How a Terrorist Became Syria’s President | Firas Modad x Peter McCormack

These are the games that he's playing. I think there was a decision to allow a program. We don't know how many people died; the estimates are from 900 to 9,000. We have no idea. And we see Syrians in Europe celebrating this and saying, "Kill more of them." And we see a lot of Sunnis saying, "Let's go, let's escalate this further, let's kill the rest of them, and let's keep going against the minorities because the minorities are the problem."

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Right here we go. Welcome back, Forz.

Thank you. Thanks for having me again so quickly.

Yeah, we don't normally do this, um, but uh, you know, we made a show—was it last week or the week before? Can't remember—but um, it was very popular, uh, really good feedback; people really enjoyed the show. That I've had emails, DMs, or the comments on Twitter—people really like you and really like the way you honestly think things out. And then we're sitting here this week reading everything that's happening in Syria, and I feel like it's something I want to cover, 'cause I I want to understand it better, and uh, I reached out to you and I'm like, "Who should I talk to?" You and you said, "Me." I was like, "Fine, let's do it." So welcome back.

Thank you. Got a lot of questions. Um, I've been trying to trying to be as objective as possible, understanding what's happening in Syria. Right there is a pull of people who want you to believe that uh, there is a Western influence to get rid of Assad, and they've made a huge mistake, and now the country is going into chaos. Uh, and there's an equal pull of people in my circles who are like, "No, this had to happen; Assad had to go, and the country will recover." There's competing voices, competing ideas of why it's happened. What's happened—like it's just a mess. And then I go deeper down and I try and look at the uh, background of the chemical attacks, and there are people said that Assad has committed chemical attacks, and there's others that saying, "No, it wasn't him; that would have been um, competing groups who wanted to create false flags." I'm trying to even make sense of it—so hard.

Yeah, it seems very complicated.

It's a mess.

It is a mess. Yes, absolutely. Probably go back a step, help me understand Syria as a country, because there's is quite a secular country, a lot of different religions, um, it seemed like some religious minorities were protected. How did the up to Assad—how did the regime come to exist, and what kind of country was it?

Okay, is it—let's start with the Ottoman Caliphate, okay? Because that's where it actually starts. Um, for all of its history, Islam was intrinsically linked with power. You never had a point where there wasn't a Muslim government. The Jews went through the Exile; the Christians went through 300 years of persecution under the under the Romans before Rome converted. Islam never had that experience, and there was always an overlap between religious Authority and secular Authority all the way through the Ottoman Empire. World War I ends, and you get countries like um, Saudi Arabia, uh, Libya, Egypt—Egypt to a lesser extent—uh, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, that hadn't really existed as independent countries but had existed under as as provinces with various degrees of autonomy, Lebanon being the most autonomous under the Ottoman Empire. So when you're thinking about the Middle East in 1918, this was sort of similar to to Medieval Europe; borders weren't particularly well-defined. Find there were many local authorities; there were different arrangements for different cities, um, and everybody understood that you were sitting underneath the control of the Ottomans. Prior to the defeat of the Ottomans, there had been in in in the end of World War I, um, there had been a gradual process of the Europeans taking away provinces of the Ottoman Empire. So Algeria and Tunisia uh, come to mind; uh, these had been centers of piracy where Muslim Pirates would go raid European ships or sometimes raid European shores, take slaves, sell them on or hold on to them for ransom, and this was done continuously until Europe really demonstrated its military superiority. So the first American overseas expedition was to go and bomb Alger in Algeria and Tripoli in Libya to stop them from taking American ships and uh, enslaving American Sailors in order to demand payments from the United States, and the Americans did so to negotiate a lower payment because the original payment that the day of Alger had demanded was pretty much astronomical. He was asked, "Why were you doing this?" He said, "Because Islam allows us to do this." Um, so this was the broader context: you had this Empire collapsing, and then the final blow to the Ottoman Empire came in the defeat of World War I in 1918, and the European powers carved up the levantine provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The as per the Sypo agreement, Constantinople was meant to go to the Russians, but there was the Bolshevik Revolution that got in the way in 1917, and France ended up in control of Lebanon and Syria. Britain ended up in control of uh, Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq. These places had never existed as autonomous states. There was a bit of autonomy in Lebanon; there were in different regions, especially on the coastal mountains on the West Lebanon Mountain train that goes from Syria all the way to Southern Lebanon and and into Israel. There had been always some more autonomy for Mountain communities because it was always harder to send armies up the mountains, and because it was harder, a lot of the different minorities holded up in the mountains. So the Maronites of Lebanon, the Druze of Lebanon, the Alawites of Syria all decided to go up into the mountains, whereas the Orthodox Christians stayed in the cities, the Sunnis stayed in the cities, the Shia went up to the mountains and to to the Bah, which was its own weird arrangement. So you had this um, religious fragmentation that predated the existence of these states. Then you had the Europeans taking over and saying, "Congratulations, you're now Westphalian States." Unlike in Europe where the transition from personal Empire to Westphalian states to nation states happened gradually over two or three centuries, in the Middle East it was just done: "Congratulations, you're now a new state," but there was no Nation underpinning that state.

Is this why you seem to have so many say uh, terrorists in the region who will happily uh, fight in Iraq and then fight in Syria and then talk about their own caliphate across Iraq and Syria? Because they don't really have a single nation-state identity.

That's a big part of it. Yeah. Another part of it is down to the to the N to the nature of Islam and to the beliefs that underpin Islam. Another part of it is down to the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, and um, some of it is down to the left, and I sincerely blame the left for a lot of the misery in the Middle East.

Okay, what happened as a result of this adjustment? There's now these paper states that suddenly exist with borders that didn't really exist before. That was that a lot of the men in the military decided that what we need to do is to replicate the Soviet experience and to try to reform land ownership and reform ownership of industrial assets and to build heavy industries and force progressivism on society. So the Bath Party that rules Syria, it's the Arab Bath Socialist Party; same for Iraq. Nasser in Egypt, he was an open socialist. Gaddafi in Libya, he tried to blend uh, socialism and his own very quirky, very unusual views. Everywhere there was a leftist takeover of power in the Middle East, there was a conflict between the religious establishment and the new leftists who took power.

Right. And this happened in Somalia, in southern Yemen, in Iraq, in Syria, in Egypt, in Libya, and the result of trying to control and contain Islam and impose something that was alien to it was that it rebounded in the same way that now Poland after the collapse of Communism is much more religious, or Russia after the collapse of Communism is much more religious. You can't erase people's religious identity. So when the Ottoman Empire was formally dissolved—it it was defeated in 1918, but it was formally dissolved in 1923, 5 years later—in Egypt an organization called the Muslim Brotherhood emerged. This was started by a school teacher, Hassan Banna, and his view was, "All of these attempts to experiment with progressivism and with Arab nationalism and with local nationalism are absolutely stupid. We need to go back back to Islamic rule; we need to become better Muslims, and we need and these countries will not progress without Islam forming an intrinsic part of their identity."

Right. So so those uh, states that have kind of more kind of Western lifestyles and values, whether it's drinking, whether it's gambling, whether it's uh, women probably with more liberal rights and maybe not having to cover themselves as much, they're the states that have fractured and seen a lot more of the internal conflict, whereas the States built purely on Islam with a strong, arguably dictator leader, but have—M you—whether it's Saudi, Qatar, they've been able to be a lot more stable.

Let me add a little more Nuance to this; it would be needed.

