Global News Podcast - Special edition: What's next for Syria

Episode Date: December 8, 2024

The latest from our correspondents across the region on what this means for Syria, its people and its future.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If Hitler isn't defeated, it's the end of the free world. Purple Heart Warriors, listen now by searching for dramas wherever you get your BBC podcasts. You're listening to the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Valerie Sanderson with a special edition on Sunday the 8th of December about the developing situation in Syria where Islamist rebels are now in control of the capital and the country. Syria's Prime Minister had this response.

Any leadership chosen by the Syrian people, we're ready to cooperate with it, providing all possible facilities to ensure a smooth transfer of various government files. And... They've seen Syria not as a country but as a hotel where people in it are actually just servants. We'll get the latest from our correspondents on what this means for Syria, its people and its future. It has been an extraordinary few days in Syria, culminating in the fall of the House of Assad

after more than 50 years, as Islamist-led rebel forces entered the capital Damascus. President Bashar al-Assad's government forces appear to have offered little resistance, and now the Syrian Prime Minister, Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali, in a recorded video message, says he's to work on a transition of power. Any leadership chosen by the Syrian people, we're ready to cooperate with it, providing all possible facilities to ensure a smooth transfer of various government files. Videos from social media showed people celebrating on the streets of Damascus. President Bashar al-Assad is reported to have fled the country and hundreds of videos posted

overnight showed scenes of jubilation with statues of the Assad dynasty being toppled. The rebels say they've freed what they called unjustly detained prisoners. This unverified footage was posted online showing the moment apparently when the women's wing of a prison was unlocked with those inside allowed to go free. Bashar al-Assad and his Baath party had exerted a brutal rule over Syria. The country has been devastated by a civil war since 2011 when he and his acolytes cracked down on mass pro-democracy demonstrations. Millions fled and hundreds of thousands died, were gassed, tortured or shot on his orders.

From the Syrian capital, Rania Qataf gave her reaction to the extraordinary developments. I live in Damascus and I can tell you I have never felt this happy in my home like I have felt today. You can never describe this feeling on a show. You have to be here. Because what we are experiencing as Syrians is for the first time we're feeling that we are actually free. And this is a feeling that cannot be described. We don't know how to describe what we own right now because it is something we've never had. Bashar al-Assad, not only is he a murderer,

he took away the youth, he took away every opportunity, he took away all the resources, he took away every single right any human can have from all of us, all of us. So imagine being in a prison but in an open air prison. Rania Kataf. The rebels say a curfew will come into place at 13 hours GMT and will last until early Monday morning. Our reporter Barbelle Paitasher arrived with the rebel forces in Damascus. We've reached Damascus. this has been going on. The soldiers are taking off their uniforms and just walking away.

And in fact, we have passed on the motorway, you could see abandoned or discarded clothing from soldiers, army equipment. Also, tanks, military cars, empty and left behind, a few people clambering over them. But mostly the roads were very, very quiet coming in. Now that we're just driving into Damascus, I can see there is some traffic on the street. Again, not that much. Very quiet. Some people on the street as well,

but I don't really get a sense of any kind of focus of activity. Shops look like they are shut at this point, and we are just heading down a main street now. Just having crossed into Syria into the country we passed another military base where our Syrian guide said people were going in and taking things, taking equipment, because there wasn't nobody stopping them from doing so. We're just passing the Iranian embassy now. There's a picture of the Lebanese leader Hassan al-Sulaim who was assassinated by the Israelis recently on the outside.

And part of it is ripped down. Our chief international correspondent, Lise Doucet, has been reporting on Syria for decades and gave me her response to the news. It's extraordinary, first of all, to hear Barbara's report as she goes into, crossing from Lebanon into the capital. It's a road we've taken so many times before and it's always been crisscrossed by checkpoints with really quite forcefully trying to impose order in Syria, of course the Syrian army, and she talked about the Iranian embassy, it's in Meze, well-to-do neighborhood, which is this many, many embassies there with their high walls and the biggest embassy of all was the Iranian one with the Iranians and Hisbullah ally keeping President Assad in power. And now everything has been turned upside down. We, as you heard

