence operatives who would... kidnap their teenage boys, rape them, castrate them, dump the bodies in garbage cans, you know, to make sure everyone knows who was really in charge.

terrible things. They had risen up against the regime in 2011, initially not calling for its downfall, simply asking the president to defang the Muhabberat. That was their initial goal. So there was some sweet justice that it was the rebel militias from that part of the country that arrived first in Damascus. And the regime just faded away. Bashar al-Assad was...

spirited away by plane to Moscow, where he and his family now live, probably in some luxury. And later that same day, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani and HTS arrived in Damascus as well. And very quickly, and very effectively as they had done city by city first in aleppo then in hama then in hams immediately taking the city and immediately putting there

the civilian governance structure that they had already perfected in Idlib province. They were ready, one by one, handing over governance to a civilian technocratic body, the Syrian Salvation Government. and indeed in Damascus as well. Abu Muhammad al-Julani, who now says, the war is over. The time for nom's daguerre are over. I am Ahmed al-Shar'ah.

has handed over the running of the government to a civilian outfit led by a man, Mohammad Bashir. He's now, he's the new prime minister of Syria. Ahmed al-Shara himself presides. over now a transition process, which he says will be completed by March 2025, or a new constitution, a new Syrian state will now come into being. That is my best attempt to explain what's happened in Syria over the last 14 years.

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, but what about this? What about that? Or this is not true. But that's my best attempt. First of all, it's fantastic and I feel myself that I'm very much illuminated as to everything that's happening and I now understand what's going on. The thing that I find very interesting is the character of Al Jalani.

who is very different to what we would think of as a jihadist in that he's a jihadist yet a pragmatist. Which is an interesting combination. Can we talk about that a little bit? Let's talk about that. I mean, 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, and I have no idea what's going to happen in Syria. None at all.

I don't know if al-Julani is in fact now a moderate Islamist, maybe more like a Muslim Brotherhood kind of person than like a Osama bin Laden inspired global jihadist kind of person. I don't know if that's really true. He says that it's true.

I don't know if that's true. So what I'm going to say now is me, I'm going to speculate now about this, but I don't want anyone to think that I'm supporting Abu Muhammad al-Jolani. I'm supporting, I don't really know. I don't feel in a way that I have a dog in the fight. I am glad that Bashar al-Assad's regime is gone because it was the worst, the worst regime. So I'm glad about that. I don't know about what has...

taken over in its place and what will emerge, I really don't know. But let's try to imagine we can put ourselves in Abu Muhammad al-Julani's head. He was 19, 20, 21 when he was radicalized. by the events that were unfolding at that time. The Second Intifada, 9-11, etc. The invasion of Iraq. He goes to Iraq, he fights. From 2003 to 2024, that's 21 years.

of constant fighting, including a stint in Abu Ghraib and other black sites in Iraq. So he has really seen it, right? But what has he seen? He's seen Al-Qaeda fail. ISIS really fail. ISIS's failure was really fundamental because it revealed just how sick global jihadism is when taken to its logical extent. ISIS was the best advertisement against global jihadism that anyone could have ever conceived. Many Muslims who might have flirted with global jihadism before...

recoiled in horror when they saw really what it meant. So Abu Muhammad al-Julani is watching all this happen and saying, you know what, I'm a Syrian. I hate this fucking Assad regime. I want the Assad regime to fall. That's what I want. And frankly, this global jihadism thing doesn't seem to be working. He's now in his late 30s.

In his early 40s, he's changing. People change, especially from their... I mean, what were you doing when you were in your early 20s? And now, over all the last years, meeting people, learning new things, no doubt your views have changed. Maybe you're more of a... pragmatist or a realist or a middle-aged man. It's what happens. So maybe that's what's happened to Jolani. He's just grown up. He wants to be effective, i.e. a pragmatist. He wants to govern Syria.

according to the governmental system that he feels provides the greatest degree of justice, which is of course an Islamic system in his mind. But does he want to fight? Does he want to support suicide bombers blowing up the Manchester arena? Does he want to cut off people's heads in the public square and everyone's filming it on their phones? Does he want that? Maybe he knows. That doesn't work. That leads to disaster. So maybe he is now pragmatic.