Yeah. So um, Libya, Egypt, uh, Iraq, and very briefly Syria, uh, as well as Jordan, Morocco, and the Gulf States, they all ended up with a monarchic system initially, and this is was accepted by a lot of people because people generally accept monarchy; it's genuinely seen as a legitimate form of government. Yeah, the royal family is the family that that is the leading family of the nation, and we're all tied into it, and we're all part of one network, and that works, and it worked. The problem was the the the most important thing that sort of destabilized that transition, I would argue, was Israel, because when these countries began gaining independence from Western Powers, mainly in the '40s, in 1948 Israel emerged, and this was a major humiliation for the Muslim world for religious reasons, because the idea of a Jewish state in control of the holy land was fundamentally unacceptable from an Islamic perspective. The modernizers that wanted to transform Arab societies tried to replace Islamism with Arab nationalism and said, "No, we want we don't want to go back to a Turkish caliphate," partly in reaction to Turkey turning hyper-nationalistic under Mustafa Kamal Atatürk and decided, "No, no, the path forward for these Arab countries is going to have to replicate the European experience," and the European experience was built on separating religion and politics and was built on a strong nationalist Foundation, but because Syria, Libya, uh, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, the Gulf States—these are not really Nations—they couldn't go with, as Syrian nationalism. There was one party that tried, and it was completely fascist uh, but capitalist, and it just they they they never really got anywhere. So they tried to replace Islam with Arab nationalism, which meant that to reclaim Arab honor they had to be seen as standing up to Israel, but they weren't able to do that; they were very resoundingly defeated in 1948, in part because the Jewish Army outnumbered the five Arab armies that attacked it, m and had been armed by the West and had gained experience during the Second World War and so on and so forth, um, and because this Society was just sort of Awakening from medieval times. There had been some elements of modernity in the cities, but not really in the provinces and not really in the rural areas where you still had quasi-feudal arrangements. So they tried to impose—each of these countries tried to impose Arabism and Arab nationalism by force. The issue was that because it didn't lack any real legitimacy—because it didn't have—sorry, any real legitimacy, um, and because it was trying to substitute uh, Islam with with with Arabism, there wasn't a clear way to govern and to decide who should be in charge. So each of those countries, especially Iraq and Syria, and Syria more than any of the others, ended up experiencing military coup after military coup. So Syrians gained independence in 1946, 1947; they organized the first election; it didn't go well, but well enough for a first election ever. 1948, they get defeated by the Israelis. 1949, the head of the army launches the first coup, and then there are two other coups that year. 54, another coup; uh, 58, they decide that we're going to experiment with Arab Unity, and they decide to form a single Republic with Egypt, but Egypt was also under military rule, having had its coup in 53 or 54 and having had a war with Israel in 56, and the Egyptians being being military men in control of a country that they don't understand. Syria tried to govern it mainly through the the secret police, okay? And the various secret police services. Nobody wants to be governed by the secret police. I mean, the Ottoman Empire was dictatorial; there was one guy in charge, but it wasn't despotic or tyrannical all the time; it accepted that you ran a bit of your own Affairs, and you paid your taxes. These guys, because they were coming in with no legitimacy other than the fact that they were soldiers first, were constantly engaged in coups against each other, and secondly, could only govern with brutality because, "We are doing this for your own good; we will impose progress and development on you, and so we will destroy the old models that you had, which involved wealthy merchants, a wealthy landed class, a middle class, etc., etc., and we will adopt the ideas of um, peasants and Factory workers against the bourgeoisie," but this didn't have any intellectual roots in the Arab world or in the Muslim world; it was just a foreign import, and so the only way was brutality and coup after coup after coup. So it was three coups in 1949, a coup in 1954, Arab Unity with with Egypt—Syria and Egypt One Republic in 1958, a coup in 61, a coup in 63, a coup in 66, a coup in 1970. The 1970 coup brought Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar al-Assad, to power, and since the 1966 or 63 coup, it had been that the Alawites were the dominant force, but they're a minority group within Syria, but there are very many privileges to being a minority.

Mhm. So because they were a minority, the French relied on them a little bit more in their Armed Forces because, being a heretical Muslim sect, the Sunnis hated them, and so they were natural allies of the French, thinking, "Okay, the French are there imposing their will on the Syrians in part to protect the Christians of Lebanon, in part to secure their Mediterranean interests," and they thought, "Who could our allies be in Syria?" The Christians of Syria—not particularly good soldiers; they're mainly City people, the Orthodox—and so the natural Ally turned out to be the mountain men, the Alawites, who were constantly humiliated under Sunni rule because of their heretical Muslim beliefs, and they played a big role in the Army. And so when the Alawites then took power through the vehicle of the Bath Party—Bath meaning regeneration—so it's the re—it's the Arab regeneration Socialist Party, and it believes in Pan-Arabism, but it got captured by the Alawites in Syria and in Iraq by the Sunnis—similar developments there.

Yep, by the minority essentially deciding, "We're going to be the ruling minority," because they're a minority with a long history of humiliation at the hands of the Sunnis, they were willing to be more brutal; they trusted each other more, and that allowed them to insert themselves as a trusted minority, as a as a minority with internal cohesion and Trust in the face of the Sunnis because any Sunni could launch a coup against any other Sunni, but once the Alawites were in power, it was just Hafez al-Assad's coups against his own allies to become the uh, main Alawite leader and then to take power, and he was able to fill the security forces and to fill the army with Alawite officers, with the idea being that, "I will trust them because they have nothing else; they they have nowhere else to turn other than me as the guy in charge." So this is the minority privilege: the well-organized and committed minority always defeats a disorganized majority because they wouldn't be another Alawite coup against—he did the only other Alawite coup against other Alawites, and then he was in charge. It didn't mean that he didn't have Sunni allies or Druze allies or Christian allies even, because he was very clear that, "I'm the one in charge." He could select from the other minorities, from the other groups in Syria, people that he could trust and place them in positions of power so long as they understood that they were dependent on him and that all their power comes from him. So you ended up with Syria that is in theory a Pan-Arab Republic that wants to integrate and unify with the entire Arab world. Okay, he said that the in the Constitution that the religion of the state is Islam and the president must be a Muslim, and he converted personally to Sunni Islam. He said, "I'm not an Alawite anymore; I'm a Sunni Muslim," except that nobody believed him because it wasn't true.

What is the fundamental difference between Alawi and the Sunni?

So um, there was a break early on in Islamic history between the successors of Muhammad. Yeah, one of the successors was a gentleman by the name of Ali, Ali ibn Abi Talib, his cousin, and this is down to whether it's a meritocracy or by birthright—not quite—this is down to personal struggles between different people, um, relating to marriage relations and who should be in charge when, with the supporters of Ali saying he should have been the successor all along and the other three successors—initial successors—shouldn't have come, um, and with the Sunni saying, "No, there was nothing wrong with the way the succession happened," and then there was a conflict between Ali and uh, Muhammad's favorite wife, Aisha, and then there was a conflict between him and the Umayyads, the Umayyads being a family that was from Muhammad's tribe who had been hostile to him but who had then converted, and their most astute man was Muawiya, who founded a new dynasty, a new Muslim Dynasty. We can get into the esoterics, but let's not—let let's park that for now. And that Dynasty's Capital was in Damascus, and they lasted for hundred something years, and then they were overthrown by people claiming relationship to Ali, who were the Abbasids, and their Capital was in eventually Baghdad in Iraq. So the importance of Baghdad and Damascus really is that these were always the centers of Arab power and Arab culture up until the Ottoman takeover, which was contributed to by the Mongol invasions, and let's not digress too much. Um, so these were the heart of the Muslim World. Islam came from Arabia, but it was civilized in the Levant, and it was in the Levant that Islam interacted with the Byzantines and with the Romans and with the Greeks and where it took on its own unique flavor. This went badly with Islam deciding that philosophy is inherently heretical, or most philosophers were inherently heretical, and this is this was when the Muslim mind sort of shut, if you will, and according to Sunni Muslims, there was no further ijtihad, no further interpretation of Islam. So this was the background where you found yourself; you found yourself in in Baghdad and Damascus, the two cities to which the glory of the Arabs belonged and the that had exploded Islam into the world stage more than any others. They had been under foreign rule by the Ottomans for 400 years; that foreign rule was seen as acceptable because it was Islamic Rule, and all of a sudden these countries found themselves as nation-states with which they had no experience of [Music] whatsoever.

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But this is the why there's a desire to build the caliphate across Syria and Iraq by certain groups.

Well, they they don't limit themselves here. So so the Islamic State was first State in Iraq, then it was Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, then after the conflict with al-Qaeda, it became just Islamic State, and it had a province in Nigeria, and it had a province in the Philippines, and it has a province in uh, Central Africa, and it has had a province in Libya, and so on and so forth. So they the Islamic State project is a bastard child of the Muslim Brotherhood in a way, but it was also the media attention was on Iraq and Syria, but they refer to themselves as the Islamic State everywhere, and they believed that all Muslims owed them Allegiance. There was a time when I really lost—nearly lost my mind—because I decided to spend two weeks a month listening to Islamic State anthems and sort of documenting the themes. Um, the main source of entertainment in the Islamic State was probably video games and anthems because music was forbidden, and pretty much was so was everything else—smoking, drinking, having fun—and so a cappella singing was really one of the few ways of entertainment that they had. So I thought I'd better try to understand this. When studying the Islamic State and when doing this research, it turned out that one of the most repeated themes of the Islamic State was how disappointed they were in other Muslims for not supporting them, because on an individual level most Muslims didn't really subscribe to this, but then there's a kink in that story. Pew surveys in 2013 decided to survey, I think it was Bangladesh, Pakistan, a bunch of Central Asian countries, Jordan, Tunisia, Iraq, Lebanon—yeah, I I think these were the ones where—and and Egypt and the Palestinian territories. The what they found was that in the moderate countries—Jordan and Tunisia—40% of the population supported full Islamic law, including amputations, stonings, uh, whippings, etc. In Egypt, it was 60 something percent; in the Palestinian territories, it was 60 something percent, uh, high 60s; in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it was in the '90s that supported did this. So you end up with this bizarre dichotomy where a lot of people will tell you, "We don't support Islamic State," okay, "but you do—you support flogging? Yes? Why? Because it's it's in the Hadith; it's supposed to be done." Uh, actually, I think flogging is in the Quran, but never mind. So you end up basically at the end of World War I—at the end of World War II more accurately—with these states having become fully independent, fully fledged independence with seat in the unit—seats in the United Nations and all of that, all of the trappings of of a Westphalian State, but no historic Pathway to get there; it was just a system that was dropped on them by the Europeans. It wasn't entirely alien in that under the Ottomans, Basra in Iraq, Baghdad, Damascus, Aleppo—these were different provinces. So Lebanon was a different Province, um, sometimes part of Tripoli, sometimes part of part of AA, and I think one time Beirut, but as autonomous, full-blown Westphalian states, that wasn't—that hadn't happened. So ended up with the trappings of a state without the people of a state and the history of a state and the history of a state and and yes. And so what did they turn to? They turn to ancient Arab history, and how did they try to modernize with Arab nationalism, but that was a dead end because there was no legitimate way to unify the Arabs. "Why should you be in charge of—not me?" So everybody who was ever in charge would try to impose his will by brutal force, m and to end these cycles of coups. Because Iraq also had its own cycle of coups, people like Saddam and Assad emerged and said, "I will be as brutal as I had to be to make sure that you people launched no more coups, and so I will appoint people from my immediate family and from my immediate Community to the key positions, and I will execute anybody who dares to think differently." It was a predictable reaction, and in the meantime, while these guys were trying to sell the story that, "We're building up Arab Unity," which they couldn't do because of their internal hostilities, they were getting defeated in war after war by the Israelis. In 56, they got humiliated and saved by the Americans. In '67, it was a disaster; they lost the Golan Heights; they lost the Sinai, and they lost the West Bank. In 73, they did well in the first days of the war, but then when the war ended, the Israelis were within a stone's throw of Damascus and of Cairo because of American help. And then in 82, Israel invades Lebanon, Syria's next-door neighbor, and it—historically speaking—you invade Damascus through Lebanon; you go up the coast of Lebanon and you go through the Bekaa, and then you swing into Damascus, and that panicked the Syrians. And then in 93, 96, 2006, Hezbollah fought Wars against Israel with full Syrian backing because the Syrians were absolutely terrified that um…

