Syria
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Welcome back to Conflicted. The last episode was dedicated to the Yemeni civil war, an intractable conflict that continues to ravage the lives of the Yemeni people. Today, we're going to talk about perhaps the greatest tragedy of modern times, the Syrian civil war. In this war, you'll certainly notice a lot of the same players involved.

It is a highly complicated civil war, and we're going to try to help you understand how on earth Syria's leader Bashar al-Assad and the world let this beautiful country and its people get caught in the dangerous crossfire between government and terrorists and foreign interests.

Syria wasn't known for extremism or for this kind of brutality and bloodshed. This is foreign and alien to it. And this is why whenever basically I see jihadists, you know, and jihadist sympathizers, you know, whether they are in Europe or North America, in the Middle East or South Asia, and they keep telling me about Bashar this, Bashar this, Bashar that, you know, the first thing I tell them, shut up. You and people like you empowered him.

Stick with us. This is Conflicted. ...and we're basically crying for help. ...and we're basically crying for help.

Here we are again, dear listener. I'm here as always with Eamon Dean, author of Nine Lives, My Life as MI6's top

agent inside al-Qaeda. Nine Lives, my life as al-Qaeda's top... Al-Qaeda's... Oh, dear. You put me in trouble now. Author of Nine Lives, my life as MI6's top agent inside al-Qaeda, Eamon Dean. Welcome, as always. And I'm Thomas Small, co-producer of Path of Blood, a documentary film about Saudi Arabia and al-Qaeda.

Today we will be discussing the great tragedy of modern times, the Syrian Civil War.

The last episode we devoted to the Yemeni civil war, a tragic conflict that is extremely complicated, in which Iran plays an important role, the Gulf states play an important role, the international community plays an important role. Today we will be talking about another tragic civil war, the Syrian civil war, with many of the same players on the stage. Iran, the United States, Sunni jihadists, Shia militants, the Gulf states.

and in this case Turkey as well. Russia. And of course Russia. It's an extremely complicated story, the Syrian Civil War. Much more complicated than even this podcast can do justice to, but we will do our best. So, to talk about Syria is a difficult thing. It's a complicated country. Its history is very complicated. The current president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, came to power in 2000 following the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, who had been dictator of the country for 30 years.

For the first three years or so of Bashar al-Assad's rule, the West in particular was encouraged. It thought that Bashar al-Assad would introduce liberal reforms and would dial down some of the oppressive police state aspects of his regime. This was called the Damascus Spring. These hopes proved to be ill-founded when, following the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Bashar al-Assad returned

returned to the old ways of the Assad dynasty. He doubled down on oppression of his own people. He facilitated jihadists moving into Iraq to help undermine American efforts there. And by 2011, his people had had enough. They rose up against him demanding reform. When he rejected those demands and instead ordered his police to fire on the crowds,

The uprising became a rebellion which was quickly infiltrated by Sunni jihadists on the one side, Iranian radicals on the other, and the whole country descended into anarchy and death and destruction. Eamon, tell us again briefly, what is Iran's geostrategic aim in the region and why would it focus on Syria? We have to remember that

that when we are dealing with the Iranian regime, we're not dealing with an ordinary political entity. We are dealing with a leadership of a country that believes passionately in religious ideology and eschatology. These are these prophecies again that you've been mentioning, the prophecies of the end times, and somehow these end times prophecies

place in Syria. Indeed. And that's why I have to beg the indulgence of a Western audience when they hear, you know, prophecies, when they hear the phrase eschatology, they immediately become cynical. But the answer is,

Do not try to analyze the mindset of the Iranian regime through your own religious skepticism and cynicism. No. If you try to apply your own pragmatist Western-based cynicism and skepticism...

then you will fail to understand the motives and the strategic engines of the Iranian regime. So what you're saying is some people in the West might think that the Iranian regime employs religious rhetoric in order to further strictly pragmatic aims, but that they don't really believe it because who could really believe that nonsense? That's what you're saying the West needs to get over and realize that the mullahs, the Iranian regime, really believes this. Yes, they do believe this nonsense. I mean, this is what we have to emphasize here.

You know, the rallying cry of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, of the Lebanese Hezbollah brigades, of the battalions of the Houthis in Yemen, of the Shia militias in Iraq, in Syria, and elsewhere in the world, their rallying cry is, you know,

We are here for you, Mahdi. The Mahdi, which is a sort of end-of-times figure who comes on a white horse carrying a sword to vanquish the enemies of Islam. Oh, the enemies of the Shia Islam, I would say. In this case, in the eyes of the Iranians, the Shia. Exactly, and the savior figure. And this is why when the entire political system in Iran is based on the Mahdi. I know many people will be skeptical, but actually...

The system is called the wilayat al-faqih, which basically, for those who read Lord of the Rings trilogy, you have an absent king, and so in his stead, there is a steward. That's right. So yes, the ancient kingdom of Gondor has languished without a king for centuries, and in the king's place, a steward has sat on a little chair just beside the king's throne. Absolutely. So what you have here is that the grand...

Ayatollah of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei and Khomeini before him, actually they are called Wali al-Faqih, which their mission is to just sit there deputizing on behalf of the absent Imam, the Mahdi, who disappeared 1200 years ago and when he was only a baby or I think he was four years old according to Shia theology and is prophesied to emerge again when the Shia are in dire needs of him.

The entire political system is based on that. The title of the Grand Ayatollah, his mission, what is written into the constitution of Iran, is actually all based on deputizing on behalf of that absent imam, the 12th imam, who disappeared 1,200 years ago. And when the 12th imam, the Mahdi, returns, he's going to return to Syria?