from Rania, there's celebration there. People can't believe that finally the 50 year rule of the Assad family is over. And I have to say, having been to Syria so many times, every time I went, you felt the force of an oppressive state power and how its tentacles were in every part of life. Syrians too afraid to say much, except for that moment, that extraordinary moment with the peaceful protests of 2011 when Syrians rose up and said we have lost our fear, calling at that point not for an end to the regime, calling for more democracy. And when President Assad dug in, refusing over these past 14 years not to give even an inch to the democratic opposition much less to the armed groups of course

this this certainly is one of the major is the major reason for his demise his stubborn and brutal hold on power we had a statement from the head of the the, the most powerful Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Hamad Jalani, who's now using his own name rather than his known to get his war name to say that they have liberated Damascus. But I'm in the Qatari capital Doha, where there are just coincidentally a lot of Syrian observers here, including foreign ministers from across the region watching closely. Their assessment is that it is not the HTS that has taken power in the capital Damascus. It was another group of rebels from the south, composed many of them, of a former group known as the Free Syrian Army,

which worked with countries like Britain and the United States in the first years of the uprising, working with local groups who had arms within the capital. And so the real challenge now is when the celebrations subside is how do all these rebel groups control their own forces to ensure they don't run amok and also how do they work together because different groups now control different parts of Syria. And we also heard there from the Syrian Prime Minister saying he's ready to support continuity of governance. I suppose the big question, like you're saying, is how will that work? It's over.

It's really over. It's really, you know, here in, here again in Doha, all of the Arab foreign ministers who rushed in here, the Iranians and the Russians who were the key backer who kept President Assad in power, the Turkish foreign minister, the country which does have some sway over the rebels. In the early hours of the morning, they called for a peaceful transition

for there to be discussions on an inclusive government, but there has been so much brutality. So many people have suffered. So many people were tortured to death, disappeared in the black hole of Syrian prisons. It's very hard at this moment to see there being any space for what's left of President Assad's order, an order which refused to give an inch to give any space to any of the opposition. It's really hard to imagine that now. But there is a real fear that there could be what happened in Iraq, a complete collapse where the army melts away and there's

no force to take over. People have been through this before. They want to avoid the worst. Our international editor Jeremy Bowen is in eastern Turkey and he's been speaking to Laura Kunzberg. What's happened is absolutely astonishing. Nobody expected the collapse. I finished work last night in the early hours of the morning and at that point I just heard that Homs had fallen to the rubbles. I woke up about five hours later to find Damascus had fallen to the rebels and that Assad had disappeared. I think all bets are off. Nobody knows. I think there are real fears about what on earth might happen in Syria because it's a place where there are, well, you know, the end of any dictatorship is often followed by a terrible bounce of bloodletting and revenge and that's something like that doesn't happen

in Syria. But the Assad family controlled Syria from 1970 until now. That's more than half a century. So there is an awful lot to unravel. I think no one knows which way this is going to go. Will HTS, the group who've been, who started this lightning offensive and causing the collapse of the regime, will they be able to keep a lid on things? Will they be able to stop different groups fighting each other, going after remnants of the regime?

I mean, there are all kinds of scenarios that we could discuss at the moment. And just one more thing. Syria is right at the centre of the Middle East. It's really one of the most strategically situated places. So anything that happens in Syria has not been effects elsewhere. And Jeremy, it's been such a turbulent few months and, you know, it's so valuable for us all on Sunday morning to get your insights. In terms of the possible implications, you know, if you're watching at home this morning and thinking this just looks like more chaos and more confusion in a very dangerous

part of the world, why should you take attention? Why should we heed what's going on? Because this is something different. There was, there's been a protracted war lasting many years since 2011. It's been in sort of somewhat frozen state the last few years, but trying to overthrow the Assad regime, it did not succeed. It pulled in the phrase I used to describe, I used to use when talking about it when reporting out of Syria about 10 years ago, it had become really a mini-world war because the Russians

were involved, the Iranians were involved, the Americans were involved, they were bombing. Now they have troops in the north. The Turks control part of the north. There are remnants of al-Qaeda, Islamic State. I mean, you name it, they're here. And there are links through Syria to different sectarian groups. It's also from the point of view of Iran. Now this is a massive blow to them losing Assad because their entire already battered so-called axis of resistance which relied upon clients and allies like Hezbollah in Lebanon has already taken a massive pounding because particularly because of what Israel has done to Hezbollah in Lebanon but also because Israel has been attacking Iran itself. Now the Iranians will have lost