They would end up with Lebanon under Israeli control, which would mean that Mascus had fallen from a military perspective, even if it wasn't directly attacked because of the geography. If the Israelis had fully consolidated over Lebanon, Syria would have been effectively defeated. So this is the sort of background. There was an experiment in building nation-states in the Levant, and it failed. And there was an experiment to build a secular nation-state in Turkey, and it also failed.

The Turkish Army was constantly launching coups in 1960, 1982, 1997 to stop the rise of the Islamists and to make sure that the Islamists wouldn't take power again and bring Turkey back to what they perceived as the backwardness of Islam—to what the military perceived as the backwardness of Islam. And that failed with Erdogan taking power in 2001 and weakening the military severely, uh, especially in 2008 and then defeating a coup by some of his allies in 2016 and consolidating. So it's one story in a sense of trying to build nation-states where no nation exists.

Why doesn't the nation exist in those countries? Because they're diverse. Diversity means that we disagree on who we are, what's "us." Mhm. For the Kurds, "us" is the other Kurds. For the Christians, "us" is the other Christians. The Sunnis, same. The Druze, the Alawites, the other minorities, the Shia—their loyalty to each other trumps their loyalty to this theoretical entity of a nation-state.

And then when it was pretty obvious to an outside observer that this experiment wasn't going very well, Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father, dies in 2000. But, but he maintained uh control without losing the country for 30 years. Yes, but over those 30 years he fought an insurgency against the Muslim Brotherhood. There was the first insurgency in 1964 when the Ba'ath was in power, and he was one of the key decision-makers. And then there was another insurgency from '76 to '82, and he ended that insurgency with the massacre of Hama. Hama is a city in central Syria between Aleppo and Homs. Um, nobody knows how many people died, and the estimates are from 5,000 to 20, 30,000. I don't have a number that I fully believe. I accept this range. And he ended it with artillery, tanks, etc. He simply tore down, tore down the city on the heads of the Muslim Brothers and crushed them.

The Muslim Brotherhood throughout this time, where there were these, there were these coups going on, were playing their own, I would say, visionary long-term game. They said there is no solution to this other than returning to Islamic rule. Islamic rule means there must be a caliphate, uniting those countries. Uniting those countries through Arab nationalism is not going to work, and we're always going to have a problem with minorities, and we're always going to have to treat them as second-class citizens. There's no getting around it because they're not part of the same "us." So this is the natural trajectory, and as long as you fight it, you're either going to, uh, uh, you're going to fight wars, you're going to be fighting coups, uh, and you're going to have to, you know, use a certain amount of violence, fear, torture, intimidation to maintain power and control. So hence why Libya, Iraq, uh, Syria, Syria have had, Yemen have all had decades of instability with brutal dictators leading them—different degrees of brutality. Nobody really exceeded uh the Ba'ath, yeah, partly because it—Ba'ath in Iraq or Syria or both, both, both, both.

So in Syria, for example, if you were a senior officer and you were caught regularly praying, you would get summoned to military intelligence, and this could get very bad for you. This could go very, very badly for you. Even praying as a Muslim, especially praying as a Sunni Muslim. Okay, especially praying as a Sunni Muslim. If you were a Christian, you went to mass, you weren't a threat because the Christians couldn't threaten the Alawite regime because they couldn't govern the Muslims. They don't have the right level of brutality. So the fear was a growth in Islamism and uh another attempted coup against the Alawites that would essentially, that would essentially be seen as more legitimate by the majority of the Syrians who are Sunni Muslims than Alawite rule. So the constant paranoia of the Ba'ath in Iraq was the Shia majority, and the paranoia of the Ba'ath in Damascus was was the Sunni majority. And personal relations between Saddam and Assad were quite bad because they shared the same ideology; they had the same party; they, they, they're branches of the same party, but which one of us is the big dog? Since there was no spiritual foundation for their power, it had to be might and brutality, and so they were constantly at each other's throats and backing different groups to try to undermine each other.

So in the Lebanese Civil War, for example, uh, Saddam backed one of the factions that was anti-Syrian. Assad backed Kurdish groups. They were constantly fighting each other and trying to undermine each other. And then we get to the game-changer, that is the September 11 attacks. When the neocons of George Bush took over, they decided that the main, uh, after the September 11 attack, they decided that the main threat was the Muslim world, and in partnership with the Israelis, they began advocating for regime change in uh Libya, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. The idea being we're going to overthrow all of these regimes, and we're going to replace them with friendly allies because these regimes throughout the conflict with Israel had not only fought against Israel directly, but they'd also sponsored various Palestinian militant organizations that were doing attacks against Israel, but they were, that were also doing airplane hijackings and attacks in Munich and attacks in different parts of the world. The decision was made, okay, now the Muslims have attacked us, uh, as per the official narrative of, of, of 9/11, and we're going to fundamentally transform the Muslim world. And it was decided that the starting point was going to be Iraq, and then after Iraq, the rest of these countries would end up being toppled.

So Bashar al-Assad takes power in 2000, and he decides, well, let me try to experiment with a bit of liberalization. Hold on, can I jump in here a sec? Please do. You think September the 11th was Al-Qaeda? I think it was done by, um, I mean, I don't understand how the passport issue worked out. They found one of the hijackers' passports, you see, the plane, in a ball of flames into the building, and they find a passport, and the passport is there. Did you know about this, Conor? Um, they just find a passport on the street of one of the terrorists. I, I, I don't understand how that happened. There's a great video, Conor. Go to YouTube. This is, this is my favorite 9/11 video. Uh, search for "9/11 explained in 5 minutes." This, if you find the one—I'm not really a conspiracy theorist, but this video is—you found it? Uh, yeah, that one, James Corbett, second video. [Applause] Down it is 5 minutes, but it'll go [Applause] [Music] [Applause] quick.

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, 19 men armed with box cutters, directed by a man on dialysis in a cave fortress halfway around the world using a satellite phone and a laptop, directed the most sophisticated penetration of the most heavily defended airspace in the world, overpowering the passengers and the military combat-trained pilots on four commercial aircraft before flying those planes wildly off course for over an hour without being molested by a single fighter interceptor. These 19 hijackers, devout religious fundamentalists who liked to drink alcohol, snort cocaine, and live with pink-haired strippers, managed to knock down three buildings with two planes in New York, while in Washington a pilot who couldn't handle a single-engine Cessna was able to fly a 757 in an 8,000-foot descending 270-degree corkscrew turn to come exactly level with the ground, hitting the Pentagon in the budget analyst office where DOD staffers were working on the mystery of the $2.3 trillion that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had announced missing from the Pentagon's coffers in a press conference the day before, on September 10th, 2001. Luckily, keep good, the news anchors knew who did it within minutes—Osama bin Laden. The pundits knew within hours of Osama bin Laden. The administration knew within the day—terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored them. And the evidence literally fell into the FBI's lap—that a hijacker passport was found blocks from the World Trade Center crash site, if you can believe that. But for some reason, a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists demanded an investigation into the greatest attack on American soil in history. That investigation was delayed, underfunded, set up to fail, a conflict of interest, and a cover-up from start to finish. It was based on testimony extracted through torture, the records of which were destroyed. It failed to mention the existence of WTC7, Able Danger, PTE Cbel Edmonds, o, and the CIA and the drills of hijacked aircraft being flown into buildings that were being simulated at the precise same time that those events were actually happening. It was lied to by the Pentagon, the CIA, the Bush Administration, and as for Bush and Cheney, well, no one knows what they told it because they testified in secret, off the record, not under oath, and behind closed doors. It didn't bother to look at who funded the attacks because that question is ultimately of little practical significance. Still, the 9/11 Commission did brilliantly, answering all of the questions the public had except most of the victims' family members' questions and pinned blame on all the people responsible, although no one so much as lost their job. Determining the attacks were a failure of imagination because nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government, that could envision flying airplanes into buildings except the Pentagon, FEMA, NORAD, and the NRO. The DIA destroyed 2.5 terabytes of data on Able Danger, but that's okay because it probably wasn't important. The SEC destroyed their records on the investigation into the insider trading before the attacks, but that's okay because destroying the records of the largest investigation in SEC history is just part of routine record-keeping. NIST has classified the data that they used for their model of WTC7's collapse, but that's okay because knowing how they made their model of the collapse would jeopardize public safety. The FBI has argued that all material related to their investigation of 9/11 should be kept secret from the public, but that's okay because the FBI probably has nothing to hide. This man never existed, nor is anything he had to say worthy of your attention, and if you say otherwise you are, are a paranoid conspiracy theorist and deserve to be shunned by all of humanity. Likewise him, him, him, and her, and her, and her, and him. Osama bin Laden lived in a cave fortress in the hills of Afghanistan, but somehow got away. Then he was hiding out in Tora Bora, but somehow got away. Then he lived in Abbottabad for years, taunting the most comprehensive intelligence dragnet employing the most sophisticated technology in the history of the world for a decade, releasing video after video with complete impunity and getting younger and younger as he did so before finally being found in a daring CT raid which wasn't recorded on video, in which he didn't resist or use his wife as a human shield, and in which these crack Special Forces operatives panicked and killed this unarmed man, supposedly the best source of intelligence about those dastardly terrorists on the entire planet. Then they dumped his body in the ocean before telling anyone about it. Then a couple dozen of that team's members died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. This is the story of 9/11, brought to you by the media which told—I mean, it's nuts. Look, I'm not sure how much of that is just for, for satire, but it's just the whole thing. I can't, I can't get my head around the idea ever that it was some kind of false flag or it was some kind of conspiracy with the US government or Israel, but, but there's so much weird stuff. There's a lot of weird stuff. There's a lot of very, very strange stuff. I don't know enough to say one way or the other, but in either case, it doesn't change what happened in Syria.