He's going to return to a place which is between Syria and Iraq and the idea is that from there he will use the armies that are based in Iraq, Syria and Yemen who are his supporters to invade the Hejaz, the western part of Saudi Arabia where Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities in Islam, are located. So therefore

Iran's strategy was that the Mahdi could only appear if all the Shia of the regions are united under one banner and one goal, which is the Islamic revolution, which will place armies that are in Yemen and in Syria and in Iraq. And actually, during the Houthi war and the Syrian war,

Many of the discussions emerged among the Shia militias, and you can see it online everywhere, centers around the fact that we are fulfilling the prophecies of the end of time. Even Assad of Syria features heavily in the prophetic narrative.

text, modern prophetic text of the Grand Ayatollahs in Iran. Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, he will no doubt take up a certain amount of our time today because he's a very important figure. But first, I'd like to just talk about Syria, not the Syria of prophecy, but the Syria of everyday reality. I lived in Syria for a year in 2007, 2008.

during my university degree course. Well, that's just one year before I visited myself. Oh, my goodness. Well, you've been haunting me my whole life, Eamon, shadowing me like an unlucky penny. I don't know. That's the mixed metaphor. You have no idea what I had in my mind for you. Oh, no. I know, a podcast.

When I lived in Syria 10 years ago, and it's amazing to think 10 years ago, Syria was, to those of us visiting it, a haven of stability, friendliness, sectarian cooperation and peace. None of us would have thought that within four years, the country was going to descend into what is arguably the most tragic civil war in

in modern Middle Eastern history, I think, without a doubt. How would you characterize the Syrian civil war? I would say it is not only the most tragic civil war, but I would say it's the most unnecessary war to have ever occurred in modern Middle Eastern histories. And when you compare that to Iraq, which was the most unnecessary invasion ever, that's saying something. It's a double whammy. The most unnecessary invasion on one side of the Levant and the most unnecessary civil war on the other side.

creating this petri dish of chaos. I mean, it's hard to imagine actually how the region will escape from it. Ayman, tell me, as an Arab, as a Muslim, what is Syria to the average Arab and Muslim? If you ask me about Syria, I would say that Syria represents to every Arab the glories of the Umayyad dynasty. The Umayyad dynasty, the first great... Dynasty, not dynasty.

Is that true? I'm an American. Yeah, yeah. I don't care if you're American. You're in the UK. Here, you're supposed to say dynasty, not dynasty. Listen, I spent every day after school watching reruns of Dynasty. It was Dynasty.

Anyway, the Umayyad dynasty, the first great, let's say, secular dynasty. How would you describe it? The first great... Royalist dynasty. The first great royalist dynasty... In Islam. In Islam, in Muslim history, centered on Damascus and ruling much of the known world at the time. Absolutely. The greatest extent of the early Muslim empire happened during the Umayyad dynasty when Damascus was the center of the Muslim world.

So Damascus is synonymous with great architecture, with great intellectual renaissance. And at the same time, Damascus and the whole of Syria, including Aleppo and Homs and many of the great cities there are synonymous with architecture.

the great heroes who resisted the crusades Saladin, Nour al-Din, Ahmad al-Din Zengi and all of these wonderful figures from Muslim and Arab history

Add to this that, you know, in modern time, you know, Syria is synonymous with amazing cuisine, synonymous with brilliant music and also with drama. I mean, you know, many of the drama and comedies that used to come out of Syria in terms of, you know, TV production and films were

Up until 2011, up until the beginning of the civil war, they were catching up with the Egyptians and they were projected to replace the Egyptians as the most prolific in terms of production and in terms of viewership. Something else that made Syria not entirely unique but very special, I would say, in the Middle East is its demographic diversity. It was an extremely diverse country. It is an extremely diverse country.

Yes, they're all Arabic-speaking, they're all Arabs. But within that umbrella, there was a tremendous diversity in terms of sect, in terms of class, in terms of ethnicity. And history. I tell you something. You have Sunni Arabs. You have Kurds. You have Arabs who are Alawites, you know, a more fringe sect of Shia Islam.

You have Shia Muslims. You have Ismailis. And in fact, the center of Ismailis in the world, in the whole world, whether they are in East Africa or in India or in Europe or in North America, their center is a small town in Syria called Sulamiya. You have

The Druze. The Druze, of course, and the South. And all sorts of Christians as well. You have Orthodox Christians, Syriac Christians, Catholic Christians, even Pentecostalist Christians these days. Oh, don't forget the Armenians. And Armenians. Absolutely. I mean, you know, not to forget also that we have Kildanians, you know, we have Assyrians. And in fact, the language, the mother tongue of Jesus...

You know, it still survives to this day in Syria and spoken, you know, among many Syrians. Yes, Aramaic, the Aramaic language. It's the only place where it's still spoken in some villages. I mean, I hope it's still spoken. My goodness. There was a village called Yaqoubia and another village called Maaloula and also Houlouz.

All of these villages, you know, Aramaic and sometimes they call it Syriac, you know, was spoken and beautifully. And you can listen to the hymns, you know, so basically...

And he said, "Would you like me to recite the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic for you?" i.e. the language that the Lord himself, if you like, would have recited originally. That was a very powerful moment.

Indeed. I still remember it, and I actually memorize it by heart. Did you? Indeed. You are a poster child. A Bowen Bashmayou. Poster child for ecumenical harmony and peace, you former al-Qaeda member. So, of course, Syria was diverse.

And, you know, there was great harmony there. But the problem is all of this was a charade. Well, not a charade. It was all held in, I would say, extremely taut tension by a regime, a Ba'athist regime run by the Assad family for the Assad family and for the Alawite sect of the Assad family, which ended up smashing the country to pieces. Indeed. So who is...

Bashar al-Assad, why has he become now a byword for dictatorship and bloodletting? This man, in addition to being a psychopath and an extremely ugly man, lived in London for several years where he trained as an eye doctor, lived in Northwest London, very, very nice, civilized, middle-class area, ended up falling in love with a Syrian-British woman who grew up here, a nice West London girl with a cut-glass accent, who is now the first lady of

Asma al-Assad. A very strange contradiction, really. On the one hand, a nice British or Anglicized middle-class family, a doctor working on Harley Street, and at the same time, a psychopathic dictator of Syria. Well, she'll tell you about another evil eye doctor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Oh, maybe it's a problem with eye doctors. Yeah, the leader of Al-Qaeda is an eye doctor. Eye doctors, we've got your number. Indeed. Indeed.