their link to Lebanon. So from their point of view, there are reports that their embassy has been trashed in Damascus. I can't confirm that. So for them this is a huge defeat as well. It's essentially an absolute upending of the regional order. The balance of power anyway in the region has been in flux. So we're going to hear an awful lot out of Syria in the next month or two, believe you me. Well, in Syria itself there's been an air of celebration. Mahmoud Ali Hamad is with BBC Arabic and he's from the Syrian city of Daraa and has been speaking to people there.

You couldn't say anything today on this program to dampen the celebratory mood that the Syrian people are living. Basically because what's happening now in Syria, I mean in the memory, the collective memory of the Syrian people, there hasn't been an important moment that would as an important moment that would make them share, you know, one destination just for change, you know, to see that this regime that has kept ruling the country, evidently by sheer fear, because the army didn't stand its ground. So that's what I'm getting from people, and it's really hard to process their sense of relief combined of course with fear from the future I mean it's a natural human instinct when when you have been constrained by by this political system

for so long of course you can it's an it's only natural to feel that way and as far as the whole Islamization of the Syrian people, I think if the countries, the sponsors, the patrons of the war that has been raging in Syria, if they decide not to have a sectarian war, there will not be a sectarian war in Syria because if they have been attacking major cities, the first act they've done so far when entering cities is to free, to go to the central prison of that city and free political prisoners. That's an issue that all Syrians from any political background or persuasion agree on,

that this regime, being a sectarian regime, cannot allow you to have the right to imprison children. Today, we've seen footages from Sayednaya. We've been sent them by those people actually storming the prison where you could see children no older than three years old, toddlers. It was very hard to watch the depth of the agony that this regime was causing the Syrians collectively. Even he was hurting, this regime was hurting its ownrians collectively, even he was hurting this regime was hurting

its own people in so many ways that people outside Syria, non-Syrians, didn't understand. They thought that otherwise were beneficiaries to this arrangement of political control, but they were not. Not all of them, but the clique that surrounded the Assad family were basically party to this. They wanted it to continue for as long as they can. But once they realized that this is not happening for them anymore, they chose to fled because they've seen Syria not as a country but as a hotel where people in it are actually just servants. This is a special edition of the Global News podcast on the situation unfolding in Syria.

Still to come... I lost 40 kilos and I lost my hair in six months. My own mother couldn't recognize me among the faces. We hear about the realities of political oppression in the country under the Assad regime. grand ambitions to mine its seabed for metals used in green technology. But a community that's defined by its ocean has found itself at the centre of a global debate. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts. The big question is what happens next in Syria. A US defence official says no one should mourn the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime and urged respect for international rules. Daniel Shapiro, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for the Middle East, emphasised

the need to protect civilians in the wake of the regime's fall. We call on all parties in Syria to protect civilians, particularly those from Syria's minority communities, to respect international humanitarian norms and to work to achieve a resolution through an inclusive political settlement consistent with UN Security Council Resolution 2254. Our Middle East analyst,astien Usher told me more. I think what we've seen in the past 10 days is what seemed impossible has now happened but looking back on that that may actually be the easy bit.

The fact that the Syrian government forces evaporated and there was no final hardcore defense of President Assad. And why did they melt away? I mean the government forces were known to be incapable of keeping President Assad in power by themselves and there was no sense that they'd got any stronger really over the years. So unless they'd beamed the backing from outside And also the militias in the hardcore around President Assad had shown themselves willing to fight to the last. Without that, there wasn't really much. It felt like slicing through butter really, I think,

for the rebels as they came down from the north and then up from the south and from the east. But as I say, that almost looks like the easy bit now because they didn't face any real opposition and President Assad, it seems, has gone. Now the real difficulty, as we're hearing from the Syrians themselves inside and outside the country, is President Assad has left. What he's left behind is a country that had not been brought together, had not been united

in any sense. It's a divided country. The part that President Assad had under his control, the major cities, the 60% or so. That's the first and major concern, what happens there. That's where the power vacuum is. Down in the south, there are groups which have already started to take control. In a sense, there was almost light kind of government control there in Deir Eid, in Swede,

those cities. That may not be a huge issue. Over in the east you have the Kurds who have essentially been running a semi-autonomous area, almost a third of the country. Up in the north you have the Turks hold sway, both directly and also through proxy militias on the ground. So, as I say, the immediate concern will be how this vital rump of the country can be sustained and then how the other forces can meld together. There's talk of it being a rebel coalition. I think that's optimistic.

