Rev Left Radio - Manufacturing Syria: HTS, Rojava, Iran, and the Consequences of Regime Change

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

Syria is entering a new and terrifying phase. In this episode Breht is joined by a panel of scholars and activists (Angie Bittar, Adam, Joma, Nur and Jalyssa) to take a clear-eyed look at what's unfolded over the last year and how it fits into the longer arc of the Syrian civil war, including the rapid collapse of the Assad-era order and the emergence of a new regime centered around HTS and Ahmad al-Sharaa (Jolani). Together, they break down the latest waves of mass violence and displacement across the coast, Suwayda, Aleppo, and Rojava, and ask what these events reveal about the new Syria. From there, they turn to the Kurdish question. They discuss the SDF, the long history of US imperial instrumentalization of Kurdish forces, the recurring pattern of abandonment, and the growing pressure now facing Rojava amid shifting regional and international priorities. They also examine ongoing kidnappings and sect-based killings, the breakdown of accountability, and what the allegations surrounding Syrian security institutions tell us about the direction of the new order. Finally, they zoom out to the information war. They map the propaganda narratives being pushed in Western and Zionist media, and offer practical "tells" for separating genuine reporting from information operations. Then, they close by asking what Syria teaches us about the current political moment: imperial strategy, proxy warfare, sectarian fragmentation, and what real solidarity demands. Access a full list of all the sources used for this episode HERE Donate to Jalyssa on Cash App: $JalyssaDugrot Or donate at: BuyMeACoffee/Jalyssa Check out Joma's great podcast: JDPOD Previous Episodes on Syria and Rojava:  "The Situation in Syria" Episode w/ Angie last year "On Syria: Civil War and US Imperialism" with Rania Khalek from 2018  "The Kurds and Revolutionary Rojava" with Dr. Redcrow from 2017 Interview with Murray Bookchin's Daughter on his Life and Legacy ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/    

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. Okay, on today's episode, we have a monstrous episode. I think it's somewhere around two, two and a half hours, but it's critical. And we cover so much territory, both history and present and future of Syria in particular. But we touch on Lebanon, on Yemen, the genocide in Gaza. And we touch on Iran in particular at the end of this conversation about Syria. what's happening with, you know, the SDF, the Syrian Democratic forces and the Kurdish resistance, the northeast Syria, the massacres and ethnic sectarian attacks that have been occurring under

Jolani's regime in Syria, backed by the U.S. and Israel. We cover so much of that. We cover how to understand the propaganda coming out of West Asia, of the Middle East, right? Like when Western corporate media talks about this region in particular, we run you through a bunch of ways in which you can decipher and decode words and phrases and tactics informationally that they use to trick people or to deceive people. We kind of unmask a lot of that. We spend a lot of time talking about the Kurdish situation in Rojava because the discourse around this on the left in particular often centers on or around that question. There's lots of, you know, I think unnecessary

splits over the question and is it anarchist or is it Marxist and all of that. And so we clarify a lot of that. And for this episode, in order to get as well-rounded of a conversation as we possibly could on such not only a complex, but ever-evolving topic, we have on several guests. We have on Angie. We have on Jalisa. We have on Noor. We have on Joma. And we have on Adam. I'll link to all of their Instagrams in the show notes, because I really encourage you to follow each and every one of them. They all put out a really important stuff on social media, as well as really important work in a myriad of other outlets. And if you want to keep up on not just Syria, but on the entire region,

and follow some really good, really informed people on the topic. These are some great follows. So I'll make sure that you can easily follow all of them. And I really truly think that no matter what your level of knowledge is on the topic, when you, you know, this is not a dry interview. This is an organic, open, you know, conversational dialogue about what's going on and what has been going on. So it's not something, it's not like an academic lecture.

You're going to lock into this conversation and it is compelling throughout. And by the time you walk away from this conversation, you will objectively have a better understanding of what's going on in Syria and what's coming over the horizon for Iran. Because so much of the playbook implemented in Syria is attempting to be implemented in Iran by many of the same. forces. So this is really an indispensable episode for understanding the current situation within Syria, as well as the current situation throughout the region. And as always, if you like what we do here at Rev Left Radio, we are 100% listener funded, always have been, always will be. You'll never hear an ad. You'll never see a commercial break. Not that anybody would advertise. No corporation would advertise with a show like ours. But we depend on our, you know, loyal supporters to continue

this show, you know, it's hard for me to find the time to do it, but I could not find that time and energy and resources to do this episode without listener support. So Patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. You can get access to bonus monthly episodes. We have community meetings. We have situation rooms when big global events pop off. And we have a meditation group that we call the Sanga, where we come together, discuss existential, spiritual, psychological stuff, meditate together. but also we politicize the Sanga because spirituality is not divorced from political situation. So tomorrow's Sanga, it'll probably be over by the time you're hearing this. But on the last Sunday of every month we have a Sanga, and often we explicitly politicize it,

where we use that as a communal opportunity to discuss political events. And then we end it on a shared guided meditation where we all quiet down together and walk through meditation as a community. And it's a really beautiful thing that we're building over. that's only for $5 a month you get access to all of that and more. If you don't have the money right now in these hard economic times, you can just share episodes like this, you know, share it on whatever platform you may have, share it with friends, leave a positive review, all those things go a long way in increasing our reach, which, you know, our reach is almost certainly algorithmically dampened.

No corporate outlet is necessarily going to algorithmically pump up or uplift a show like this. So again, we depend on our listeners to get the word out. So without further ado, here's my discussion again with Angie, Jalisa, Noor, Joma, and Adam on what's happening in Syria, the SDF and the Kurds in Rojava, the Alowitz, the Druze, the ethnic attentions, the role of Israel and the U.S., the prospects for Iran, how to see-through propaganda, and so much more. Enjoy. Hi, my name is Angie Bitar. I am a master's scholar in Eni Bajor. international relations and development, and I have my background in political conflict focusing on terrorism. My studies mainly have focused on looking at how terrorism interacts in the Middle East, and I'm currently the head of communications of the Syria Justice Archive. Hi, my name is Jalisa Dukrow. I'm an independent journalist based out of Florida.