So Bashar al-Assad, he's famously soft-spoken. You look at him, he's a bit of a pencil neck, actually. He doesn't seem so scary. Well, you see, this is a problem with narcissistic psychopaths, is that they do not appear to you to be willing to sacrifice a whole nation for

in order for them to stay in power. And don't forget, the man wasn't actually going to be the successor. That's true. He had his older brother, Basel al-Assad, who was groomed to succeed the father, Hafez al-Assad. Basel al-Assad, he died in a car crash in Damascus. He was a famously reckless driver and famously a psychopath. He was supposed to be the psychopath, not Bashar. Indeed. But don't forget, the entire family is just a family of psychopaths.

And I will tell you why. First of all, we have to go back to the 1966 when, you know, you have the Baath Party coming to power in Syria. Hafez al-Assad became the defense minister. And then in 1970, he staged a coup and became the president.

Hafez al-Assad, the greatest survivor of Middle Eastern modern politics. And the trouble is that he held on to power so much and he allowed his fellow minority Alawites to become powerful in the cabinet, in the army, intelligence services. So, you know, they have taken over most of the important apparatus of power within Syria.

So it became a rule of minority. Power resided with the Alawites. And within the Alawites, with the family, it was very much a mafia state in that regard. Just like Saddam Hussein in Iraq. You know, it's simple. It's like carbon copies of each other. One is a Ba'ath party, but Sunni in terms of its, you know, makeup, clothing.

in terms of power. And in Syria, it was the Baath Party, but Alawite in its makeup with dependence on some other minorities like the Christians and the Druze and the Ismailis. One thing that's often brought up in Hafez al-Assad's favor is that not only did he

bring to power the minority Alawites, but he also protected all the other minorities in Syria. And to this day, the minorities of Syria, Christians, Armenians, Druze, as we said, they tend to support Bashar al-Assad to this day, despite all the destruction that's gone on. Well, the problem is, if the protection of the minorities against the majority happened not through consensus means, but by brute force,

This is not a treatment. It's just painkillers. Painkillers and then the pain will come back again. Many people don't understand that in Hama in 1982. I'm glad you brought that up because I wanted to bring that up now. The sort of uncompromising response of Bashar al-Assad to the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 was foreshadowed by his father's response in 1982 to a Muslim Brotherhood-inspired uprising in the city of Hama.

where quite infamously Hafez al-Assad ordered his brother, Rafat, to utterly destroy and crush that rebellion, resulting in tens of thousands of civilian deaths and the leveling of much of that city in 1982.

So Bashar al-Assad's response to the Arab Spring could have been foreseen. And another thing about the Hama massacre of 1982 that's quite instructive, I would say, is that it was a Muslim Brotherhood uprising that the Syrian state under Hafez al-Assad crushed

you have in that conflict in 1982, a similar ideological conflict of the one that at least in rhetorical terms is going on in Syria now, that between a sort of Sunni Islamist movement and the quote unquote secularism of the Assad state, of the Baath Party state.

What does secularism mean in the context of the Ba'ath Party and why – and do you think that it is fair to hold up the secularism of a state like Syria before it collapsed as a great achievement? You see, this is one of the debates that divides people the world over when it comes to Middle East politics.

They see the Syrian Baath Party and they will say, "Oh my God, it is secular. We must support it because secular equals good." And they see the Muslim Brotherhood and anyone else basically and they say, "Oh, they are religious." Oh my God, then they are so bad because religious movement equals bad.

And this is where this oversimplification of the ideological tectonic plates in the Middle East that are pushing against each other results in myopic and inaccurate analysis of what happened in Syria.

Not all seculars in the Arab world are good. Look at Saddam was secular and look how many people he killed and gas and everything and all of that. And in the name of Arab nationalism and the Baath party, look at them. Basically, they are all secular, you know, in Syria. And yet look how many people they have killed and caused to kill. The problem here is not about secular equal good and religious equal bad. You know, it's far more complex than that. Sometime you have religious people who have more respect for democratic values.

process and human rights than their secular counterparts and that the most vicious dictators in the Middle East actually were secular in their outlook. Look at Gaddafi, look at Mubarak, before him Jamal Abdel Nasser, and look at Hafez al-Assad, and look at Saddam Hussein. All of them were secular. Sure, but you might say if the greatest threat of all is some sort of Taliban-style government rolling across the Middle East, then perhaps you need an authoritarian secularist to crack some skulls and break some eggs.

to prevent an even worse evil from establishing itself. This is why I always say that between the two wolves, you know, so you have a wolf pack there and you have a wolf pack here, and they're fighting each other. And what's happening is that the world is divided, cheering, you know, for one side against the other. And I would say no.

No. You know, there are other alternatives. You know, especially when it comes to the fact that I'm an unabashed monarchist. Because monarchies tend to behave better. Look at Morocco. Less resources than Syria. And yet, basically, the living standards in Morocco are better than in Syria. We have to ask ourselves why. The system of governance seems to be more resilient now.

and less prone to torture, imprisonment, and brutal tactics. In the King of Jordan, no one is going to call him a dictator, even though he is actually, in all sense of the word, a dictator.

That is where people got it wrong as far as Bashar al-Assad. They saw his secularism and they viewed it as a virtue when in fact, actually, it is not a virtue. There's a tragic irony in the story of Bashar al-Assad because when he came to power following his father Hafez's death in 2000, the first...

three years or so of his rule in Syria was known as the Damascus Spring when it seemed that Bashar al-Assad was going to liberalize slightly, was going to open up more to the West, was going to bring Syria back into the fold of the international community from its self-imposed isolation and strident anti-Israeli rhetoric and all that sort of thing.

