--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- [Discussion begins with Sean Rameswaram and a guest]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, we're going to talk about the war in Syria. Joining me is John Asante.
--:-- John Asante: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, I wanted to ask you, what kind of toothbrush you use.
--:-- John Asante: I use a manual toothbrush.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay. Yeah, not, I guess, what do you call the other ones? You call them electric toothbrushes.
--:-- John Asante: Electra, there you go.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You've never been to getquip.com slash explain to find out about Quip electric toothbrushes?
--:-- John Asante: No, I haven't. I've heard of Quip, but I haven't been to that website.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're going to have to talk about this.
--:-- [Discussion transitions to a new topic]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Zach Beecham, host of the Worldly Podcast. Hello.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Hi. So the crisis in Syria, the war in Syria, among the most brutal conflicts ongoing in the world right now? True, false.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: True.
--:-- Zach Beecham: More than true, I would say. It's probably the single worst conflict ongoing in the world today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Biggest humanitarian crisis on the planet among them or the one?
--:-- Zach Beecham: Also true.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well over 400,000 people have died. We don't know exactly how many because the situation is so dangerous that human rights organizations have been unable to continue counting or the UN has in any accurate way.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Over half of Syria's population, about 60 percent in most recent estimates, have been displaced. It's around 13 million people who are living somewhere that is not their home, either in Syria in internally displaced camps or outside of Syria in refugee camps in neighboring Turkey, Lebanon or elsewhere.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is the greatest humanitarian crisis on earth today.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Proxy war for a number of other countries, including the United States. Is that a fact?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Also true.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Part of the reason the Syrian civil war has gotten so bad is a cycle of intervention and counter-intervention on both sides.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What started as a war between Bashar al-Assad's government and essentially its own population has turned into a war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, a war between Russia and various different other groups between the United States and ISIS, between Turkey and Kurdish breakaway factions in the north.
--:-- Zach Beecham: There are so many different sides and so many different axes of conflict that people are flooding weapons into the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are about 2,000 American troops in Syria. According to the State Department, the United States has spent more than $6.5 billion there since the conflict began.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And the conflict's far from over.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But this week, President Trump said, I want to get out. I want to bring our troops back home. I want to start rebuilding our nation.
--:-- Zach Beecham: We will have, as of three months ago, $7 trillion in the Middle East over the last 17 years. Think of it. $7 trillion over a 17-year period. We have nothing, nothing except death and destruction.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a horrible thing.
--:-- Zach Beecham: But many of the president's military advisors and allies don't want to pull out. They say the United States needs to stay and fight a diminished ISIS.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That the United States needs to stay and save Syria.
--:-- Zach Beecham: It'd be the single worst decision the president could make.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We've got ISIL on the ropes. You don't let them off the ropes. Remove American soldiers.
--:-- Zach Beecham: So how did this disaster start? And how could it end?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Zach, I feel like the reason the war in Syria is so complicated is because of where Syria is. Where is it?
--:-- Zach Beecham: It is basically right in the center of what we'd think of as the Middle East.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It borders Israel. It borders Lebanon. It borders Iraq. It borders Turkey.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And in the Arab Spring, this whole region all of a sudden became highly unstable politically.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And is that where this conflict begins in Syria?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. Everything goes back to 2011 in the modern Middle East in a lot of ways, but especially in Syria.
--:-- Zach Beecham: The world's attention now focused on Syria. Will it be the next domino to fall?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Arab Spring was a series of popular uprisings where people basically came out in large numbers and protested against repressive governments.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Even with the brutal crackdown of the regime, demonstrators are on the streets.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Syria was not the first country to experience one of these protests, but it was one of the biggest ones.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Huge numbers of people started coming out in early 2011 against Bashar al-Assad's regime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, the important thing to know is that Assad's government was dominated by people from the Shia religious group.
--:-- Zach Beecham: That's one of the two major branches of Islam. The other one being the Sunni?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Sunnis.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And it was a minority in Syria. About 80% of Syria's population is Sunni.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the Shia government didn't seem to fairly represent their interests. And it didn't objectively.
--:-- Zach Beecham: So you had a government that was positioned against the vast majority of its citizens.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hence, part of why there was such a massive public uprising when they saw uprisings in other countries that were actually effective.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Was that government democratically put into power?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, hell no.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Really, it started with the current dictator's father, Hafez al-Assad, who came to power through a military coup.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It really goes back to French occupation of the country, which in the way that a lot of colonial regimes do, elevated the Shia minority over the Sunni majority.