My work primarily focuses on Middle East Affairs and the United States political intervention in the Middle East, you know, the effects there, and that's what I do. Hi, my name is Joma Hanassadon. I am a PhD candidate in Global and International Studies at UC Irvine. And I work primarily actually on the political economy of Rice in the Philippines and organized in the National Democratic Movement. But I have a past life researching Rojova. Hi, my name is Nood. I am a bachelor student doing international studies in the Hague. My regional focus is the Middle East and I've done a lot of work on Syria. as well. Hi, my name is Adam. I'm an organizer and a non-credentialed researcher on Syria. I'm an organizer

and I'm just here for the ride. I don't know. I have no real credentials compared to these guys. Well, it's an honor and pleasure to have all of you on. Many of you I've had longstanding relationships with in the background sort of over social media, follow many of you for a very long time. we've done an episode within the last year or two on the fall of the Assad government. And we've talked about that. I'll link to that previous episode in the show notes so people can kind of get some more of that history. But this is obviously sort of an update. This is going to be covering current events in Syria and helping people make sense of it,

fighting through in so many ways the propagandistic fog that Western media employs when it comes to issues like this. And we'll end the conversation after we learn a bunch about what's going on in Syria. We'll end the conversation on a question about Iran, which is currently, I think, in the scope of outright direct military confrontation with the U.S. and Israel. The U.S. now is currently moving military assets into the region. And it seems pretty likely that some sort of aggression is going to ramp up in the coming days, weeks and months. But we'll touch on that at the end. I also wanted to say up front that the one and only Michael Parenti, it's been confirmed, has passed away today. Parenti is a giant for the American Marxist left.

All of us, I'm sure, to some degree or another, have used his work and have, you know, used it to educate ourselves on our path to becoming, you know, principled Marxists and our analysis and our approach and our organizing. So he really was a giant. He never got the credibility within academia that he deserved precisely because he was a principled Marxist. But we just wanted to up front say that we honor him and his work and his legacy. Perhaps there'll be a Rev Left episode kind of covering his life and his work and his legacy as a way of honoring him in his passing. But it has been confirmed by his family that at the age of 92, I believe he has passed away just before we got on this. recording. So with that said, let's go ahead and in some ways honor Parenti by conducting a principled analysis of imperialism and what's going on in West Asia and trying to understand it in a way that isn't possible if all you, if all, the only way you get your information is

from, you know, Western corporate media or, or heaven forbid, various forms of Radlibs on, on Twitter. So let's go ahead and get into it. And I want to start kind of with the big picture, zooming out and kind of summarizing what got us to this point. So can you kind of walk us through the key turning points in Syria over the last year or two, how they connect to the longer civil war, and how the current political order kind of took shape, including the direct role, of course, played by the U.S. and Israel throughout the whole process? Sure. I mean, it feels a little surreal.

I think the last time we recorded with you on Syria was a little over a year ago. and we were talking about Ahmed al-Shara's new name and the recent takeover of Hayat the Heideh Sharm. And I think at the time, we still talked about it like it was trepidacious and not quite solidified. So now a year later,

we refer to Ahmad al-Shara as the president of Syria, not the interim president, but the president of Syria. Syria has an interim constitution that is explicitly Islamic and explicitly theoprotic. And several now, I could say, massacres and ongoing campaigns of violence have occurred and are ongoing throughout various regions in Syria,

primarily targeting religious and ethnic minorities. Outside of that, Syria is doing fantastic. The Caesar sanctions are in the process of being lifted Damascus is largely open to tourism. Palestinian residents are no longer able to enter Syria on their Palestinian documents. And we are one step closer to normalization. Outside of that, I think that it's really easy to see when we kind of look at all of those things I just laid out, how the current power has taken shape in Syria.

We've witnessed a western movement, we could say, of the political class. of the Syrian elite. And we're entering this really odd phase of Ahmad al-Shadha, Mohammed al-Jolani, having one foot firmly in his past of, we could say Islamic extremism or Islamic governance if we wanted to be a little bit more generous towards him. And then one foot into this very buttoned up diplomatic, Western appendage role that he's he is starting to lean more and more into. And I don't want to really enter too many of the details of what's happened in the past year because we'll dove into them a bit more with some of our additional guests. But I think what we really want to focus on today is the way that Syria has

really no longer been Syria for the past year. It has been a puppet for others' intentions and agendas and motivations. Absolutely. And the playbook of imposing brutal economic sanctions in order to make the economy scream in Kissinger's words to undermine the social, political and economic foundations of a society as a lead up to regime change is something we've clearly seen in so many places, including Syria. And once the U.S. approved, Israel approved puppet government has been installed. Economic sanctions are lifted. And there is now. naturally and organically, sort of an uptick in the overall economy.

And that is a crucial weapon and crucial strategic tool in the toolbox of Western imperialism that they use time and time and time again. And we're seeing that play out in a textbooked way in Syria. Any follow-ups on that or Adam? Yes. Yeah, I just wanted to say, and others can chime in on this too. The other way to think about the current state of Syria is the victors, are competing for the spoils. So you have Turkey who was basically Jolani's or Alshara's main backer.

It was the Syrian National Army, quote unquote, and HTS, which overthrew Assad in December of 2024. Those were both armed and more or less given battle instructions by Ankara. But then you also have the Saudis who are approaching Jalani with a little bit more trepidation because they have always been a little bit weary of these sort of radical Islamist movements for fear that it could spread to their borders and overthrow their monarchy. And of course, you have Israel who is also a little bit worried about having somebody with Jolani's past in power. Then you have the U.S. who, for the most part, seems more or less content to have him there. They think he's effectively neutered enough.