Yeah, which is that Iraq was invaded in 2003, even though it had absolutely no involvement in 9/11 whatsoever, with the idea being that we're going to democratize Iraq and we're going to use it as a launchpad because it's the most central country in the Middle East and, and abuts Iran and Syria, and we're going to use it to fundamentally change everything in the Middle East—a launchpad, a launchpad. And so from Assad's perspective, he found that the Americans were on his border. They'd invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they invaded Iraq in 2003, and then Colin Powell, the American Secretary of State at the time, came and told him that he's going to be next unless he behaves himself. So what did Assad do? He turned to the Muslim Brotherhood and to the jihadis in general, and even though he didn't allow any objections from the Muslim Brotherhood against his own rule, he started channeling Sunni Muslim jihadis to go fight in Iraq, one of whom is the current president of Syria. Yes, Ahmed al-Shara. Yes, this man got some of his religious lessons by a cleric called Abu al-Walid, who was based out of Aleppo, and it seems that this is how he was recruited and sent on to Syria, with the Assad government constantly looking the other way, to the extent that Nouri al-Maliki, uh, the sort of American-endorsed prime minister of Iraq, had a break in relations with Assad because of the number of suicide bombers that were being sent into Iraq via Syria. He had a $10 million bounty on his head. Still does. Oh, still does. I think still does. I, I, I don't think it's fully lifted. I think it's sort of, we're not going to enforce it right now, but it's sort of there on paper. Okay. Okay. So this gentleman goes to Iraq, he gets involved with the insurgency, from—he went before the American invasion. He was caught in 2005 or 2006, and then he was released a couple of weeks before the Syrian Uprising of March 2011 began, and then a year, and then a year later, I believe, uh, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State at the time, sends him to Syria. The way he tells the story is that he had 50 or 60 guns and six men, and then somehow within a year this guy builds a 5,000-man army. Mhm.

Now, when the Syrian Uprising began, we had an email from Jake Sullivan to Hillary Clinton—Jake Sullivan being, among other things, Joe Biden's last security advisor—saying that Al-Qaeda are on our side in Syria, and you had the Americans, through two operations rooms, one based out of Amman in Jordan and one based in Turkey, funding and sponsoring the jihadi insurgency against Assad. Obama decided that he didn't want to go all the way to overthrow Assad because he was busy negotiating with Iran, and he didn't want to fully overthrow the Syrian regime. So he did the cruelest thing imaginable: he decided to back the Syrian opposition enough to weaken and destabilize Assad but not enough to let them win. So the decision was made by the Americans to prolong the war as much as possible as a way of pressuring Iran and Assad and Hezbollah, and to keep from actually overthrowing in a way that would upset the Iranians too much. And in the meantime, Obama decided that he's going to negotiate with the Iranians because he wanted to diffuse the nuclear issue. This was Obama playing right into the Iranians' hands because if the Iranians wanted a nuclear weapon, they would have built it. We've been hearing for 20 years that the Iranians are six months, five years, two weeks, one day from building a nuclear weapon. They did execute—didn't they execute the head of the nuclear program? In—that was the Israelis who murdered him. Yeah, the Israelis managed to murder him. So the Israelis have, have very clearly deeply penetrated Iran to the extent that they stole their entire nuclear archive and were able to kill a bunch of their top scientists. And so you had a period in Iran where there were people on motorbikes approaching the cars of nuclear scientists, plunking a sticky bomb on the car and then riding off on the motorbike in traffic and disappearing, and then the scientists would die. So the Iranians didn't want a nuclear weapon. Now they might, but I don't know how much use they have for it. Um, the Iranians wanted to use the nuclear program to negotiate concessions in the region from the West and from other regional powers, and they wanted it as a way of boosting their own credibility and of saying, "We're the leaders of the Muslim world. We can make the West sit down and negotiate with us as equals. Aren't we strong? Aren't we great?" They were doing it for a combination of internal consumption and getting external concessions. And Obama decided, okay, I'm going to go into that. So he made a deal with them over the nuclear issue that preserved their regional influence and helped them expand it and didn't, in fact, solve the nuclear problem permanently. And this is then where we end up. Assad gets severely weakened by the insurgency, even though it wasn't fully backed, and in 2012 Hezbollah steps into the Syrian Civil War. Mhm. And they decide that we must maintain our supply lines into Syria, and we must expand into Syria, and they go into Syria and begin fighting against the Sunni insurgents, thinking correctly that if the Sunni insurgents won, essentially their own power in Lebanon would be crushed and the project of exporting the Islamic revolution throughout the region and defeating Israel under Shia leadership would be fully defeated. So this is sort of how it played out and where we are.

What was Russia's involvement in Syria? So for the Russians, there were multiple dimensions. First, Syria was an ally from the '60s, from the Ba'athist takeover. Syria became an ally of the Soviet Union, and it was a dependency of the Soviet Union and was a proxy, just as the Americans had Israel as their proxy. The uh, Russians tried to use Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and Syria as proxies. They wanted to maintain that relationship because it gave them a presence on the Mediterranean. That was one part of it. The other part of it was genuinely counterterrorism. As the Syrian Civil War expanded, the jihadis came in from everywhere, with, I would suspect, Western connivance, to the extent that there was one gentleman, um, trying to remember his, his name. He was the Islamic State's ambassador to Turkey—ambassador. Mhm. And he had a counterpart from the Turkish intelligence who he was coordinating various things with, including treating Islamic State soldiers who were injured, including support, including channeling people into the country, etc., etc. Among the people who came to Syria were a lot of jihadis from uh Central Asia. So there were a lot of Tajiks, there, mh, there were a lot of uh various—Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, other minorities. There were Chinese Uyghur who also went to Syria to fight. And for the Russians, they learned that the lesson of Afghanistan was that these things backfire. So if these militant groups grow, they will then be used against us. And indeed, the Americans and the Saudis had funded the Chechen insurgency against Russia in the '90s, which was just as vicious and, al, as Islamic State—horrific. Some of, some of the terrorist attacks were horrific—the school attack. School attack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So these were essentially animals, and the Russians thought there's no way we could tolerate these people winning in Syria. Another component of it—surely there's alignment between the Russians and the Americans with this. Then why would the Americans have sponsored the jihadis of Afghanistan and the jihadis of Chechnya? There's always been an alliance between the Protestant world and Sunni Islam, including radical Sunni Islam, and this dates back to the British playing geopolitics against the Russians and the French by backing up the Ottoman Empire and propping up the Ottoman Empire to make sure that their other European enemies didn't grow too strong at the expense of the Ottomans. But there's a time when the Russians and the Americans are both facing uh potential attacks from Islamists. Yes, surely there should be alignment there, but then they want to weaken each other. You, you, you explain that to the neocons, and I'll be 100% there behind you, brother. Well, if anything, it feels like the Americans have been less consistent in who they back, as is the nature of empires. Yeah, they don't particularly care. They view—remember, there's an element here which is the following: if you look at the Israeli reaction to the 9/11 attacks, they basically were selling the Americans the story that you are fighting Al-Qaeda and we are fighting Hamas, and they're the same exact people. Mh. And in a way, there is alignment. And when you look at Islamic State's interpretation of Islam, it's a viable, credible, serious interpretation. It's not coming out of nothing. So Islamic State, with all of their atrocities, um, in Sunni Islam, there are the four main madhhabs, the four main schools of thought. Okay. Everything Islamic State did had approval from at least two of the four, including burning the Jordanian pilot, if you remember that incident where they put him in the cage and they set him on fire—horrific. Yes, yes. But even that, they, they had robust religiously legitimate interpretations. I'm not saying universal. I'm not saying the only interpretation, but I am saying this is serious and that these were serious people with a good understanding of their own religion. Yeah, okay. Uh, and I'm not saying most Muslims back it at all, but there is a nuance there in what kind of backing does it have. [Music]

It's very important that you don't lose this. Okay, this is your inheritance through Bitcoin. A, let Bitcoin rip. Don't rip up your Bitcoin. Set up inheritance with Casa. I saw some dark things on the internet around that—a lot of dark things there. A, yeah, yeah. There was a period of time where I didn't want to go on the internet. So I got to a point where I could be having a sandwich and watching a beheading video and sort of be completely unfazed by it. Yeah, I saw too many beheading videos. I can't watch anymore. It's, it's too much. It, it, you know, not to go back to, to our previous conversation, but it was one of the things that steered me in that direction. Yeah.

