December 10, 2024 • 35 mins
James and Robert discuss the downfall of the Assad regime, the future for Syria, and what we can all learn from Syria.
Sources:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tJgepOyOt9cjXRjLE4kHdOhoCesJx-l_S9hJ2foQxnI/edit?tab=t.0
https://youtu.be/kuj8zPLY_4E?si=D2SVT1KBQzXwrxEU
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Uh, welcome back to it could happen here a podcast
about the things that are happening all around us, including
shockingly in the last week something we did not expect
two weeks ago, the fall of the Assad regime, which
our official stance as a network is that fuck him.
This is pretty good, but a lot of people feel differently,
(00:25):
And to talk with me about that. Another guy who's
always angry about Syria and also has been to Syria, James,
And you know, just as a note, I think a
lot of the people podcasting about this right now are
talking about a place they've never been, although James and
I have not been.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
To EdLib, so you know, it's true.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
We're going to be fairly focused on our experiences in
the Kurdish regions. But at least we're not just bullshitting
about a place that we've read about on the internet.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
Yeah, claiming deep on the ground understanding of a place
from ready, yes that is not us. Yeah, we I
briefly look to regime held Syria.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Yeah yeah, yeah, over from a commisiala where there is
kind of the governance capital of Rojava but is also
a big chunk of it was held by the assad regimes.
You would just periodically, like see that fucker's face on
the wall as you were a crossing the street.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
It's a good times. But my fixer would come around
at noon for whatever reason. When I was in Rajava,
and like, I hate to sit in the hotel, so
I'd go out for walks around the market. Yeah, not
advised by the old safety people.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
But no, one of the sketchiest cities I've been in
because of the presence of regime troops. Yes, yes, everything
else was lovely. Yeah, people are lovely.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
I'd be walking down the street and like I'd be
looking around, see has anything interesting to go and see?
And then you can literally take one wrong turn down
the street and walk into to regime Syria, as you
covered in in the Women's War. Like I was walking
down one street and this man walked up to me
and m curtis, she's not very good. Tried to say hello,
told in my name and stuff, and then he starts
getting more agitated, and he just starts repeating at higher
(01:59):
and hier volume, a sad bad man. Yeah, stay away, bro,
stay away. He's like, you're going to fucking die to
be a fucking of all.
Speaker 5 (02:10):
Yeah, girl expars to that guy.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Yeah, Bashi Barshi.
Speaker 5 (02:14):
Yeah it is. It was a very straight situation.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
It is no longer a straight situation because in the
last week the A side regime has crumbled. Statues of
him have been torn down all over the country, which
we love to see. It's another of us dancers other
network is fuck a statue?
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Yes, yeah, fuck most statues.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
Most statues are probably some cool one does the lady
hitting the Nazi with a handbag in Sweden? That's a
good statue. But yeah, most statues, most statues of dudes
in suits. Don't love them.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
No, very few dudes in suits. I want to see
a statue of.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
Yeah, I can't think of any right now.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yeah, it's not coming to me.
Speaker 5 (02:49):
Yeah, I'm sure it will.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
So these statues have been torn down because your said
regime has basically crumbled. It failed to really put up
any meaningful resistance to disadvance by different rebel groups, right
by HTS, by SNA, by the Southern Front as well.
And despite I guess even what I would have said
two weeks ago, right even after they lost Aleppo, I
(03:12):
assumed that they would regroup in Hama or Homs and
they did not.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
They completely failed to do so.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
Their Russian backers more or less abandoned them, focused on
getting their stuff and their people. Those who survived out
of the country, and as a result, there is no
more a SAD regime, right A SAD fled the country
at some point. It was initially speculated that a Sad
had fled on an aircraft on Saturday night as rebels
were entering Damascus. That seems to be untrue, or perhaps
(03:41):
it was true, but the speculation that aircraft had crashed
or been shut down, certainly it does not seem to
Sad now seems to be.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
I think.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Look, I made the call about two days before the
regime fell that I felt he was out of the country,
based on some reporting, including reporting from the scene regime,
that he'd gone to Iran first. I think he left
days before it fell. I don't think he's He's got
enough instinct for self preservation that I think he got
the fuck out of there.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
Yeah, he didn't want to be found in a hole
in the ground like here, or end up like Canafi.
Speaker 5 (04:11):
I guess, so he left.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
It's quite possible that he was doing a sort of
final please please help me tour of Russia run, which
turned turned into his eventual exile.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
In breaking news, Robert, I don't know.
Speaker 4 (04:24):
I don't know if you've seen this telegram post, and
obviously we can't confirm it because we don't have a
direct Clansiasad regime, but allegedly he is planning on setting
up a specialized hospital in the field of ophthalmology in Russia,
Abkhazia and Dubai.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
Yeah. Great, great place for him to be working.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
Yeah, wonderful, cool stuff. Yeah cool. Yeah, not at the
Hague where he belongs. And yeah, anyway, he's gone. And
we have seen in response, like some of the worst
social media posting that I've seen, And I don't want
this to be like like Twitter review. I think that
obviously that's pointless and pure ut but I want to
(05:00):
address I guess this kind of really disappointing response I've
seen from a lot of people on the left that
oh yeah, well, either I mean, you have the like
the grey zone tendency, right that a sab was great
actually in the protection of human rights in the region,
and the like the Syria was socialism in Karna, which
is obviously nonsense, right, Like, this is a person who
(05:22):
as we have seen in the last week whose regime
prisons were holding thousands of people, killed, tens of thousands
of people, tortured people to death in some cases in
Sednaia Prison, which is a big prison in Damascus, certainly
a Damascus, I should.
Speaker 5 (05:39):
Say, it's towards the coast.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
It looks as if there were children in that prison
who were possibly born in that prison and may have
never been out of that prison, which is like one
of the most horrible things I've ever had to think about,
you know, like like a little child four or five
years old never having seen the sky.
Speaker 5 (05:58):
It's just it's heartbreaking.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
Like a lot of the things we are going to find,
the things we're going to hear about in the next
few weeks are heartbreaking.
Speaker 5 (06:06):
And anybody who's.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
Prepared to apologize for that or prepared to say that
that was good, I think you really need to question
if there's someone who's aligned with you.
Speaker 5 (06:14):
But in addition to.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
That tendency, there's one that sort of holds that in Syria,
like what will come next is worse right, what will
come next?
Speaker 5 (06:25):
Or we don't know?
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Of course, we don't know what will come next. None
of us can see the future. But what will come
next will make a sad look like it was a
preferable option, and like, I feel that we need to
address that because I think it's one of the long
legacies of authoritarian socialists. How do I say this, like
the authoritarian socialist media project.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
And that kind of colliding with the Iraq War anti
anti war movement. Yes, you know, yeah, the whole hands
off Syria thing that groups like the PSL, the Party
for Socialism and Liberation, we're doing when the rebel started
this offense of being like we've got to stop you know,
these US backed rebels from taking uh, you know, Syria
for the Empires, Like, man, the fuck it. It's not
(07:07):
the US that was primarily backing the rebels that did
most of the fighting, Like these guys are Turkish backed,
you know yeah, yeah, the extent that that even matters, right,
Like the that like this is not the CIA did
not orchestrate all of this. The guys the CIA were
really trying to back in Syria basically all died Like.
Speaker 5 (07:27):
Yeah they've gone.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
Some of the weapons, sure that the US supplied in
Timber Sycamore are probably stood in the hands of HTS, but.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Yes, some of them but like, even that's not the
bulk of the weaponry that those fuckers know using.
Speaker 4 (07:40):
The entire weaponry of the Syrian and arabambi is also
in the hands of the HDS, which we'll move on
to actually, because maybe we should address that now before
we address responses. Actually, yeah, when we talk about international
involvement in Syria, right, we talk about the United States
who has supported the SDF, not as a project, and
this is important. They don't support the Democratic Autonomous Administration
(08:02):
Northern Assyria as a democratic project. What they support is
the SDF as a partner force in the fight against ISIS,
and that's been very clear when they have failed to
defend the Anes against genocidal violence, ethnic cleansing, and a
free right what we're seeing again now in the Talifat area.