Makes sense to me. Let me push back on two things you said. Number one, whatever Mohammed Al Jelani was doing in his 20s, it's not the same as what Francis did. I can promise you that. Poor unspeakable acts of horror. I only know a tiny fraction. of what Francis got up to in his 20s. But the second thing that, look, this is just a question from somebody who doesn't know anything, but I went on my Twitter the other day and I saw a clip.

of a statue of Hafez al-Assad being pulled down by ropes and people celebrating and throwing shoes and whatever. And I went, I'm not very old, but I've seen this movie before. And so have you. Saddam Hussein statues. Saddam Hussein statues. And a moderate jihadi from ISIS and Al-Qaeda? Like, that's a hard sell. I know, I know. That's a hard sell to me. And I don't even think we know exactly what it would mean to be a moderate...

Islamist, former global jihadist. We don't know what that means. Well, we know one of those guys who's your co-host on Conflicted, right? Amon Dean, former Al-Qaeda guy, and then turned double agent and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now a pretty reasonable guy who does a podcast. Pretty reasonable. He's wrong about some things. So it can happen. But I think for Eamon, it was like he left that entire space. Whereas this guy won.

He's now in charge of a country. Yeah, but he is in charge of that country, having really, in the crucible of Idlib, changed. I mean, he did change. He had to become more pragmatic. Absolutely. And it paid dividends for him. He realized that by becoming less extreme, he could... enter into alliances with other people. The Islamist movement, the jihadist movement, was constantly splitting into factions. They were fighting each other because no one was extreme enough. We know how this...

how radicals work. Radicalism tends to split off into these different, I know, who's more radical? You're not radical enough. Well, I'm fighting. He saw that happen. He overcame that and he got all of those players united around one umbrella. That's an achievement.

He created the Syrian Salvation Government, which provides governance to a land, technocratic, competent governance. He shifted HTS's... sort of whole, it's sort of process, what's the word, it's practice of militancy away from a battlefield militancy towards a policing kind of militancy, becoming... themselves a counter-terrorism outfit, using all the tools of modern counter-terrorism to snuff out cells of ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Idlib. He did that. So he will have seen that this works. And now...

He has taken the country. ISIS didn't take the country. Al-Qaeda hasn't taken a single country in 30 years of trying very hard to do so. So he might be thinking, well... Pragmatism is what works. You're talking about pragmatism that works. This is a very unpleasant question and deals with an unpleasant truth about the Middle East.

There was a moment at one point where Assad maybe flirted with a more liberal kind of approach to governance, but then realised, looked at the lie of the land, looked at the fact that his... The people we represented were only, I think, 12% of the population. The Alawites, the minority of them. Absolutely. Is the reality, unpleasant as it may be, that you need...

a strong man in order to hold Syria together with all of these disparate groups who, to put it bluntly, hate each other? You know, I don't want to say you need a strong man. That argument has been leveled so many times. And one result of that argument is that so many Arab countries, so many Muslim countries have languished under the rule of strong men.

on the belief that that's what they deserve. That's the only kind of governance that they can have. I don't really like that argument. I certainly don't know if that's the case. However, I do know... that historically speaking, Syria has been more often than not a zone of great power conflict. No question. Until the French mandate was established.

in Syria, no single government had governed, no political organization had governed that particular land mass at all. I'm talking, you know, go back to the Bronze Age. And that part of the world has always been caught between empires, usually between empires based in Anatolia, i.e. Turkey, Egypt, and Mesopotamia and Persia. So usually...

I mean, that's one thing to understand about the Syrian civil war, that what we've seen play out in the last 14 years, it's horrible. Is it historically unprecedented? Sadly, it is not. What makes it historically unique is the degree... of technological sophistication that was brought to bear in the conflict, but the history of Syria is full of this kind of conflict, periods of relative stability.

based on other powers propping up some kind of system there than that collapsing as the great powers shift. So I would like to answer it that way. I'm not saying that what Syria needs is a strong man. I don't know that. But I do know that Syria, its geography alone, not to mention its demographic diversity, suggests that there is no... easy solution to creating a functioning nation state there, absent a strong center. I think there's a great challenge there for it to be achieved.