So when people try to say, well, how is he a Western puppet? but if Israel keeps bombing Syria or, you know, this and that. What you really need to think of is all of these countries played a part in destroying this country. And now they're all trying to lobby for who gets to dictate its policies and basically who gets to reap the most benefit from it. I mean, I don't know how much we want to really talk about the former regime or, the civil war in great detail. But I think it's really important to remember that HTS's history is very much embroiled

in that of the Islamic extremism of al-Qaeda and of the Islamic state. There's this narrative, I would say, now, that seeks to really distinguish Ha'a Therite de Ha'Hsham from the Islamic state of Syria and Iraq. And I don't know that that is the most rational analysis of the Civil War. I don't want to get into rehashing 14 years. I think that we did a great job of that a year ago when you let us speak about it. I think it's just important to think of

HTS and ISIL as two actors that fundamentally want the same things and are competing for who gets to do it. So right now, I think we'll get into a little bit further, exactly as Adam says, we're competing. competing for spoils, but different actors are competing for different tiers of those spoils. So while the U.S. and Israel and Turkey are almost explicitly seeking to perhaps partition or, I mean, functionally partition Syria, whether it's by economics or annexation, I think that there are many parties within Syria that are fighting these much lower battles and they're content to submit to the needs of the imperial actors so long as they're left alone to fight out those battles. So I think that's also an important dynamic to consider when we look at the way that international

actors are going to respond to the violence that we talk about here. Absolutely. That's crucial. And again, I just want to remind listeners, if you do want more of that particular history and that background, I will link to our first episode together in the show notes. You can go and educate yourself on that, which of course is incredibly important to understand what's happening now. But again, we don't want to retread so much of that ground. So if nobody else wants to chime in on this question, we can move forward into more or less current events, even though we've already sorted moving in that direction. And I think what a lot of people are seeing, especially if you're engaging with this on social media, as you're seeing

horrific, I mean, stomach churning videos of various forms of violence, massacres, beheadings to some extent, throats being slit, just grotesque. videos that are really, really hard to watch happening. So maybe we could talk a little bit about that. What do you see as sort of the clearest account of the major massacres and mass violence that we have seen recently? And what broader pattern do you think they reveal about what's happening in Syria more broadly? So I have also shared a couple of links, both of some videos that we were able to obtain on behalf of the Syria Justice Archive, as well as some research and some journalism done by others that I think offer some very clear accounts of particularly the March

2025 massacres across the coast. There are a lot of different narratives, whether you want to pull towards the side that there were genuine factions of former loyalists or former regime loyalists that were seeking to fundamentally overthrow what they saw as a still weak regime that had taken over or if it was explicitly retaliatory violence towards a sect that the majority no longer believed they had to respect. I think that the truth probably lies somewhere around a marginal medium. There's evidence to believe that there were individuals who felt they needed to defend themselves from the new regime and were organizing to do so and that there was a brutal response from the government that was explicitly ordered from the, I believe, then Syrian interim

government. I don't know if we had dropped the interim by then. But I will link those to you so that that can be shared to your viewers as well. And I wanted to also give Nood an opportunity to speak on those massacres because she's done extensive work on it. Absolutely. Thank you very much, Angie. So I'm not sure I prepared sort of like a little background to introduce people who might not like know what had happened in March 2025. So I would wish to briefly outline a violent episode from March 2025 in Syria, which were the mass killings of Eloyte civilians, before moving to why this matters for us as people who are concerned with questions of liberation and justice

and anti-sectarianism. So in early March, 2025, following the establishment of what was then transitional government, armed clashes erupted in the coast of Syria. And according to a report by Human Rights Watch, this wave of violence began after coordinated attacks by former regime loyalists on March 6th. And in response, the transitional government forces, or what are now, the official government forces, launched extreme killing operations in multiple coastal cities and regions that have heavy al-o-white populations, right? Amnesty International reported that by the 9th of March,

the death toll along the coastline had reached 973 all-white civilians that were killed in these executions. As per the total number of victims, there are different numbers reported depending on the different sources, but most of the sources round up to roughly 1,500 civilians that were murdered in less than a week's time. And many people, in the fence of what the government did, used the narrative of, oh, these people were not civilians, they were regime loyalists, they had worked for the Assad regime, and so on and so on. However, we do have core facts that prove that these were indeed sectarian-based and civilian-targeted killings. Even UN investigators reported that the people who tragically died were murdered in these killings were tortured and executed after being singled out on the basis of identity.

Amnesty reported testimonies of armed men that were interrogating residents with questions such as are you Eloyte before executing them? And I think it's also important to mention that among the victims, there were adult men and women, but there were also many children and the elderly. So I think that the argument of the regime loyalists cannot hold true. and what we saw in these massacres is, I believe, a prime example of collective punishment and revenge against civilians based on their sectarian identity. It is sectarianism. And the actors who are responsible for these massacres are not random. They are not unknown.

They have been identified as government members. They have been identified as HDS. Yes, amnesty as well concluded that government-affiliated militias deliberately targeted all right civilians, and a Reuters investigation also later found chains of command linking at least some of these atrocities back to leadership figures that were associated within the government. And what this means is that we have a government ruling in Syria who is pursuing sectarian violence, collective punishment and massacres of civilians. So I believe that with these 2025 coastal massacres,

it is impossible to talk about a free Syria. It is impossible to talk about a democratic and inclusive Syria when we have such mass violence done by literal government forces. I believe that sectarianism is also a, a very big issue and that this violence is not existing in a vacuum. It is also not out of nowhere. So it is definitely something that is linked to HDS. It is something that is linked to the government. And it is a product of what happens when, you know, you have a regime installed by someone else in the country. Yeah, thank you for that.

Now, I want to continue moving forward, and honestly, this is a related question. A lot of the things that people will hear if they're on social media trying to make sense of this, because, again, very little if any of this will be given to you through the normal mainstream media in any shape or form. But a lot of people are engaging with this issue currently through the lens of the Kurds. Many people will be familiar with the Kurdish resistance, SDF, the role that they've played. over the last several years. It's a, you know, it forms a split on the left, more or less, at least in the discourse around this issue. And I want to help people make sense of it in particular. So where do the Kurds and the SDF kind of fit into this moment? And how should we understand

the U.S. relationship in particular to the SDF over time, to the Kurds over time, including the recurring dynamic people might describe as being used or, you know, you'll hear the word betrayal. The Kurds have been betrayed by the U.S. several times at this point, et cetera. Can you kind of help us make sense of all of that and what the current pressure on Rojava looks like right now? Right. So in order to understand where the Kurds and the SDF fit into this moment, as well as the relationship between the U.S., as well as the SDF, and by the SDF, we're referring to the Syrian Democratic forces, I think we have to zoom back to understand the broader Kurdish freedom movement, which precedes both Rojava and SDAF. SDF. So I know many of your listeners will know this history, but I would also encourage those who haven't to go way back in the Rev Left archives. And there's a series of interviews with Dr. Thoreau Red Crow.