Um, so you end up with a situation where Assad backed the forces in Iraq that led directly to his own downfall, but these forces also had legitimate grievances in the sense that this was a guy who was clearly trying to repress the Sunni population because he saw them as a threat to him. And the reason that they didn't simply accept, "Okay, we have a bad Caesar now," is intrinsically related to the way Islam sees its own relationship with power and intrinsically related to the fact that Islam and government have never been separated. And this experiment in secularism in trying to separate Islam and power has failed. It's failed in the most important Sunni Muslim country, Turkey. It's failed in its near abroad in Iraq and in Syria and in Lebanon, whereas at the same time, weirdly enough, you're seeing in Arabia something similar to what the uh Arab dictators were doing in the '60s and '70s. You're seeing an attempt to sort of break free from the perceived backwardness of Islam to bring about advancement in Saudi Arabia and in the UAE and to change the way society thinks and make it more secular in a controlled way, in a very controlled way. Yeah, without in any way letting go of political power. Yeah, which is how, you know, when you think about Syria in the early 2000s, um, Assad experimented with something that was referred to as the Damascus Spring, where he let out a bunch of people from jail, and he let poets and artists and other people start tinkering around and to sort of have a little bit more freedom. Then the Americans sold him, "We're going to invade you," so he decides, "Absolutely no new political freedoms. If we previously thought you should be in jail, we now again believe that you should be in jail." However, because the economy was doing so badly, partly because for the previous decade there had been no support from the Soviet Union and Russia was in chaos and he had no reliable external allies other than the Iranians, he decided to liberalize economically. What happened was that all of the sons of the senior officers and the senior officials from the days of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father, all got involved in business, and because of their connections, nobody else was allowed to do business. So if you had a turnover in your business of more than $100,000, somebody from one of the intelligence agencies was going to come visit you and explain to you what you now owed unless you partnered with them and gave them something. Things were going to go very badly for you. So there was this economic liberalization that made Syria wealthier but increased inequality enormously. And then there was a drought in 2008, and with the attempts to reform the budget and to cut spending and so on, this came with cuts to subsidies and the…

The ability of the state to support the poorer classes, on which Assad—the father—had relied, um, and so you ended up with a massive inflow of migrants going into the cities around Damascus, into the major Syrian cities, including Damascus, including Aleppo, Homs, etc. Similarly, though, fleeing Syria and heading into Lebanon as well and other—so in Lebanon they were going in as laborers, and they came in in huge numbers, and they were, and they destroyed the Lebanese artisanal class and the Lebanese working poor. So we, we witnessed that when we were in Lebanon, um, how difficult, how difficult life is for Syrians within Lebanon.

Yes, they experience a lot of discrimination, a lot of hatreds towards them; they also get more support than the Lebanese from the United Nations and from foreign partners. So the UN and the West are doing everything that they can to keep the Syrians in Lebanon.

Of course, yeah. And the Lebanese Christians, Sunnis and Christians, Shia and some Sunnis are saying, “Get them out of here; this is too much cheap labor,” yeah, and they're getting subsidized, so they're undercutting our wages, yeah. Same story pretty much everywhere, you know. So you see this poverty of the Syrians; you also see more support for them than for the Lebanese because of the various UN programs and aid programs and EU-funded programs and USA-funded programs and so on and so forth.

Yeah, we saw it; we saw it. There was visual hatred towards the Syrians in Lebanon from some quarters.

Yes, yes, um, and, and, and, and it's old because the Syrians remember when the Lebanese Civil War started in 1975, um, the Syrians also went on a bit of an assassination spree, um, and then in '76 their army entered Lebanon, on and they stayed there until 2005. And the reason that they had to leave in 2005 was because of the uprising against them following Hariri’s killing of Hariri. So this is important to understand: the Hariri assassination was that bomb attack in Beirut. That was the 2005, February 14th, Valentine’s Day, Happy Valentine’s Day, uh, explosion in Beirut, not the Beirut explosion of 2000.

Yes, yeah, yeah. Was, was it a car bomb or was it, was it a truck bomb?

Truck bomb. No, no, it was a truck bomb loaded with around a thousand, uh, with around a ton of TNT. We went to the site, didn’t we?

I’m sure we did. Yeah, I think we went to the side of it. You prob—and you can still see bullet holes in the in some of the buildings, and, and you could see bullet holes from the Civil War.

Yes, yeah, yes. So again, you look at the region and you look at this experiment in them being independent states, and the only one that’s sort of gotten out of it relatively okay is Jordan. And why has Jordan gotten out of it okay? Because Jordan exists to make sure that Israel’s longest flank is not controlled by a hostile and strong country such as Iraq or Syria or Saudi or Egypt; it doesn’t exist for another reason. And the Hashemite rulers of Jordan fully understand that their job is to secure Israel’s border. And so the one time they were seriously challenged was in 1970 when the Palestinians tried to fight a, uh, war against the Hashemite monarchy, and they were defeated, right? And those Palestinians passed through Syria; the Syrians would have let them stay because they would be very destabilizing, so they passed them onto Lebanon. And by passing them onto Lebanon, they guaranteed a Civil War in Lebanon, which began in 1975, with the Christians saying, “Guys, this country was created to be a Christian state, not to be an Arabist, Palestinian, Islamist, uh, Jihadi, communist, whatever you want to call it, state.” That’s its reason to exist as a Christian state. And a lot of the Lebanese saying, “No, no, we are here for pan-Arabism; we are here for pan-Islamism; we back the Palestinians.” And so they came; they, they led to the start of the, they contributed massively to the start of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. And then in 1982 the Israelis invaded and cleared them out, which was a disaster for the Syrians because, even though the Syrians by then had turned against the Palestinians because they became too strong, they also didn’t want the Israelis controlling Lebanon. And so this was the whole game with the Syrian state trying to maintain an artificial creation that’s only propped up by the brutality of the Assad family and by their appointments of loyalists and cronies to the security forces and trying to keep down the Sunnis. And the extent of cynicism—people don’t understand the sheer extent of cynicism.

Um, so Assad also didn’t really want to get his own Alawite areas to become economically developed because he wanted to keep all of the Alawites poor enough to take state wages and to be appointed to the security forces and therefore to act as his enforcers. So he kept a lid on the communal hatreds and he kept control. And you know, if you had Islamic State or the former incarnation of, of the current Syrian, Syrian president versus Assad, well, Assad was obviously the better choice, but he was never a good choice, and this is the tragedy of the situation.

So did the Americans back the overthrow of Assad?

Yes, absolutely. It was obvious when Netanyahu, in, in September, uh, last year started saying, “We’re going to change the strategic picture in the north,” fully, we were writing, “Okay, this means that there is going to be an overthrow of this year in government,” because that’s the only way to change the strategic picture. So this suits his round, have this suits Israel, but it—yes or no—because yes, Hezbollah’s supply line was cut, mm, but now you have a Sunni state that’s trying to consolidate that can threaten stability in Jordan, that can take parts of Iraq, that can inspire Egypt to change course and also go down the, uh, Islamic route, that can take control of, of a country like Libya, and that can therefore become a much bigger threat to Israel. And then the Israelis received a big blow yesterday because, even after the massacres on the Alawite coast, the new Syrian president, Jolani, Shara, whatever you want to call him, managed to reconcile with the Kurds, at least temporarily. Let’s see if it gets implemented. I mean, he is a, a terrorist.

Yes. Did you watch his interview with Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart?

Yes. Uh, interesting. I mean, interesting to hear from him, interesting to hear the tone of voice, the way he referred to Israel as the Israeli state, um, the political language he’s using.

Yes. So where he talks about his own mature political ideas. Yes. Do you, do you believe what—I mean, what do you believe is happening and what do you believe his goal is? There, he’s talking like a nationalist, but he historically is an Islamist.

Yes. So do you think it’s, do you believe he’s become a nationalist or do you believe he, he is speaking the necessary language of a trajectory towards establishing Syria as an Islamic state?