I'll use that terminology because if you want to look
(08:24):
it up on Google Maps, that's easier to find the
violence that we've seen repeatedly from the Turkish back Syrian
National Army or Turkish Free Syrian Army as are sometimes called. Right,
the United States hasn't defended the people of the Ans
against and it won't because that's not what it's there
to do. And as much as we would like it too,
I don't think that as in the nature of the
(08:46):
US mission in Syria. And I don't think it's in
the nature of the US as a state to support
a project which is seeking to build democracy without the state.
Speaker 5 (08:54):
It's not in the nature of the state.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
We stumbled backwards, accidentally into exactly one, supporting the good
guys in the conflict, you know, specifically in the conflict
with ISIS. Yeah, like a broken cloak, and we immediately
ever since we have been trying as hard as we
can to pull back and you know, betray them, yes
to their deaths like that.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
That that is the story of US support of Rojava.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
Yeah, it's not. This is not a US proxy state.
Some people are trying to tell you, this is not
a CIA revolution of Some people are trying to tell you.
Speaker 5 (09:24):
Indeed.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Now, part of what gives fuel for that is there
are a number of photos of like US troops really
vibing with the WHITEPG and YPJ, and they're vibing with them.
And you and I could both say this having been
with those people.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
They're nice. Yeah, they're fun, they're chill folks.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
Yeah, they have good music and they like to done
generally cool people. Yes, yeah, I enjoy that company. I
have vibed with the WHITEPT you know, like.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
It's hard not to see a bunch of young women
who like left isis captivity and immediately said give me
a gun. I'm going to learn how to use it,
and be like, yeah, that's pretty cool. Good for you.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
Yeah, it's one of the cooler things that's happened in
the Middle East in the past century. Like, the United
States does not have a plan for what has happened
in the last two weeks, and it appears to be
trying to think on the hoof right now. Joe Biden's
foreign policy has been dog shit and it doesn't look
like he's going to pull a one eighty. Now. We
(10:20):
should not expect the United States to save for Java.
We should do everything we can to get the United
States to continue supporting the people who gave more than
ten thousand of their children in the battle against ISIS.
The US didn't want to say ground troops right at
Bama didn't want to have another ground war. Noithery did Trump,
and so they got people from the SDF to do
the dying, and a lot of the killing were they
(10:42):
maintained an aerial presence, was a light ground footprint. We
shouldn't expect the US to show up for the people
who showed.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
Up for it.
Speaker 5 (10:50):
That's not in its nature.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
The only state that had a plan for what happened
in the last two weeks appears to have been Israel.
Disappointingly right, Russia and Iran seemed to have largely scrambled
extracted their state assets. Russia got some of its people out,
they took some of their aircraft out. Iran Likewise, the
US seems to be kind of scrambling. I'm sure there
(11:13):
are still some like Oda's, some special forces guys embedded
with the SDF. I'm sure that in the areas where
ISIS has written up, because in some areas where the
regime has pulled back, there has been an increasing presence
of ISIS sleeper cells trying to sort of once again
control territory and attack the SDF in those areas. I'm
sure that there are US special forces like directing air strikes.
(11:36):
But I don't think the US is going to come
and say brijha. But the only country that had a
plan was Israel, and what Israel's plan was was to
invade Syria in the Golan Heights, right, to increase their
area of control, and then to bomb almost all of
the aircraft. And perhaps I don't know it also includes
(11:56):
air defense systems. But from what the IDF is saying today,
they have bombed all of the Syrian air Forces aircraft
that had fallen into rebel hands. This includes ammunition for
the aircraft and includes the ammunition dump at Kamishlow Airport.
About half an hour before Robert and I started recording
here on Monday, I saw a video from a friend
in Kamishlow of the ammunition dump at the airport, which
(12:19):
have previously belonged to the regime now belongs to the
a and ees exploding after it had been hit by
an IDFs.
Speaker 5 (12:26):
Right.
Speaker 4 (12:27):
So what they're trying to do, I guess, is deny
any of those weapons to people who they perceive as
a threat to their interests. Yep, and like there's been
I don't know if you're seeing this. Also, Robert by
a lot of like Israeli accounts being like, oh, we
stand with the curd Israel and the Kurds are won.
And first of all, I want to warn you. I
(12:49):
want to warn you that we have an advertising breakcoming, Robert,
is what I want to warn you about.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Oh well, speaking of well, actually not speaking of the IDF, thankfully,
but speaking about maybe the California State Highway Patrol.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
Here's some ads.
Speaker 5 (13:13):
We're back. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (13:15):
Firstly, I think when you're seeing analysis about Syria, any
when he talks about things in terms of these monolithic blocks,
this ISRAELI counts. Often we will support the Curds. I
would be sometimes I'll maybe use that to refer to
A and E S or the SDF. But I really
trend on too because it's it's a multi ethnic project, right,
Like the areas that we'll talk about in a minute,
(13:37):
where the SDF is being attacked those areas, the largest
component is the SDF is is Arab, Yeah, forces right,
and that that is the case in the SDF as
a whole. Actually, the majority of the SDF is now Arab.
Speaker 5 (13:49):
Not not Kurdish.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
I would be very skeptic of the expertise of anyone
who refers to things in these monolithic absolutes, right, the Sunnis,
the Shias, yeah, the allah Whites, the Kurds. There are
a lot of different groups in Syria, and those groups
are comprised of individuals, and those individuals shockingly have different
and distinct goals and experiences and desires. Like there are
(14:10):
absolutely Ala whites who will have remained loyal to us,
sad there are others who demonstrably did not, as we've
seen in the last week, right. And so I would
be skeptical of anyone who tries to paint things in
those terms. And I would be skeptical, to return to
what we were talking about earlier, Robert, of people who
tell you that, like we should expect the one I
(14:33):
see most is Syria to turn into Lebanon, right, And
like you and I have been talking about this before
we recorded, but that's not a useful example in my
mind of what we're likely to see in Syria, right.
And the reason for that is that like in Lebanon, yes,
there was there was like a US Air component, as
there is in Syria.
Speaker 5 (14:53):
That's true.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
But I don't understand why we would look at the
example of Lebanon, a place thousands of miles away, when
we have at least two examples of governance in Syria, right,
people who have been governing, in one case for more
than a decade, significant parts of Syria, like they have
a government project. In the case of the ANS, I
(15:16):
don't think it's fair to call it a state project.
Like they would tell you that they're trying to build
democracy without the state, which is something that which might
not be popular with states evidently, which doesn't let them
the support of many states, as we've seen. But we
have and with HDS in July and the Salvation Government. Right,
we have these two governance projects. They're extremely different, right.
(15:39):
The Salvation Government under HDS is people have been arrested
for playing music at their own weddings. It is neither
democratic nor particularly liberatory. And then we have the ANS,
which I would argue is the only democracy in the
Middle least. Yeah, certainly the only democracy where people of
different ethnicities and genders matter the same amount.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Yeah, certainly the like multi ethnic democracy. Yes, in the
Middle East, that's functional.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Yeah, you know, you're just straining the definition of democracy
if you're constraining it by ethnicity, right, Right, So I
think you can make a good case for it being
the only democracy in the Middle East. I saw this
really atrocious BBC interview this morning. Right, I'm trying to
network some networks now have reporters on the ground in Damascus,
and I've been trying to watch those to sort of
see sort of what's going on. It can be very
(16:26):
hard to just get your news from telegram like. I
would also caution people who are perhaps new to this,
who are finding these telegram channels to take everything you
read on there with the pinch of salt.
Speaker 5 (16:34):
You'll see a lot of disinformation there.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
One of the BBC had an expert on and he
was like, Oh, every time we see people pulling down
statues of dictators, I'm a bit concerned, and like, I
have to think about how to express this. It seems
to me deeply as lamophobic or bigoted or racist. I
don't quite know the white term to say, Oh, the
people of this country and the place is in the
(16:57):
last ten twenty years where we've seen people pulling statutes
of dictators have largely been in the Middle East. Right
to say that, oh, these people are incapable of self governance,
these people are incapable of living in peace with one another,
but like they're not.