I think probably 2017, roughly. Yeah. Yeah. It's an excellent pirate. Actually, funny enough, it's where I first, it might have been where I first heard about Rojava, was from Dr. Thore, Red Crow. And later I ended up doing a bachelor's thesis and then a master's thesis on the topic and had interviewed Dr. Othorough five or six or seven times. And so it came full circle. Absolutely. And I also have a paper in Middle East Critique. It's titled North and East Syria, Rojava, Libertory Project or U.S. proxy.

And that's open access. And I would encourage folks to check that out as well if they want to dig into this topic deeper. But I think for the pre-Rosjeva period, we have to start with the PKK in 1978 or the Kurdistan Workers' Party, founded by Abdullah Uchilan and Sakyn Kanzis. And the PKK was a Marxist-Leninist party, emerging out of the student-left movement with global revolutions occurring across the global south. And their aim was to achieve national liberation through armed struggle. And really, they situated their struggle for national liberation within a broader world

proletarian revolution, going back to the October Revolution, which was gaining strength through various national liberation movements. And so they would say that the struggle to liberate Bakur, which is Khrmanji or Kurdish for the North, whereas with Rojava we get west, it's this broader story and broader vision of a greater Kurdistan being liberated from these imperial borders that were drawn at the end of World War I.

This French and English person just drawing some lines on a map, and here you go, have Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. So this is the understanding from the Kurdish perspective. And they also saw this national liberation struggle as intertwined with the fight for Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination. So even in the early 1980s, you have the PKK training alongside Palestinian fighters in Lebanon's Beka Valley.

In 1984, we move forward. we have the beginning of the People's War against Turkey. And in this period, we also have the developments of an autonomous women's movement inside the PKK and various institutions being created. And I'm just moving us quickly through the history to kind of get us to understand the present moment, if that's okay. Yeah, please do. Take your time. Cool, cool. So in October of 1988, we have some major developments, and this is in the shadow of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Abdulah Oshelan, who's seen by many Kurdish people as the leader of the Kurdish freedom movement, was granted asylum within Syria, and this is under Hafaz Assad. He was then forced by Turkey to flee. So while fleeing, this is, we're at the end of 1998, beginning of 1999. He ends up getting kidnapped by MIT Turkish intelligence with the help of the CIA. He was actually en route to South Africa. where he was granted asylum by Nelson Mandela. And in Nairobi, in the airport, he was kidnapped and taken to a island prison off the shores

of Turkey, where he's been held ever since. I'm really gaining mythic status. You're talking almost 30 years now of being in this tiny prison isolated besides your lawyers coming in to do legal work. But in this legal work, Ocelan is writing and thinking and theorizing. about the Kurdish question, about national liberation, about how to move forward, about self-determination and sovereignty for the Kurdish people and for Kurdistan. And in this development, he is reading broadly, and a lot of people will have known this story,

starts reading an American anarchist, well, actually Marxist-Len has turned an anarchist, Murray Bookchin and synthesizes sort of these lessons of direct democracy, social ecology, into this program for Kurdistan or for Kurdish people, which he called democratic confederalism. And so here, this is in the, he's writing these letters talking about the, first he's being charged with all of the deaths that occurred during the protracted people's war. both from the Turkish side, which was much more Turkish violence raising entire villages rather than the guerrillas who were fighting for the National Liberation. But he's been put on trial, and in these letters that he's writing as his defense,

he's putting out these theories. So fast forward, we get to 2003 to 2004. There's a split within the PKK over this new direction towards this. democratic confederalism. So to recap, we had sort of a national liberation movement, traditional Marxist-Leninist understanding of national liberation through armed struggle for an independent state that then develops. And granted, you have to think about you have four countries that your homeland has been carved up over. Are you going to fight a four-pronged to maintain your new borders? Since your region,

has been carved up under what is recognized as Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. And so in some ways, I'm very sympathetic to understanding, like, making that call. But after this call, there was a Congress, over 1,500, some estimate 2,000 members of the PKK leave, and over the split, and they are continuing in various formations, continuing their struggle, But after this split, we have the, really the beginnings of the experiment of Rojava. Sort of informally, you have these institutions being built, these communes, these councils being built. This is this bottom-up sort of understanding with recallable delegates and with power that sensibly should be flowing from the community upwards. And like I said, listen to Thore Red Crow's episode on Rev Left because it goes a much.

more detail and he does a much better job. But that'll give your listeners a good prehistory. But moving forward to 2012, this is the Declaration of Autonomy. We didn't really go into the full 14 plus years of the so-called Syrian Civil War. But in the midst of this, the beginnings of this, really an international war on Syria's sovereignty, you have to have. have the Declaration of Autonomy in the North. So as the government in primarily in Damascus in the South is dealing with all of these conflicts and skirmishes, the Kurdish freedom movement takes, and Rochava takes the moment to declare autonomy and seizes the moment and actually ends up declaring autonomy over what ends up being recognized as one third of the territory of Syria.

And this is, of course, extended over time and it is constantly in flux. And to jump forward to the present moment is really in flux as we see the windback of this territory. But I think that brought us to the beginnings of this relationship, 2012, the beginnings of the Rojava experiment, as well as when the U.S. comes in. I wanted to pause right here and see if you wanted to add anything, or if anyone else wanted to add anything before I continue. I mean, by all means, raise your hand if you have something to add, but just kind of reiterating during the Civil War, as, you know, Bashar al-Assad's government is under attack from so many directions. The, you know, the Kurdish people in northeast Syria have taken the opportunity to kind of, you know, take over their territory and declare autonomy. And that's what we kind of know as Rojava.

and so that's kind of the broader setup, just kind of reiterating what you've said, leading up to where we are today. So that's kind of, that's the historical backdrop that we're dealing with. Angie, anything to add to that? I think it's just also important to contextualize that the division of kind of the Kurdish people across those four nations was a very intentional one under, I mean, my history is failing me in the moment. if it's Sykes-Picot in specific or the litany of other, like, legal violences that were done to our region in that era. But it's, those were strategic divisions that were sown not only on the Kurdish population, but the, the sectioning off of Lebanon, the way that Syria itself was managed under the colonial era, under the mandate era. And even in its, I mean, Syria had three years of genuine. autonomy between 1946 and 1949,

1946 being Syria's year of independence declaration, and 1949 being the first CIA-backed coup upon Syria. So there's never been a moment where there have not been international forces actively sewing division within Syria. And that really is the backdrop for what we see in the coastal massacres and in the massacres in villages of Hama and in the massacres on Swayda and the Druze people, who of course Syria, excuse me, Israel will weaponize against Syria to try and section off and partition. And now exactly again, what we have seen for the past decade and a half with Rojava and the Kurdish people generally.

