349. The Fall of Assad: What's next for Syria?

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0:20Hello, welcome to a special episode of The Restless Politics with me, Mr Campbell and with me, Rory Stewart. And the reason we're recording this live on YouTube is because of what's happening in Syria as I'm sure you'll all be aware, major, major, major developments in Syria. We talked about this on the main podcast the other day. We're recording 2 p .m. UK time Sunday. So if you're listening or watching live, obviously you know that. For people who are logging in later, it's important to locate it because we don't know what is going to happen in the next few hours. What we do know is that in a matter of days, Bashar al -Assad has gone from being a dictator in a dictatorship that was broadly accepted and that people saw a very little chance of it being upended to now fleeing the country with his wife and close circle, doubtless hoping to have a life of wealthy exile somewhere having stashed away tons of money from his kleptocracy.

1:16But they will be fearful because there's a massive outpouring going on, not just in Syria, but amongst Syrian exiles all around the world, which underlines the grip he has had the sheer scale of brutality and depression and the hatred he arouses. The rebels who will now quite soon, I suspect, cease to be called rebels and will become at least part of a new Syrian government at some point. They've announced to curfew in Damascus starting 4pm local time until 5am. So amid the celebrations, obviously lots of fear, but Rory, you did a brilliant explainer about the history of this on the podcast last week.

1:56John, just maybe sort of briefly recap that but also give us your take on what's going on now. Yeah, thank you, Alistair. So to remind people, Syria is a country that emerged from the end of Sykes' Pico agreement after the First World War. And for longer than my lifetime, as you've pointed out, since 1971, it's been run by the dictatorship of the Assad family, first the father, and more recently the son. This government is critical to what I'm about to say, it's an allowite government, comes from a very particular religious sect, and the fundamental thing to understand about Syria is that it's more divided ethnically religiously than almost any other place on earth.

2:48There are maybe a few other regions, but very few that compare. So there are allowites and drugs, and for this I refer people to the excellent book by our friend Gerard Russell that looks at all these minority groups. Basically the allowites and drugs have the same relationship to Islam that Mormons have to Christianity. Then you've got about 16 different Christian groups. You've got big Sunni population, and then you've got different Shia populations, 12 Mums Shia, closely connected to the Iranian regime, but you've also got Ismailis, who believe in Seven Imams, etc. Why am I saying all this?

3:24This regime was a minority regime from a minority religion holding together a very complicated country, and a country that had begun to split apart. Split apart with a section up in the northwest, which were where the rebels centered, and the rebels originally had a sort of strong input of secular liberals, but increasingly dominated by Islamist groups, by al -Qaeda affiliates. Over on the east, a lot of Kurdish people, so that the Kurdish nation, again after the First War was basically split between Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. There's a big chunk of them living on the Syrian side of the border, who essentially dominated everything east of the Euphrates.

4:08You had the regime that was holding on to the major cities, and then you had Arab groups in the south. And to fast forward, what's happened is with everybody having sort of basically ignored this group for years, and we can talk a little bit about what the intelligence failure was, why we ignore these groups. It seems quietly under the radar largely ignored by Western intelligence and other governments, to have been developing links with communities up and down, and with the regime itself, which we can talk about a little bit more, allowing it in the space of just over a week to critically get to Damascus the capital city, the center of power, and take back all the major population areas of the country.

4:56But the problem, and then I'm going to have back to you, is that it's not like the Taliban. It's not done it to loan. There are other bits which are involved in the armed resistance, which is going to have to deal with the Kurds that I've talked about. A lot of armed Kurds have advanced west. Some Arabs come up in Jordan, and something called the Syrian National Army that's backed by the Turks.

5:21So complicated religious sectarian history. He's dealing with the country whose economy is in bits. He's dealing with a country where the one and a half million people living in camps, whether a five or six million Syrian refugees overseas, and he's dealing with four different armed groups back over the year. Yeah, I mean, so that's why I said amidst all the celebration, and the guns going off in celebration, there will be an awful lot of uncertainty and anxiety. Let's just quickly maybe recap something about the Assad's, because as you say, they pin in power, you're 51, 51, on in 1973. Right, so they've been around for 53, 54 years as a ruling family.