Speaker 5 (17:11):
We've seen that in Java, and I don't think.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
That the right response now is to respond with skepticism,
to like the Syrian people's ability to live in peace.
They've been at war for fifteen years, fourteen years, thirteen
thirteen years, thirteen and a half years. But I think
that there is not an appetite for more killing, more dying,
certainly from what I've seen and what I've heard.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
No exhaustion is a factor here.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Like you really cannot emphasize enough how long I mean,
HTS and the SNA have been at this and how
fucking tired, particularly like HTS has to be, Like this
has been more than a decade of constant terror and violence.
So I do think that that's going to be a factor,
(17:59):
and like what happened next, I should hope it will be. Yeah,
I mean some things I don't know how to interpret. Right,
HTS has asked the regime, police and authorities in cities
to stay on. Some of that is probably good, right,
Like the people who ensure that the water gets pumped,
I hope that they stay pumping the water. The people
who were the police side regime, it's here an Arab republic.
(18:23):
I don't want those people to stay on. I want
those people to fuck off, and I want those people
to be held accountable for the crimes it committed. But
it doesn't point to sort of wild sectarian violence. We
don't have the situation we had in Iraq, right, Right,
we have a US occupation which sits inside its base
is and it only leaves ce big lead to kill people.
(18:44):
Right from the perspective of the people living in a rack.
That that's what the US occupation look like for the
most part. Right, it's guys in big military vehicles who
kill civilians by mistake.
Speaker 5 (18:54):
We don't have that here.
Speaker 4 (18:56):
There's not that resentment, generational resentment that they're allowed the
Islamic state to grow there. Now, the Islamic State did
grow through capturing a lot of state institutions, which which
is why Yes has done But I don't see that
same resentment, and they don't see that same desire for
sort of redemptive violence that we saw. That I might
be wrong, right, that there might be more into communal violence.
(19:17):
I have seen some videos of what looked like summary
executions in Damascus today.
Speaker 5 (19:22):
That's very concerning.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Yeah, but also I mean, look, there's some people who
need to be summarily executed.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
In this you know.
Speaker 5 (19:30):
Yeah, if you've got to shoot someone, fuck it.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Yeah, if you're looking at the photos of just like
thousands of shoes and decomposed bodies, dissolved ascid. That's aid
Naya prison. Like you're liberating those places, you catch anyone
who was working there. I'm not going to say that
that's a bad thing to do. I might do the
same thing, and there's that you in their circumstances.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
Yeah, I can't blame somewhere. I can understand someone doing that.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
What are you going to do?
Speaker 4 (19:54):
Yeah, I can understand that in the next few days
they will probably be more of that violence, because we
are literally in some cases opening the lid on some
of the west crimes against humanity of this century.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Yes, yes, and they are going to be catching There
are a lot of mok barrat, you know, secret police
guys who didn't get out, who were throwing on We've
got videos of them leaving the palace, throwing on civilian clothes.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
And I'm not going to be shocked if a lot
of the justice process of that is ugly. Now, I
do suspect that Joe Lannie is going to at least
grab a chunk of those guys and do trials because
he is really looking for state legitimacy, you know, and
that's one way you get it. Yeah, that's his project now,
But that's not going to be how all these guys
go down.
Speaker 5 (20:35):
Some of these guys are going to die, and yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
They're just gonna get fucking got yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
Yeah, and look they got a lot of people. They
kind of had it coming to him. I'm not particularly
concerned about that. I'm more broadly concerned with, like what
are you doing on the left? If you see people
in the streets, you see people tearing down statues of dictators,
you see people celebrating the end of a regime that
oppressed them for decades, and you meet go to, oh,
(21:00):
this is bad, Like why do you even bother? If
we don't believe that people can govern themselves, if we
don't believe that the people in the street are normally
the people who are right, and if we don't believe
that the downfall of tyrannical regimes is.
Speaker 5 (21:15):
A good thing.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Yeah, what what do you believe?
Speaker 4 (21:17):
You know?
Speaker 2 (21:18):
If you're just torturing it to be like, well, no,
you know, you and I both read that there was
a post earlier today with someone being like these leftists
purity politics, you know, to be angry that a side
kept a lid on radical Islam and isis and just
didn't do it super cleanly. And it's man, he was
fucking guessing children.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Like you, where are you here? Yeah? What is wrong
with you? Come on? Man?
Speaker 4 (21:41):
Yeah, this is yeah, this is a person who dropped
chlorine gas on blocks of flats with little children in them, right.
Speaker 5 (21:46):
Like, yeah, fuck this guy. It's good that he's gone.
I wish he was dead.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
I'm sad that he gets to go and be an mphthalmologist,
like he, of all people, needs to be held accountable
for his crimes.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Yeah, yeah, some could have we get have a song
on antilirium kind of situation, right, Yeah, who's the Armenian
who shot a member of the Turkish government in Berlin? Yeah,
we could have something like that go down, God willing.
Speaker 4 (22:10):
Yeah, yeah, you never know they Yeah, I guess people
there he's in Russia.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
Now he's in Russia.
Speaker 5 (22:15):
Someone will find him and his in his high end
eye clinic one day.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Yeah, he's probably going to be going back and forth
to Dubai. There's some Syrians who wound up in Dubai.
Somebody might stab them.
Speaker 4 (22:24):
Yeah, we can hope, but I want to take one
more break talking of stabbing. Maybe maybe we will get
an advert for knives, you know, yeah, I've never had
a knife advert, have.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
We No, I don't know that we have. And I
would sell the hell out of knives.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
Yeah, almost any knives, even crappy gas stach Night, like,
if you make the ones that look like an oil slick,
get in touch with the advertising department at iHeartMedia.
Speaker 5 (22:47):
We'll pimp them. All right, we're back.
Speaker 4 (22:59):
That's thing I want to talk about, Robert, is how
the rebels won because there was not a lot of
fighting after the collapse of a Lepo, but before there
was fighting, and in part how that fighting went I
think led to the downfall of the morale of the
syrianat of army. Right, So there are some things here
that both Robert and I are somewhat nerdy about about conflicts,
(23:21):
right like it there's something even when we're not attending
was we like to read about them. And you and
I both take a great interest in history, and I
think we'd be unwise to not look at this and
learn from it, especially with HTS who massively professionalized since
the ceasefire in twenty twenty, I think professionalists is probably
the right word like that command that technology, that the
(23:44):
way they operated looked a lot more like a modern
military than it did, you know, the militias, Like I'm
sure you and I both remember the early Syrian of
a war for people who are a bit younger than us,
Like some of the most incredible improvised weapons that I've seen.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Oh yeah, there was literally at one point they had
an Ottoman era black powder cannon on the back of
a flatbed that they were using to hit regime positions.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
That they had literally taken out of the museum in
a leopard to get it out of the museum.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
Fucking amazing stuff.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
Like only I thought the top of like that sort
of thing was when fucking inserts in Afghanistan would use
seventeenth century jazails to shoot at US troops. But the
Ottoman cannon is really a was that's a flex.