Yeah, and I just quickly just want to add like this all traces back as has been already mentioned to the fact that so many of these borders are just written. up by Western colonial powers. And so, you know, these ethnic sort of disputes that occur are sort of a natural function, a natural outcome of these colonial carvings up of the global South in so many regions around the world, including this one, but then people that don't know anything but have big platforms on corporate media will often fall back on these lazy cliches of like, these people have always been at war, these people will never get along as if it's something

inherent in the culture or the religion or the region itself and not a product of centuries of colonial and imperialist purposeful destabilization and just a purposeful disregard for the actual realities on the ground. They are just there to be used by Western forces in the view of Western imperialist countries. So I wanted to kind of point out that historical process. And I also want to ask before you move on, Joma, if you could talk, you mentioned the ideology of democratic confederalism. Sometimes people get confused is, you know, is this anarchism? Is this a form of Marxism? In the actual structure of political economy and society in Rojava, what would be like the actual ideological description of how that society is organized, just as a kind of curiosity before

you move on and tell us more? Sure. So democratic confederalism is this bottom up understanding. you have a commune structure which was spread out. And I don't remember offhand the specific names for them, but you had sort of at the village level, these councils with recallable delegates, where people would meet each other and talk about their needs and then have delegates pass that on. And so, ostensibly, the power and decision-making

were happening amongst small communities of 50 families. and this was some I know my anarchist comrades will like to claim democratic confederals and the Rojava experience because it very much is inspired by this long history of councils of direct democracy Ochoon in some of his writings he has just it's insane how much he's written but he talks about the nation state being the problem and so a very very much he has a, what a Marxist-Lennist might say, a revisionist understanding of national liberation and has really taken up this sort of anti-state position that the state is the problem.

But I would say that also I wouldn't call democratic confederalism anarchists per se in the same way that I really wouldn't even, a lot of times people will talk about the Zapatistas in short. up us as this anarchist revolution. And there's like this sort of applying, I think, theories of direct democracy to concrete conditions that like, sure, we can place it if we had to put it on like a, on a sort of a diagram and say, is this more like status or Marxist on the left?

Or is this more freedom and autonomy on the right? And it's like, I guess it's leaning towards freedom and autonomy. But, so I don't think it's necessarily helpful to phrase it as whether it's, you know, anarchist or not. But I'll say also a lot of anti-fascists joined the YPG and the YPJ, which were the guerrilla armed fighters that were fighting ISIS. And also were the originally who declared with arms autonomy in northern Syria in 2012. And so there's this legacy of anti-fascism that's embedded in this. But it's much more complicated or not even complicated nuance than just is it anarchist or is it Marxist. And actually what Angie was saying is really important that the ways that it's often discussed,

the Kurds as this either it's an anarchist feminist utopia or it's this like proxy that's, you know, embed with the U.S. and Israel and is here to fracture Syria, I think, misses this deeper dynamic of how imperialist powers will utilize legitimate national questions, Kurdish national questions, Arab national questions for their own names, which gets to the question that you began us with, and I know it took us way off, but about, you know, this story of betrayal or not. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I just, yeah, quickly just want to say, I think you, you, you, hit the nail in the head with the nuances that you're exploring. It doesn't fit neatly into an anarchist or Marxist camp. It doesn't fit neatly on a political compass. There is an inherent

statelessness that is present. There's a clear anarchist influence, but there's also, you know, a direct democracy or almost like a council communism, if you will, that, you know, many people across the left can be very, very sympathetic to. But it's precisely this involvement you're about to get into with U.S. imperialism, which itself is nuanced and often hyper simplified and in the discourse around this issue that I think led a lot of people on the left to have this split that we're going to discuss or the split that many people, whether you're a Marxist or an anarchist, will be aware of whenever this topic comes up. Adam, would you like to add something before Joma continues? Yeah, sir, I just wanted to say someone sent me a Wall Street Journal article that was just published that said that it's literally titled Jolani called America's Bluff, which is that the U.S. told him not to go ahead with his offensive. of Rojava in northeast Syria, but he knew that they weren't going to come to the Kurds aid anyway,

so he just did it. So, yeah, that article literally just dropped as we were talking about this. There you go. But yeah, I'll hand the mic back over to you, Jömen, to continue. Yeah, I think what you just said, Adam, is important, too, because as we're discussing this, so much is changing. So keep that in mind, depending on when you're listening to this, this is a rapidly ongoing development. but I wanted to for the Rojave book period and its relationship to the U.S., I'm going to kind of bracket it 2014 to, I guess we can say, to the ouster, the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in December of 2024. And I'm not going to hit on every moment, but I just want to get sort of the key moments for us to lay that out.

So throughout the experiment of Rojava, these borders, as I was saying, were not even borders. These territories that were under control were under constant flux. And so this period was one of expanding what was even before the Declaration of Autonomy was an attempt at building direct democracy across where primarily Kurdish people were living and expanding to other communities. And so I mentioned earlier at one point they controlled. what was recognized as one-third of Syria and now has shrunk. I just read a report from Rojava Information Center that the territory under what's recognized as Rojava went from 50,000 square kilometers to 10,000 square kilometers in a period of two weeks.