I think what we're hearing from Lee's and these reports that, you know, it's the southern rebels or ones in the east who took over Damascus. That's probably true, but it wouldn't have happened without the drive in any sense from the North and from HTS and they're the ones who spearheaded it. They're the ones who are going to have the first and may say at the moment. And look at all the outside interests. Syria relied, didn't it, on Russia and Iran for support. So that seemed to go away. Have the conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon changed everything do you think? Well they changed that. They changed the ability, the readiness. I mean I think in

a sense those powers must have looked around to see if the others were still there and I think it was probably seeing that they weren't but then decided them we're not going to do this alone. I think Russia was probably the last. They were using their air power against the rebels at certain points, but never to the degree we saw before. And then it eventually ended. The Iranian ability through its militias, its military advisors, had been seriously, seriously weakened and diminished very much through Israeli attacks and strikes, which have been intensified. And also Israel, its offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon, that had a major effect too. So I mean, though Syrians and Syria itself, I'm quite sure, are no friends of Israel

and the Israeli government. In a sense, they owe a little bit of freedom that they are sensing at the moment to what Israel did. Not so much against President Assad, I think Israel would probably prefer President Assad to remain there and not a potential jihadist threat but the way that it weakened the forces would have kept him in power. So it's very difficult to predict what will happen next but let's remind ourselves of the main group behind the fall of President Assad. The rebels, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or HTS, were set up in 2012, originally under a different name Al-Nusra Front, and they pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda the following year.

In 2016, al-Nusra broke ties with al-Qaeda and took on their new name. But the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and other countries have continued to designate HTS as a terrorist organisation. Our security correspondent Frank Gardner told us more about the rebels. The early signs are quite encouraging that there could be an orderly transition of power because the leader of the main rebel group, HTS, Abu Mohammed Al Jolani, he has said we are going to respect minorities. There's not going to be a great big bloodletting of vengeance and so on.

But he is only one person at the head of a very large, sprawling coalition of rebel groups. And there are some pretty hardcore jihadists in amongst them. Let's not forget that HDS is still a prescribed terrorist organization, prescribed by the UN and by many governments. It's going to have to prove itself in the coming days, weeks and months that it is absolutely true to its word and has left its terrorist roots behind. Because people will be thinking about what happened in Afghanistan when the Taliban seized the capital Kabul and the whole country and the international community disappeared, Taliban spokespeople were going on television saying, nothing

to fear, don't worry, we're going to respect women's rights. We're not like we were in the past. And they're exactly like they were in the past. It's been an absolute basket case for human rights and women's rights. So there are any number of ways in which Syria could now go down a very dark path. It could go the way of Libya, with rival factions, armed groups descending into sort of tribal and religious friction. But so far, it's looking quite promising. The West is largely staying out of it. It's going to be for Syria's own

people to sort this one out, with the backing, hopefully, of the United Nations and, hopefully, without too much meddling from outside countries. It's always very difficult where you've got rebel groups that have been in opposition for years and years and have been operating in a very small, tightly controlled area. In the case of HDS, they've just been in Idlib. They've been confined up to the far northwest of the country. They don't have any experience of governing non-Sunni Muslims and a wider cross spectrum of people because Syria was a patchwork of Kurds, of Christians, of Sunni Muslims, of Shia Muslims. And I think perhaps one of the biggest threats is friction between the Alawite minority from

which Bashar al-Assad's dynasty comes. They are Shia. They're based in the northwest of the country, to the south of Idlib. There could be friction between them and the Sunni militants. There is a risk if Syria starts to spiral, if Jilani and the rest of his rebel group, if they don't establish a smooth transition of power very quickly and move to elections and basically calm the place down, there is absolutely the risk that ISIS and al-Qaeda could become resurgent and form new bases and start planning

international terror attacks from Syria. Thousands of Syrians were imprisoned in Bashar al-Assad's network of jails known for their harsh conditions and their use of torture. Many people, including peaceful protesters, were disappeared and not heard from for decades. Ahmed Helmi is one of them. He was detained and tortured under the regime and is now a human rights advocate. I can't even start to describe how I feel, like the rollercoaster of emotion, that moment of freedom. You see it on the people's face. Like I can't even stop myself from crying. I have been there.