--:-- Zach Beecham: So Hafez al brutally repressed dissent and Bashar al learned from his father
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so when there were mass protests unlike other Arab dictators who necessarily just send the troops into the streets Bashar decided that the best thing to do would be to start gunning people down.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Witnesses and human rights activists said government security forces had opened fire directly on protesters with rubber bullets, tear gas and live rounds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People might think that this accidentally turned into a civil war. That's not true.
--:-- Zach Beecham: The strategy the entire time was to militarize the conflict.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Assad knew that he could not win an uprising against roughly 80 percent of his population.
--:-- Zach Beecham: So he thought he could win a war where he had control over most of the guns and had most of the military on the side because he had been training and providing them with money for a very long time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The idea was that if you just kill everybody, then people will stop protesting or if it comes to a war, you'll win.
--:-- Zach Beecham: OK, so that's how Assad's dealing with his own popular uprising.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's happening with all of the neighbors? How do they start to get involved?
--:-- Zach Beecham: The two things are intertwined, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So when Assad starts violently repressing the protesters, a large faction of the military defects and helps arm, supply and create a rebel force to fight back.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And that does create a serious threat to Assad.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Most people early in the conflict believed that Assad couldn't hold on. That was the general sense among Middle East observers.
--:-- Zach Beecham: So Assad's allies start to get involved at this point.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He has two major international patrons. The first is Iran.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Iran sees Syria as a vital, one of its only allies in the region, first of all.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Second, another Shia government that it can align with in an increasingly sectarian Middle East where the entire region is divided between Sunni and Shia powers.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And third, it's a really important conduit to some of Iran's important other partners in the region.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Most notably, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
--:-- Zach Beecham: So they intervene quickly in the civil war.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They send their own troops. They send weapons to Assad. They send money.
--:-- Zach Beecham: They're doing pretty much whatever they can to try to prop up the Assad government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so that's one of his allies.
--:-- Zach Beecham: The other one is Russia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Russia has long – really going back to Cold War days, had a close relationship with the Assad dictatorship.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And so it initially doesn't provide military support but it provides anti-aircraft missiles.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It provides diplomatic cover at the United Nations, vetoing Security Council resolutions, condemning Assad.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Generally speaking, Russia and Iran are from the get-go pro-Assad in this conflict.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And both of Russia and Iran's intentions have to do with their own sort of militaristic aims in the region.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Iran is principally geopolitics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Russia is partially geopolitics.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And partially they're very worried about the Arab Spring and in general democratic protests spreading to different countries.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Putin particularly believes that a lot of these protests due to his experience in Eastern Europe are American plots against authoritarian governments.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And he believes that it's important not only to prop up an ally but to show the democratic uprisings can fail.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you've got Iran and Russia piling on in this conflict.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Who's got the back of the rebels?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I know the United States on some level but who in the region?
--:-- Zach Beecham: Yeah, the US didn't do a big job early on backing the rebels.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In fact, its support has been lukewarm the entire conflict.
--:-- Zach Beecham: The key players on the pro-rebel side are the Gulf monarchies, most notably Saudi Arabia and to a lesser degree Qatar.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Saudi Arabia and Iran are locked in a kind of cold war in the Middle East.
--:-- Zach Beecham: They see each other as these fundamental rivals and existential threats to each other's governments for reasons deeply rooted in history and ideology.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And as a result, when this uprising happens, the Saudis see an incredible opportunity to unseat a pro-Iranian government.
--:-- Zach Beecham: For all of the reasons that Iran sees this uprising as seriously threatening to its regional position, Saudi Arabia sees it as seriously promising.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the Saudis start flooding money and weapons to back the rebels.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And other Gulf countries do the same.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The complexity is that they back different players.
--:-- Zach Beecham: The rebels are not a unified force.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We talk about the rebels like they're one thing. But in reality, there are hundreds of different things.
--:-- Zach Beecham: There are lots of different rebel groups.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sometimes they fold. Sometimes they combine. Sometimes they shift.
--:-- Zach Beecham: It sounds hard to keep track of.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are experts who are dedicated to keeping track of just that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And amidst all of this insanity, I guess you've got the United States and Russia sort of staring each other down, right?
--:-- Zach Beecham: Right.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this gets worse as the conflict goes on.
--:-- Zach Beecham: So the first few years of the Syrian civil war are defined by swings back and forth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It looks like the rebels are winning. Then the Iranians come and help out Assad and it looks like Assad is winning and then Saudi and Qatar step up their support and it looks like the rebels are winning again.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And so it teeters back and forth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this is during the Obama presidency.