Speaker 5 (24:33):
Yeah, with a huge flex.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
They they also worked, you know, they fired propane cylinders
out of huge tubes, these improvised mortors they called hell cannons,
Like really incredible and like it speaks to the ingenuity
of people and their desire not to be oppressed, right,
they desire to fight against state tyranny. But when we
compare that to what we saw with HTS in twenty
(24:58):
twenty four, a world of change right. In particular, I
think it was very interesting that they captured armored vehicles
and then they were able to combine armor and infantry
very effectively, which is not easy to do right, that
has eluded even some professional militaries. They also very effectively
(25:18):
used drones, both drones to drop bombs and drones to
adjust their artillery and mortifier, which I think is something
that again like that modern militaries do, but it's not
easy to do right, and it's not like HDS could
do massive exercises in the lead up to this operation,
like they seem to have professionalized very quickly. Another area
(25:42):
that they were you can see that they've learned a
lot from the conflicts in Ukraine and perhaps in Memmar too,
was their use of FPV drones, a first person in
view drone. How do you describe it? It's like your
eyes are on the front of the drone. Is that
a good description, Robert, Yeah, it's like you're flying. And
there are videos of whole classrooms of HTS, I guess, soldiers, militants,
(26:05):
whatever you want to call them, practicing flying drones or
using the controllers to play like a computer game where
you have to like go through checkpoints and follow a
route and things. And they seemed to have developed like
a training course that then gave them this drone brigade,
which they used incredibly effectively. They had these massive first
person view drones that were almost like a sort of
Ersat's cruise missile, and it was I think one of
(26:27):
those that penetrated some kind of command headquarters in Aleppo
in the early days of the battle there, killed several
important offices and commanders and helped to then spread that
panic which they rode all the way to Damascus. Right, So,
like this use of drones was extremely consequential. The other
thing that they used in which we've seen the SDF
(26:49):
use a lot, is these pulse art thermal optics. So
a thermal optic sees heat, right, I guess would be
the easiest way to describe it, and it maps heat
in a visual fashion for the user, and in this case,
they put them on their rifles and they're able to
see other people at night. Our friend Carl, who we
had on last week week before maybe Carl made a
(27:10):
really good video about thermal versus night vision on his
Arrange TV channel. I'll link it in the notes because
I think it's worth people checking out if they're not
familiar with this technology at all. The optics he used
were not the optics they're using, but these thermal optics.
You've seen them a lot with the SDF, especially in
a freen like they'll do these night missions, right, and
(27:30):
when you look at the recording from the thermal optic,
it it looks like people are glowing because they are
the hottest things in that area, and it makes it
very easy to target people. And HDS us these a
lot when they were attacking a lapper, right, these thermal
optics that they mounted on their rifles, and they allowed
them to pretty much. The United States used to talk
(27:52):
about owning the night right. Yes, it had night vision
where no one else does. Night visions proliferated a long
way now and in that mean that some of the
ways that they used to use night vision they can't anymore. Like,
for instance, they used to send out lasers that were
only visible and the night vision to aim weapons. If
your adversary has night vision as well, you've now created
a giant line that goes right back to you if
(28:15):
you're using a laser aiming device, so you can't do that.
But these thermal uptics, especially when they're fighting against Assyrian
Arabami who I mean, these conscripts are massively demoralized, right,
They're underpaid, they're under fed. Did you meet any when
you were in raja But did you meet any people
who defected?
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Yes, I'd met a number of people who had, and
some who had also had to flee, like from Aleppo
and whatnot, because they had been on like rebels fighting
the Assad regime, and some had wound up in the SDF,
some more just civilians living in the area. I also
there's also a number of folks who commuted like to
and from regime held territory just because like if you
were someone that wasn't particularly wanted, you could do that. Yeah,
(28:52):
it was a very confusing situation for a lot of people.
Speaker 4 (28:55):
Yeah, extremely And I think when you meet the people
who have been regime soldiers and come across often they're
like they seem to be happy being waiters or working
in the market in Rajaba because their pay was so
bad and their lives were so miserable as conscripts that
they'd rather just come and work, you know, any job
they can get in a nes And I think when
(29:17):
you've got those guys going up against well trained people
from HTS with these thermal optics, with these using drones,
that communications were solid. You know, you can tell from
their appearance that a lot of these guys are professionalized.
They were almost indistinguishable from US troops. Like I think
you and I had both responded to this tweet about
some YouTube guy was shocked that people were wearing helmets
(29:41):
and body armor, which that has been the esthetic of violence,
at least in places where the US has operated for
I know half a decade.
Speaker 5 (29:51):
Would you say, like they're the sort of US Special Forces?
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Look, yeah, I mean, and that's just the norm for
dressing if you're fighting in a war anywhere on the
planet now, like whether you're the Russian Army or some
militia in Syria, it's you know, plate carrier, usually like
some sort of fast helmet, you've got you know, belt
with side arm mag pouches, and then usually either in
(30:14):
akam or some sort of ar style weapon. Like everybody
dresses that way. Everybody looks very similar yah now because
it's just the most kind of. I mean number one,
there's a lot of that gear lying around and it's cheap.
And number two like it works, it's a load out
that works.
Speaker 4 (30:28):
Yeah, it's very practical, yeah, for what they're doing. I
think number three as well, like we should not understate
the desire to look like your avatar and call of duty.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
Yes, yes, it's also looks cool.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
It looks like being in a movie, and that is
all that matters a lot to the kind of young
men who start fighting in wars.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
Yeah, yeah, people, I think if you've not been you
won't realize how young a lot of these people are.
This incredible professionism or incredible professionism. I overstating it. But
this dramatic change in the appearance and conduct of these rebels,
particularly HDS, occurred over about three or four years from
the ceasefire in twenty twenty to this offensive in twenty
(31:08):
twenty four, and I think it gives us an insight
into the way that war is changing. Right, that access
to information is easier than it ever has been, and
access to a lot of these technologies has proliferated massively
because we've seen in Myanmar, right, drones proliferate people three
(31:32):
D print little night vision goggles in Meanmas. Spoke to
Milk about it about a year and a half ago.
People remember Milk from our Meanma series about three D
printing little night vision goggles that use the camera from
you know, those security cameras that can kind of see
at night. They use those and then a tiny LCD screen.
Of course, drones are everywhere now, right, things like plate carriers.
(31:54):
Even you see rebels in Myanma wearing them, buying them
from Ali Express. Like all of the technology, all of
the tactics are also much easier to find on the internet.
You know, Robert and I have both spoken to people
who go who said they go on YouTube to learn
about like military tactics and small arms even and you know,
how to use different weapons systems when they capture them.
(32:14):
I think it's a real change in the way that
conflict is conducted, and it's one that we will probably
continue to see as like, you know, the world isn't
getting any more peaceful, nope, and with a lot of
you know, Russia and Iran took a massive l in Syria.
That doesn't mean that they're not gone as sort of
(32:35):
global actors. We will continue to see particular Russia obviously
fighting in Ukraine, and I think it's worth looking at
what happened in Syria so that we can understand what
we're going to see in other parts of the world YEP.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
One of the ways I like to think about it
that is crucial for people don't understand, is that Syria
has largely been the laboratory in which the twenty first
century was cooked up, Like all of our futures have
to some extent been built in Syria. Both like this
is where we get a lot of the fuel behind
the right wing surge that has been occurring over the
(33:07):
last few years, started because of the refugee crisis, you know,
but also a lot of the tactics and weapons shit
that like Israel is doing right now in Gaza. Like
Syria was the lab to a significant extent for how
authoritarian regimes would crack down, and it was also the
impetus behind a lot of the most significant things that
have been happening over the last decade and change.
Speaker 4 (33:28):
So it might still be already yes, Serem and the
Netherlands have stopped processing asylum applications from Syria, which is yeah,
which is concerning YEP, but Yeah, I think it's worth
continuing to keep an eye on I will continue to
post about it, we will continue to inform you about
it here, and we will continue to bring on people
who have more expertise and insight than we do. So yeah,
(33:50):
we hope you'll keep an eye on it. And I
just want to end by saying that like the democratic
project in Rojava is under a great deal of threat.
Speaker 5 (33:58):
Yes, currently more than it has been for perhaps a decade.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
YEP.
Speaker 4 (34:02):
They do not have an ally in the United States.
They do not, as far as we know, have an
ally in Israel. And from what we've seen, it's one
thing what Israel says, it's another thing what Israel does,
and what Israel has been doing today is bombing ammunition
that they already have in the A Andes. And that
means that it's more important than ever that you do
what you can to support them. If you go to
(34:24):
the Emergency Committee for a Java, you can find them online,
you find them on all different kinds of social media.
They have a toolkit for supporting Java right now. I
would urge you if you care about that project, if
you care about building democracy without the state, care about
building a place where women and men are equal, and
the revolution was led by women. It's not a revolution
that included women, it's revolution by women for women. I
(34:45):
would encourage you to do what you can to support them,
all right, Yep, that's all.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website
Polsonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you.