That, in the end, didn't happen. And it's possible to say that one of the reasons it didn't happen was because of that other tragic war in the Middle East, the invasion of Iraq, at which point Bashar al-Assad thinks, hmm, I'm probably going to be next here. Why should I be playing along with America? These neocons are clearly threatening me. Do you feel that that was a turning point for Bashar al-Assad, the Iraq war?

Yes. And also don't forget that many people don't understand that, you know, while Bashar was, you know, of course, basically a secular dictator, his greatest ally in the region was the theocratic government of Iran because of the fact that while he is secular on paper, but because he belongs to a minority that belonged to a fringe Shia sect, he saw in Iran a great ally and a protector.

So this is where the irony comes when people say, but Bashar is so secular. No. And in fact, that is why when the Iraq war happened, Bashar decided to pull two strings here. His alliance with Iran made him allow many of Al-Qaeda members to actually come and pass through Syria and then get into... Yes, let's go into this in great detail because it's actually a wonderful story. I mean, because Bashar al-Assad...

oversaw a secularist regime, at least on paper. And because Sunni jihadists in particular and Muslim Brotherhood influenced revolutionaries were a threat to that regime, they languished in Syrian prisons. Come the Iraq war, Bashar al-Assad, in collusion with the Iranian regime, is what people understand today,

agreed to release those jihadists from Syrian prisons and facilitate their entry into Iraq in order to discomfort the American forces there.

And not only that, but from all around the world, jihadists who went to Iraq to fight, to join al-Qaeda in Iraq under Zarqawi, as we discussed two podcasts ago, they came via Damascus and the Syrian regime facilitated that movement. Is that right? Absolutely. In fact, you know, I happen to have met one of the grandees of the Syrian regime, you know, who later defected against Assad.

He was the son of the former defense minister, you know, at last. And so when I talked to him, he confessed. He said, yes, we did it. We did it because basically for us, we wanted to make sure that the project for the Americans in Iraq never succeed.

Then don't forget the other string I was talking about, you know, Assad pulled the first string, which is the Iranian alliance. But the second string here was the fact that the Baath Party in Iraq was still ideologically linked to the Baath Party in Damascus. And of course, they lost that power. So many of the Baath Party members fled to Syria. So Iraqi Baathists fled to Syria where they regrouped, where they regrouped.

where they also conspired against the American occupying forces. Absolutely. So, you know, basically Bashar al-Assad was playing both sides. He was playing the Ba'athists, the Iraqi Ba'athists who resided in Syria. And also he played the Iraqi Al-Qaeda members and also the foreign Al-Qaeda members who were coming and he facilitated their entry into Syria. When...

Bashar al-Assad was facilitating foreign fighters into going into Iraq to attack the Americans there in 2006, around 2005, 2006. You were still an MI6 double agent. Indeed. Were you working in any direct way on countering that? How did the Western intelligence agencies counter that conspiracy? Well, it's simple. I mean, we discovered at the time that Syria was the route from as early as 2004. How?

Because what happened is, of course, many people who were in Saudi Arabia and in Kuwait and in Bahrain, and these are the countries I was monitoring at the time, I was monitoring al-Qaeda activities in these countries.

Whenever you have a new young man recruited and wants to go to Iraq, where would he go? You will immediately find there are certain people who I knew personally in Bahrain, in Kuwait, who would hand over small pieces of paper with instructions and phone numbers, and all of them are where? In Damascus. So...

I'm not talking about one example, two or 10 or 20. I'm talking about dozens of examples here. But Bashar al-Assad, by allowing this jihadist activity to take place inside Syria in those years, he was really laying the foundations for the destruction of his own country. Because in the end, these jihadists, they came back to Syria and began fighting him. So...

The Arab Spring, of course, afflicted many countries throughout the Middle East. In Syria, it played out in a unique way. Protests begin in the south of the country, but quite quickly, it descended into violence. What happened? Well, I'll give you my take on what really happened here.

Well, first give us the official narrative and then undermine that narrative if you wish. The official narrative is that there is a conspiracy by Saudi Arabia, by Qatar, by Turkey, by the Muslim Brotherhood, by the U.S., by the European Union, by Jordan even, by Israel. So all of these powers, in fact, the Syrian TV used to call it the globalist conspiracy to topple the regime there.

And what many people don't understand that no one had any interest in the regime actually falling. No one, even the Saudis and the Qataris, no one wanted that to happen, actually. They wanted just to punish Bashar for everything he did. The killing of the prime minister of Lebanon in 2005, assassinations of so many Lebanese pro-Saudi and pro-Gulf politicians. But that's another story. But no one wanted him to be toppled. So.

What happened here is that they said these protests in Daraa, which is the first city to experience protests. In the south of Syria. Yeah, in late March of 2011. What happened there? According to the people, they were saying that three young kids, they were taken into custody for mischievous behavior. They were just kids from a poor neighborhood. They were young boys around the age of 11, 12 or 13.

And then their bodies were found ditched somewhere. Mutilated. Yes, and raped. By the way, you know, there has been many instances, many numerous documented instances of rogue police officers in Syria kidnapping and raping young boys. And that was rampant. And no one can deny that because the people themselves will admit it happened.

So, of course, what happened is that the atmosphere of the Arab Spring, the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt convinced the people of Daraa that, look, do we have to put up with this anymore? Do we have to put up with Bashar al-Assad's policemen raping our boys? Exactly. So what happened is...

When the uprising in Dar'a began, it was actually directed at the local police. And they sent a delegation to Damascus to meet Bashar al-Assad to say, rein in your police. The Arab world is changing and you have to change.

And your police need to be less repressive, less power to the police. That's how it all started. Which seems to me a perfectly legitimate thing for the people to do. Exactly, because I've been to Syria, you've been to Syria. You see how the police were behaving with impunity, taking bribes from people, oppressing people. If you are a police officer, it's just basically your salary is just like a tip. The rest of your income actually comes from bribes. So Syria was an incredibly corrupt police state.

Don't forget, it's the only country in the world almost where undemocratically a son succeeded his father as a president. The second one was North Korea. It wasn't like a bastion of democracy and human rights. Certainly not. No one would claim that. No one, yeah. So...