If that answers fair. That does answer the question. And it's very interesting as well, because the more you read about Syria, the more you realize all of these different wars, which you didn't think would have an impact, are all interconnected. Absolutely. The fact that Russia got dragged, well, invaded Ukraine, impacted Syria because Russia could no longer provide as much military and financial support to Syria and to the Assad regime because they were...

fighting that war with Ukraine. It's all linked. You're right. I mean, I think that to some extent that has been exaggerated. Okay. Some... Russian material had been relocated to fight the war in Ukraine, but not that much. Certainly, Vladimir Putin's position is... is weaker than it was two years ago as a result of his invasion of Ukraine. But I think more to the point is what I said before, that both Iran and Russia realized that Bashar al-Assad was not...

any longer in any way a trustworthy ally, not worth the billions, not worth the blood to support that he was going to betray them. And so, let him go. Well, speaking of the great power games in this context, what's interesting is I suppose... For Russia, it was the port and the airbase. Are they going to lose that now? Have they lost that now? They haven't lost it. It seems like back-channel negotiations have been opened up. I don't know when they opened up with HTS.

HTS is now effectively the government of Syria. So they will be talking to all the great players. Of course they will be. I mean, Western powers are in a particularly difficult position because HTS is a prescribed terrorist organization. Ahmed Ashara, as he now wishes to be known, still has a $10 million bounty on his head. So it's difficult for countries like the United States, the UK, France, etc. to directly talk to him.

They will be talking to him via their intelligence agencies underground so as not to be seen to be dealing with them until... this thorny issue of whether or not HTS remains a prescribed terrorist organization can be sorted out. But Russia, it does seem, has been... negotiating with HGS behind the scenes, and at the moment it seems that they have secured their two bases. The regime doesn't seem to be attacking them. The Israeli government...

The Israeli regime, as soon as Damascus fell, as we all know, immediately launched a devastating air assault against former Syrian regime military installations across the country, sinking its navy, destroying the chemical weapons factories. that despite the UN, despite agreeing to do so with the UN, the Assad regime had not destroyed, destroying basically what remained of Syria's military capabilities, just destroyed it.

But they didn't attack, obviously, the Russian bases. So it seems that HTS, you think, okay, Jelani, do I really want to provoke a fight with Russia? Why? It's kind of... Might be useful to me to keep Russia on side in this period going forward when I need as many supporters as I possibly can to put together a new Syria. So I think Russia's position is more or less secure there.

It remains to be seen, but that's what I think. What a game. I mean, these two forces were literally at each other's throats. You know, that's pragmatism for you. That's incredible. That's pragmatism for you. If you forget about all the human suffering and misery, which of course we mustn't, but if you just step back and look at the geopolitics of this, that's just like, okay.

Let's start from this now and we'll go and... It's good that you bring that up because Jelani himself can be as pragmatic as he likes. The question is, is he able to determine exactly how... the foot soldiers of HTS and its allies behave on the ground now that they've spread out across the country. Does he have the ability to make sure that they don't? start causing lots of problems, hunting down Alawites and killing them. I mean, the regime has not...

It has announced some blanket atmesties, for example, soldiers who were conscripted into the Syrian army, largely forcibly so, and most of them are in fact Sunnis anyway. really affiliated with the regime, particularly those associated with the security apparatus, there has not been an amnesty against them. They have been found, already executions have occurred, and there were reports. Christian communities in Syria, of which there are lots of Christians in Syria.

Are they worried? It seems that they're worried. Can this be overstated? It seems that it can be overstated. It serves the purposes of some actors to inflate the anxiety of minority groups, to discredit the government. You know, it's hard to know. Exactly, but certainly religious minorities will be wondering at the very best, what does this mean? Does this mean returning to a form of governance that governed this part of the world for over a thousand years where

a Sunni Muslim state governed more or less according to traditional Sharia law. And Sharia law is really a process more than a law code. It's a vibe. where Christians and other minorities are allowed a great deal of self-governance, but very much as second-class citizens, they'll be wondering, Is it a return to this? Some of them might be wondering, well, on balance, maybe that's better than the secular, totalitarian, leftist, nationalist regime of the Assad family.

which was, as we all see now, a real horror show. They might be thinking that. And one final question before we wrap up for me is it seems that... If you are right, which you may or may not be as you yourself say about this guy becoming more of a pragmatist and governing in that way. I'm not saying that. I don't know. That's why I mentioned that you may or may not know.

But let's say that we take that as a possibility. It would make sense for the West to drop its terrorist designations and to try and, as you said yourself, it's quite clear that he's already been working with the Americans to eliminate, you know, at least what Eamon thinks. And then the question for me is, well, I don't know if the cause of global jihad has entirely been... destroyed in this process and so if this guy becomes a moderator

Is he going to face an insurgency from the non-moderates who are still around in the region, who think, oh, this guy doesn't go far enough. No, no, we need a global insurgency. We need... If I'm Iran, I'm thinking, well, we need some jihadis here to go and attack Israel, for example, right? Well, if you're Iran right now, you're thinking...

