1099: Syria | Out of the Loop

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Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Turkey kind of made this happen.
Erdogan is like Littlefinger in Game of Thrones. He has all of these pieces moving, all of these strings that he can pull.
And with his funding, with his help, he managed to take a dictator down in Syria. Welcome to the show.
I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
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Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, out of the loop, Syria.
Syria has been in the news lately. A lot of you have been following this.
Many of you have not. And even if you have, it might just be a little too darn complicated to wrap your head around.
There are so many different players. There's the dictator.
He's gone now. But then there's this group, that group.
There's actually over 70 groups or something like that at last count that were vying for power in Syria. And the situation evolves day by day.
There's a heck of a lot going on here to cut through some of the noise and give us a great overview of this conflict and where it currently stands is YouTuber, sub stacker, if that's a thing, Ryan McBeth. He's a good friend of mine, and he does a lot of videos on geopolitics, military weaponry, these kinds of conflicts and all of the things related to this.
I wanted an overview on Syria. I'm pretty well informed, but Syria is just one of those things where there's like 20 different balls in the air.
This episode seems a little bit disjointed. This is a very complicated conflict.
The timelines are weird. There's a lot of uncertainty.
There's fog of war. This is a really longstanding civil war that is, I guess, kind of, sort of, still not quite over.
So bear with us. We do try to make things as clear as possible.
And I wanted somebody who could juggle a lot of balls, and that is Ryan McBeth. So here we go, out of the loop on Syria.
Thanks for doing this, man. I appreciate it.
Coming back over the holidays. Absolutely.
By the time this airs, it'll be 2025. Can you believe it? Oh my God.
Yeah, I know. Where's our jetpack? That's right.
New year, new Syria, which is what we're talking about today. New year, new regime in Syria or something that resembles a regime.
And you sent me an email with notes and I think it's just the best beginning because you wrote to start, don't get wrapped around the axle if you don't understand what's going on. There are about 70 factions fighting in Syria right now, but it's best to think of them as two big groups, pro Assad forces and anti Assad forces.
That was obviously before a relatively large event, which is Assad talking his tail and flying one of his private jets over to Moscow forever. Yeah, you're absolutely correct.
When you think about it, there's still a lot to talk about because you can talk about what's going on with Iran, what's going on with Russia and why this happened in the first place. Who were the winners and who were the losers? I got to wonder if Assad is sitting around in whatever five-star hotel or wherever they moved him into in Moscow.
And is he watching the news nonstop, looking at all this? Is he like, yeah, I got a meeting with Putin on Monday to see if they can go in and invade and get me my country back? Or is he just like, it was a good run. I'm over it.
You know, what's interesting about Bashar al-Assad is that he never really had much interest in doing this in the first place. That might be a decent point to talk about, but I feel like we're getting a little ahead of ourselves because some people are like, wait, who's Assad again? All right.
Who are the players in Syria? What we know now from Syria is the government fell. The dictator Bashar al-Assad is gone.
He fled to Moscow, like we just mentioned. And now there's another kind of proto regime in place ish, maybe.
But let's back up then and talk about who was Assad, because like you said, he wasn't very interested in running a country. And then suddenly he became one of the most murderous dictators of our generation.
So this can turn into an episode of Dallas or if you watch more recent TV, an episode of Yellowstone. So think of Yellowstone or even Game of Thrones, but set in Syria.
So there is this guy Ha Hafez al-Assad, and Hafez al-Assad was the ruler of Syria, and he had two sons. The first son was being groomed to become the leader of Syria, and he was into cars, and he got into a car wreck one day, and his father told Bashar, you need to come home and you need to take over for when I die.
Now, Bashar al-Assad, he grew up a quiet kid. He was interested in studying French and interested in medicine.
Eventually, he went to university, got a degree in medicine. He did his National Army service as an army doctor.

And then he went to London and he became an ophthalmologist. He did his residency in, I think, the Western Eye Hospital in London.
And he was an ophthalmologist. Then one day he gets a call from his dad and says, hey, your brother is dead and I need you to come back and start wearing the ropes.
So like a good son, Bashar al-Assad comes back to Syria. And one of the first things he did was he joined the army again, and he was in charge of the Syrian occupation later, the withdrawal from Lebanon.
And the other thing he did was he was known as a guy who fought corruption. As it just so happened, everybody who was corrupt was anyone who was opposed to Assad.
Yeah. Like, how do you fight corruption when your dad is the dictator because you can get rid of anyone you want? Oh, wait, that's the pretext for getting rid of anyone you want.
Instead of just, yeah, my dad doesn't like or trust this guy. It's that guy's corrupt, so he has to go to prison forever.
And anybody who's friends with that guy, just to be safe, should probably also go to prison forever. You're absolutely correct.
So Bashar al-Assad, he's in charge of the occupation of Lebanon. So Syria occupied Lebanon.
And is it safe to say that Lebanon was almost like a puppet of Syria or is that overstating? No, you're absolutely correct. You could say that in a lot of ways, Lebanon was a puppet of Syria.
Syria caused a lot of problems in Lebanon. Syria let Iran come in and help fund what eventually became Hezbollah.
When the U.S. was in Lebanon back in the early 80s to try to fix Lebanon's problems and allow stabilization so Lebanon's government can recover during their

civil war. Syria played a huge part in causing a lot of the trouble that we've seen in Lebanon.
We're talking funding, we're talking weapons, we're talking training. And it didn't work out well for the U.S., especially the Marines who were in barracks.
Essentially, the first time we had to deal with suicide bombing terrorism, a guy ran a gate with a truck and blew up and destroyed the Marine barracks. I think over 200 Marines were killed.
This was 82, I want to say. But yeah, Syria has been kind of a thorn in the U.S.
side in that region for a very long time. So Bashar al-Assad is like, I'm going to be an eye doctor, gets a call from his dad that's like, just kidding, you're going to be a dictator.
And you got to wonder, was he like, sweet, I always wanted to be one of these powerful billionaires. Or was he like, I was so looking forward to living in London and not being a dictator, but maybe borrowing a couple hundred million dollars here and there from the country.
No big deal. That seems like the best place to be.
You're not a dictator, but like your dad is. So you're loaded and you have a security detail and you have a life of luxury.
But maybe not everyone in the free world wants to see you dismembered in public.