So since this offensive, in early January to right now, we've had a, I guess, a five-time decrease if my mouth is correct. There's a reason why I'm in the humanities and social sciences and a mathematician, but 50,000 to 10,000 is all you need to know. But, um, and so this was always something that was constantly being defended and constantly in flux. Um, and so I want to bring us to 2014, and this is as ISIS is expanding across rapidly, uh, across Syria. And actually, I think through a red crow, I don't know if he said this on the, the, the previous episode with you, Brett, or this was just from one of our conversations, but he called it a Toyota Blitzkrieg because you had all of these ISIS fighters rapidly

hitting towns and villages and moving up in these like these reappropriated Sol and Toyotas. And so as they're doing this, they're making their way up towards northwards towards Kobani, which is a very important, this was where the Declaration of Italiano has made, and both strategically from like a just conflict perspective and resource perspective, but also a symbolic place. And so as ISIS is rapidly advancing, we have Kurdish fighters in Kobani that are bracing for a grim battle. you also don't have just Kurdish fighters,

but you have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of civilians, men, women, children in this region, and you have a hostile nation state above Turkey that's always saw any thing that looked like the PKK or that looked like Kurdish freedom as suspect, or literally as terrorist. And so you basically had a closed border above. And so I know we don't have, this isn't video, but just imagine a map you have northern Syria and right above you have Turkey.

And so they have this hardened border that people can't escape to, escape out of. Whereas you have this so-called Toyota Blitzkrieg coming up from the south northward towards you. And so they were faced, they were caught between a rock and a hard place. What do we do? do we fight off, of course you fight to survive. And so they were left with some options. So in an interview I did with Dr. Thoreau Red Crowe, who was embedded at the time with the PKK, ended up, I think he was following the aftermath as ISIS was moving northward,

which as a researcher and with fellow researchers, I imagine the Institutional Review Board, the IRB for ethics, had a, I've been reeling over how things had developed, but here you have a PhD student following this battle. And he was telling me that one of the commanders reached out to Damascus asking for some sort of support and never heard back. Of course, this is like, you know, trust, you know, cite my source, like, I don't know, trust the messenger, but to me it makes logical sense that you reach out to whoever you can

if you're facing an existential threat where potentially hundreds of thousands of civilians are going to face a massacre. And so they reach out to, from what I've understood, they reached out to the Syrian government and didn't hear anything, but they did, and they also reached, I don't know if they reached out to the U.S., but somehow the U.S. offered providing air support.

And so what do you, what's the principled position? Do you not accept the support on the purity of your politics to not deal with the devil, to not deal with U.S.-led imperialism, knowing, we open with a question of betrayal, knowing that the U.S. is not a, is protecting its own interests and its own aims for, number one, de-development of any sort of autonomous path, away from its hegemony, but number two, just maintaining its own power in ambitions in the region, which are intimately intertwined.

And so they were faced with the choice. Do we accept the support of the U.S. or do we fight in knowing that we don't have the numbers? And they ended up taking the air support. now and this is let me see here this was in

September 27th 2014 which is when the U.S. begins providing a sport and you have a lot of international fighters that are

that have joined from the U.S., from Germany, from all over and these international brigades that were fighting and a lot of people

have probably seen or even followed some of these people that were tweeting about their time fighting ISIS with the YPG and the YPJ and the YPJ is the women's units.

And sorry, there's so many acronyms. I'll do my best to make sure that I'm defining them. And please interrupt me, Brett, if there's acronyms that I'm just sort of glossing over. Yeah, no, you're doing great, yeah. Cool. So you have this decision. And I think I want to say also I find myself like almost defending the decision. And nowhere from what we can call the communist international or anywhere else, was there

a support that I know of that happened to be able to, so they could have turned to someone else besides the United States, besides the empire. And maybe I'm wrong and someone can intervene there. But I think it's something whether we want to or not, I think we need to have a frank discussion about the capacity to enact any sort of action on history, any meaningful action in history. Like, holding up signs is great, I guess, and going on marches and such isn't a bad thing. But if it's the height of the political power, we're in a moment of defeat. And so I think it's something that as the left, we need to reckon with.

and be honest with and not, you know, claim these easy victories and ignore. And I just want to, I just want to pop in really quick and, you know, I want to hand it back over to you to continue if you have anything else to say. But I just want to say that your nuanced analysis here aligns perfectly with my own sympathies. I find it simplistic and even cruel and weird for some on the Marxist left to, you know, almost, and this is not a common sentiment, but to almost take glee or to feel like the Kurds in some way deserved it, they were truly in an impossible situation. And I don't think they were ever under the delusion that the U.S. is a loyal friend. They were using whatever they could to survive. And I think,

you know, simplistic narratives about, you know, them being aligned with U.S. imperialism in any broader sense or in any way deserving the onslaught that they're facing now. I mean, this, I think, is cruel and outside of the bounds of any reasonable analysis. It's really an impossible situation. And while it's easy to sit back in an armchair and tell other people what they can or should do, it's much different to actually be living in that situation with everything on the line. And the enemy in the form of these ISIS or ISIL terrorist cells, these brutal maniacs, you know, that will stoop to any level of evil in the destruction of their perceived enemies.

I mean, imagine facing off with that opponent. I think most of us would, you know, find and take advantage of absolutely any help that they could get. So I really appreciate you articulating that in such a humane and nuanced way. And do you have anything else to say on this topic before we move on? Because I think it's important to understand the whole situation like this. I think just the one other thing I would add in is that this is when we get this relationship overtly between the, U.S. and Rojava. And the political, like, sort of abbreviation, because Rojaba is for the territory, and a lot of people

will call it now the autonomous administration of North and East Syria, or AANES. But the political formation is the PYD. So if you hear someone say the PYD, that's referring sort of to the political umbrella, and then you have the YPG, YPJ as the guerrilla unit. But this is where we get the start of what's recognized as the Syrian Democratic Forces or the SDF. And basically, U.S. Special Operations Command comes to the YPG and YPJ and says, hey, you have a branding problem. Like, if we're going to continue to work with you and continue to, as the ground unit fighting ISIS, then we need to change your name and change your brand.

First, you have Turkey seeing anything that, like I was saying, anything that looks like the PKK as nothing more than terrorists. Yeah, and so they had to change their brand. And so they came back the next day and said, we're going to call ourselves the Syrian Democratic forces, which from reading reports, the general loved, it's not great. Like, we're, you know, we're arming the people that are for democracy, which is always sort of the myth that, you know, the U.S. is doing and foreshadowing, you know, even Iran.