So let’s go back to his break with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Islamic State. Yes, okay. His official boss, to whom he supposedly owes allegiance—Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declares that now there is a unified Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and that Ja’afari’s former outfit, um, is now fully absorbed into this new state. So he turns the tables on the tables on him, and he says, “I have a pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda; I don’t owe you allegiance; I owe allegiance to somebody higher up—Ayman al-Zawahiri, the successor of Osama bin Laden, and he’s the guy actually in charge, and I refer the matter to him,” which surprises al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda then decides there are two provinces: there is the Islamic State in Iraq and there is—ra and Syria, and they are two independent organizations and they should be separate. By aligning with al-Qaeda, he managed to get a big chunk of the foreign jihadis on his side, especially in his stronghold of Idlib. And he chose Idlib wisely, partly because he apparently grew up there and partly because it’s a mountainous area on the border with Turkey; he could get resupplied from Turkey easily; he could tax it, control it, govern it, experiment with governance, and it was immune to the areas where Islamic State was stronger. So he managed to turn the tables against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which became Islamic State, and his old boss, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Then he realized he needed to transition again from an affiliate of al-Qaeda into a more Syrian face, and so he tried to merge with a bunch of other Syrian organizations, successfully did it, and rebranded to, uh, the committee body, whatever you want to call it, for the liberation of Sham, the old Arabic name of Syria, and then try to sort of put on a bit of a more national agenda and say that we are no longer involved in transnational Jihad, as was al-Qaeda; domestic Jihad, our priority is the domestic Jihad against the unjust tyranny of the Alawite regime represented by Assad, who he believes have destroyed the country economically. Who—these guys—I mean, Hafez al-Assad successfully built up Syria and organized Syria and built up a legal system and managed to improve the lives of a lot of Syrians, including by expanding access to healthcare and to education and by helping farmers and developing rural areas and developing some industries and creating a certain level of self-sufficiency. Bashar came to try to liberalize the economy, so the corruption exploded. One of the things that Hafez did was also expropriate a lot of assets and turn Syria fully into a socialist state in line with the thinking of the Ba’ath Party. So he expropriated oil, he expropriated the cotton industry, uh, a lot of land, et cetera, et cetera, distributed it to farmers, created a Soviet-style system, um, and he did use a bunch of, at least one Nazi torturer and interrogators and, and, and, um, and torturers from the East German, uh, Republic.

Jesus. More, bid funny. Um, one prisoner I was listening to said that when the German interrogators came, a lot of the prisoners would decide to go on hunger strike and stop cooperating and, “Please, let’s have the regular Syrian regimen of torture, because the Germans are far too cruel.”

Jesus. “We want the moderate torture from the Syrians; can we get the moderate torture?”

Yeah. “Can we get our home—these Germans are professionals.” And mind you, the Syrian torture was horrendously cruel.

Yeah. I mean, I’ve seen it, which is that I’ve seen it from, probably you would have seen it, yeah, where they were burying them, uh, the kinds of things that they did, the creativity in torture, the horror of it. I mean, I have a cousin who was briefly detained by the Syrians in Lebanon, and, and they pretty much broke every bone in his body.

Jesus. Shaved his head, humiliated him, and then sent him back. Um, some people completely go mad, of course, under the torture, um, it’s, it’s, it’s very cleverly designed to completely break people, and there’s a cruel streak there that comes from the deep knowledge that these people have that they were never a legitimate government, and they understood that the only way to do things was to fully brutalize this population.

Is that justified under Islam—torture? So there is one story about Muhammad using torture once against a Jewish guy, and then he married the hus—the wife of the guy that he tortured and killed. Was it—he married his wife or his sister? I can’t remember. One of his wives had had her father, brother, and husband been killed by Muhammad; he tortured either her brother or her husband, um, or to be more accurate, because random people like to pick on these things, he had a guy torture him in his presence by repeatedly poking him with a sword until he revealed where a hidden treasure was. Um, that’s not regularly seen as a mainstream Islamic endorsement of torture, but corporal, corporal punishment is fully a part of Islam, including floggings, stonings, amputations, and crucifixion, usually done after death. Um, that—what you saw—you’re referring to that video from—it wasn’t a Christian that was being tortured and killed in that video; it was a—he crucified and shot, right?

He was crucified and shot in the head. Yeah, but it was an internal fight between different Islamist groups.

Okay. And these were the moderate guys?

These are the moderates. Yeah, these were the moderates. It’s sort of predictable that, given the cruelty of the Assad government and what they did to people, this cruelty would permeate society. This isn’t, this isn’t a justification; this isn’t a defense; it’s the explanation, but it’s a comment of human nature. Yeah, um, we tend to reciprocate, and Islam has versus commanding people to reciprocate, punish with that through which you have been punished, um, which was incidentally used to justify the burning of the Jordanian pilot. So the cruelty that you see is not surprising, disgusting as as it is, and again, this is an explanation, not a defense; people get confused about these things. So yeah, okay. So the recent violence that I saw, perchance on Twitter.

Yep. I searched Syria; I saw video after video of massacres of, uh, bodies being loaded or already loaded into the back of trucks, people being hit with guns, uh, shooting over their heads, shooting them in the heads, bodies in ditches, uh, humiliations.

Yeah, the, the crawling up and whistling like a dog. Kids, kid, yeah, kids.

So children getting killed. Yeah, I mean, it was horrific. I had about had an hour or so, and in my head I immediately jumped to the idea, “Well, this is just a—we’re now having a geno—the Islamists have taken control of Syria, and we’re now going to see a genocide of the Christians, the Jews, the Alawites.” I’m not sure if I’ve jumped too far ahead; maybe this is just, uh, this is what happens in chaotic post-war environments in economically challenged countries with a history of sectarian issues. I, I, I, I can’t explain it, but I, I jump to the—we’re at the start of, of genocide, but I don’t really know what we’re at. And then we—you put up the, um, the statement, then I read the statement, which I thought was kind of interesting.

Yep. Okay, I’m going to read it out so people hear it. Syrian President, armed al-Shara, firmly declared three key points in his Friday speech: “There will be no tolerance for any members of the former regime who are responsible for attacks on the army, state institutions, hospitals, and civilians in the last two days. These individuals must surrender immediately or face prosecution.” So that’s interesting because he’s started recognizing that they’re Assad—who knows if directed by Assad from Russia or just, you know, splinter Assadites within Syria who are, uh, who are destabilizing what is his, uh, government. But then he goes on to say, al-Shara emphasized that justice will be applied without exception, and no one is above the law; anyone involved in civilian bloodshed, abuse of power, crimes against Syrians will be held accountable and prosecuted accordingly. In this context, al-Shara announced that the formation of a fact-finding committee to investigate the recent violence in the coastal region. This committee will identify the perpetrators, hold them accountable, ensure transparency in the process. So that sounds very nationalist, but also sounds like the kind of thing the UN would put together. Al-Shara rejected any attempts to stir sectarian divisions or call for foreign intervention, stressing that Syria’s unity and sovereignty will be protected at all costs. So therefore, it’s like an appeal out to foreign influence. Additionally, announced that a high committee for civil peace has been established under direct presidential authority, and it will work closely with local communities in the coastal region, ensuring their security, stability, and foster a national unity during this critical period. The president called on regional and international actors to stand with Syria and respect its sovereignty, warning against any attempts to interfere in its internal affairs or fuel instability. Finally, reaffirmed the government’s firm commitment to securing Syria’s stability, unity, and future; he says that the country and not be dragged into chaos or civil war. I mean, he’s got a, a job on his hands, but it, it felt like a, a very clever statement. He’s, he’s, he’s tried to speak to everybody, but it, it sounds like to me there are remnants of what, uh, uh, Bashar al-Assad and his father both did in trying to protect, uh, religious minorities.

So I guess saying what you’re saying to try and stop other cents against him, because that’s the biggest threat as other people will try and ask him now. Yeah. So he has a—aside from his own background as a, as a terrorist personally and his own evolution, um, this guy—I mentioned the bits about him managing to thwart both Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and he succeeded in, in, in thwarting the Turks in some areas who wanted to control him better or wanted him to force with, um, proxies of theirs that were more fully committed to them. It’s quite impressive, really. It’s quite impressive that he managed to survive all of this and come out on top. Um, he’s definitely the great man of the moment, warts and all. My read on the situation is as follows: there were a bunch of attacks by groups associated with him and not associated with him against Christians and Alawites and other communities, um, to settle scores, to, um, take revenge and to humiliate the Christians as well as the Alawites. This happened in Homs; it happened in Hama; and it happened along the coast. Some Alawite militants, members of the former security forces, then decided that they were going to see if they could see parts of the coast and start an insurgency, and so they cut some roads; they surrounded some government buildings and tried to take them over; they succeeded in some areas, failed in some. Shara, then had no choice—Jani Shara, whatever you want to call him—then had no choice, um, but to unleash the jihadis that he had, and these guys are nihilistic criminals; they enjoy torture; they enjoy murder; they have deep-seated religious hatreds, and they went wild with his approval. I believe now he’s saying, “I’m going to reign the men and control them.” There are several reasons to do this. When Assad destroyed Hama properly in 1982, he then kept it open and kept the destruction and made sure that other Syrians saw it in the same way. Shara is making an example of the Alawites to send the message to the Kurds, to the Christians, to the Druze: “This is what happens if you defy me; these are the animals that I have, and I will unleash them on you.” But he also wants to play statesman, hence the statement. He also wants to say, “I’m going to build a unified Syria; I’m going to centralize government,” and he’s been saying for a while that, “I won’t tolerate different autonomous provinces because I don’t want to replicate the Iraqi and Lebanese experiments; these only resulted in failed states; I want a strong central government.” He wants legitimacy on the international stage; he wants legitimacy; he wants the foreign aid; and he wants the lifting of sanctions and the control.