Russia certainly didn't want that to happen Right

There is a reason for that

Syria and Russia go back to the Cold War

When the U.S. was on Israel's side

So Syria received a lot of funding from the Soviet Union, weapons, training, things like that. So there was this relationship going on.
And Russia really needed an ally in the Middle East, especially with ports on the Mediterranean. And Syria was an excellent place to do that.
But I don't know whether Bashar al-Assad wanted to be dictator. He certainly rose to the occasion.
One of the things that he did while in power was he created the Syrian Computer Club. That doesn't sound very hard ass of a dictator.
He's like, all right, my first order of business, we got to get a land going, man. Have you seen Duke Nukem when you have 12 players? It is awesome.
Oh, and we got to murder a bunch of dissidents in brutal ways in public. But we'll get to that later.
First land party. Yeah.
First the land party. And Bashar al-Assad was the guy that essentially brought the internet to Syria.
And people thought, all right, this guy is going to be a reformer. Like we have someone who was on the side of the people.
Now, I should say, we've skipped over this part here, that Bashar al-Assad and his father, his family, there was what are called Alawites, which is like a sect of a Shia Islam. And one of the things they believe in is a drink alcohol.
Is that the belief or is that just a side effect of one of the beliefs? They have their own interpretation. Okay, gotcha.
And some people don't really consider Alawites to be Muslims. And Alawites are technically a minority, but they gain control through the Ba'ath Party.
And they also gain control because they would take the other minorities, the Druze, the Christians, and stick with them and support them against the Shia Muslims that were inside of Syria. So you're using all these smaller factions to try to gain power and try to remain in power inside of Syria.
I see. Okay.
So the Alawites are a minority, but they gain control and they help other minorities, which is why you see online some support for Bashar al-Assad, because you see these people who are like, it's going to be worse now because they're a small minority Christian. Maybe they're Druze.
Maybe they're some other secular minority. And they're like, HTS, who we'll get to in a second, the new regime is not going to be better for us.
Trust me. Bashar was a bastard, but this is going to be even worse.
You just watch. So this guy becomes the dictator of Syria.
He continues the tradition of supporting minorities and pitching other bad guys against each other in some way and repressing everyone. And you mentioned they're in the Ba'ath Party.
I heard about that from the Iraq war. Is that the same Ba'ath Party that was Saddam Hussein? Yeah, it's a splinter of the Ba'ath Party.
The Ba'ath Party is kind of like this communist or really more like a socialist Arab awakening organization. So there is a Ba'ath Party in Syria.
There's a Ba'ath Party in Iraq. But you could say it's two branches of the same ideals.
What's really interesting is that Bashar al-Assad, when he became president, it was after his father died, which was in June of 2000. And there was a slight problem.
Their constitution, the Syrian constitution, said you can only become president if you're 40 years of age or older. So the legislature lowered the age for serving as president from 40 to 34, which just happened to be Bashar's age.
Oh, that's a fortunate coincidence for him. Otherwise, he would have been ineligible.
Yeah. Imagine that.
And he became president in July of 2000 with 97 percent of the vote. Wow.
Wow. He was so popular.
That's the thing with these dictators. They are just insanely popular.
Lukashenko was like 90 plus for 80 percent of the vote. These guys, man, the mandate is really strong, unless there's some in which case all bets are off.
But otherwise, the mandate, man, it's a clear majority.

Okay, so all jokes aside, isn't al in Arabic the or of?

Yes.

Okay.

Yes, absolutely.

Technically, al-Assad means the lion.

Assad is lion.

I see.

So this is not like the city where they're from. This is the name they've given themselves to sound tough.

Yeah, you can say it like that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay.