And so I think I'll leave it there as that that was the beginning of that relationship, which has not decoupled. Well, I guess we can say it has decoupled in the most recent couple days, as Adam was saying, where Al Jolani had called the U.S.'s bluff. Yeah, absolutely. Any, I want to say also, I'm going to link to your article on the topic for people to dive even deeper. I'll link to our initial episode with Dr. Thoreau Red Crow from 2017 to get more of that

history and background. And I'll probably also link to my interview I did with Murray Bookchin's daughter, where we outlined, you know, his overall, you know, ideology and in his life and his legacy as a direct sort of, you know, precursor to Rojava and that movement. And it's his influence on it. But yeah, Joma, one more point before we move on. Yes, I just wanted to throw in one more point that's crucial, which is about all of the oil fields. So when the SDF militarily and territorially defeats, I think. This was in 2017 or 2018.

March 23rd, 2019 is when it was officially declared territorially defeated. So when the SDF gets these oil fields, they also don't have refineries. So you asked a question earlier, which I kind of skirted past, about the political economy of the region. And this is a,

the northeast Syria is the breadbasket of the Syrian Arab Republic. You have most of the wheat, most of the oil, and most of the cotton in the region. And so there were, according to the Deer Azor, which is one of the cantons, one of the regions within Rojava, there were 1,400 oil fields under their control. However, there were no refineries. And this goes back to a longer history of fears of Kurdish separatist ambitions. and so you leave the refineries and also the it would to me it makes sense if you're going to have refineries by the port by by the waterways that you're going to export it because if not how are you going to get I mean you're not it's much easier to export it via via water and so you build it by the port and so there are several reasons but that led to the fracturing of Syria's oil and that limits what a government can do and squeezes and who does it squeeze does it squeeze does it squeeze sort of the the elite class uh sort of the the the military um mercantile class not really it's the the the everyday citizen

on top of that you have crippling sanctions that uh angie began with um the caesar sanctions that have now uh funny enough or like not not even funny uh like sordically enough has been lifted that Al Jolani, and I use, you know, I know President Ashara, but I use Al Jalani given that this was his Nambdegro when he was leading Al-Nusra or Al-Qaeda Syria affiliate. And so I think it's important, like discursively to not cede that, like to not seed that ground. And so what you have, though, is all of the oil being controlled. by the SDF granted without a refinery, so you're stuck selling it on the black market and smuggling it. But you have, you also have the average Syrian suffering because the government in Syria is not able to actually provide what states should be providing.

Social infrastructure, fuel, the bare necessities, fuel, these things that we take of obviously for granted if you're not under the boot of U.S.-led imperialism. And so I think while, yes, we must be very nuanced and say, like, it's very lazy to just say, oh, they are U.S. proxies. There was a very material relationship that the U.S. utilized this rock in a hard place, this horrible position that the Kurdish Freedom movement and Rojavans were placed in, of course they're going to the u.s is going to utilize it for its own evil i don't any other way to like sick uh aims to um to to to keep the resources from actually

reaching the people as you opened up with to make the economy scream to quote kistinger talking about chile and so that's another component that we need to keep in mind is so you have famous photos and people can look it up of um u.s. or even actually Trump, what do you say? I'm here for the oil or I'm going to steal the oil or something like that. And so, and this, of course, isn't just a Trump phenomenon, but this was happening under Obama, under Biden as well. Yeah. Absolutely. You mentioned the map and looking it up, and I really do think, like, mental maps of the whole world is really important and people should strive to kind of clarify their own mental map of the world because it helps in discussions like this. But if you have any blurry or vague notion of what's going on here, you know, definitely lurk. look up the Kurdish region, look up these borders and kind of get a mental visual image of the situation that the Kurdish people are in with regards to the surrounding countries and

the borders and specifically, you know, think about Turkey's hostility to the Kurds and all of that. The map does, I think, help clarify visually for a lot of people. I have one quick question. I know we spent a lot of time on this and I think it's really interesting. We'll move on right after this, but just to kind of clarify, you touched on it a little bit, but what was the relationship between the Kurds in northeast Syria and the Assad government in the immediate run-up to the toppling of the Assad government militarily in particular? How was that relationship shifting perhaps over time? And what was the relationship at the time of the collapse? Yeah, well, I'll give my understanding and folks can jump in. Now, when

the SCF was partnered with the U.S. As always, there are multiple, there are lined struggles within any party. And so there were sort of two different wings. One, the pragmatic wing that wanted to sustain a relationship with Washington. And this is really representative of Muslim Abdi, who's the, now I think, yeah, Muslim Abdi. Whereas Adir Khalil represented the faction that was aligned with PKK leaders,

that was favoring reintegration with Assad, with Damascus. Now, this was prior to, and also viewed this sort of partnership with the U.S. with suspicion. And so we learned from the Chinese experience as well that where is class struggle most concrete and most astute, and that's within the party itself. And so always, we can't be lazy and say, oh, like the Kurds, you know, show us, made their bed. But no, this was a line struggle that one line won out. and so you had one line that wanted to be

reestablished as a broader Syrian Republic under a federal with autonomy and so this was actually always the political line of the PYD or of Rojava which was not to be a breakaway state but to have sort of a federal solution with a economy. And this is also what led to the breakdown of what we're seeing now in the last couple months. There was, I think March, March 2025 was when there was this agreement happening between the SDF and El Jolani. And they had basically a year to sort of tease out the details.

and one of the things that they refused, what the SDF refused, was something that Aljolani was demanding, which was for the SDF to no longer have a separate military force. And for good reason, the SDF is like, no, you know, seizes a suspect and wanting to be able to maintain the potential. And we're seeing this similarly with Hamas, like Trump saying for them to give up their weapons. and trust me, you're going to be fine.

You're going to be safe to like to not face any sort of repercussions. Right. Or the brutality of Zionism. But so, yeah, the goal was to be united as a Syrian Arab Republic, but this calculus changed dramatically when you have Al-Julani, when you have HTS coming to power. Yeah. So, yeah, so Jolani was like, we want to kind of dissolve you into the broader forces of the government and not allow you to have any military autonomy.