6:06That is, you know, just the father, the father was a brute. He was, he ran a brutal regime. His son took over, and I met, I've met the younger Assad a few times, and he's actually when you meet him, he's somebody who's very hard to find impressive. He's very, he's very tall. He's about six foot two and a half. He's got this sort of no chin thing. Literally, you know, you were talking about chinless wonder. He's a bit of a chinless wonder, and he's got very, very thin lips, quite a weak voice. And yet, he runs this kind of utterly brutal regime where torture and murder are just inbuilt into what they have done for many, many years with anybody who steps out of line.

6:51And of course, at the start, when he first took over in 2000, I think people that we'll always do. I think we always hope they're going to be better and more modern. And of course, they do the occasional thing that makes you think they will be. And of course, I think there was particular interest in Britain because of his wife, asthma. And that's a really interesting story. She was born in London, Syrian parents, dad, a doctor, cardiologist, mother, a diplomat. And when Havis the father died, she, she, there'd be no sense of, he died in the June, I think it was, there'd be no sense of the sun having some sort of big relationship.

7:34And it suddenly, this one appears and they get married within a month. And she then becomes much, much more than a wife. I mean, she's somebody who's a big economic player. She's sort of involved in the banking sector and the maritime sector. Interestingly, when at the time of the Civil War, the European Union, we the UK don't have sanctions against her. Of course, of course, she's still a British citizen. She's got food nationalities. But the EU put her under sanctions, her specifically, as well as him, because she's actually a big player, as well as being as well. Can I just sort of take about because it's a fascinating question that we keep coming to when you're in government trying to analyze new regimes.

8:16And this question of whether you're going to be optimistic or pessimistic. Obviously now, we know that the guy turned out to essentially become a sort of Russian oligarch gangster type. But if we take you back to 2000, so you're in Downing Street, you've been in there for three years. And this man comes in who's done a postgraduate degree in ophthalmology in London is known as a kind of slightly geeky IT type. And there are a lot of, I remember at that period, very expatriate Syrian businessman who cared deeply about their country, but were living abroad and who really hoped this would be a moment of reopening.

9:01And I remember going to Syria in 2003, 4, 5, 6, and seeing the country beginning to open up an investment coming in. And even as late as the beginning of 2010, I remember as a young MP being encouraged, you know, would I go on visits to Syria, meet the Syrian embassy, you know, he's much better than can we lift sanctions. And then the Arab Spring happens, the end of 2010, the beginning 2011, he starts torturing people. And of course, from the point of view of the Syrian businessman who were encouraging this, a moment of incredible trauma and betrayal, where they thought my goodness, I've been promoting for the last six years this man as a moderate.

9:47And now he's turned out to be an absolute monster. At which point they flip hard over and start saying he must be toppled at once and get very angry with the British government for not intervening, because Cameron doesn't get his vote through Obama backs off in 2013 from his red lines. And then fast forward Basharistan and in power. But let me take you back tonight to that, this year, to 2000, it gives a sense of how he's thought about it. Well, of course, this is the great advantage, Roy, of having kept diaries, because when we talked about Assad the other day, Fiona, Fiona, my partner said, why didn't you talk about that lunch?

10:25I said, what lunch? She said, there was that time when they came to London, Mr. and Mrs. Bashar al -Assad. And you went off with Tony and Al -Assad and Jonathan and David Manning and one or two others. And Sheree and I had lunch with Mrs. Azma Assad in the in the white room. And I'll be honest with you, I had no memory of it. This is my diaries of really, really useful. Anyways, in fact, as a now, we had a new word that we developed when we call Tony, if Tony got a really hard time from somebody, we'd say he was Bashar. And because what happened was Tony once did this press conference with Bashar in Damascus, October 01, when and they basically agreed in the meeting that would, you know, because of 9, 11 and the Americans were under such pressure.

11:20And, he's kind of saying, do the right things. Instead of which, when we went out to face the media, he absolutely turned on Tony Blair, said that he was on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the argument and all this. I'll never forget Tony after he said, I think it was just a cultural thing. I'm not sure he meant. So after thereafter, we call that being Bashar. But there's a very interesting footnote in my diaries because when I talk about the issue that we were addressing, the footnote says this after this is what he said at the press conference, after repeating Syrian condemnation of the September 11 attacks Assad defended resistant fighters, he said resistance to occupation is an international right.