Now, when you actually took power, there were a lot of people who thought like, all right, this guy brought us the internet and this thing called Damascus Spring started, which was kind of led by artists and intellectuals and they started demanding reforms. And they had some pretty good feelings about this new president.
Bashar al-Assad created a state of emergency, started throwing people into prison. And he also started to enforce the strict licensing of guns.
Usually when the government starts doing that, it's not necessarily championing gun control for safety. It's so that they can stay in power.
And then 9-11 happened. And Bashar al-Assad was actually sort of like a U.S.
ally during this time. Syria actually helped fight al-Qaeda.
They worked closely with the CIA. I'm sure you've heard of the extraordinary rendition.
Is that the, I won't sugarcoat it, the kidnapping program where the CIA was like, that guy's a terrorist. We're going to put a bag over his head and he's going to pop up later in a place that doesn't have constitutional rights or where we can get away with it.
You're absolutely correct. And so he put a bag over his head.
You could take him to Guantanamo, but as soon as you do that, they have rights. But if you take him to a Syrian prison, those guys will do anything to get a confession or intel out of those guys.
Oh, that's I want to be clear. If that's protecting us from terrorism, fine.
But it sounds pretty terrible and possibly like one of those things that we're going to find out later was just a big mess and tons of innocent people got tortured to death in Syria. In Syria, there is no such thing as a nice Syrian president.
In fact, when the revolution now, we're skipping ahead a couple of years. But when this 10day offensive happened that resulted in the fall of Syria, there were people who believed that some of Assad's prisons actually had secret rooms inside of them, where prisoners were super-duper locked away.
And they actually brought in the White Helmets, which was an organization that would help people out in the left boat who had been trapped under rubble. They brought those guys in to try to search the prison for secret entrances where there might be secret prisons inside.
And you can just imagine if this was the case, I don't believe they actually found any secret areas of these prisons, but you can just imagine dying from hunger or thirst in a free Syria. Oh, that's awful.
Yeah. Hopefully they don't find that stuff in five years.
Hey, there were 300 people down here. We had no idea.
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Now back to Ryan McBeth. They went into, what is it? Sednaya it's called prison.
And there were kids in there that had been born in there probably because their mothers got by the guards is so gross on so many levels. they showed the footage, and it's like people lived in there for how long? And it looks like a dirty shower, and that's the whole room.
And you just sleep on the floor in the dark. It's just horrifying the conditions that you would see in a place like this.
It's hell on earth, and people spent decades in there. I followed the Syrian Civil War subreddit,dit and somebody posted videos and news of the guys that they were finding in these prisons were saying, oh, are you from Saddam Hussein's army? And it's, oh, I got news for you, man.
That guy's been out of the game for a while. And one of the guys made a comment.
What are these things that everybody keeps pointing to? And they're talking about the phones. They don't realize that it's a phone with a touch screen.
It's like they've never seen this. They've never heard of this.
They didn't know Iraq fell. That's how long they've been away from other people and other sources of information and just probably other humans because they would have gone, hey, what's new since you got thrown in here a week ago? Oh, Saddam Hussein is gone.
No, they haven't talked to anybody for 12 years or however long it's been 20 years. All right.
So Al-Assad becomes president. He gets 97 percent of the vote.
You got the Damascus Spring question mark. Congratulations, but not really.
Gun control. Extraordinary rendition.
OK, so by this point, we can see that Al-Assad is a monster, right? He's definitely gassed his own people, right? He's killing all these dissidents. He's throwing people in prison.
This is not the ophthalmologist that everybody had hoped for who likes the internet and computers. No, you're absolutely right.
And the gassing of people didn't come until a little bit later. In January of 2011, there was a fruit vendor in Tunisia who got his produce confiscated by the police because he couldn't afford a license or the policeman's bribe.
So then he lights himself on fire. And this was the beginning of Arab Spring.
Now, this is where you saw Libya fall. This is where you saw Mubarak in Egypt fall.
And protests in Syria start and people start demanding reforms. They demand the end of the state of emergency, which has been in place in one form or another since, like, 1963.

The Syrian security forces, they respond with violence.

And the Shah blames outsiders for the protests.

So we all immediately establish sanctions against the Assad regime.

I think it was in April of 2011.

And the EU imposes the travel ban. Even

Canada imposed the sanctions on Assad, the nicest people on earth. The U.S.
proposed U.N. sanctions

and Russia, which has been an ally in Syria, and also they're on the security cancel. They vetoed

that resolution every single time. Sure.
So now you got mass demonstrations. And pretty soon,

armed militants start rising up and the country starts heading down the path to civil war.

Thank you. So now you got mass demonstrations.
And pretty soon, armed militants start rising up and the country starts heading down the path to civil war. You have some army units defect and they pop up on the side of the rebels.
Now, in the middle of this absolute mess, this organization called ISIS starts to appear in Syria. If you think of a map of Syria, Think of the boot chicken McNugget.
All right. Take that boot chicken McNugget and turn it at 45 degrees with the boot part facing up.
And that's kind of what Syria looks like. I just want to pause and let people who are now just learning that there is a regular shape for each chicken McNugget that is uniform across all of them.
That has to sink in for a second because no one's going to listen to the next thing you say until they're like, wait a minute, my whole life I've been eating chicken McNuggets and now I realize the shape is not random. That's right.
Those are molded. That's right.
They have four shapes and it's like the boot, the bell, and I can't remember the other two shapes. But two shapes should be enough to get most people off Chicken McNuggets for the most part.
Anyway, continue. So at the top right of that boot is the intersection or the border with Iraq.
And so now you have this group called ISIS forming northern Iraq and northwestern Syria. And that whole area, it's a very strange area.
It's a very lawless area. It's always been that way.
And usually those areas have had a

strong man in charge. There'll be rebel groups pop up in those areas.
There's not a lot to do,

not a lot of major cities, not a lot of industry. And so they manufacture rebellion and revolution.

So that's where a lot of revolutions and a lot of bandits and these ne'er-do-wells, they hang out.

Thank you. not a lot of industry.
And so they manufacture rebellion and revolution. So that's where a lot of revolutions and a lot of bandits and these ne'er-do-wells, they hang out in that area because it's hard to get to.
And there's not a lot of industry there, so people don't really care. It's funny that you just described ISIS as ne'er-do-wells.
Yes. And by now, Russia is kind of looking at the ISIS conflict.
This is in 2015. And they're like, all right, you know what? We can go into Syria and we can farm XP by fighting ISIS.
Okay. Seriously, that's literally what they're doing.
They send aircraft. They send special forces.
They send Wagner. The mercenary group Wagner, for people who don't know.
The mercenary group Wagner, correct. And they start fighting ISIS and sometimes fighting the rebels as well.
But the whole idea here is that, all right, if you're a Russian and you want to learn how to be a JTAC, like a joint terminal air controller, call in bombs onto bad guys, you have essentially a big live fire range in northwestern Syria when you want to fight ISIS. So it's a way literally to farm XP, to get your special forces and get your terminal air controllers trained on how to drop bombs.
It also allows your pilots to get training as well. During this fighting, the major fighting was around the Syrian city of Aleppo.