You know, the people who said, well, enough is enough because the atmosphere in the Arab world was that of freedom. So what happened? They say enough is enough. They send a delegation to Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. What does he do? Bashar promised them to do everything right. And then as soon as they returned to Dar a'a, they were arrested. And this is basically when things started to get

more ugly people went more into the streets and started to infect other cities. Where then in Homs, there was another young boy who was kidnapped by the police, Hamza Khatib, very famous case, kidnapped, raped, and his body was dumped into the rubbish.

And the police station that done it said, if you keep protesting, we will kidnap more boys and do it. They don't understand that the world is changing and there is social media. And this kind of tit for tat, if you do this, we will do that, is no longer applicable. People will rebel. And quite soon after the rebellion started, the regime turned their guns on the crowds. Exactly. So what happened here is that the protests all around the country were not anti-Bashar.

Actually, it was more anti-government repression. So their demands in the first three months, I still remember. And people, unfortunately, have short memories. They think basically that they wanted to stop a regime. No. The demands were the repeal of Article 8 of the Constitution, which is that the Ba'ath Party is the only party that is allowed to be in power. So they wanted more political pluralism. Exactly, which is fair enough.

Yeah. And also they demanded that the 17 security agencies to be, you know, more merged into one or two or three agencies and more with more oversight because every agency thought they are immune and they could kidnap boys or take children.

bribes or arrest people at a whim and disappear them without any trace. They wished for the state security apparatus to be disempowered. Indeed. So political pluralism, less state oppression. Yeah. And the release of political prisoners. Now, what does that mean, though? Because political prisoners...

in Syria, aren't these the jihadists we were talking about? Does that mean that already amongst this movement there was a Sunni jihadist undercurrent? Oh, no. There were so many different types of political prisoners, even sometimes comedians and even artists were part of the political prison movement.

Movement, sometimes children, unfortunately. You know, there was a young teenage girl, 16-year-old. She was 15 when she was arrested and 17 when she was executed. Tal Al-Malouhi. She was living in Egypt. She had a blog where she was reminding Bashar al-Assad of his democratic promises when he came to power. During the Damascus Spring. Exactly. You know, when she arrived back in Syria, she was arrested at the age of 15. Tal Al-Malouhi, her name.

She was arrested at the age of 15 for writing a blog. And then they decided to put her on trial in front of a military tribunal for being a spy for the Israelis. And she gave information to the Israelis, which enabled, you know, the Israelis to target, you know, a terrorist.

an intelligence officer of the Syrians, and he became paralyzed for life, which is completely pathetic. It's all made up. Clearly, these are Trump charges. And then she was executed. Unbelievable. Yeah. So the protesters were, in fact, appealing to their president, Bashar al-Assad, to make these very reasonable reforms. But instead, he switches the psychopath button in his mind, and he orders his men to fire into the crowds. And within months, the whole movement is...

is militarized. There was a sentence he uttered just one month after the beginning of the uprising. After one month or less than that, he gave a speech to parliament. Well, I mean, to the appointed parliament, as you know, in Syria. And in that speech, you know, I was listening to him so intently. Of course, basically, I was trying to see where will he go, which direction he will take.

And one sentence, just one sentence, in my opinion, inaugurated the whole civil war. Because he said, of course, at the time there were about 700, 800,000 people on the streets of Syria out of about, you know, 25 million population. So it was still easily containable.

He said that from the videos of the protests, we have identified 64,000 protesters who we believe are criminals and we will arrest them and justice will be done. That is, in my opinion, the stupidest, most idiotic

dangerous sentence ever uttered in modern Middle Eastern history. When there are 800,000 people on the streets and you are saying we have identified 64,000, each and every one of these 800,000 will never come back home. That you have basically

inaugurated civil war because you told them keep on protesting, keep on being violent, keep on, you know, this uprising because if you go back home, you will have the secret prisons treatment. And Bashar's prisons are very infamous, unfortunately, for being nothing but death factory. He undermined the possibility that these protests could have resulted in something like reform because he wasn't interested in reform. Not only not interested in reform,

You know, when you threaten the protesters on the street that possibly all of you will be in prison because none of them know which one of them is part of the 64,000, you give them a point of no return. You put them on a path where there is no return. The Syrian civil war did quickly devolve into total violence on all sides, right?

And I'll have to ask us to sort of skip forward three or four years to when the Civil War was raging at its most violent. We have a battlefield scenario where there are myriad Sunni jihadist groups, myriad so-called moderate revolutionary groups, although who these people are has never been entirely clear to anyone.

You have Bashar al-Assad's forces. You have Hezbollah in Lebanon providing troops to Bashar al-Assad to fight the Sunni jihadists. You have Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders overseeing that Bashar al-Assad effort. You have Afghan Shia mercenaries shipped in by the Iranian regime to Syria to provide further troops. It's a total shitstorm. And

At the same time, you have foreign powers, the United States, the EU, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, on the opposition side to Bashar al-Assad, coordinating, miscoordinating. And then, in the midst of all this, you have ISIS arise. Let's talk about these jihadists. Why such a patchwork? Why such a kaleidoscope of jihadist groups fighting each other, fighting the regime, fighting the Americans? What was going on?

You see, the greatest calamity that Syria suffered after Bashar al-Assad, you know, was the arrival of Al-Qaeda. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot.

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So I told her, Aqaida came to town. Now, tell us that story. Yeah. Well, you see, Bashar was partly responsible for that in two ways. One before the war and one after the war. Before the war, as we said, he released al-Qaeda prisoners and such like people from prison and sent them to Iraq where they regrouped and came back to bite them in the butt. Exactly. Exactly.

The second way after the war in which the way he responded to the uprising, which was moderate at the beginning with violence, led to people, you know, trying to find, OK, who will protect us? Who will actually, you know, be the force that could actually force Assad to reevaluate his options? And they turned to al-Qaeda, which was called initially in Syria the Nusra Front. Exactly. Jabhat al-Nusra, which means the support front.