12:03Nobody can deny we have many organizations, many people who support resistance fighters who seek to liberate their land. And I thought really in that today, I mean, what goes around comes around. He of course was talking about the right, the right of those who were under occupation by the Americans to fight against them. It was an amazing moment because the moment when you're meeting him, his father's died and the Syrian constitution stated that you had to be a minimum of 40 to run for the presidency. And he was 34 years old. So the constitution was changed overnight to say you had to be a minimum of 34.

12:41And he then I think got something like 97 .29 % of the vote. Yeah, it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't close. It wasn't close. Comes in. Now, when you read these are entries, does it then spark a lot of other memories that are not in the diary or is it still mostly the substance to diary? Do you suddenly think, Oh, what if I cut it suddenly forgot about all the others? No, I do. It does spark stuff. So there's another, another meeting we had. And this was this I think was the dinner or the lunch that Fiona talked about. And she had she had she only got a better memory than I have. She she remembers Mrs.

13:14Assad as being a kind of wannabe queen Rania, you know, queen Rania of Jordan, who's kind of amazingly glamorous and very clever. And also I think got a pretty good heart. And and and and as Marassad couldn't quite couldn't quite put it off. But no, I remember it's funny you mentioned IT because in one of the meetings, I actually recorded in the diary that it was a bit dull. Right. And that he and the minister, he was with kept wanting to tell us about how great their IT systems were. Right. So and that but but equally to go back to the serious point you were making about how do you how do you operate with these people that you're trying to push in a certain direction?

13:54And of course, Putin is the most obvious example of where we, you know, we got any sort of optimism wrong or at least certainly didn't it wasn't it wasn't sort of backed up by history. But with Assad, I I record in the diary, you know, we got a really good press for how we handled Assad. I I don't remember this at all, but I I wrote for Tony an article in the Syrian press about the importance of us having, you know, good relations and working together and settling differences peacefully and all this sort of stuff. So you do you have to kind of I guess go through the motions and also the some of not just go through the motions, you may even be trying to do more hopefully you're gambling you're hoping that it's a new person.

14:37He's younger. He's more western, more British. And maybe just maybe he's going to be a Gorbachev figure. Maybe he's going to lead the reform. And as I say, people kept believing that for years afterwards, there was this optimism. You know, I had a friend in the in the embassy in Damascus and I I went to stay with them in these kind of tragedies. And my godson was baptized in a little church in Syria. And again, at that period still, there was so much hope that maybe now meanwhile, we've also got David McCluskey, who now does the rest is classified, who we were talking to when we were last week, who was a CIA analyst on the ground in Damascus in the latter period.

15:26Of course, reporting on regime prisons, on torturers, on horrible allegations, not just allegations, reality of rape. And then after the event, the revelations of a you, well in fact, maybe I'll sort of selfishly kind of fast forward a little bit to my experience, engaging with them off the Arab Spring. So by I was very close to Simon Collis, who was our ambassador in Damascus when the whole regime collapsed. And Simon and I had been in Bastera together. And I went to see him in Qatar. And he speaks very, very good Arabic, one of the best arabes in the foreign office. And I think Simon won't mind me saying Arabic, Arabic speaker, or you're not?

16:13Arabic speaker. So you stood in the foreign office coming through you there. I'm afraid. I hope you won't mind me saying I've just been talking to him again over the last two, three days. A great deal because he's following this unbelievably closely and is so well informed on these different groups and weather going. But I hope you won't mind me saying that there was a moment when he was relatively optimistic that the Bashar al -Assad regime wouldn't last very long. You know, he was able to point out that the regime seemed pretty rotten, that they didn't really know how to do counterinsurgency.

16:43They were killing a lot of people. And there was this huge opposition against them, which wasn't just Islamist groups in those days, was moderates. And of course, five million people fleeing the country, many of whom have ended up in Germany and some of whom have ended up in Britain, etc. And of course, most dramatically of all, disrupting the whole region, Jordan ended up taking a million refugees, Lebanon ended up taking a million refugees, Turkey ended up taking two million refugees, or three million refugees. Then I'm the minister. So by 2016, I was the International Development Minister responsible for the Middle East.