Yeah, and the removal of the terrorist—obviously the removal of terrorist designation. Yes. So these are the games that he’s playing. I think there was a decision to allow a pogrom; we don’t know how many people died; the estimates are from 900 to 9,000; we have no idea. And we see Syrians in Europe celebrating this and saying, “Kill more of them,” and we see a lot of Sunnis saying, “Let’s go; let’s escalate this further; let’s kill the rest of them, and let’s keep going against the minorities because the minorities are the problem.” And so you end up seeing people that are both saying this isn’t happening and that it’s a good thing—the classical leftist move. You see this is perhaps for another conversation—the overlap between leftist thinking and Islamist thinking. Okay, so he’s allowed, he’s allowed this pogrom to happen partly because these are his enforcers and partly because you need to brutalize potential challengers because, again, Syria is not a nation-state; even among the Sunni Arabs, there, there’s not one community; the Bedouin Arabs of the East are different from the city Arabs, and each city has its own power structure and its own tribal structure and its own allegiances. And the problem that that plagued previous Syrian regimes was disagreements over, okay, so which city is going to be the dominant one?

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I think by talking to you, there’s like, there’s these things that I’m trying to come to terms with, of accepting, which are very hard, which I think leftists will particularly struggle with, is this idea that if you are to lead a country in—if you lead a country like Syria, if you were to, uh, be successful in a coup and retain power, you have to do horrific things or horrific—why would leftists disagree with this?

These are the sons of Stalin; these are the sons of—

No, but I think mod—I don’t, I don’t, I think modern leftists, they, they kind of—oh, just—they—the reality—cruelty that they exercise when they want to cancel someone or when they want to make somebody bake a cake or when they will make fun of, uh, detransitioners or when they will surround people with their families and, and, and start humiliating them or start planning assassinations or look at the, the, the chaos that they unleash throughout the West, from the Baader-Meinhof to the, to the Red Brigades to the, uh, Weather Underground. These people have always been criminals; they just play at being humanitarian. Yeah, they, they, they, they have no—for them and the Islamists—the problem is who’s committing the violence, not the violence. But it’s a, it’s a tough acceptance when you think about a country like Syria, is that any scenario—there’s going to be horrific violence. Yes, there’s going to be murders, massacres, ethnic cleansing, coups, wars, factions, factions attacking factions. This, there’s this continual cycle of violence, and there’s no scenario that you can support which is not a violent scenario. Quite even Christianity, as in pure human nature, this is our nature, but there is this cycle of violence. And so, you know, on first viewing of al-Shara’s, uh, interview with, um, Rory Stewart, Alistair Campbell, there’s this moment of thinking, “You can—this guy—I know he’s a terrorist, but can this guy bring stability to this country?” And then there’s a realization—now it only comes—it can’t be, uh, divorced from horrific violence and murder, because it’s a hard thing to come to from that perspective. The risk for him is that the minority insurgencies would succeed and that they would draw in foreign support—the Russians and the French backing the Alawites, along with the Israelis—the Israelis backing the Druze, um, and, and the Kurds, and therefore the partition of Syria. He doesn’t want to partition Syria; he wants the Sunnis to govern because he can’t accept the idea—you go left, if, if you go left, I’ll go right, and if you go right, I’ll go left, and each of us will, will, will go his own way—Abraham to Lot. He can’t accept that; he must govern all of Syria, including its minorities, and therefore the way to keep control does involve being willing, being willing to shed a certain amount of blood.

Yeah. But what, what I’m trying to say is as a, as a guy from Bedford, England, who has a podcast who’s trying to understand the scenario, uh, you will see—you, you, you’re essentially trying to understand what is the best horrific, violent scenario. Yes, because yes, there are many—certainly Western conservatives who have, uh, pointed to, uh, the removal of Assad and said—I mean, we had Tulsi Gabbard visit there and said—she’s no supporter of Assad; she thinks that he’s committed horrific crimes, but further war and destabilization is not good for the country.

Yes, and, and you’ve got—and they’re now very critical that there is an Islamist, former al-Qaeda, ISIS terrorist who’s now head of state. Yes, uh, and, and you basic—and, and, and we’re seeing murders and massacres and ethnic cleansing happening under his rule, and your explanation that, “Well, this kind of has to happen; it’s a natural course of action.”

But if it's not him, it would have been Assad and his prisons and tortures. And it's like, how do you even come to a place where you can know what is right, what is right for these countries? I would say that everybody converts to Christianity and tries to be good to each other, but that's not going to happen. That's not going to happen in the next week or so; well, it's not going to happen in decades. So, so here we are. My job is to understand what is happening, yeah, and understand how they're thinking. But is the best scenario for just to have a separation of the religions? To should the Christians—that would require ethnic cleansing. So that's what the Greeks and the Turks did. Greece and Turkey in 22, 23, uh, thereabouts, basically agreed we're going to expel each other's populations. So you could be a Turkish-speaking Christian: out you go, you're going to Greece. You could be a Greek-speaking Muslim in Greece: out you go to Turkey. And they decided that the only way to do it was to expel each other's populations. Um, it happened in a number of areas after the First World War and after the Second World War, where the decision was made: we can't be one people; there must be a degree of ethnic cleansing. This is what the Israelis did; they expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and then out of the Arab world, hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled. So these kinds of population exchanges have been happening. Um, it would imply uprooting Christian communities that have been there for 2,000 years, of course, yeah. Uh, um, it would imply, and it's not clear that these would then form nations either. It isn't obvious to me, as someone who's formerly Duus, that the Duus would be able to establish an independent state, even if they ethnically cleansed everyone else. I, I, I don't buy into that assumption.

So what I'm saying to you is that I don't have a prescribed moral solution or the right way of doing things, just an personal conversions, yeah, an explanation. I have an explanation, yeah, I hope it's a good one, um, but that's all I have. I mean, your depth of knowledge is pretty incredible. Well, thank you. Yeah, it's really interesting. Even since our last conversation, Conor and I were talking about it quite a bit, um, even this morning, trying to understand the overlaps even between the religions, yes, and the history of the religions. I didn't know till recently that Judaism predates Christianity. I didn't understand the relationship between the Old Testament and Judaism. I didn't fully understand the splintering uh, with Islam—what was it, 600 something? Yeah, and then the split from Sunni and Shi'a. This constant splintering of, of an almost like an original thought of religion. Yes. Yes, it's kind of fascinating, really.

So if you want to—because I—one the weird thing is you made—sorry, you need to make the point you made up. I wonder—it might sound naive as somebody's not religious—and tracking and and reading and understanding the history of, firstly, yeah, Judaism—it's what was that, 600 BC? Much older, much older. Okay, apologies. Uh, and then obviously the, the, the Old Testament, the New Testament, and then the establishment of Islam. There's these kind of splintering of religion, either ideological reasons or you different belief systems, and the religions you come to may come from geography or your your parents or your life experiences. But I kind of feel like whether you are follower of Islam, Judaism, or Christianity, I think you're all looking for the same thing, which is religious guidance, yes, and wherever your past—as you're—I think you're all pointing to the same thing, but you're interpreting the direction differently. Yes. Do you understand what I'm trying to say? I, I think everyone kind of wants the same thing, but differently. So I, I can't say that I fully agree with that. I see the point that you're that you're making, but I can't say that I fully agree with that. Um, we understand the point I'm trying to make. Being religious is built in, and we are all intrinsically—if, if you accept a Christian framework, or even a a Jewish or or a Muslim framework—um, we are created in the image of God, and therefore we are looking for him, and in the sense, and in that sense, we're looking for the same thing; we're looking for the same God.

Fair enough, but then there are very many different pathways in this quest. A religious person will always argue that mine is better than the others, yeah, that's just sort of built into us, because the claims of the different religions are, although overlapping in many ways, they are also mutually exclusive. If Christ is the son of the father and is God, then Islam is not true. If Islam is true, then Christ is not the son and he is not God. If Judaism in its current form is true, as opposed to its pre-Christian form, then neither Islam nor Christianity are true. These claims are mutually exclusive. M Islam, as the last of these religions, came with the most um, practical political outlook, of this saying essentially: so long as you apply your religion in your personal affairs, but submit to mine in questions of politics and justice outside of things like marriage and inheritance, then you're good. You will be taxed; you will also be protected; you won't have to fight with us in wars, but if you at any point turn against us, this will be considered treason, and the punishment will be extremely severe, including killing your men and enslaving your women and children. So this is the sort of pact that Islam made; it was a practical solution, being the youngest of the religions, but also the one with the most fervent claims in a in a sense, and with the claims that are most political, because it believes that it is entitled to rule and apply the laws of God, because the Christians and Jews don't apply them.