And it was – so the Nusra Front was an al-Qaeda franchise, if you like. But at the beginning, not everyone knew that. Is that right? They had done a pretty good job of hiding their al-Qaeda affiliation. I knew. Well, yeah, you're not just everybody. Yeah.

But I knew because immediately I started to notice, because don't forget, after I left the service of MI5 and MI6 in 2006, I became a banker, as many listeners would have known by now. And because I was a banker, I was always, you know, in the banking section which monitored terrorism finance. Around November, December of 2011, just about seven, eight months after the beginning of the uprising,

that there are certain Al-Qaeda financiers in Kuwait, in Bahrain, in Qatar, started some movement of collecting money for certain groups. And that's when I started to become suspicious that something is not right. And I remember, even at a great risk to me, I went all the way to Kuwait at the beginning of 2012.

and even attended one of these fundraising meetings. Wow. Which was risky, but I just wanted to... Risky because at that point there was already the fatwa against you. Exactly. Your former al-Qaeda brothers were going to kill you. Exactly. So thank God there were hundreds basically in that big tent erected near one of the Diwaniyas in Kuwait basically. So you're saying you went to a jamboree in Kuwait,

specifically oriented towards raising money for terrorists in Syria. Well, they didn't call them terrorists. They called them basically, you know, the cause of jihad in Syria against the tyrant Bashar al-Assad. Right. And funny enough, funny enough, I started listening to the speakers and they were talking about

eschatology. Oh, the prophecies. Goodness gracious. Among them were, you know, people like Nabil Al-Awadhi, you know, he was, he's a famous Salafist cleric in Kuwait. Among them was Hamid Al-Ali, one of the famous supporters of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, in fact, and Al-Qaeda in... And why are these people able to come out in the open in Kuwait and say these things? Why aren't these people in prison, Ayman? Because

Not far away, just about 15, 16 kilometers away in Kuwait. I'm not kidding you. In Kuwait, just in the same week, there was another big tent. Yes, I'm not kidding. There was another big tent, another gathering of Shia Kuwaitis raising funds for, you know, militants to go and fight in Syria alongside Bashar al-Assad. So Gulf funding was funding both sides? Yes.

Yes, the Syrian civil war has been a sort of solvent that has caused national identities, other identities to wither away, and the sectarian identities are all that's left. Exactly. And actually, you know, to give an example, you know I'm a Bahraini, and my nephew and cousin, both of them are Bahrainis. You know, my nephew, Ibrahim, he was only 19, and my cousin, Abdurrahman, he was only 20.

Abd al-Rahman went to fight with Jabhat al-Nusra. With Al-Qaeda in Syria. With Al-Qaeda in Syria.

And he died there in May 2013. I'm sorry to hear that. That's very sad. Then my nephew went. First, he was tempted to join ISIS. But I, after many Skype calls, you know, myself, his father, I mean, basically, we convinced him not to join and basically, like, you know, just try to go somewhere else. And he joined another more moderate group, which belonged to Ahrar al-Sham, another, you know, Muslim Brotherhood offshoot of the insurgents. And he died there in September of 2013.

There are two Bahrainis, but they were not the only two Bahrainis from Bahrain to fight and die there. There were other Bahrainis who were from the other side, Shia Bahrainis, who fought alongside Hezbollah and Bashar al-Assad. So there are Kuwaitis fighting Kuwaitis and Bahrainis fighting Bahrainis and Saudis fighting Saudis in that conflict. It is, you know, the arrival of Al-Qaeda, which brought with it, of course, ISIS after that,

and their purest Sunni Jihadist ideology. And because they came not from Al-Qaeda Central, they came from Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was known at the time as the Islamic State of Iraq.

And then when they broke away from Al-Qaeda as a whole in 2013, they announced that, oh, al-Nusra, these people in Syria, they are ours. And that caused al-Nusra to split with two-thirds going to ISIS and one-third remaining, you know, which basically grew up later, of course. It's quite complicated, but the takeaway is that ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Syria are essentially the same organization. They just had picked a fight with each other. Yeah, they split in May 2013.

When I was in Syria, one of the monasteries that I visited there, Marmousa, not far from Damascus, not far from Malula, in fact, where Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ, is still spoken. It was a Roman Catholic monastery and its abbot, Father Paolo, an Italian Franciscan, if I'm not mistaken, who had really worked hard for 20 years to form close relations with the Sunnis, with the Shia, with all the different groups in the vicinity. And the monastery had become a place of pilgrimage for all these groups.

When the Syrian civil war started, Father Paolo very famously refused the Vatican's demand that he leave Syria because it was too dangerous, because he wanted to remain a spokesman for sectarian unity in Syria. In the end, he was kidnapped and beheaded by ISIS. And that's a tragedy. You see...

Syria wasn't known for extremism or for this kind of brutality and bloodshed. And this is foreign and alien to it. And this is why whenever basically, you know, I see jihadists, you know, and jihadist sympathizers, you know, whether they are in Europe or North America, in the Middle East or South Asia, and they keep telling me about Bashar this, Bashar this, Bashar that, you know, the first thing I tell them, shut up, you're

you and people like you empowered him. He was about to fall. Many people defected, even his own prime minister, Riyad Ahjab, left him in March of 2012. Many people were leaving him. His army started to disintegrate. And it was clear that he either concede reforms or give up. He might lose.

But what saved him was Al-Qaeda. The arrival of Al-Qaeda on the scene gave him a rhetorical victory. He could always say, I'm defending Syria from Al-Qaeda. Exactly. Al-Qaeda did not start the war. They just arrived and taken advantage of that war. And as a result, turned the war from a war of liberation in order to

bring about some sort of a better Syria into a conflict that is based on sectarian jihadism. What about these moderate rebels, Ayman? We heard, especially here in Britain, because the UK was always going to support the moderate, the moderate rebels in the Syrian civil war. Who were these moderates?