--:-- Zach Beecham: This is during the Obama presidency.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But perhaps the most decisive event to date was Russia's intervention in the conflict in 2015 when Russia decided to stop being on the sidelines and start directly participating.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Six weeks now, Russian bombers have been taking off round the clock from an airbase near Latakia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Their mission airstrikes on what Moscow calls terrorist targets.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Aaron Ross Powell Russian planes particularly but also coordination from ground forces have played a vital role in turning the conflict around for Assad.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Even in 2013, after Assad crossed a red line the Obama administration had set up for military intervention, that is the use of chemical weapons on its own population, Obama didn't act.
--:-- Zach Beecham: The U.S. didn't intervene.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: With so many players and conflicts and fronts to this war, is it even still about a popular uprising at all?
--:-- Zach Beecham: Is that just a forgotten facet of this conflict?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The demonstration stage of this conflict is long over.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That ended in 2011, really early 2012.
--:-- Zach Beecham: By then, it was a civil war.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now it's not even a civil war anymore.
--:-- Zach Beecham: It's so much more than that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is a place where the Middle East's largest powers and some of the world's largest powers come to blows.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And they fight out various different grievances.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some of them are domestic. Some of them have to do with their foreign policy goals.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And in which these countries come into conflict with each other and support local forces or even directly fight them based on what they perceive as being good for them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the people who suffer the most from this aren't – they're not Americans.
--:-- Zach Beecham: They're not Russians. They aren't Iranians. They aren't Turks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're Syrians.
--:-- Zach Beecham: There are the roughly 24 million people who lived in Syria prior to the war.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These people have been devastated by their country turning into a geopolitical violent playground.
--:-- Zach Beecham: All of these competing interests in Syria, Assad, the rebels, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, they're all taking part in one war.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But in the north of Syria, there is an entire other war being waged.
--:-- Zach Beecham: That's after the break.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so John, how old are you?
--:-- John Asante: I'm 30.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 30? Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 30 years old.
--:-- John Asante: I've been brushing my teeth for a long time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Have you?
--:-- John Asante: As long as I can remember.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I assume, but I don't want to assume.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you've never used an electric toothbrush before?
--:-- John Asante: I have.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There was some time when I was younger. 98, 96, something like that.
--:-- John Asante: Something like, yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so would you believe me if I told you that technology has dramatically changed in the world of electric toothbrushes?
--:-- John Asante: Get out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, these things, they give you little pulsing alerts to tell you when to like start brushing a different part of your mouth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay. That's helpful because I usually treated an electric toothbrush like a manual toothbrush and never felt like I got quite the right scrub in, you know, the right brush, brushing it.
--:-- John Asante: Getquip.com slash explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These things start at $25 and you get free brush heads every once in a while if you sign up now.
--:-- John Asante: That is good.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was going to ask. I'm going to need to replace those things.
--:-- John Asante: Exactly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, your first set is free with your first purchase there.
--:-- John Asante: Getquip.com slash explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All right. So wrapping my head around everything you've just said, you've got a popular uprising being squashed by a dictator.
--:-- John Asante: You've got a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia and each of their allies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Then you've got the two biggest nuclear powers in the world staring each other down.
--:-- John Asante: And this isn't even just contained inside Syria, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, no.
--:-- John Asante: There's more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Another really important part of the conflict is the Syrian Kurdish minority.
--:-- John Asante: So in the north of the country, there are a bunch of people from a different ethnic group, the Kurds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: OK.
--:-- John Asante: And the Kurds early in the conflict decided basically fuck this and created their own kind of country up there called Rojava.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the Syrian government decided basically to leave them alone.
--:-- John Asante: Really? Pretty much, yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There was a kind of soft truce between the Kurds, who Assad didn't really care about, and the rebels who he really wanted to crush.
--:-- John Asante: Now, this really freaked out Turkey, who's the northern neighbor of Syria.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Turkey also has a Kurdish minority, which also has separatist tendencies, and is home to a militant group, the PKK, that the Kurdish government has fought on and off for years.
--:-- John Asante: A roadside bomb has injured at least a dozen soldiers in eastern Turkey.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The country's seen daily violence since July when a ceasefire with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, broke down.
--:-- John Asante: The Kurdish government worried that Rojava would be a base for the PKK.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the Kurds ended up becoming a target for the Turks.
--:-- John Asante: Not only that, but the Kurds have been the principal U.S. ally in Syria fighting ISIS, which is in northern and eastern Syria for the most part.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the Kurds have been a key U.S. ally in the north, right?
--:-- John Asante: And the U.S. has given them tremendous amount of military aid.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is by far our biggest intervention in the Syrian conflict.
--:-- John Asante: But now the Kurds are also fighting Turkey, which is a NATO ally.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you have this whole other kind of conflict that is largely but not entirely independent from the civil war and the other interventions where two US allies are fighting each other while one of them is also fighting ISIS.
