Shock and thaw: Syria’s frozen war resumes

0:02The Economist

0:10Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

0:24One of our correspondents wanted to remove traces of herself from the internet for security reasons. Then she found out just how hard it is these days to disappear. And stock markets surged after the decisive re-election of Donald Trump. But the windfalls were not evenly spread. Our data journalist digs into who made out best as the next generation of Trump trades began.

1:01But first...

1:16The End

1:33who fired their guns into the air and pulled down statues dedicated to the Assad family that's held on to power since 1971.

1:48President Assad responded with airstrikes that left bodies strewn in the streets of central Aleppo.

2:00In the province of Idlib, footage from the Syrian White Helmets, a humanitarian organization, showed the evacuation of civilians after the strikes. It has been a shocking few days in Syria where front lines that had been frozen for years fell apart in a matter of hours. Greg Karlstrom is our Middle East correspondent. On November 27th, rebels launched a surprise offensive in northwestern Syria. Within two days, they were posting photos of themselves at the ancient citadel in the heart of Aleppo. They had captured Syria's second city in an embarrassing route for the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president.

2:40Now, it's been a while since we've had to go through what's going on in Syria. It's clearly a complex conflict. Just give us a quick part of history, if you would. It is complex. We could spend a whole hour talking about it. But in brief, it began in 2011 when the Arab Spring protests reached Syria. There were peaceful demonstrations against the Assad regime, which were met by overwhelming force by that regime. And slowly, this turned into an armed conflict as various outside powers began supplying weapons to Syrian rebels. The battle for Aleppo in particular really began in 2012. That's when the city was cut in half.

3:22Rebels controlled one part, the regime controlled the other. There was no man's land in the middle of it. And it took the Assad regime more than four years to retake all of Aleppo. And they were only able to do it with extensive help from Russia and Iran and a constellation of other militias. After Aleppo was retaken in 2016, the war began grinding into a stalemate. The front lines froze in 2020 with an agreement between Russia and Turkey and the Syrian regime, a very fragile pact that split the country basically into three parts. There was the rump state controlled by the regime on about two thirds of Syrian territory.

4:00There was a rebel held part in the Northwest. Those are the rebels who have now taken Aleppo. And then there was the Northeast, which is controlled by a mainly Kurdish militia with the backing of the United States. And that is where the lines were set in 2020. And that is where until a few days ago, they had largely remained. So what started things moving again? The timing of it was a surprise. I think everyone, myself included, was a bit shocked that the rebels launched such a successful offensive when they did. But they had been preparing for it for months, if not for years. The main group in Idlib province in northwestern Syria, the main rebel group that is governing a large chunk of the Northwest, Hayat Tahrir Shem, is a group that broke away from Al-Qaeda in 2017.

4:48It was originally a jihadist group, but it broke from jihadi ideology. And it's been setting up this increasingly professionalized government and military force in Northwestern Syria. They even set up a military college in Idlib to train officers. So they had been preparing, but then I think the timing, the sort of why now question, has a lot to do with events happening elsewhere in the region. Yeah, you mentioned Iran, Russia, others, countries, states that have other business elsewhere. They do, and Syria is no longer a big priority for them. The first battle for Aleppo a decade ago, Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militia, sent thousands of its fighters to support the Assad regime.

5:31You had other Iranian-backed groups that poured in their own fighters to serve as sort of shock troops. Iran itself sent officers to back the regime. and Russia provided the air power. That was what Assad needed to retake Aleppo back in 2016. But today, Hezbollah has been fighting a war with Israel for more than a year. There was a ceasefire that finally ended that war just a week ago. I don't think it's a coincidence that this rebel offensive began just after that ceasefire. Hezbollah lost most of its leadership fighting Israel. It lost an estimated 4 ,000 fighters. It is not in a position to send the numbers of troops to northern Syria as it once did.

6:10The same goes for Iran, which has seen its own military infrastructure in Syria badly damaged by more than a year of Israeli airstrikes. And then Russia, of course, is preoccupied in Ukraine. It withdrew thousands of its own troops from Syria after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And it has not prioritized fighting in Syria because there are so many demands on its own forces in Ukraine. So you put all of that together And this regime, the Assad regime, that has only ever been able to survive with extensive external support, suddenly finds itself in a vulnerable position because that support is no longer there.