This city is a major city.

It's a major trade route.

The M4 and M5 highways run through Aleppo.

And it became like the focus of a lot of fighting between the rebels and the Assad government. And so the battle over Aleppo essentially rages from 2012 until 2016.

And it basically turns Aleppo into an Arab Stalingrad. And Assad started indiscriminately bombing.
Now, he bombed to the point where they essentially kind of ran out of bombs. I don't know if you've heard of the term barrel bomb.
That's the helicopter bomb, right? Yeah. They would take 55-gallon drums, stop them with explosives, push them out the door of a helicopter, and now it's a bomb.
They're not very surgical. They would push these out into civilian areas or onto what they thought were rebel forces.
And with Russian help, they started to take back the city of Aleppo. This is essentially Russian close air support.
And by 2016, government forces are in control of Aleppo, and ISIS starts to collapse. By April of 2017, that's actually when we start seeing the use of chemical weapons, specifically in rebel-controlled towns.
And actually, in one case, Assad used sarin gas against this one town, and the Russians found out what he what he did and they thought we have to destroy any evidence of this. So Russia actually bombed the hospital.
Oh, gosh. Wow.
OK. That's where people were going to be treated.
OK. It's interesting because it's like they had another option for getting him to stop using chemical weapons.
But instead they were like, what we need to do is make sure that everybody who's been hit with this chemical weapon is dead and can't say anything. Which it's a very Russian way of doing things, because if you take a lung sample, you're still going to find scarring.
But when there's no lungs, can't argue that logic. Jeez.
It is a very Russian way of doing things. So since roughly 2022, the lines between the rebels and the Assad forces have been mostly stable.
Now we should talk about the rebels and the pro-Assad people. On the pro-Assad side, of course, you have Russia, right? Russia, they need that warm water port.
It's a great way to refuel their ships when they're in the Mediterranean. It's a way to get supplies in when they're in the Mediterranean.
It's also part of the land bridge to Africa. So Russia can make a refueling stop in Syria before they head on to some of their interests in Africa.
Now, Iran, they supported Syria and Assad as well, mainly because they needed Syria to exist, because Syria was a road that went from Iran through northern Iraq, through Syria, and directly across the border into Lebanon. So that's how weapons got to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
So the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they used the war, again, to form XP, to train on how to fight these bad guys and to train their militias on fighting bad guys. Hezbollah was a big supporter of Assad as well.
And I think they had about roughly 2,000, roughly a brigade of honest to God, genuine, honest to God special forces.