Jesus, we really got to lick our wounds here. They are really on the back. Sure. But what I'm saying is there are still people in that region to whom the global jihadist worldview is very appealing. It's true. So, first of all, let me... respond to what you said about whether or not HTS should be removed from the prescribed terrorist group list. If I were president-elect Donald Trump, I would think...

Well, this is a way of getting some leverage over HTS around any negotiation moving forward about the future of Syria. I can use the prospect of being removed from that list as a means of getting some concessions from Jolani. moving forward. So that's probably what I would do if I was the United States at the moment. As for global jihadism more generally, the most proximate threat to Syria from that point of view...

are the pockets of ISIS that remain in the country, including those tens of thousands of ISIS prisoners in prison on the other side of the Euphrates. So if, as is possible, Turkey... allows for a diminishment of Kurdish power in Syria. Kurds now who have been governing that part of Syria with the Americans in order to keep ISIS down, if that is somehow upset, maybe there could be a resurgence of ISIS.

and isis is absolutely still devoted to its own caliphate and in jolani and hts on social media and other things by by ISIS supporters and ISIS members themselves has been subjected to great criticism like, oh, this guy's a traitor, you know, he's a traitor to the cause, etc. So that exists. I think one of the reasons that Israel... launched its devastating assault against what remained of the Syrian armed forces armaments and bases and things.

was probably done in collusion with not just the United States, but maybe a lot of regional actors, Israel contended. do things that other people don't want to do to help ensure that if ISIS does come back, they don't get a hold of that material. So I think that's part of what's going on there. But if we zoom out and look at global jihadism more generally.

And this is the most important thing really to realize, that if you're still stuck in September 11th, 2001 thinking, when the global war on terror was launched, as a result of those terrorist attacks, and the invasion of Afghanistan happened, and the invasion of Iraq happened, and black sites were set up, and all that, that whole thing, zero, dark, 30, all of that time. If you're still in that headspace, you've got to get out of it. The world has moved on. The jihadists have moved on.

A younger generation of jihadists have come to the fore. This is the millennial jihadists now, right? They have seen the mistakes that the older generation made. They have seen how every jihadist effort... got bogged down in either inner jihadist fighting or were crushed by other forces, the Americans, the French, whatever. So there's a transformation generally. We see this across the Sahel, that strip.

of land south of the Sahara Desert, which has seen a lot of terrorist fighting, names like Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and all these groups, they are undergoing transformations themselves a bit like what we've seen.

in HTS, as their ambitions become more regional, more local, and it's about getting territory, governing that territory. In a way, a return to the status quo ante, because That part of the world was largely determined by the extent to which a warlord of some kind, illuminated by the light of Islam, would be able to grab some territory and govern it.

more or less justly. That's how it worked. So it seems to be returning to that model. Global jihad, you know, how inspiring is it now? It really was not successful. If you look, where are the successes? The Taliban now control Afghanistan again. They survived. But the Taliban was not a force of global jihad. They wanted to govern Afghanistan. They're a more or less Pashtun aligned

Islamist group, you know, they wanted Kabul, they want to govern that part of the world. Okay. They were a problem for the United States because they supported global jihadist actors like Al-Qaeda, but they themselves, they sit there in Afghanistan. They've survived. Okay, that's interesting. Now in Syria, another example. So global jihad itself might be on the way out as pragmatic.

Nationalist jihad becomes more the norm. But then you start having to ask yourself, well, what do these words mean now? What ideology are you opposing if you're opposing... If you're opposing efforts through the use of a combination of the military and political institutions, creating Muslim state institutions, like what are you opposing then? Are you opposing...

the will of the majority of Middle Easterners? I mean, it's hard to know. I mean, do you see what I mean? It's very hard to know. I think what is certainly true is that the Middle East, let's say Syria. suffered from very top down, progressive, secular, modern governance. That's what the Assad regime was. It was not the result of the will of the people.

It was a fascistic kind of totalitarian, authoritarian regime imposed from above, inspired by the West. It was not Islamist. It was Western. The Ba'ath Party was inspired by nationalist... romantic nationalist, crazy, you know, rhetoric from Europe. So the Middle East had that kind of imposed from above. Now, it wasn't liberal.