Speaker 5 (35:06):
Listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
You can now find sources for it could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Also media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Uh, welcome back to it could happen here a podcast
about the things that are happening all around us, including
shockingly in the last week something we did not expect
two weeks ago, the fall of the Assad regime, which
our official stance as a network is that fuck him.
This is pretty good, but a lot of people feel differently,
(00:25):
And to talk with me about that. Another guy who's
always angry about Syria and also has been to Syria, James,
And you know, just as a note, I think a
lot of the people podcasting about this right now are
talking about a place they've never been, although James and
I have not been.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
To EdLib, so you know, it's true.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
We're going to be fairly focused on our experiences in
the Kurdish regions. But at least we're not just bullshitting
about a place that we've read about on the internet.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
Yeah, claiming deep on the ground understanding of a place
from ready, yes that is not us. Yeah, we I
briefly look to regime held Syria.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Yeah yeah, yeah, over from a commisiala where there is
kind of the governance capital of Rojava but is also
a big chunk of it was held by the assad regimes.
You would just periodically, like see that fucker's face on
the wall as you were a crossing the street.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
It's a good times. But my fixer would come around
at noon for whatever reason. When I was in Rajava,
and like, I hate to sit in the hotel, so
I'd go out for walks around the market. Yeah, not
advised by the old safety people.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
But no, one of the sketchiest cities I've been in
because of the presence of regime troops. Yes, yes, everything
else was lovely. Yeah, people are lovely.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
I'd be walking down the street and like I'd be
looking around, see has anything interesting to go and see?
And then you can literally take one wrong turn down
the street and walk into to regime Syria, as you
covered in in the Women's War. Like I was walking
down one street and this man walked up to me
and m curtis, she's not very good. Tried to say hello,
told in my name and stuff, and then he starts
getting more agitated, and he just starts repeating at higher
(01:59):
and hier volume, a sad bad man. Yeah, stay away, bro,
stay away. He's like, you're going to fucking die to
be a fucking of all.
Speaker 5 (02:10):
Yeah, girl expars to that guy.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Yeah, Bashi Barshi.
Speaker 5 (02:14):
Yeah it is. It was a very straight situation.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
It is no longer a straight situation because in the
last week the A side regime has crumbled. Statues of
him have been torn down all over the country, which
we love to see. It's another of us dancers other
network is fuck a statue?
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Yes, yeah, fuck most statues.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
Most statues are probably some cool one does the lady
hitting the Nazi with a handbag in Sweden? That's a
good statue. But yeah, most statues, most statues of dudes
in suits. Don't love them.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
No, very few dudes in suits. I want to see
a statue of.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
Yeah, I can't think of any right now.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yeah, it's not coming to me.
Speaker 5 (02:49):
Yeah, I'm sure it will.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
So these statues have been torn down because your said
regime has basically crumbled. It failed to really put up
any meaningful resistance to disadvance by different rebel groups, right
by HTS, by SNA, by the Southern Front as well.
And despite I guess even what I would have said
two weeks ago, right even after they lost Aleppo, I
(03:12):
assumed that they would regroup in Hama or Homs and
they did not.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
They completely failed to do so.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
Their Russian backers more or less abandoned them, focused on
getting their stuff and their people. Those who survived out
of the country, and as a result, there is no
more a SAD regime, right A SAD fled the country
at some point. It was initially speculated that a Sad
had fled on an aircraft on Saturday night as rebels
were entering Damascus. That seems to be untrue, or perhaps
(03:41):
it was true, but the speculation that aircraft had crashed
or been shut down, certainly it does not seem to
Sad now seems to be.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
I think.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Look, I made the call about two days before the
regime fell that I felt he was out of the country,
based on some reporting, including reporting from the scene regime,
that he'd gone to Iran first. I think he left
days before it fell. I don't think he's He's got
enough instinct for self preservation that I think he got
the fuck out of there.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
Yeah, he didn't want to be found in a hole
in the ground like here, or end up like Canafi.
Speaker 5 (04:11):
I guess, so he left.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
It's quite possible that he was doing a sort of
final please please help me tour of Russia run, which
turned turned into his eventual exile.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
In breaking news, Robert, I don't know.
Speaker 4 (04:24):
I don't know if you've seen this telegram post, and
obviously we can't confirm it because we don't have a
direct Clansiasad regime, but allegedly he is planning on setting
up a specialized hospital in the field of ophthalmology in Russia,
Abkhazia and Dubai.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
Yeah. Great, great place for him to be working.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
Yeah, wonderful, cool stuff. Yeah cool. Yeah, not at the
Hague where he belongs. And yeah, anyway, he's gone. And
we have seen in response, like some of the worst
social media posting that I've seen, And I don't want
this to be like like Twitter review. I think that
obviously that's pointless and pure ut but I want to
(05:00):
address I guess this kind of really disappointing response I've
seen from a lot of people on the left that
oh yeah, well, either I mean, you have the like
the grey zone tendency, right that a sab was great
actually in the protection of human rights in the region,
and the like the Syria was socialism in Karna, which
is obviously nonsense, right, Like, this is a person who
(05:22):
as we have seen in the last week whose regime
prisons were holding thousands of people, killed, tens of thousands
of people, tortured people to death in some cases in
Sednaia Prison, which is a big prison in Damascus, certainly
a Damascus, I should.
Speaker 5 (05:39):
Say, it's towards the coast.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
It looks as if there were children in that prison
who were possibly born in that prison and may have
never been out of that prison, which is like one
of the most horrible things I've ever had to think about,
you know, like like a little child four or five
years old never having seen the sky.
Speaker 5 (05:58):
It's just it's heartbreaking.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
Like a lot of the things we are going to find,
the things we're going to hear about in the next
few weeks are heartbreaking.
Speaker 5 (06:06):
And anybody who's.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
Prepared to apologize for that or prepared to say that
that was good, I think you really need to question
if there's someone who's aligned with you.
Speaker 5 (06:14):
But in addition to.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
That tendency, there's one that sort of holds that in Syria,
like what will come next is worse right, what will
come next?
Speaker 5 (06:25):
Or we don't know?
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Of course, we don't know what will come next. None
of us can see the future. But what will come
next will make a sad look like it was a
preferable option, and like, I feel that we need to
address that because I think it's one of the long
legacies of authoritarian socialists. How do I say this, like
the authoritarian socialist media project.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
And that kind of colliding with the Iraq War anti
anti war movement. Yes, you know, yeah, the whole hands
off Syria thing that groups like the PSL, the Party
for Socialism and Liberation, we're doing when the rebel started
this offense of being like we've got to stop you know,
these US backed rebels from taking uh, you know, Syria
for the Empires, Like, man, the fuck it. It's not
(07:07):
the US that was primarily backing the rebels that did
most of the fighting, Like these guys are Turkish backed,
you know yeah, yeah, the extent that that even matters, right,
Like the that like this is not the CIA did
not orchestrate all of this. The guys the CIA were
really trying to back in Syria basically all died Like.
Speaker 5 (07:27):
Yeah they've gone.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
Some of the weapons, sure that the US supplied in
Timber Sycamore are probably stood in the hands of HTS, but.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Yes, some of them but like, even that's not the
bulk of the weaponry that those fuckers know using.
Speaker 4 (07:40):
The entire weaponry of the Syrian and arabambi is also
in the hands of the HDS, which we'll move on
to actually, because maybe we should address that now before
we address responses. Actually, yeah, when we talk about international
involvement in Syria, right, we talk about the United States
who has supported the SDF, not as a project, and
this is important. They don't support the Democratic Autonomous Administration
(08:02):
Northern Assyria as a democratic project. What they support is
the SDF as a partner force in the fight against ISIS,
and that's been very clear when they have failed to
defend the Anes against genocidal violence, ethnic cleansing, and a
free right what we're seeing again now in the Talifat area.