These are genuine operators, Hezbollah special forces that were fighting in Syria on the side of Assad. Because, again, it was a way to train so that when they fought Israel, they would have all the training they needed.
I have heard that a lot of people who are Hezbollah supporters were pretty pissed off about the fact that they were sent to Syria to kill civilians on behalf of Assad, who kills tons of Muslims. Yeah, I have not heard that, but I would not be surprised when you're a soldier.
This is a training opportunity. Go do what you're told to do.
And I've said before, Hezbollah is a varsity team. Hamas, they're JV.
Hezbollah is the varsity team. They are genuine, honest-to-God soldiers with training programs, with pay, with benefits.
So if they're told to go, you go. That's right.
And you get a free pager when you sign up. You get a free pager when you sign up.
Now, on the other side of that, the anti-Assad forces, you essentially have three different groups. All right.
You have the Islamist groups and HTS or Hayat Tahrir Ashal, which basically means like the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant or Levant Liberation Committee. HTS, which is the organization that's ruling Syria right now, that was one of the Islamist group factions.
And they were an offshoot of Al-Qaeda, and then they backed away from Al-Qaeda. In fact, they even arrested Al-Qaeda members.
Because that doesn't bode well. HTS is an offshoot of Al-Qaeda and now runs Syria.
It's not something you want to read or see. It's not.
Although we can get to the fact that they don't seem to be as bad as we thought they were going to be. Okay.
Good news-ish. There is another group called al-Din, which is essentially like the guardians of the religious organization.
They're another offshoot of al-Qaeda, although those guys consider ISIS heretics. So like they mainly fought ISIS, but they also fought Assad.
So that's one faction of your Islamist groups. You have another anti-Assad faction, which are Kurdish groups.
And for the most part, the U.S. supported these Kurdish groups.
Now, Kurds are Muslims as well. You had the SDF, which is the Syrian Democratic Forces.
It's the main U.S. ally.
It was probably the largest group fighting. It had about 100,000 or so fighters.
Unfortunately, this particular group is tied to another group called the PKK, which is a Kurdish militant movement that's in southern Turkey and northern Iraq, and Turkey considers them terrorists. So the SDF was fighting against Assad, but sometimes it would also fight against Islamic forces, and sometimes it would fight against Turkish forces.
And there was another unit called the YPG, or People's Protection Unit, which was like a component of the SDF as well. Those guys mainly fought the Turks, though.
Now, the third type of group that is anti-Assad are basically moderate opposition groups who just don't like Assad. So there is the Free Syrian Army, which is a bunch of rebel groups, including defectors from the government.
So people in the army who switch sides. Then you have the Syrian National Army, which you might be hearing a little bit about, as they were essentially a Turkish-backed coalition that was operating mostly in northern Syria.
But the Syrian National Army, or SNA, mainly fought the Kurds. Okay.
So it is like Game of Thrones. Serious civil war.
Yeah, like we're having a little bit of a laugh, but it's a really serious subject with multiple parties fighting the government, but also fighting each other and just doing it in horrific ways. It's not like when a real national army says, look, we got all the manpower we need.
We have naval support. We have air support.
We're just going to cordon this off. This is like house to house.
Let's burn this entire village down and kill everyone in it. And then we won't have to worry about it anymore.
Kind of fighting. It wasn't nice.
And everyone was fighting each other usually. And sometimes they would also fight Assad's forces.
That kind of leads us to present day. And now that we're at present day, Hamas attacked Israel.
Israel fought back, invaded Gaza. And then they turn around and they go north and they go after Hezbollah.
And so Hezbollah starts pulling their fighters out of Syria, back into Lebanon to start fighting the Israelis. So now you are Bashar al-Assad and you have one very reliable, very experienced brigade of special forces that is suddenly gone out of the fight.
And one of the other issues that you saw in Assad's army is that he didn't have a particularly good army. It was an army of conscripts, somewhat professional officers.
But by this point, the Syrian pound, it's running at a rate of like 15,000 Syrian pounds for one U.S. dollar.
So their economy is collapsing. It's really tough to purchase goods from outside of the country with that.
So you had some soldiers who are not getting paid very well, so they would actually pay a bribe to their commander to say, just mark on the list that I showed up, and then they would go work a civilian job or get their side hustle on. So you have these units that are essentially ghost units.
You have people who aren't very well motivated to fight if they're even there at all. And since the army was so corrupt, you have officers taking payoffs.
They're taking care of themselves, but they aren't necessarily watching the front lines. So that happens.
And then those troops move back to Lebanon, the ones from Hezbollah. And then the third thing happens, and that's President Trump gets elected.
So now, if you are an organization and you want to take over Syria, you essentially have 50 or so days to take over all of Syria before a new U.S. regime comes into power and might change the dynamics on the ground because President Trump has always been a wild card.
President Trump might fund the Kurdish forces more or he might remove funding from the Kurdish forces. And either of those things could change the outcome on the ground, because if you are a part of an Islamic rebel group, you might think, all right, if the Kurdish forces don't get any more funding, then we should try to attack Assad now to weaken Assad, because the Kurds aren't going to have as many weapons.
Or we could attack Assad and then turn north and attack the Kurds once we capture enough land as a buffer zone. Or if the Kurds do get more funding from the U.S., now you're going to have to compete with the Kurds because the Kurds are going to start taking land.
So I believe what happened is that the Islamic forces thought, you know what, the peace treaty between Hezbollah and Israel has just been signed. That means that Hezbollah is not going to be back inside of Syria to cause trouble.
We need to push as hard as we can to take Aleppo. And they did.
If you take a look at the casualties that Assad's army sustained in defending Aleppo, it was essentially like maybe 200 dudes. Yeah, they just cut and ran.
I saw the videos. I saw dudes stripping down, literally stripping their uniform off and running away with like shorts on and a t-shirt because they didn't want to be known as military.
I assume their first stop was someone's house to get a decent set of clothes on so they could blend in with civilians and pretend that they were also running from this offensive. One of the reasons why you see armies collapse slowly and then really fast is that the average unit needs resupply every 36 hours or so.

So who are the first soldiers who are going to leave?

They're going to be the supply people.

They're in the rear.

They have access to things like radio or internet or cell phone service.

They have a way to charge their stuff.

If you're in a foxhole, you probably don't have a way to charge your cell phone.

And so these guys start hearing like, hey, HTS is attacking. And they start thinking like, you know what? I'm done.
And so they leave. And then the guys at the front line, they haven't been resupplied in 36 hours.
36 hours turns into 40 hours. And that turns into 48 hours.
And now they go, you know what? We haven't eaten in two days. I'm leaving to go find food.
And so that doesn't create a very defensible position, right? When people start leaving because they're looking for food. And as it just so happens, what is Aleppo the intersection of? Highway four and highway five.
So now you have a straight shot down that highway right toward Damascus. Speaking of ISIS and Sharia law, now for a word from our sponsors.
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It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now back to Out of the Loop Syria with Ryan Macbeth.
Aleppo is essentially, isn't that kind of the New York of Syria, whereas Damascus is the Washington, D.C.? Is that fair? Yeah, that's a fair comparison. Aleppo was a manufacturing hub, an intellectual hub.
Yes, you could say that. OK, so they capture this big city, this main city, the main city that's not the capital.
And then they decide, let's roll to seat a government, because if that's how they defended Aleppo, maybe Damascus, we can at least encircle it. And I think that was their initial plan.
And it looks like since everybody just cut and ran, they just kept moving. Absolutely correct.
They just kept moving. Took them about 10 days to finally secure the capital.
Jeez, that is nuts. And like we said at the beginning of the show, Assad gets in one of his jets and flies to Moscow.
And I think didn't he have a fake press conference where he pretended to still be in the country, but he was already gone.

I actually don't recall seeing that, but that's a little Baghdad Bob right there.

That could have been fog of war stuff like Reddit post says this, but truth says that.

I don't know.