--:-- John Asante: And how much of Syria does ISIS control right now?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Very little
--:-- John Asante: It used to control a huge chunk
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can see this on maps
--:-- John Asante: Usually they get illustrated with a giant black blob
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They have a black flag and stuff.
--:-- John Asante: And I'm looking at one right now and the black blob has basically disappeared.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does that mean the United States is sort of succeeding in this effort to quash ISIS in Syria?
--:-- John Asante: The Kurds are fighting ISIS well on our behalf?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. I mean look on a narrow counter-ISIS level, American policy in Syria and Iraq has been a great success.
--:-- John Asante: ISIS's territorial control is basically down to zero at this point.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Iraqi government just declared victory over ISIS and it's part of the conflict.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That was a plus in terms of literally taking away their territory.
--:-- John Asante: The question is whether you can prevent them from restarting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And a lot depends on the eventual outcome of the Syrian conflict and how the Assad government, which seems likely to hold on at this point, it's not guaranteed, but seems likely to hold on, how it manages the territory in which ISIS had control in the past.
--:-- John Asante: So what is the latest going on in the Syrian conflict? What's going on right now?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The biggest development in conflict between the regime and its allies and the rebels has been happening in the Damascus suburbs of Gouda.
--:-- John Asante: So Damascus is the capital of Syria.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But rebels have held a lot of territory near it for quite some time.
--:-- John Asante: The Assad regime, with the help of Iranian and Russian forces, have nearly completely taken back Gouda from the rebels, and some 125,000 people living there have been displaced.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what about that conflict in the north involving Turkey and the United States and the Kurds who are fighting ISIS, but also fighting Turkey?
--:-- John Asante: Has that simmered down?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No.
--:-- John Asante: So the past month or so has seen serious fighting between the Kurdish factions in the north and Turkey, which has intervened essentially to try to take some of their territory and demonstrate that it will not tolerate an independent Kurdish presence that supports the pro-Kurdish independence forces in Turkey.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there's been fighting over the city of Afrin, which is a city in the north held by the Kurds, that Turkey has used its, frankly, superior military to seize that territory from the Kurds.
--:-- John Asante: You said the United States went from unwilling to straight up scared to intervene.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How does John Bolton entering the administration and Mike Pompeo being elevated to secretary of state change that, does it?
--:-- John Asante: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Those are some pro-war guys.
--:-- John Asante: But here they run up against President Trump's instincts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Trump has long believed that the U.S.'s only goal in Syria should be fighting militant groups.
--:-- John Asante: So you got to kill the terrorists.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Somebody criticized me the other day because they asked me what I do.
--:-- John Asante: And I said, I'm going to bomb the shit out of them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's true. I don't care. I don't care.
--:-- John Asante: And he's floated even partnering with the Russians and the Syrian government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He did during the campaign.
--:-- John Asante: And now he said he wants to pull US troops out of Syria.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then the military said they were maybe planning to possibly do that at one point, but it doesn't seem like it's happening anytime soon.
--:-- John Asante: So you've got Trump's instincts running up against the government's instincts and his new advisors who both, I think, support a more confrontational stance towards Russia and Iran.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, is there an end anywhere in sight to this war, to this conflict?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No.
--:-- John Asante: I mean, we think Assad is going to win.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have no idea what Reconstruction could begin to look like.
--:-- John Asante: We have no idea how long peace would hold.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And even if we get there, we have no idea when we might get there.
--:-- John Asante: To that terrible outcome, I should say.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A brutal dictator winning a civil war is not a thing that anyone should want.
--:-- John Asante: And yet it looks like that's where we're going, but at some indefinite point in the future.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Civil wars sometimes last for a decade or more.
--:-- John Asante: This war started in 2011.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You could see even more suffering and even more death in Syria than we've seen already.
--:-- John Asante: And you could see it for a long time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Zach Beecham is a senior reporter at Vox.
--:-- John Asante: I'm Sean Rameswaram from this is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So have I convinced you, John, to make the switch to an electric toothbrush?
--:-- John Asante: Are you ready 22 years later to try it again?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ooh, I think so.
--:-- John Asante: I think so.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are there any other features about this electric toothbrush you could fully sell me on?
--:-- John Asante: I think there are.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think the bristles have been like dentist approved.
--:-- John Asante: I think it's really quiet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's not like clunky, like your old school electric toothbrush.
--:-- John Asante: And I think you can choose what kind of color it comes in too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay. I like that.
--:-- John Asante: The quiet part really does help.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It speaks to you?
--:-- John Asante: Definitely.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Great.
--:-- John Asante: And don't forget, getquipped.com slash explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I will.
--:-- John Asante: You won't.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I won't forget.
--:-- John Asante: Thank you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you. All right.