I have been, I spent three years in prison waiting for that moment when they opened the doors. And it didn't happen. Like, I would wish that I was freed that way, even though I was released seven years ago. But I've never felt as free as today. I will tell you a little bit about torture in prison, but in an indirect way. So I was disappeared by the Syrian regime for my peaceful and nonviolent activism. I disappeared.

My mom knew nothing about me. Six months later, I called her. They took me to the state prison where I had a right of visitation. For six months, she didn't know that I was alive. She didn't know where I was. And she was waiting for me to open the door of the house every morning and going to sleep, crying every single night.

When she came to the prison, she was scanning the faces of the detainees, of my friends. She couldn't even recognize me because I lost 40 kilos and I lost my hair in six months. My own mother couldn't recognize me among the faces. Ahmed Helmi. So who is Bashar al-Assad, the man from a political dynasty who trained as an eye doctor here in London

and went on to reshape Syria? Caroline Holly has this report. Bashar al-Assad took power in the year 2000, inheriting Syria's police state from his father Hafez. The new young president, just 34 at the time, promised reform. And after his inauguration there was a brief period of greater political openness. But the old family way of ruling soon reasserted itself. Power was to have been handed down to Bashar's elder brother Basil but when he was killed in a car crash it was the quieter, somewhat awkward Bashar who was next in line. He'd been training as an eye doctor in London

when he was called back to Syria to prepare for taking over the presidency. With his British-born wife Asma by his side, President Assad had first presented a new image of Syria to the world. Mrs. Al-Bassat, your message. The West responded. There was even an audience with the Queen.

But the change that so many Syrians hoped for at home failed to materialise. And when an uprising against him began in 2011, he responded with tanks in the streets. As accounts of atrocities multiplied, Bashar al-Assad denied they were taking place, refusing to take responsibility. We don't kill our people. No government in the world kills its people unless it's led by a crazy person. For me as president, I became president because of the public support. It's impossible for anyone in this state to give order to kill. state to give order to kill. Whoever it was that gave the actual orders, Bashar al-Assad headed a regime that killed too many of its own people to even count, with barrel bombs as well as bullets, and

also with chemical weapons that are internationally banned. This was the aftermath of an attack with sarin gas on an opposition held suburb of the capital in 2013. Hundreds of people were killed. The West repeatedly said that Bashar al-Assad must go. But however sickening the violence, there was no stomach to really take on his regime. He repeatedly said he was merely fighting terrorists. When you shoot, you aim. And when you aim, you aim at terrorists in order to protect civilians. Again, if you're talking about casualty, that's war. You cannot have war

without casualty. There were more chemical attacks and many, many more casualties. But back in 2015, Russia had stepped in to turn the tide of the war in Bashar al-Assad's favour. It was Russian airstrikes and support from Iran and Hezbollah that helped defeat the rebels in Aleppo and elsewhere, and led to this moment in 2023. After years of isolation, President Assad at an Arab League summit, his regional rehabilitation a symbol of his victory at the time. As he was in Saudi Arabia, the rebels were confined to the northwest of Syria.

But then came this major offensive by the rebels, who headed first for Aleppo, Syria's second city, a huge prize that they took over with ease. They went on to capture more and more territory from the Assad regime, weakened because the support it had been able to rely on was no longer there. Now he's gone, leaving a country deeply scarred by his brutal rule. And that's it from us for now, but we'll have more on this in the Global News podcast, which is back at the usual time tomorrow. This edition was mixed by Masoud Ibrahim Kael and the producer was Stephanie Prentiss. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Valerie Sanderson. Until next

time, goodbye. Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Katie Watson in the Cook Islands, where we're taking a deep dive into the Pacific. This small island nation has grand ambitions to mine its seabed for metals used in green technology. But a community that's defined by its ocean has found itself at the centre of a global debate. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.