6:47So the rebel group that has taken Aleppo, you mentioned some jihadist roots. And so who are they now and what is it that they actually want? What they want is to eventually reach Damascus and run Syria. Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, who is the leader of HTS, that one-time Al-Qaeda affiliate, he has tried over the past few years to, let's say, smooth down the group's very rough edges. So in addition to setting up this government in Idlib, he has done a lot of outreach trying to reassure Christians and other minorities in Syria that they have nothing to fear from a group that was once affiliated with Al-Qaeda to the point of helping to pay for the reconstruction of churches in Idlib, things like that.

7:31Whether he's going to be able to convince civilians living in Aleppo or elsewhere, I think is still an open question. As rebels were moving into Aleppo, there was an order that came down from Zolani telling them to protect civilians, to be prisoners humanely. But whether or not rebels are going to actually follow those orders, I think remains to be seen. And then there's also along with that, a question of what Turkey wants in all of this. Turkey has supported HTS over the years. Turkey also has its own proxy force in northwestern Syria called the Syrian National Army. And Turkey has treated that part of Syria almost as a Turkish protectorate over the past few years to the point where people living there use the Turkish lira as their currency.

8:16And so there's a question now about will Turkey extend its protection to Aleppo? Will it try to prevent the Syrian regime from launching an offensive to retake Aleppo by putting it under explicit Turkish protection. When the Syrian civil war was new, it was a brutal conflict, killed hundreds of thousands, all told displaced millions. Do you think that we're on the doorstep of that again? Or do you think the distraction of many of the players here will keep things perhaps a little less violent? We're already seeing some brutality. There have been airstrikes over the weekend carried out by both Syrian and Russian jets, many of them targeting civilians in Idlib and in Aleppo, a repeat of what we have seen so many times, as you say, over the years.

9:05But their capacity to carry out those sorts of strikes is going to be more limited. But for civilians living in Aleppo and living in other parts of the country, that is very much a concern. There had been a relative calm in places like Aleppo in recent years, and people are very worried about the prospect of that city once again falling on the front lines. People who may not support the Assad regime. I mean, this is a regime that for years now has sort of stood by as Syria spirals ever further into economic collapse that has become increasingly corrupt and increasingly brutal. It's a very unpopular regime that has done nothing for the people living under its control.

9:45But at the same time, people are worried about the prospect also of HTS coming in, of this once radical group coming in to govern their territories. They're worried about what that might mean. They're worried about great power conflict. What are Turkey and Russia and all of the other external powers in Syria going to do? So I think even for people who are critics of the Assad regime, there is a lot of unease about what this rebel offensive might portend for the future of a country that has already seen too much war. Greg, thanks very much for your time. Thank you, Jason.

10:35So I started trying to delete myself from the internet by just figuring out what was on there. And I went right back to the beginning. So the first social media platform I really used, I think starting around 2006, was Facebook. Evantika Chilkoti is our global business correspondent and these days you won't be able to find much more about her online The event invitations were the most surprising So there was invitations to a Santa-themed pub crawl around the south of Mumbai and then my groups that I've joined were quite worrying because as a journalist I often use Facebook groups as a way to get in touch with people figure out an organisation So I'm also part, very suspiciously, of quite a few right-wing Hindu nationalist groups because I've written a lot about that topic.

11:26So I started deleting myself because I produced a podcast series with The Economist earlier this year called The Modi Raj, which you should listen to if you haven't listened to it. And the situation in India right now, especially for the last few years, hasn't been great in terms of security for journalists. There's been quite a few cases, specifically of female journalists being harassed. I know one journalist in India who had a photograph of her face superimposed onto a pornographic video, which was then shared far and wide on WhatsApp. There's a lot of leaking of personal information like addresses and contact details with death threats.

12:01So I was going around basically trying to reduce the amount of information about me that trolls could find. The podcast wasn't that risky and as a journalist overseas, I really am far less at risk than any local journalist. It was really just a precaution. But the security team told me to, so I started off this process. Once I was done with Facebook, I started looking at my other social media, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter. So I went and got in touch with the platforms and they have a fairly simple process whereby you can request all of your data and they send you zip files full of everything, from every connection you have to every message you've sent.

12:40All of my email addresses from all previous jobs are there. At some point, I basically gave up trying to delete personal information. And then the question was, do I want to delete these social media profiles? What I realised was it's kind of impossible in this day and age to just delete yourself, because frankly, as a journalist, if I don't have a LinkedIn profile, Everyone that I get in touch with wants to look me up for giving me time. And so I knew full well that these social media platforms are both useful for me as a journalist and incredibly risky. Google offers you that they can take down search items about you.