I'll use that terminology because if you want to look
(08:24):
it up on Google Maps, that's easier to find the
violence that we've seen repeatedly from the Turkish back Syrian
National Army or Turkish Free Syrian Army as are sometimes called. Right,
the United States hasn't defended the people of the Ans
against and it won't because that's not what it's there
to do. And as much as we would like it too,
I don't think that as in the nature of the
(08:46):
US mission in Syria. And I don't think it's in
the nature of the US as a state to support
a project which is seeking to build democracy without the state.
Speaker 5 (08:54):
It's not in the nature of the state.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
We stumbled backwards, accidentally into exactly one, supporting the good
guys in the conflict, you know, specifically in the conflict
with ISIS. Yeah, like a broken cloak, and we immediately
ever since we have been trying as hard as we
can to pull back and you know, betray them, yes
to their deaths like that.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
That that is the story of US support of Rojava.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
Yeah, it's not. This is not a US proxy state.
Some people are trying to tell you, this is not
a CIA revolution of Some people are trying to tell you.
Speaker 5 (09:24):
Indeed.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Now, part of what gives fuel for that is there
are a number of photos of like US troops really
vibing with the WHITEPG and YPJ, and they're vibing with them.
And you and I could both say this having been
with those people.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
They're nice. Yeah, they're fun, they're chill folks.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
Yeah, they have good music and they like to done
generally cool people. Yes, yeah, I enjoy that company. I
have vibed with the WHITEPT you know, like.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
It's hard not to see a bunch of young women
who like left isis captivity and immediately said give me
a gun. I'm going to learn how to use it,
and be like, yeah, that's pretty cool. Good for you.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
Yeah, it's one of the cooler things that's happened in
the Middle East in the past century. Like, the United
States does not have a plan for what has happened
in the last two weeks, and it appears to be
trying to think on the hoof right now. Joe Biden's
foreign policy has been dog shit and it doesn't look
like he's going to pull a one eighty. Now. We
(10:20):
should not expect the United States to save for Java.
We should do everything we can to get the United
States to continue supporting the people who gave more than
ten thousand of their children in the battle against ISIS.
The US didn't want to say ground troops right at
Bama didn't want to have another ground war. Noithery did Trump,
and so they got people from the SDF to do
the dying, and a lot of the killing were they
(10:42):
maintained an aerial presence, was a light ground footprint. We
shouldn't expect the US to show up for the people
who showed.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
Up for it.
Speaker 5 (10:50):
That's not in its nature.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
The only state that had a plan for what happened
in the last two weeks appears to have been Israel.
Disappointingly right, Russia and Iran seemed to have largely scrambled
extracted their state assets. Russia got some of its people out,
they took some of their aircraft out. Iran Likewise, the
US seems to be kind of scrambling. I'm sure there
(11:13):
are still some like Oda's, some special forces guys embedded
with the SDF. I'm sure that in the areas where
ISIS has written up, because in some areas where the
regime has pulled back, there has been an increasing presence
of ISIS sleeper cells trying to sort of once again
control territory and attack the SDF in those areas. I'm
sure that there are US special forces like directing air strikes.
(11:36):
But I don't think the US is going to come
and say brijha. But the only country that had a
plan was Israel, and what Israel's plan was was to
invade Syria in the Golan Heights, right, to increase their
area of control, and then to bomb almost all of
the aircraft. And perhaps I don't know it also includes
(11:56):
air defense systems. But from what the IDF is saying today,
they have bombed all of the Syrian air Forces aircraft
that had fallen into rebel hands. This includes ammunition for
the aircraft and includes the ammunition dump at Kamishlow Airport.
About half an hour before Robert and I started recording
here on Monday, I saw a video from a friend
in Kamishlow of the ammunition dump at the airport, which
(12:19):
have previously belonged to the regime now belongs to the
a and ees exploding after it had been hit by
an IDFs.
Speaker 5 (12:26):
Right.
Speaker 4 (12:27):
So what they're trying to do, I guess, is deny
any of those weapons to people who they perceive as
a threat to their interests. Yep, and like there's been
I don't know if you're seeing this. Also, Robert by
a lot of like Israeli accounts being like, oh, we
stand with the curd Israel and the Kurds are won.
And first of all, I want to warn you. I
(12:49):
want to warn you that we have an advertising breakcoming, Robert,
is what I want to warn you about.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Oh well, speaking of well, actually not speaking of the IDF, thankfully,
but speaking about maybe the California State Highway Patrol.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
Here's some ads.
Speaker 5 (13:13):
We're back. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (13:15):
Firstly, I think when you're seeing analysis about Syria, any
when he talks about things in terms of these monolithic blocks,
this ISRAELI counts. Often we will support the Curds. I
would be sometimes I'll maybe use that to refer to
A and E S or the SDF. But I really
trend on too because it's it's a multi ethnic project, right,
Like the areas that we'll talk about in a minute,
(13:37):
where the SDF is being attacked those areas, the largest
component is the SDF is is Arab, Yeah, forces right,
and that that is the case in the SDF as
a whole. Actually, the majority of the SDF is now Arab.
Speaker 5 (13:49):
Not not Kurdish.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
I would be very skeptic of the expertise of anyone
who refers to things in these monolithic absolutes, right, the Sunnis,
the Shias, yeah, the allah Whites, the Kurds. There are
a lot of different groups in Syria, and those groups
are comprised of individuals, and those individuals shockingly have different
and distinct goals and experiences and desires. Like there are
(14:10):
absolutely Ala whites who will have remained loyal to us,
sad there are others who demonstrably did not, as we've
seen in the last week, right. And so I would
be skeptical of anyone who tries to paint things in
those terms. And I would be skeptical, to return to
what we were talking about earlier, Robert, of people who
tell you that, like we should expect the one I
(14:33):
see most is Syria to turn into Lebanon, right, And
like you and I have been talking about this before
we recorded, but that's not a useful example in my
mind of what we're likely to see in Syria, right.
And the reason for that is that like in Lebanon, yes,
there was there was like a US Air component, as
there is in Syria.
Speaker 5 (14:53):
That's true.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
But I don't understand why we would look at the
example of Lebanon, a place thousands of miles away, when
we have at least two examples of governance in Syria, right,
people who have been governing, in one case for more
than a decade, significant parts of Syria, like they have
a government project. In the case of the ANS, I
(15:16):
don't think it's fair to call it a state project.
Like they would tell you that they're trying to build
democracy without the state, which is something that which might
not be popular with states evidently, which doesn't let them
the support of many states, as we've seen. But we
have and with HDS in July and the Salvation Government. Right,
we have these two governance projects. They're extremely different, right.
(15:39):
The Salvation Government under HDS is people have been arrested
for playing music at their own weddings. It is neither
democratic nor particularly liberatory. And then we have the ANS,
which I would argue is the only democracy in the
Middle least. Yeah, certainly the only democracy where people of
different ethnicities and genders matter the same amount.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Yeah, certainly the like multi ethnic democracy. Yes, in the
Middle East, that's functional.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Yeah, you know, you're just straining the definition of democracy
if you're constraining it by ethnicity, right, Right, So I
think you can make a good case for it being
the only democracy in the Middle East. I saw this
really atrocious BBC interview this morning. Right, I'm trying to
network some networks now have reporters on the ground in Damascus,
and I've been trying to watch those to sort of
see sort of what's going on. It can be very
(16:26):
hard to just get your news from telegram like. I
would also caution people who are perhaps new to this,
who are finding these telegram channels to take everything you
read on there with the pinch of salt.
Speaker 5 (16:34):
You'll see a lot of disinformation there.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
One of the BBC had an expert on and he
was like, Oh, every time we see people pulling down
statues of dictators, I'm a bit concerned, and like, I
have to think about how to express this. It seems
to me deeply as lamophobic or bigoted or racist. I
don't quite know the white term to say, Oh, the
people of this country and the place is in the
(16:57):
last ten twenty years where we've seen people pulling statutes
of dictators have largely been in the Middle East. Right
to say that, oh, these people are incapable of self governance,
these people are incapable of living in peace with one another,
but like they're not.