I just remember hearing that he had a fake press conference where he was like, all right, we're dug in over here.

And he's like, yeah, dug into my four seasons stay over here in Moscow, eating caviar while you suckers hopefully shoot your way out. It was just nuts.
OK, so they get rid of Assad. But what does this mean for the world? Who is in charge of Syria right now? Can you even answer this question? Yeah, that's actually a pretty darn good question.
Right now, it seems like the de facto leader of Syria is Hamad al-Jolani, who was the head of HTS. HTS would nominally be in charge.
Al-Jolani, kind of an interesting dude. Al-Jolani actually means Golan.
So Al-Jolani's family was originally from the Golan Heights of Syria. When Israel invaded during the 1967 war, his family fled.
Eventually, they ended up in Saudi Arabia. So technically, Al Jolani isn't even Syrian.
He's from Saudi Arabia. I guess he's ethically Syrian, but he was born in Saudi Arabia.
So eventually, Al Jalani returns to Syria and decides, I'm going to become a medical doctor. He does that for a while.
When the U.S. invades Iraq, he decides that he's going to go on jihad.
Well, yeah, he's going to say, you know what happens when a Syrian studies medicine abroad and comes back to Syria. Nothing good.
Nothing good, right? So he decides he's going to go jihad. And he joins al-Qaeda.
He ends up in Iraq. And he starts fighting U.S.
forces. Eventually, we capture him.
This was in 2006. And we held this guy until 2011.
And he was released. And supposedly, he might have joined ISIS, but maybe not.
And then he swore off Al Qaeda. But he essentially, at that time when the U.S.
invaded Iraq, Iraq was easy to get to. And it was like Woodstock.
So if you were a dude who wanted to jihad, who wanted to show in front of your friends, like, I'm a real man. I went and fought the Americans.
You had two choices, right? You can go to Iraq. You can go to Afghanistan.
Afghanistan's a one-way trip. Even the Afghans don't want you there.
From what I understand, there were Chechens who were ethnically Muslim Russians who tried to go to Afghanistan to teach the Taliban sniper tactics, and the Taliban them. We don't want you either.
But if you go to Iraq to fight, it's a bus ride away. You get air conditioning, right? You get familiar food.
You can fight. And then when you're done fighting, you go back to college and show all your friends, hey, I'm the man.
It was like Woodstock. Iraq was like Woodstock for all the jihadists.
Everyone wanted to be there, or at least wanted to say they were there. So this dude comes back, and after a certain set of circumstances, he forms HTS.
And they were kind of in with Al-Qaeda, and then they kind of weren't anymore. In some cases, they fought ISIS, and then this guy starts fighting Syrian loyalists.

And right now, it seems like he is in control of the country.

And all of the things that people thought would go wrong haven't gone wrong yet and

might not.

This guy is still on the terror watch list.

He was in an American prison for six years, was it, roughly? 2006, five years? Yeah, 2006, 2011, he was in an American prison. So he was on our radar screen.
He was a known affiliate of Al-Qaeda, which kind of puts you on the naughty list. But if you want to get technical, Nelson Mandela was a terrorist, and he was invited to the White House House when Nelson Mandela was part of the African National Congress.
The African National Congress was a communist organization that also believed in kinetic action. They tried the peaceful route that didn't work.
So he actually went and got trained in small arms and insurgent tactics, I believe, in Cuba. So Nelson Mandela was a terrorist before he was the president of South Africa.
In fact, I believe he was on America's terrorist watch list, I want to say, until 2008. A friend of mine who has been a guest on the show, Bradley Stein, S-T-E-Y-N, if people want to search for him, he was recruited by the apartheid government to go undercover in the communist movement, went to Angola, got trained, flipped sides because he was like, oh, actually, maybe we're the baddies, white supremacists.
And then he ended up uncovering an assassination plot against Nelson Mandela. It's super interesting story.
Not that there weren't a zillion assassination plots against Nelson Mandela, but he uncovered one of them and ended up being his bodyguard for a while, which is pretty cool.

So Mandela believed in violence at one point.

So maybe Al Jalani has given that up.

Maybe he's not a terrorist anymore.

I guess people can change.

And you look at Mandela, he was a terrorist.

He became president of South Africa.