13:19So I thought, let me just have an experiment. So I filled in these forms and it's quite confusing to figure out which form you need to fill in and how. but in the EU we have very very good data privacy rules. It's the legislation that lots of other jurisdictions have copied but they can only take down that search item on Google within the jurisdiction that I'm in. So it was sort of this learning that yes these social media platforms tell me I have control over my data but actually there are confines to what they can and cannot do. so i got in touch with a few companies that say that they can wipe you off the internet one was appropriately called delete me and when i interviewed the founder it was fascinating because he said to me we can just do all of this for you and just so you know what you're doing is the tip of the iceberg you are looking up stuff that is visible about you online what you really need to worry about is the data that companies gather without you even knowing they're gathering it.

14:19I think the best example is if you think about Google, Google owns YouTube, so they know what you watch on YouTube. They own Gmail, so they have some sort of understanding of your contact history. They also obviously have the search engines, they know what you're searching, and they know your location, depending how you're using it on your phone. So this is not data that you can see, but it's a data that a company has, and Delete Me will offer you pay a fixed sum to delete you from the internet and they have to get hold of something called data scrapers that basically make money by scraping the internet for all of this quiet data about you compiling it into basically profiles and then selling it so they sell profiles be it to insurers to other companies marketers whoever it might be the trouble is you can try and do this yourself but the guy I spoke to said this would take you about 100 hours and not only that you You have to do it again every three months.

15:13So at this point, it was pretty clear to me that what I had begun to do was an impossible exercise, even if I decided to delete my social media profiles. So in terms of what I learned that could be transferable to other people, so please check your privacy settings. There are things you can opt out of. You can opt out of personalization. You can opt out of location settings. One thing that that privacy expert said to me is like, always be really suspicious of free apps because they have to make money somewhere. And that might be through selling your data. There's other simple things you can do.

15:46So just be careful what you punch in where. I am the worst at this, but I'll be in an airport very often. And I want Wi-Fi really quickly. And I will just log into the first Wi-Fi I can find. I've got no idea who is the owner of this network. I'll plug in my email address and then I'll use this Wi-Fi network to call my mom and do a bank transfer. So just don't do that. Just be careful about what you're connecting your phone to. If you're really being careful, you can use a VPN. So you can have a commercial VPN, which just adds to the privacy of you and how you're using your devices. And I think there's a new dimension now with AI.

16:21Like, just be careful about what we type into AI tools. We don't really think about the fact that what we type in is also data as well as what the AI tools are spitting out. But just be careful about what you type in. And if you're not willing to delete your social media, you just have to suck up that it's a two-way street. You can look up other people, and they can look up you.

16:54It's nice to win. It's always nice to win. When Donald Trump won America's presidential election last month, the country's stock market was ecstatic. Doug Dowson is a data journalist for The Economist. The next day, the S &P 500 leapt by 2.5 % as America's big firms anticipated lower taxes, less regulation, and higher economic growth. The Russell 2000, which tracks smaller companies, jumped by even more, 6%. But are the good times as good as they seem? We analyzed the performance of America's 3 ,000 biggest public companies and found that the Trump rally has been uneven. And some Trump trades, as they're called, have proved less profitable than expected.

17:44Three sectors that could be big winners under second Trump administration include financial services, private prisons, and crypto firms. Shares in banks are currently up 13 % compared to before the election. They're expected to benefit from an easing of capital requirements and less scrutiny of mergers and acquisitions under Mr. Trump. We're going to end up with the largest deportation in American history. We have no choice. Trump campaigned on a promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants. Although the army is going to be involved in some of that work, the government is also expected to outsource to the private sector.

18:25Shares in two of the big prison firms, Geo Group and CoreCivic, have soared since the election. And then there's crypto. Hello, Bitcoiners. Thank you very much. Hello. It's good to be with you. Trump was a big cheerleader for digital currencies on the campaign trail. If crypto is going to define the future, I want to be mined, minted, and made in the USA. It's going to be. He's promised to make America, quote, the crypto capital of the planet. Since the election, Bitcoin has surged by 45 percent, and companies involved in mining, minting and trading digital currencies have also rallied. Some Trump trades, however, have not fared well.

19:08Shares in American steel companies rose by 13 percent on Election Day, but then have since fallen down due to a lack of clarity on policy. Shares in oil and gas drillers also rose. We will drill, baby, drill. But then after an 8 % election day bounce, their shares are now back where they were before the vote. Shares in Trump Media, the president-elect's social media firm, have tumbled since the election. Certainly not what you might have expected. Just goes to show that investing in Mr. Trump does not always pay off.

20:14Transcription by CastingWords Thank you.