17:18And I was being sent submissions from the Civil Service to send money to these Syrian opposition groups around Idlib up in the North West. And I was beginning to get very, very concerned that the liberals were disappearing and that a bunch of al -Qaeda affiliates were taking over the show. I remember seeing which by then have moved to Turkey, pushed back against me and said, no, no, there still are secular liberal elements. Don't underestimate these town councils such as funding. But the corruption was unbelievable. Did that include Hayate Yer al -Shaw? Absolutely. Right. So when would they be?

17:57They were then largely called Jebel -Ton -Nusra. But the father group of HTS was absolutely the center of this whole story. And HTS is the group that's taken over that area that we the British government were funding. And so this is then the problem, right? So when did we prescribe that? When did the British government prescribe HTS? Because they are prescribed, aren't they? Yeah, yeah, yeah, but definitely because we put a $10 million bounty on his head and to put that in context, that is only for the very, very top terrorist leaders, right? You don't get a $10 million bounty easily, right? This is for Jalani.

18:31This is for Jalani. Jalani himself, right? Because Jalani himself had gone to fight in Iraq and was associated with what we call ISIS, ISIL, Daesh. And he got jailed there. He was in jail. Absolutely. So he was a proper, proper foreign fighter going from Serenade to Iraq, comes back. But this is something I want you to get on to, which is that one of the problems is that when you label something a terrorist group in government, there are lots of reasons why that's a bit dangerous in terms of continuing to take curiosity and how they might be changing. So let's say for the sake of argument, HTS is a very different group to the group that existed in 2016.

19:12And that he's a very different man from the guy that went out to fight in Iraq. He certainly claims to why didn't we pick that up? And part of the problem is that if you label something as a terrorist group, you run into problems even on talking to them, you know, the US Department of Justice will sanction you if you get too close to these groups. It was the same as you with Hamas and his Bala and it was the same and I'm going to bring you to this on the IRA. When do these groups transition from being terrorist groups in a narrow sense? I a small group of people killing civilians in order to terrorize the population.

19:51When do they transition into becoming a political movement? So with Hamas, potentially, that's when they stand for election in 2006, his Bala, when they start entering the Lebanese government, HTS, when they take over regime Taliban, when they take over Afghanistan. Now, let me just come back to you then, because one of the key questions now that he's dealing with is very close to the questions you dealt with in Northern Ireland and Good Friday. What do you do with a society where people have been killing, you know, hundreds, 400 ,000 people on either side where families are pitted against each other, whether the destruction is unbelievable, the resentment is unbelievable, the suspicion is unbelievable, and where the leader of the organization is himself intimately and directly connected to the terrorism over you.

20:39I think you have to, well, particularly now, that Gellani is the leader of this organization, well, the leader of the biggest organization involved in all the organizations that have performed this toppling of the Assad regime, which is an incredible achievement when you think about it. What if you think about who and what they are to have done this in such a small time and move so far and so fast, it's pretty amazing. But you now have to talk to them, there's no doubt about that, and that does mean you do one of two things. You either keep them as a prescribed organization, but you have little sort of conversations under the radar as, you know, John Major did with the IRA and John Major's government did with the IRA and then we did for a while as well, and then eventually brought them as they were into the tent, or you unprescribe them.

21:29And I suspect that that is probably what those governments who have prescribed them will end up doing, because this is, this is both the moment of real, real danger for that country and for the region, but also it's a kind of moment of hope as well. And the question then is how do you, how do you build on that hope? And I think it's very, very interesting to watch the way these guys have been behaving. So they've gone from from Idlib and then they'd Aleppo and then Hamar, now they're in Damascus. And along the way, I mean, look, they've been fighting, right? They have been fighting, they've been killing people, but they've been, it's quite clear that the Syrian forces have been kind of melting away a lot at the time.