Speaker 5 (17:11):
We've seen that in Java, and I don't think.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
That the right response now is to respond with skepticism,
to like the Syrian people's ability to live in peace.
They've been at war for fifteen years, fourteen years, thirteen
thirteen years, thirteen and a half years. But I think
that there is not an appetite for more killing, more dying,
certainly from what I've seen and what I've heard.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
No exhaustion is a factor here.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Like you really cannot emphasize enough how long I mean,
HTS and the SNA have been at this and how
fucking tired, particularly like HTS has to be, Like this
has been more than a decade of constant terror and violence.
So I do think that that's going to be a factor,
(17:59):
and like what happened next, I should hope it will be. Yeah,
I mean some things I don't know how to interpret. Right,
HTS has asked the regime, police and authorities in cities
to stay on. Some of that is probably good, right,
Like the people who ensure that the water gets pumped,
I hope that they stay pumping the water. The people
who were the police side regime, it's here an Arab republic.
(18:23):
I don't want those people to stay on. I want
those people to fuck off, and I want those people
to be held accountable for the crimes it committed. But
it doesn't point to sort of wild sectarian violence. We
don't have the situation we had in Iraq, right, Right,
we have a US occupation which sits inside its base
is and it only leaves ce big lead to kill people.
(18:44):
Right from the perspective of the people living in a rack.
That that's what the US occupation look like for the
most part. Right, it's guys in big military vehicles who
kill civilians by mistake.
Speaker 5 (18:54):
We don't have that here.
Speaker 4 (18:56):
There's not that resentment, generational resentment that they're allowed the
Islamic state to grow there. Now, the Islamic State did
grow through capturing a lot of state institutions, which which
is why Yes has done But I don't see that
same resentment, and they don't see that same desire for
sort of redemptive violence that we saw. That I might
be wrong, right, that there might be more into communal violence.
(19:17):
I have seen some videos of what looked like summary
executions in Damascus today.
Speaker 5 (19:22):
That's very concerning.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Yeah, but also I mean, look, there's some people who
need to be summarily executed.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
In this you know.
Speaker 5 (19:30):
Yeah, if you've got to shoot someone, fuck it.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Yeah, if you're looking at the photos of just like
thousands of shoes and decomposed bodies, dissolved ascid. That's aid
Naya prison. Like you're liberating those places, you catch anyone
who was working there. I'm not going to say that
that's a bad thing to do. I might do the
same thing, and there's that you in their circumstances.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
Yeah, I can't blame somewhere. I can understand someone doing that.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
What are you going to do?
Speaker 4 (19:54):
Yeah, I can understand that in the next few days
they will probably be more of that violence, because we
are literally in some cases opening the lid on some
of the west crimes against humanity of this century.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Yes, yes, and they are going to be catching There
are a lot of mok barrat, you know, secret police
guys who didn't get out, who were throwing on We've
got videos of them leaving the palace, throwing on civilian clothes.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
And I'm not going to be shocked if a lot
of the justice process of that is ugly. Now, I
do suspect that Joe Lannie is going to at least
grab a chunk of those guys and do trials because
he is really looking for state legitimacy, you know, and
that's one way you get it. Yeah, that's his project now,
But that's not going to be how all these guys
go down.
Speaker 5 (20:35):
Some of these guys are going to die, and yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
They're just gonna get fucking got yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
Yeah, and look they got a lot of people. They
kind of had it coming to him. I'm not particularly
concerned about that. I'm more broadly concerned with, like what
are you doing on the left? If you see people
in the streets, you see people tearing down statues of dictators,
you see people celebrating the end of a regime that
oppressed them for decades, and you meet go to, oh,
(21:00):
this is bad, Like why do you even bother? If
we don't believe that people can govern themselves, if we
don't believe that the people in the street are normally
the people who are right, and if we don't believe
that the downfall of tyrannical regimes is.
Speaker 5 (21:15):
A good thing.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Yeah, what what do you believe?
Speaker 4 (21:17):
You know?
Speaker 2 (21:18):
If you're just torturing it to be like, well, no,
you know, you and I both read that there was
a post earlier today with someone being like these leftists
purity politics, you know, to be angry that a side
kept a lid on radical Islam and isis and just
didn't do it super cleanly. And it's man, he was
fucking guessing children.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Like you, where are you here? Yeah? What is wrong
with you? Come on? Man?
Speaker 4 (21:41):
Yeah, this is yeah, this is a person who dropped
chlorine gas on blocks of flats with little children in them, right.
Speaker 5 (21:46):
Like, yeah, fuck this guy. It's good that he's gone.
I wish he was dead.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
I'm sad that he gets to go and be an mphthalmologist,
like he, of all people, needs to be held accountable
for his crimes.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Yeah, yeah, some could have we get have a song
on antilirium kind of situation, right, Yeah, who's the Armenian
who shot a member of the Turkish government in Berlin? Yeah,
we could have something like that go down, God willing.
Speaker 4 (22:10):
Yeah, yeah, you never know they Yeah, I guess people
there he's in Russia.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
Now he's in Russia.
Speaker 5 (22:15):
Someone will find him and his in his high end
eye clinic one day.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Yeah, he's probably going to be going back and forth
to Dubai. There's some Syrians who wound up in Dubai.
Somebody might stab them.
Speaker 4 (22:24):
Yeah, we can hope, but I want to take one
more break talking of stabbing. Maybe maybe we will get
an advert for knives, you know, yeah, I've never had
a knife advert, have.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
We No, I don't know that we have. And I
would sell the hell out of knives.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
Yeah, almost any knives, even crappy gas stach Night, like,
if you make the ones that look like an oil slick,
get in touch with the advertising department at iHeartMedia.
Speaker 5 (22:47):
We'll pimp them. All right, we're back.
Speaker 4 (22:59):
That's thing I want to talk about, Robert, is how
the rebels won because there was not a lot of
fighting after the collapse of a Lepo, but before there
was fighting, and in part how that fighting went I
think led to the downfall of the morale of the
syrianat of army. Right, So there are some things here
that both Robert and I are somewhat nerdy about about conflicts,
(23:21):
right like it there's something even when we're not attending
was we like to read about them. And you and
I both take a great interest in history, and I
think we'd be unwise to not look at this and
learn from it, especially with HTS who massively professionalized since
the ceasefire in twenty twenty, I think professionalists is probably
the right word like that command that technology, that the
(23:44):
way they operated looked a lot more like a modern
military than it did, you know, the militias, Like I'm
sure you and I both remember the early Syrian of
a war for people who are a bit younger than us,
Like some of the most incredible improvised weapons that I've seen.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Oh yeah, there was literally at one point they had
an Ottoman era black powder cannon on the back of
a flatbed that they were using to hit regime positions.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
That they had literally taken out of the museum in
a leopard to get it out of the museum.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
Fucking amazing stuff.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
Like only I thought the top of like that sort
of thing was when fucking inserts in Afghanistan would use
seventeenth century jazails to shoot at US troops. But the
Ottoman cannon is really a was that's a flex.