Some of the things like Sharia law, it doesn't look like that has been implemented or that the HTS is interested in either factional infighting or they're interested in implementing Sharia law. That might come later.
But right now, it seems like their main issue is getting the power back on. I've talked with people from Syria who said, honestly, I don't care if we're Islamic.
I don't care if we're democratic. I just want the power back on for more than two hours.
Yeah, make it so that I can walk down the road without getting shot at by bandits or ISIS. Yeah, look, he's got his work cut out for him to pacify Syria and make it a civilized place again after all of this war.
Yeah. Maybe he'll calm the rhetoric a little bit.
Wasn't it him who said, I want a peaceful coexistence with Israel? That is not something that Islamic terrorists generally put in the news. It's not.
And one of the things Israel did, I understand why they did it. Israel bombed quite a few loyalist aircraft depots, supply depots.
In a way, it's a shame they did that because if I was the U.S. government, I would be more than happy to hand the Syrian government some money and say, let's take these jets and get them over to Ukraine.
They know how to use them, assuming those jets are in any condition to fly. Maybe they can use them for parts.
But he was a little annoyed that Israel did that because that is now free Syrian property. And I think Israel did it because the gloves have come off.
They're not letting anything bad happen essentially ever again. I think they just don't want to not do it and then find that they're now being used to run bombing raids towards Israel and they have to shoot them out of the sky.
I'm not trying to excuse it, but that's probably the logic here. Oh, there's chemical weapons.
Should we let those go into HTS's hands and hope for the best or destroy them right now and not have to worry about it anymore? OK, I get it. It's understandable.
Right. But it seems like HTS, they haven't tried to fight the Kurds, which is good.
Now, what's interesting is when you look at the major winners here, the biggest winner is Syria. But the second biggest winner is actually Turkey, because Turkey kind of helped make this happen through funding militias, funding things like the Free Syrian Army, Syrian National Army.
So Turkey kind of made this happen. So Erdogan is like Littlefinger in Game of Thrones, right? He has all of these pieces moving, all of these strings that he can pull.
And with his funding, with his help, he managed to take a dictator down in Syria. And he might have a lot of influence over how the new government is formed.
Supposedly, they're not going to try to form a new government or write a new constitution for another three or four years. I believe the reason behind that is if they try to do that right now, there's going to be all these little factions and political parties that are going to try to gain power for power's sake.
If they hold off for a couple of years and actually write their constitution correctly and get the services back on and figure out what people actually want out of government, then you might end up with a more stable government instead of a crazy constitution like Lebanon has, which always causes friction. So what does this mean in conclusion here? Because this is super confusing for a lot of people.
Hopefully we've cleared up a lot of the players and what's going on here now that Assad is gone. But what does it mean for the world? Israel, okay, they've got a neighbor that is not Assad, which were they better off with Assad who was secular and maybe the devil you know, now they've got HTS next door, the devil you don't know.
But that says we want peaceful coexistence with Israel, which is okay, status quo slash better than Assad. But what about the U.S., Russia, China, the Middle East? Do you know all the other neighbors that are definitely relevant that people never talk about? So major losers here are Russia.
From what I understand, Russia evacuated some bases, but I believe they still have forces at one port and one airfield. Now, Russia is the major loser here.
They may have actually evacuated a good number of troops and aircraft from that region. And that makes it very hard for Russia to refuel planes on the way to Africa or to refuel ships in the Mediterranean.
That's kind of it's bad for Russia in one way, but it's's good in another because if you have a squadron of aircraft sitting in Syria, that's one less squadron that could fight in Ukraine. So in some ways, like one headache has gone away for Russia and they can just concentrate in Ukraine.
Russia is definitely a loser. Now, any nation is allowed to make any sort of pact they want with another

nation. One thing Syria could do was allow these Russian bases to stay, come up with a new lease agreement, and then they get hard currency for whatever the ruble is worth.
They get hard currency, maybe oil from Russia in exchange for a lease. So that is one thing they could do.
Another loser?

Syria does have its own oil,

but I can only imagine what the royal industry is like now. One of their major industries was illegal drugs, Captagon.
Yeah, we did a whole episode on Captagon. People should, we'll link to it in the show notes.
Fascinating. Syria was making $5 billion a year off Captagon because they could make it for a couple of pennies, sell it for 20 bucks a tablet.
And a lot of jihadist spiders were on this stuff. Supposedly, Hamas was on, might have been Captagon, might have been some other amphetamine when they actually attacked Israel on October 7th.
If you haven't heard of Captagon, don't worry. I did a whole show about it.
Again, it's linked in the show notes. The reason you haven't heard about it is we have better stuff here in the United States.
And I put that in air quotes, of course, but it's basically like crappy Adderall. I suppose.
Yeah. Yeah.
It wouldn't do it if you had access to Adderall, cocaine, meth, whatever speed. Because my question is, how come we don't have a ton of it here if it's so cheap and easy to make? And the answer is because we have other stuff that's better that's cheap and easy to make.
Womp womp. Yeah.
But the busts with Captagon are mind blowing. They'll find like 200 million dollars worth of tabs in a shipment of washing machines or something that goes to Dubai.
It's just nuts. Yeah.
Another major loser, Iran. Essentially, they've lost their way to get weapons over to Hezbollah.
That's a big deal.

And Iran, they didn't try to shore up the Assad regime after they saw it falling because, like, they had bigger problems.

They just got a bloody nose from Israel attacking them, either with the air-launched ballistic missiles.