Um, it's worth diverting a little bit and talking about what Salafism is. MH Salafism is Muslim puritanism. It's an attempt to um, reform Islam, remove all of the things that were added over the ages, and go back to what is perceived as a purer form of Islam that only looks at the sayings of Muhammad, the Hadith, and the Quran, the Holy Scripture. This puritanism is built into Islam itself, but in a funny way. So they say, we are the ones applying the laws of God correctly. Okay, does that mean that you are applying the kosher laws that are described in the Old Testament? No, we're just saying no pork and no blood—that's it—as opposed to all of the other various kosher requirements: don't mix meat and milk, don't do this, don't do that, don't eat shellfish, etc., etc. Um, are you applying the Old Testament punishments of various stonings for disobeying your parents, things like that? No, stoning is just there for adultery. Um, we, we don't need to worry about the rest. So in a way, it rejects the Christian claim that says that the Old Law of the Torah was simply there to shape the Jewish people until they were ready to receive the Messiah, and the arrival of the Messiah abolishes the specific practices of the Old Law, but not its moral dimensions, and replaces the old practices with a message of that that is present in Leviticus, that's present in in Deuteronomy, uh, with a message of love your neighbor, love each other, love God, and on top of that, love your enemy, which is exceptional. So Islam rejects that Christian intervention, and it says, we're going to apply these aspects of the Old Law, and we're going to insist on government, and we're going to extend the level of toleration to the Jews and Christians so long as they are obedient subjects, that they understand that they're subjects, they pay their taxes, and they don't align against us ever, otherwise we get to enslave them, we get to kill them, we get to do whatever we want. So this is the mindset of Islam. This can't be also true if you accept that Christ died for our sins, that Christ is God, that he was sent to redeem the world, and that he died on the cross, including—because Islam denies that the crucifixion ever happened—and this can't be reconciled with what the Jews say, which is the full law must be implemented, um, and one day the Messiah will come and the temple will, will be rebuilt.

So yes, we are created in the image of God; we must, we are looking for God within us and in heaven, but it's not the same thing. These claims are mutually exclusive. No, I, I understand, although you've articulated, articulated in a way I couldn't, but I do believe everyone is looking for the same thing. I accept that, I, I, because I accept that you are created in the image of God and stamped, if you will, by God, I accept that you're looking for him. I accept that; I just don't accept that all of the pathways of looking for him are equally valid—that's all—as as would a Muslim, as with a Buddhist, as with a Hindu, as as with a Jew, yeah. You know, Hindu and and a Buddhist—I mean, they, they're completely separate religions. I'm just very intrigued by the, the overlaps and the, the crossover of these religions, both geographically, historically, yes. Um, you know, I just, I find it fascinating. Yeah, absolutely. It is to the, to the point whereby, yeah, I messaged you after I last interview, I said, I, I, I'm intrigued by Christianity; I want to read more about it. You, you gave me some direction, but I actually think I want to start before that; I think I want to start with Judaism. I think I want to go chronologically through this, yeah. Is that a bad idea? Yeah, study it, understand it, work my way through the Old Testament, the New Testament, and then even the Quran, just, just to understand the picture. Firstly, I fully support that; secondly, studying any of them seriously is a lifetime's work, and then you still sort of think, well, there's all of this stuff that I missed, yeah, in this process. There is always a choice with any of them: am I going to make the leap of faith? You can't be religious without saying yes, I am making a leap of faith. Yes, I understand the doubts; yes, I understand the issues; yes, I understand why some people might disagree, but I've committed myself to the leap of faith. So don't—how, how shall I say this? I couldn't arrive at faith just by uh, reasoning. You could arrive at there is a God by reasoning. Um, you could arrive at various evidence for the religions by reasoning, but there is always going to be—for faith to be faith—there has to be a leap of faith. Yeah, yeah. This isn't about me thinking I will uh, become an orthodox Jew or convert to Islam. Uh, my the only faith I have connection with is Christianity, right. Um, as you know, I've been christened and confirmed, and I've been to a Catholic Church, uh, but I'm just more intrigued to try and understand these overlaps because I find it fascinating. So it'll be a chronological journey.

Um, just to finish, cuz it's been fascinating again, for—as you're incredible—what do you think is the near future now for Syria? Look, there are a couple of different scenarios, um, and it sort of depends on the level of foreign intervention and the level of great power conflict. The Israelis do not want a fully functional government controlling all of Syria led by Annex al-Qaeda Islamic State guy, yeah, makes sense, because the worst-case scenario for them is that he succeeds, MH, because if he succeeds, then he inspires people in Jordan and in Egypt and in Iraq, and these countries end up allied with Turkey, and they end up with a Sunni Muslim behemoth on their doorstep. So they have absolutely no interest in him succeeding. They alone can only influence the process so much, because of the size of their army, because of the size of their resources, because their dependence on the United States. The Israelis are not an independent player here; they must have American backing for whatever they do. The minute that the Americans turn off the tap, the Israelis have to cry Uncle. Okay, so in a way, it isn't their decision; in a very real way, it isn't their decision. And for some Israelis, for some very militant Jews, they will say, I don't care about the Jewish State; when the Messiah comes, he comes, and he'll build the temple. And there was a an episode when they was there was a big fight in Israel over whether or not to recruit religious Jews into the army. Some of their rabbis were saying, we don't care about the state; we just want to be Jewish; we're not interested—if you try to take us away from studying the Torah to serve in your dirty secular army, we're going to leave, and your birth rate will plummet because we have the highest birth rate among the Jewish communities. So there are these levels here. If Shar succeeds, and after this pogrom he sort of disciplines the jihadis and he controls them, and the minorities are second-class citizens, but they're not existentially terrified, some of the Jews are going to say, why should I keep fighting eternally when this guy is going to give me security? There's another scenario, or multiple other scenarios. The agreement with the Kurds that was just signed yesterday breaks down; the Alawite insurgency gets support from Hezbollah and from Iran and from Russia, and it escalates. The Israelis therefore can back the Duus and the Kurds a lot more effectively, and then you end up with another decade, maybe two, of civil war, and this war just doesn't end because people have not worn each other out sufficiently yet. This is Israel; this would be more beneficial to the Israelis than stability in Syria, because Jordan is on a knife's edge. If you look at the economics of Jordan and Egypt, these are countries that are propped up by a few billion dollars every year from allies of the United States and from the United States itself, and the and the United States is turning the tap off everywhere—not against Egypt yet; they didn't turn it off for Egypt, M, because they understand the importance of keeping Egypt stable—and um, not—for Jordan, there's a bunch of different taps that go into Jordan. So they, these countries can very quickly fall apart and end up with currency depreciation and end up with a banking crisis and end up with uh, big supply chain issues because of the amount of food that they import, and then there's chaos, and the people that emerge out of that chaos strongest are going to be the Islamists, because the Muslim Brotherhood's idea that we must restore the Caliphate has never died, and given the nature of Islam, can never die. This is what Islam demands in a sense. So you see these two very divergent pathways that, that, that, that face Syria. When I saw the pogroms, I thought, we're definitely going into civil war territory, and that's it; here's another, here's another decade of war—God help us all. When right after the pogroms, Shar reconciles with Mulum Abdi, the leader of the, of the Kurds, and they sign an agreement—it's a very vague agreement; we don't know whether or not it's going to be implemented—I thought, well, that's a coup; that's genuinely an impressive achievement for Shar to try to placate the Kurds and bring them on side, because it leaves the Duus alone, and the Alawites are being crushed, with the jihad is unleashed against them, and the Duus alone can't challenge him. If there is going to be total chaos, it has to be total, because none of these parties is strong enough to stand up against the Sunnis. So this is the, the, this is these are the possible directions here. I feel like it will be endless war, an endless cycle of destabilization, coup wars; it feels like that's what we, we've had until uh, I, I, I hope not. Um, it was my prediction; this is what I wrote to my clients, um, but after the reconciliation with the Kurds, I'm more open to the alternative. Okay, but I think that the Israelis will try to undermine him at every step, because he's saying the state of Israel—because he's saying let's keep a certain peace, you know. Do you think the state of Israel thing was following his meeting with MBS? No, I think it was following instructions from the Turks. Oh, interesting. The Turks have, have—they don't have a peace treaty with Israel; they have diplomatic relations with Israel, but prior to October the 7th, Saudi was about to have official diplomatic relations with Israel. No, they always said that we require a Palestinian state project, a pathway to a Palestinian state to normalize. Yeah, for the Israelis this is a non-starter; it would be a—I felt like the talk was getting close to, to a normalization of relations between the two nations. The Saudis were trying to use—they trying to dangle the car normalization to try to get concessions from the Americans and say, well, we'll stay on this pathway, you'll give us a defensive pact, and you'll commit to protecting us, and this will strengthen our relationship, and we'll pay for it essentially, and um, you'll work on a Palestinian state, and when that sort of—there's a path forward—we'll normalize. There's a big problem for MBS normalizing; part of him really wants it, and it's obvious that he does, but it sort of blows up his own religious legitimacy, especially to normalize with—what's happening with—clearly the Israelis saying there's no prospect for a Palestinian state, um, and there's nobody in Israel today who sort of thinks, yeah, let's, let's give Fatah more control, more power, and make them into an independent state. It's just not sellable to Israelis. 10% of the Jewish population lives in the West Bank; how are you going to kick, kick out 10% of, of your population to give the territory to Fatah of all people? There is no, there's no logic for it. These guys are locked into conflict; the Saudis tried to pretend otherwise; the Americans tried to pretend otherwise with Trump. We're reaching the end of pretenses, and he's saying, let's ethnically cleanse them. Jesus Christ. Um, your depth of knowledge, uh, your interpretations, your explanations are incredible. I feel you, of man. Uh, for somebody like me who's just got no chance of fully understanding what's happening in the region and and probably asks lots of dumb questions, but uh, I've really enjoyed the way you explain things, and I hope we do this uh, again in the future. I've learned so much from you in two, to uh, to our sessions. I appreciate it. I know you, man. All right. For, thank you, and thank you everyone for listening. See you soon. [Music]