Speaker 5 (24:33):
Yeah, with a huge flex.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
They they also worked, you know, they fired propane cylinders
out of huge tubes, these improvised mortors they called hell cannons,
Like really incredible and like it speaks to the ingenuity
of people and their desire not to be oppressed, right,
they desire to fight against state tyranny. But when we
compare that to what we saw with HTS in twenty
(24:58):
twenty four, a world of change right. In particular, I
think it was very interesting that they captured armored vehicles
and then they were able to combine armor and infantry
very effectively, which is not easy to do right, that
has eluded even some professional militaries. They also very effectively
(25:18):
used drones, both drones to drop bombs and drones to
adjust their artillery and mortifier, which I think is something
that again like that modern militaries do, but it's not
easy to do right, and it's not like HDS could
do massive exercises in the lead up to this operation,
like they seem to have professionalized very quickly. Another area
(25:42):
that they were you can see that they've learned a
lot from the conflicts in Ukraine and perhaps in Memmar too,
was their use of FPV drones, a first person in
view drone. How do you describe it? It's like your
eyes are on the front of the drone. Is that
a good description, Robert, Yeah, it's like you're flying. And
there are videos of whole classrooms of HTS, I guess, soldiers, militants,
(26:05):
whatever you want to call them, practicing flying drones or
using the controllers to play like a computer game where
you have to like go through checkpoints and follow a
route and things. And they seemed to have developed like
a training course that then gave them this drone brigade,
which they used incredibly effectively. They had these massive first
person view drones that were almost like a sort of
Ersat's cruise missile, and it was I think one of
(26:27):
those that penetrated some kind of command headquarters in Aleppo
in the early days of the battle there, killed several
important offices and commanders and helped to then spread that
panic which they rode all the way to Damascus. Right, So,
like this use of drones was extremely consequential. The other
thing that they used in which we've seen the SDF
(26:49):
use a lot, is these pulse art thermal optics. So
a thermal optic sees heat, right, I guess would be
the easiest way to describe it, and it maps heat
in a visual fashion for the user, and in this case,
they put them on their rifles and they're able to
see other people at night. Our friend Carl, who we
had on last week week before maybe Carl made a
(27:10):
really good video about thermal versus night vision on his
Arrange TV channel. I'll link it in the notes because
I think it's worth people checking out if they're not
familiar with this technology at all. The optics he used
were not the optics they're using, but these thermal optics.
You've seen them a lot with the SDF, especially in
a freen like they'll do these night missions, right, and
(27:30):
when you look at the recording from the thermal optic,
it it looks like people are glowing because they are
the hottest things in that area, and it makes it
very easy to target people. And HDS us these a
lot when they were attacking a lapper, right, these thermal
optics that they mounted on their rifles, and they allowed
them to pretty much. The United States used to talk
(27:52):
about owning the night right. Yes, it had night vision
where no one else does. Night visions proliferated a long
way now and in that mean that some of the
ways that they used to use night vision they can't anymore. Like,
for instance, they used to send out lasers that were
only visible and the night vision to aim weapons. If
your adversary has night vision as well, you've now created
a giant line that goes right back to you if
(28:15):
you're using a laser aiming device, so you can't do that.
But these thermal uptics, especially when they're fighting against Assyrian
Arabami who I mean, these conscripts are massively demoralized, right,
They're underpaid, they're under fed. Did you meet any when
you were in raja But did you meet any people
who defected?
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Yes, I'd met a number of people who had, and
some who had also had to flee, like from Aleppo
and whatnot, because they had been on like rebels fighting
the Assad regime, and some had wound up in the SDF,
some more just civilians living in the area. I also
there's also a number of folks who commuted like to
and from regime held territory just because like if you
were someone that wasn't particularly wanted, you could do that. Yeah,
(28:52):
it was a very confusing situation for a lot of people.
Speaker 4 (28:55):
Yeah, extremely And I think when you meet the people
who have been regime soldiers and come across often they're
like they seem to be happy being waiters or working
in the market in Rajaba because their pay was so
bad and their lives were so miserable as conscripts that
they'd rather just come and work, you know, any job
they can get in a nes And I think when
(29:17):
you've got those guys going up against well trained people
from HTS with these thermal optics, with these using drones,
that communications were solid. You know, you can tell from
their appearance that a lot of these guys are professionalized.
They were almost indistinguishable from US troops. Like I think
you and I had both responded to this tweet about
some YouTube guy was shocked that people were wearing helmets
(29:41):
and body armor, which that has been the esthetic of violence,
at least in places where the US has operated for
I know half a decade.
Speaker 5 (29:51):
Would you say, like they're the sort of US Special Forces?
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Look, yeah, I mean, and that's just the norm for
dressing if you're fighting in a war anywhere on the
planet now, like whether you're the Russian Army or some
militia in Syria, it's you know, plate carrier, usually like
some sort of fast helmet, you've got you know, belt
with side arm mag pouches, and then usually either in
(30:14):
akam or some sort of ar style weapon. Like everybody
dresses that way. Everybody looks very similar yah now because
it's just the most kind of. I mean number one,
there's a lot of that gear lying around and it's cheap.
And number two like it works, it's a load out
that works.
Speaker 4 (30:28):
Yeah, it's very practical, yeah, for what they're doing. I
think number three as well, like we should not understate
the desire to look like your avatar and call of duty.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
Yes, yes, it's also looks cool.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
It looks like being in a movie, and that is
all that matters a lot to the kind of young
men who start fighting in wars.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
Yeah, yeah, people, I think if you've not been you
won't realize how young a lot of these people are.
This incredible professionism or incredible professionism. I overstating it. But
this dramatic change in the appearance and conduct of these rebels,
particularly HDS, occurred over about three or four years from
the ceasefire in twenty twenty to this offensive in twenty
(31:08):
twenty four, and I think it gives us an insight
into the way that war is changing. Right, that access
to information is easier than it ever has been, and
access to a lot of these technologies has proliferated massively
because we've seen in Myanmar, right, drones proliferate people three
(31:32):
D print little night vision goggles in Meanmas. Spoke to
Milk about it about a year and a half ago.
People remember Milk from our Meanma series about three D
printing little night vision goggles that use the camera from
you know, those security cameras that can kind of see
at night. They use those and then a tiny LCD screen.
Of course, drones are everywhere now, right, things like plate carriers.
(31:54):
Even you see rebels in Myanma wearing them, buying them
from Ali Express. Like all of the technology, all of
the tactics are also much easier to find on the internet.
You know, Robert and I have both spoken to people
who go who said they go on YouTube to learn
about like military tactics and small arms even and you know,
how to use different weapons systems when they capture them.
(32:14):
I think it's a real change in the way that
conflict is conducted, and it's one that we will probably
continue to see as like, you know, the world isn't
getting any more peaceful, nope, and with a lot of
you know, Russia and Iran took a massive l in Syria.
That doesn't mean that they're not gone as sort of
(32:35):
global actors. We will continue to see particular Russia obviously
fighting in Ukraine, and I think it's worth looking at
what happened in Syria so that we can understand what
we're going to see in other parts of the world YEP.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
One of the ways I like to think about it
that is crucial for people don't understand, is that Syria
has largely been the laboratory in which the twenty first
century was cooked up, Like all of our futures have
to some extent been built in Syria. Both like this
is where we get a lot of the fuel behind
the right wing surge that has been occurring over the
(33:07):
last few years, started because of the refugee crisis, you know,
but also a lot of the tactics and weapons shit
that like Israel is doing right now in Gaza. Like
Syria was the lab to a significant extent for how
authoritarian regimes would crack down, and it was also the
impetus behind a lot of the most significant things that
have been happening over the last decade and change.
Speaker 4 (33:28):
So it might still be already yes, Serem and the
Netherlands have stopped processing asylum applications from Syria, which is yeah,
which is concerning YEP, but Yeah, I think it's worth
continuing to keep an eye on I will continue to
post about it, we will continue to inform you about
it here, and we will continue to bring on people
who have more expertise and insight than we do. So yeah,
(33:50):
we hope you'll keep an eye on it. And I
just want to end by saying that like the democratic
project in Rojava is under a great deal of threat.
Speaker 5 (33:58):
Yes, currently more than it has been for perhaps a decade.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
YEP.
Speaker 4 (34:02):
They do not have an ally in the United States.
They do not, as far as we know, have an
ally in Israel. And from what we've seen, it's one
thing what Israel says, it's another thing what Israel does,
and what Israel has been doing today is bombing ammunition
that they already have in the A Andes. And that
means that it's more important than ever that you do
what you can to support them. If you go to
(34:24):
the Emergency Committee for a Java, you can find them online,
you find them on all different kinds of social media.
They have a toolkit for supporting Java right now. I
would urge you if you care about that project, if
you care about building democracy without the state, care about
building a place where women and men are equal, and
the revolution was led by women. It's not a revolution
that included women, it's revolution by women for women. I
(34:45):
would encourage you to do what you can to support them,
all right, Yep, that's all.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website
Polsonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you.
Speaker 5 (35:06):
Listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
You can now find sources for it could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
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Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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