Perhaps the F-35, we're still not sure if the F-35 was used in that attack on Iran a couple of months ago. So right now, Iran is looking at their air defenses and going, you know what? We can put money toward helping Hezbollah or we could put money toward our own air defenses.
Where do we want our money to go? It's probably not going to be Hezbollah. That was extremely embarrassing for Iran.
That attack on Iran, that was when the Ayatollahs, I always separate the Ayatollahs from the people of Iran, who are awesome and have some of the best food. The Ayatollahs, they talked a bunch of smack and then they immediately got their entire country's worth of air defenses knocked out by Israel in two days.
Not only their air defenses, but also planetary mixers, which are essentially mixers for rocket fuel. That was one of Israel's major targets.
So it's going to take at least a year for Iran to order more mixers, most likely from China, get those things installed. They're not going to be able to build any rockets for at least a year.
Oh, Hezbollah, no toys, man. No weapons, no rockets.
Hamas, whatever's left of them, no more rockets for them than either. They get all that stuff from Iran, correct? Yeah.
Mostly smuggled across the border from Egypt. Yeah, some stolen.
Yeah, for the most part, yes, from Iran. So what does it mean for the U.S.? The U.S.
has always supported the Kurds. So I got to tell you, the scary part is, I've often said this, if you think it sucks to be an enemy of the U.S., wait until you're an enemy.
I'm surprised the Kurds even talk to us anymore. Yeah, we have screwed them over so many times.
The only reason that they haven't lost our number is because they don't have that many options. That's correct.
And so for the U.S., well, all right, we might give less money to the Kurds. We might see a stable Syria.
There'll be fewer weapons trafficked from Iran into Lebanon for Hezbollah use. So it's a net win for the U.S.
But how Syria is going to play out is up in the air. We don't really know which direction they're going to go in, although it looks like they might be going into a moderate direction.
But for the most part, the one thing that should concern us is what's going to happen to the Kurds because we have been supporting them. But with this new administration, you might say, OK, well, you got your free country.
Good luck. Man, what a mess.
I assume there's still light skirmishes or fighting happening somewhere in Syria. I haven't really heard much about it.
It seems like the rebel groups have pretty much stopped shooting at each other. This includes the Kurds.
And that's a good thing. If these factions can just get along and form one democratic government, inshallah, that would be the best possible outcome.
That would be absolutely incredible. I would love to see Syria.
My friend went and he said it was just incredible. He was like, the people are great.
The food is great. And of course, he was a Kiwi from New Zealand.
And he's like, look, I don't mean to be dark, but everything is really cheap right now because it's a little bit of a crappy way to describe things. He was a little more tactful than I was just now.
But one of the things that he did is he went around to a lot of people and bought their family heirlooms from them and said, if you want this back, here's my phone number and address and I will give it back to your family in 10 years or whatever, if you want to. And he put the price paid for it.
He has like a museum-ish thing in his house in New Zealand, full of all this old Syrian stuff. And he's like, yeah, I'm just expecting these people to call me back and be like, can I have my great grandfather's backgammon set that he made out of marble or pearl or whatever? And he'll be like, yeah, 50 bucks.
That's what I gave your dad for it. Here you go.
Because these people needed money to escape. Anyway, he said it was just the most incredible country, one of the most incredible countries he's been to besides Yemen, another place that none of us are going to in the next 20 years.
I don't know, man. You want to go to Syria once this thing dies down? Are you a traveler? I am a traveler.
I've been to that area before. I have been to Israel.
I have been to Iraq. But not as a tourist.
I didn't go as a tourist. No, it might be more fun when you can go as a tourist instead of when you're worried about people shooting at you.
Yeah, considering I have a job doing contracting for the government, I have to inform my security manager every time I travel. They probably won't like that one too much.
I want to go to Iran, Syria, and Yemen, and I might die of old age before I get the chance to do it. Syria, though, looking a little more promising than the other two so far.
I hope so. I really do.
These people have suffered a lot. And I think that they want to create as close to a democracy as they can get in that region of the world.
Yeah. More power to them.
Ryan McBeth, thank you so much for coming on and explaining this very complicated set of moving parts in Syria. This episode is like juggling 20 different objects at the same time.
This is just a really crazy amount of things to keep in your head. I can only imagine what it's like if you're actually in Syria trying to deal with all this as well.
It's just a complete cluster that frankly could have been a lot worse than it ended now. I mean, look, the Civil War was terrible.
That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is we could have had HTS take over and turn this place into something terrible.
We could have had it turn into 10 more years of Civil War. Maybe it's too early to say.
But so far, it looks like that's not happening, which is just a miracle. If there's any positive news coming out of Syria these days, it's this.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on.
I believe this is my fourth time. So the fifth time do I get a bathrobe like a Saturday night long?

That's right. We'll have a bathrobe made for you.
Yeah. A slightly too small bathrobe that you have to wear on appearance number six.

Thank you so much for inviting me. Thanks, Ryan.
you're about to hear a trailer for our interview with bill browder he was one of the first investors in russia after the fall of the iron curtain and became a thorn in the side of vladimir

putin who to this day has him looking over his shoulder after he uncovered a massive fraud inside the Russian government. This is one of our most popular episodes.
So if you haven't heard that yet, you'll want to check that out. Making 10 times your money is the financial equivalent of smoking crack cocaine.
And once you do it once, you just want to repeat it over and over and over and over again. It was completely, absolutely Wild West, chaos, gold rush type of situation.
The companies were run by these oligarchs. And these oligarchs said, well, we might as well just cheat everybody on everything.
And so while I was sitting there down 90%, they were going to steal my last 10 cents on the dollar. I took a decision which nobody had ever taken before, which was to take on one of the oligarchs.
I did. I fought back big time.
I ended up with 15 bodyguards. There was a lead car, a lag car, a sidecar, three armed guys in my car.
When we got close to the home, they would go and scout the rooftops for snipers. They would look for bombs under the cars and secure the stairwells and then escort me into the apartment.
Then I had two guys with automatic weapons sitting in my living room. It was very, very intense, very scary.
And after that, I hired a young lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky to help me investigate it. Sergei and I exposed the crime.
The same people who Sergei testified against arrested him and then tortured him to try to get him to withdraw his testimony. And they thought, you know, here's a guy.
He buys a Starbucks in the morning. He wears a blue suit and a white shirt and a red tie.
And he works in the tax practice of an American law firm. He'll buckle in a week.
And it turns out that they got him wrong completely. He's the most principled guy in the world.
He was really a man of steel. On the morning of November 17th at 7.45 a.m., I got the call from Sergei's lawyer, and it was the most horrifying, life-changing, soul-destroying news that I could have ever gotten.
And if you want to hear more about how Bill Browder took on one of the most powerful men in the world, Vladimir Putin, and continues to fight for change, check out episode three of The Jordan Harbinger Show. All things Ryan McBeth will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.
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