I don't know where in the Middle East a liberal regime imposed from above has worked or has even been tried, frankly. You know, the only liberal-ish regime in the Middle East is Israel. But we know that its liberalism is compromised because of its security situation and all the problems there. But apart from that, liberalism has not been a big goer in that part of the world. Because Islam is there. Islam is not liberal. Liberalism is not just reality. It's not just common sense.

an ideological structure that requires faith in it for its power. That's the thing. Someone like Jolani thinks that Islam is what you think liberalism is, just the way things are, a political system that corresponds to reality. There is a God. God will provide security, justice, and wealth for those nations that are governed according to his will. This isn't for him a kind of...

religious belief that exists in his own heart, separate from some secular space, that's not how he sees the world. For him, that's just true. And liberalism in his view is... the radical ideology that is ungrounded from reality because it denies God, it denies objective morality, and he looks and it leads to the atomization of society, the decline of family, the decline of neighbors. So I'm just saying that...

Where does that leave us? I don't know. Right now in Syria, a terrible totalitarian regime has fallen. A possibly moderate Islamist regime. has taken over and is going to try to create a more just government for the Syrian people, according to its own lights. And in that effort... is already reaching out to possible partners including in the west so all we can hope without deciding in advance that this is impossible all we can hope is that cool heads and

pragmatic solutions-based thinking prevails, that Syria does not, as is very possible, devolve once again into civil war as various factions based on ethnicity, sect, whatever, fight each other. And that malign, more or less malign external actors don't intervene again to serve their own national interests. That's what we can hope for. That's what I hope for. Because I lived in Syria for a year in the Naughties. I loved the country when I was there.

It's been heartbreaking for all of us who love the country to see what's gone on there all these years. And so we just hope that moving forward, it just... solution that is the true expression of all the peoples of Syria's will comes to triumph there. So before we head on over to Substack, where our viewers and listeners get to ask their questions to you, the final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

Before Thomas answers the final question at the end of the interview, make sure you click the link in the description. Go to our substack where you'll be able to see this. Is there an example of a Muslim-dominated government that moved from a radical Islamist stance to a more moderate non-jihadist one? We haven't talked about what this means for Israel. What does this mean for Israel?

What is the probability that this fighting might spread outside the borders of Syria? Well, you asked me this question six years ago or whenever it was I was last on the show. And I think people were listening because my answer then was, what we're not talking about enough is religion, the importance of religion and the possibility that religion might be true.

That's what I said. Often at the time, it seemed that no one ever was stopping to consider the possibility that religion might be at least corresponding to something that is true about the nature of reality. I think in the last five years, there's been a big change in that regard. And more and more people are beginning to take religion more seriously. As I talked about last time, I, as a young man, converted to...

Orthodox Christianity. I spent time in monasteries in Greece and in Egypt and places learning that more ancient tradition, ancient contemplative tradition of Christianity. I feel confident that religion does correspond to what is true about the nature of reality. And I'm glad that people are talking about it more. And now, shameless plug.

I'd like to say that if anyone is interested in learning more about the ancient, intelligent, psychologically illuminating, contemplative tradition of Eastern Christianity, I have started a substack. called Life Sentences, where I offer audio podcast readings, reading through ancient mystical texts, and offering commentary to make those texts more explicable, and I also write pieces about. more spiritual, psychological themes. That's wisdomreadings.substack.com.

wisdomreadings.substack.com. As I say, if, as I think is the case, your listeners and people like your listeners... are lending a more interested and engaged ear to religious things, and maybe particularly Christianity, you won't find someone rolling up his sleeves and getting into the down and dirty of Christianity as much as... life sentences. So I recommend that. Well, I really hope you write about some of this stuff on yourself. Yeah, I really should. I will. I will. I will.

I really do hope, because I think there's a huge audience for that. People would love to get... Because you sat down, we asked you one question, you gave a 50-minute perfect answer. That is one of the most illuminating things I've ever heard on this subject. Well, thank you for the opportunity, Constantine and Francis. It was great to have you on. But we've got more because we're going to head on over to Substack where Thomas is going to answer your questions.

If no single group can control Syria, then fighting will break out between these tribes, factions and warlords. What is the probability that this fighting might spread outside the borders of Syria?