22:12You've then had the Russians of sort of come in and done a bit of kind of fighting back on behalf of Assad, but not very much. I'll tell you in a minute about Lavrov. I watched a thing with Lavrov yesterday. It was very interesting. So they know there, and do you know what really got my kind of antennae twitching? Was there was just as the news broke that Assad was left, he fed the country. There was a very short video clip posted by the Prime Minister. So you've got the President Assad, he's the dictator in charge, and he's got his kind of little puppet government as it were. And the Prime Minister was on video, basically saying, I'm really paraphrasing now, but you know, the rebels have toppled power a lot.

22:53Therefore, they're going to be the government, and we're going to make sure there's a kind of nice, smooth, peaceful transition. The next thing, you see him being brought out of a building, out of a government building and being escorted very politely, but these guys with guns to the four seasons hotel. Where are you supposed to stay? Right. Well, he's their base there, sort of helping this kind of this transition. I guess the other thing we should think about Rory is who the players now in this, because you've got, so you've got America who always can be a big player, and all you've got from the White House is Joe Biden is being briefed and watching closely.

23:32You have got Donald Trump, who was in Paris last night, and did a post on Truth Social saying, this is none of our business, stay out of Syria, it's a mess, but it's not our problem. I think the big player in this potentially could be Turkey, because Turkey, we don't talk enough about Turkey on the podcast, because they are such an important country. But I think in this, because of their historic role, because of their current role in what's going on now, I wonder if they are the force that's going to try and create some sort of cohesion between these opposition groups. You're completely right.

24:06So this is also complicated that I didn't properly get into this in the explainer, but the reason why Bashar Assad survived was because of Iran and Russia. Russia basically provided the Air Force, and Iran had this militia group, Hisbalah, coming from Lebanon, that provided the infantry. And Hisbalah has been hit very, very hard by Israel, which is the Patriotax, the radio attacks, the killing of Hassan Nasr Rela, and so has the IRGC, which is the Revolutionary Guard commanders from Iran, who actually works on the ground with Hisbalah, and Russia has been distracted by Ukraine. So what we've seen is as these groups have advanced, the assumption was that the regime would at least try to hold Hammer, Homs and Damascus.

24:57And the war, Russian planes, still there, but it's all collapsed like a pack of cards. And it's turned out that even the inner circle of the presidential bodyguard that you used to see strutting around the streets next to British Embassy in their smart suits, who are allowites also, don't seem to have really fought. And the Russians appear to have evacuated both their naval base and their air base. And this makes a lot of difference because the naval base is what the Russians used to supply the Wagner mercenaries in Africa. Now, one of the questions is, so Trump's view on this, and Trump's tweet is absolutely astonishing.

25:42He seems to be really thinking about Russia's interests here. It's quite sort of insightful analysis by Trump, very unusual from a presidential candidate. He says, Russia, because they're so tied up in Ukraine, seeming capable of stopping this literal march through Syria country they've protected for years. Now they're like possibly our set himself being forced out. It may actually be the best thing that can happen to Russia. There was never much for benefit in Syria for Russia, other than to make Obama look really stupid. So he could be right here. You missed a bit there, Roy, where he said, this is where former President Obama refused to honor his commitment to protecting the red line in the sand and all hell broke out with Russia stepping in.

26:24Very rarely that I agree with the point that Donald Trump makes, but I agree with that point. You do agree and then he goes on to say, we'll get to this in a second in any event, Syriza mess, but it's not our friend and then in caps, you know how does caps. The United States should have nothing to do with it. This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved. And of course, you know, 25 ,000 replies, 60 ,000 retreats, 350 ,000 likes, 66 million views. And that's just on Twitter. So that's true social, isn't it? No, no, that's Twitter. That's what I'm reading. It's the same tweet out with the same post -downless.

26:59But this is 66 million views on Twitter alone. I don't know what you're getting on truth social. 13 million. Oh no, 1 .3. Sorry. 1 .3. So then the question is, what do other people do? And as you've mentioned, Turkey really matters here. Although Turkey apparently are angry with the HTS because clearly the HTS haven't been doing what the Turks wanted. And they've allowed the Kurds to advance and the Turks are very frightened about the Kurds because the Kurds are a major opposition group in southern Turkey. The Turks, the Russians and the Iranians were the key players in the peace process in Astana, which was one of the great moments that seemed to stabilize Bashar and As Rijim.