At the beginning, they were mostly soldiers from Assad's army who actually defected. The Free Syrian Army. Indeed. And many of them had purely nationalistic aspirations. Many of them were not just only Sunnis, but also they had Druze, Christians. So what happened to the Free Syrian Army? They were taken over by...

I'm marginalized by the jihadists and the ideological groups that were linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. So you're saying jihadists both infiltrated the Free Syrian Army and also attacked the Free Syrian Army and defeated them on the battlefield? Well, not just only that, but actually more or less just like what happened if you listen to the podcast on Iraq when we talked about Zarqawi.

What Zarqawi had at the time was money, but also the name of Al-Qaeda and the name of jihad. And so they were able to cannibalize other groups, including the Free Syrian Army. So it's just pure cannibalism on the part of the jihadists that marginalized people.

the moderate rebels completely. And what role did the Gulf states play in all of this? Because Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Emirates, they're often accused of fueling the bloody mess of Syria with money, with weapons. What's the truth there? Well, the truth there is that it happened.

And in fact, you know, I'm not going to deny it. It happened. The Qataris were supporting Ahrar al-Sham. The Saudis were supporting Jamal Marouf and Hazm. You know, it's a group called Hazm. And they supported Unit 13. They supported Unit 49. You know, the Turks, of course, they supported Noureddin Zengi group and others. They supported the Uyghurs, the Afghans.

TIP or the Turkestan Islamic Party. We will talk about them in the next podcast. So in a sense, all of this was not coordinated.

And at the same time, many of them, while they were moderate, but they were not moderate enough. They still had this tinge of either jihadism or Muslim Brotherhood ideology about them. But surely some of these Gulf states also supported al-Qaeda directly, ISIS directly. That's what we're always told. None of them did. None of them. I see...

You know, I always basically had... How can we believe you, Eamon, actually? I mean, surely you're just an apologist for Gulf states. No, of course not. I'm not an apologist for anyone. I'm an apologist only for the truth. And for me, I am an ex-spy, and after that, a financial banking investigator.

which means that I follow the money. And whenever someone challenged me on this and says the Saudis are supporting ISIS and Al-Qaeda, the Qataris are supporting ISIS and Al-Qaeda, the Americans actually are supporting and creating ISIS and Al-Qaeda. These are all the accusations. And I will say to everyone, look, I have spent 11 years of my life in the banking sector. Before that, 8 years of my life as a spy against terrorist groups. So...

Unless if you have with you, you know, official transactions, banking transactions or any other form of transactions that I can take actually to court, then please do not utter this nonsense. Why? Because I have followed terrorism finance for 19 years of my life. And you're saying there's no hard evidence that Gulf states supported either ISIS or al-Qaeda in Syria? No.

If you have, if you are as a listener, have an evidence, I will actually guarantee you hundreds of thousands of pounds of in payment from many lawyers who want to hold these countries to account and demand justice for the victims, whether they are in North America or Europe. If you have evidence, come forward.

You don't, then it's not there. If you hear about me buying a Lamborghini and basically living in one of the mansions in Beverly Hills, it means that I finally found the evidence. That's the lottery ticket. That's the lottery ticket. The proof we've all been looking for. Because if it happened, I would be a rich man by now. But it never happened. They were...

supporting groups that are not related to Al-Qaeda or ISIS. They did, but these groups cannot be classified as terrorists because they were not classified as terrorists by the U.S. Treasury or by the EU. And sadly, indirectly, the support of these other groups

may have led to the empowerment and aggrandizement of al-Qaeda and ISIS when al-Qaeda and ISIS conquered those groups and expropriated the funds and the weapons that had been given them. So it was a blowback. Absolutely. And that's why all of these countries stopped completely by, I would say, the end of 2016. That's it. All the support dried out. They realized that their support for other jihadist groups, other resistance groups in Syria had backfired. Exactly. First, the Americans told them, stop.

and they also stopped on their own volition, as well as the fact that the Americans decided that the best one to fight ISIS are not those so-called moderate Syrian groups. They are useless. The only ones who can do that were the Kurds. America empowered the Kurds. Now, that allows me to ask a question about America in the Syrian civil war, and especially the former president, Barack Obama, often accused of...

waffling in his response to that conflict, accused of drawing his red lines beyond which he said Bashar al-Assad would not be allowed to pass, but then Bashar al-Assad would transgress the red line and Obama would do little or nothing. What is your estimation of America's intervention or lack of intervention in the Syrian Civil War, especially given the fact that you say America's intervention in Iraq was such a disaster?

You see, the problem of the Syrian conflict is that it was a victim of the Iraq war in many ways. Of the radicalization that took place in Iraq, which basically sent ISIS and Al-Qaeda from Iraq back to Syria. But also because in Iraq, the West was overcommitted. In Syria, because of what happened in Iraq, the West was undercommitted.

And what Syria needed, especially that window between November 2011 and June of 2012, that window, if the Americans used it wisely, all what was needed was just two American submarines and 72 Tomahawk missiles raining on Bashar al-Assad's security and military apparatus, and his own army would have ditched him immediately. There would have been a coup.

and his vice president, Sunni yet secular and Baathist, Farouk al-Sharra, would have become president, and the Syrian civil war would have ended before it even started. So why didn't Barack Obama order the Tomahawks to rain down? Because he was a chicken. He was a chicken? Yes. Okay, expand on that. Okay. The problem with Barack Obama is that he was always a hesitant leader when it come to world events.

You know, this is why Putin took advantage of Obama's hesitation on the world stage. And he supported, of course, stupidly the Arab uprising, especially against Mubarak. But then he did not want to intervene. He was always anti-intervention. But what about in Libya? We intervened in Libya. Why did we intervene in Libya but not in Syria? Oil? No, there was more to it than that.

Barack Obama wanted to appease the Iranians over the nuclear deal, and he wanted to negotiate a nuclear deal with them. Antagonizing them on Syria meant that he would lose Iran forever. So for the sake of that nuclear deal, which is gone now anyway. Because Trump has vetoed it. Exactly. Or has abrogated it. Absolutely. So for the sake of that deal, he...

hesitated on Syria so much that this hesitation cost the Syrians and the world, especially Europe with the waves of migration, a lot of great pain. And finally, Roscoe

Russia intervened in the Syrian Civil War on the side of Bashar al-Assad to protect its naval base in Tartus on the Mediterranean coast, to project its own influence in the Middle East further, to take advantage of Barack Obama's hesitation and in general, Obama's withdrawal of American influence from the region. And in alliance with Iran, Russia has ended up being the

the major player in that part of the world. No one would have foreseen this 10 years ago. Of course not. And that's the problem with, you know, the fact that Barack Obama's foreign policy was absolutely disastrous as far as the Middle East was concerned, because he could have put an end to this war, even if he really, really forced Bashar al-Assad into a corner.

he could have forced him to concede at least some reforms. But unfortunately, he decided to sit on the sidelines and allow this to happen. And does Russia now call the shots in the region then? Well, not in the region, but in Syria at least. And I want to raise another issue, how to show the globalist thing of it. There are two people, two people I blame personally.

for sending Syria into this chaos even further because of their constant interference, theological, ideological interference with the uprising in Syria. Abu Qatada, the Jordanian cleric who was based here in the UK for more than 13 years, possibly even more. Actually, no, 20 years almost. And he went to Jordan after he left the UK, of course, when he was extradited to Jordan.

And there, the Jordanians allowed him to have his own Twitter account and online presence. And he kept talking about, you must do this, you mustn't do that, you must do this. Don't agree to democracy, don't agree to pluralism, don't agree to... He's addressing the Syrian uprising. Absolutely. And he just kept, along with the other snake...

Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who was also responsible for informing the ideology of Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia in the early days, which informed your film, Path of Blood,

Both of them, you know, put their poisons into the mind of the young people in Syria who were, you know, protesting based on, you know, civil rights demands and turned all of this into ideological battlefield over jihadist ideology purity. So when you said at the beginning of the episode that the Syrian civil war was the most preventable civil war in the Middle Eastern history, is it because Al-Qaeda?

Al-Qaeda didn't need to have arrived on the scene? I would say it was preventable because of several facts. One, Assad did not need to use repression or violence against his own people. He could have just conceded a few reforms.

and the number of protesters would have plummeted from the hundreds of thousands to only a few thousands, which then he can deal with, but he could have conceded reforms. Some people will say, oh no, the protesters would have kept on. No, I will say no, because we have two other countries where when reforms were promised, the protesters went home, Jordan and

Morocco. Both of them led by young people, King Abdullah of Jordan and King Muhammad VI of Morocco. Both conceded reforms and in both cases the protesters went home. So Bashar could have conceded reforms. What else? He did not need to utter that sentence, the most fateful sentence in the Syrian history, when he said that there are 64,000 people we identified, we will arrest them.

That was wrong. You know, you just forced them to stay on the streets and then become militants. Okay, and three? And three, Al-Qaeda did not need to come there. Well, when you say they did not need to come there, but who's going to sit down with Al-Qaeda and talk sense into them? They did need to go there in their own minds because of the prophecies, because of everything they'd been working towards for 20 years. Ah, yes, the prophecies, the bloody prophecies. I mean, basically, you know, I wish...

Really, these prophecies never existed. So, Ayman al-Qaeda didn't have to come to Syria, sure. Certainly, Bashar al-Assad didn't have to respond the way he did. But now, what is it, seven years later, is it safe to say Bashar al-Assad, despite being the asshole that he is, has won the war and will be on his throne in Damascus for the time being? No. If this is winning, what is losing? 700,000 people dead.

13 million people displaced. The entire country ravaged, destroyed. The infrastructure is non-existent. It will cost 500 billion dollars, half a trillion dollars to rebuild the whole thing. If this is winning, God knows what losing is. But he's in power. Well, at what cost and what price? And the question is, maybe he won the war, can he win the peace? Because why? Still, a quarter of the country is in the hands of the Kurds.

And they are not going to play ball with him. They are not going to give up the sovereignty, the sovereignty they had won. One quarter of the entire Syrian territory is in the hands of the YPG, the Kurds, who fought so hard against ISIS onslaught, the massacres that ISIS committed against them, and the enslavement of many Yazidi women among them.

So do you think they will just roll over and give up everything? Because basically Assad was repressing the Kurds also, denying them their language, denying 3 million of them citizenship even. So now that they have been empowered, they have an army almost the size of 200,000 fighters,

Do you think they are going to give all this up and go back to being subservient to Assad? So what you're really saying is the war is not over. No. It's too early to declare a victor. No. This is why I would say basically that Assad has won back about 70% of the territory because 25% is in the hands of the Kurds and 5% still in the hands of al-Qaeda and their allies in Idlib. So we are not there yet.

Because don't forget, 3.5 million people live under al-Qaeda's rule in Idlib and other jihadist groups, and roughly another 3 to 3.5 million live under the rule of the Kurds. Everything that is basically east and north of the Euphrates is under the hands of the Kurds. So the idea that he won, well, and don't forget, he won the war, but...

But with the help of so many foreign mercenaries, one day they have to go back. Their salaries are just draining the Iranian and Syrian coffers. One day they will have to go back to their families and homelands. And then Assad will not have enough manpower to control even the territories that he has won.

Eamon, you say that Bashar al-Assad's military strength has relied almost entirely on mercenaries for a while now, mercenaries who will eventually return home. Of course, Al-Qaeda militants and other Sunni jihadist militants, they also have a tendency eventually to return home, which is what we're going to be talking about in the next podcast.

What is the world to do about the phenomenon of jihadists, battle-hardened, ideologically committed jihadists returning home? This episode of Conflicted was produced by Jake Warren and Sandra Ferrari. Original music by Matt Huxley. If you want to hear more of Conflicted, make sure you search for us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download yours.