And that was a line that they were not willing to agree to because that would, of course, compromise their ability to fight back severely if they were to simply be dissolved into the new Syrian regime's military. Correct. And there's actually a really great quote that just I read in a report from DropSight News. This was on the 20th. And it was Sheikh Hashem al-Bashir, who is the head of the Bagara tribe, which is one of the largest tribes in Diorazur, which is one of the, where a lot of the oil fields are in Rojava or in northern Syria. And he says, quote, our state, referring to Syria, is one state, we are fundamentally Syrian.

We waited for the negotiations for over a year without progress, end quote. He said, referring to failed talks between the Syrian government and the SDF. And he said there was no coordination. This was a popular revolt in support of our Syrian state. And so what happened, and I don't want to, I guess I'll say it, and then we can move around as we need to. But when over the last couple weeks, essentially Arab fighters that were embedded in the SEP,

and I should have said this much earlier, but I kept saying the Kurds, the Kurds, the Kurds, I'm talking about the Syrian Democratic forces, but this isn't only a Kurdish movement, but of course had communities all throughout the region, Adam, Druze, Christians, etc., and different identities. And so it's really lazy as well to just sort of say the Kurds. So Arab tribes that were aligned with the Syrian Democratic Forces defect

and joined the Syrian government side, Al-Jolani, the HDS. And so this is the huge calculus that shifted things in the last couple weeks. and what the Shaikh was saying was that we waited since March 10th. We waited. They were negotiations. They were supposed to happen and nothing happened. And so they revolted whether this was an autonomous decision to revolt against the SDF, whether it was coordinated with Al Jalani and Damascus, etc.

I don't know. I haven't seen the report that Adam mentioned that just came out. But this was what led to the current developments. And I'll stop it there. Yeah, absolutely, you know, elite retelling of that history. And it's hard to summarize so much history. But I think that does lead us back up to what's happening currently. And that's a good segue kind of into this next question. So setting aside that particular issue for now and kind of zooming out to look at the entire situation happening within Syria right now. I want to kind of hone

back in on kidnappings and sect-based killings. What's happening with these, you know, kidnappings and killings? What does the total lack of accountability tell us? And can you kind of talk about the credible allegations about the role of the Syrian general security and other authorities in these attacks? It's kind of like a war within a war in a way that we have these clashes or little moments of armed conflict that happen on the coast in Hama in the northeast or in Swayda, and then within those contexts, as well as within the context of Damascus and Homs and the villages throughout Syria, we're also seeing these notably sectarian-based, I would say overwhelmingly targeting Aloites, but targeting Christians as well, targeting Shias,

that are almost driving a stake into the heart of the populace to make it clear that these are division lines. These are war lines. There is a side to be on and there is a side that will be pushed out. So throughout the last, I guess, over a year now since the end of 2024, there have been over 150 reported abducted women and girls throughout Syria. I would say approximately, the last time that I was able to get an accurate count from organizations on the ground was in November of last year. So I apologize that some of this is out of date and I'll use some approximate language to just clarify that. But less than two thirds of these cases have had resolutions. I would say that about of those, the majority that have had resolution were paid by ransom were returned

in some way harmed with physical evidence of harm, be it bruises, be it haircut, be it wounds that came from from cutting, from any kind of physical injury. Women have reported rapes, women have reported various forms of sexual abuse and physical abuse. Children have been kidnapped along with their mothers. And it is targeting women in terms of the abductions. There is a notable goal there that is gendered. When it comes to the sectarian violence in general, I think we've seen just a lawlessness. One thing that wasn't really addressed in the initial takeover of the government was that the various militias at the time that took over Damascus, essentially emptied the jails indiscriminately.

So along with people who were wrongfully imprisoned and imprisoned for political reasons, murderers, people who had been in prison for sexual violence or for burglary, I'm an abolitionist, but we need to be a little bit rational here, that those prisons were emptied indiscriminately and without any accountability or responsible tracking. So over the past year now, we have seen just complete lawlessness in that there is no organized policing system. If you call for the government, you will receive general security. And there is no assure, you don't know who you're getting. We don't know if this is someone who has been trained by the government. We don't know what that training looks like anymore.

there were videos that circulated on Facebook approximately March or February of 2025 that were just men marching around Damascus in all black and with machine guns. And that was our view into what police training looked like under the new regime. That's who we're calling when our mothers, when our daughters, when our sisters go missing. or when our brothers are shot in the street or when they're held up in their cars, because those are the kinds of situations that are being reported to us. And I'll be happy as well to link some examples of these. There's also been several cases where the government or the general security forces have been complicit in the crime effectively, excuse me, where women have been able to call for help.

abducted women have been able to reach someone to ask for help to reach a government security force, and they have taken not only the abductor into detention, but the victim as well. So we're just seeing a complete disorganization of what we would call in the U.S. law and order, but really just community accountability, understanding where people are going when they're held in detention, understanding what's happening when a murder is reported or an abduction is reported. There is no lines for a family member to follow up on an investigation. It's nearly impossible for people in detention to access their legal counsel. So we're seeing a lot of just these kinds of lay violations of human rights.

And what we would in the U.S. consider these civil rights, and liberties that underscore democracy and freedom. Yeah, it's, it's absolutely brutal. Two prodded sort of follow-up here. To what extent does this serve the interests of the new Jolani government, this sort of sectarian violence and this inability of any accountability? It seems like, you know, from a naive point of view that pure chaos wouldn't be good for any government, but I'm wondering if you can kind of help articulate or elucidate that relationship. And then also you mentioned the role of gendered violence in particular. I saw the tearing down of the woman warrior statue. I've seen, you know, Kurdish female fighters being

humiliated in really grotesque and brutal ways. You mentioned sexual assault. We've seen, you know, throat being cut, women's hair being being cut off. I'm wondering if you could talk about that as well a little bit more so people understand the gender dynamics of the assault. I think just start with your first point. I think that right now, a lot of the logic underscoring the violence is the era of reconciliation. The idea that this majority has been under the minority's thumb, and I'm kind of parroting not only the narrative that I think is prominent now amongst a lot of people that will gloss over this violence or perhaps will excuse it without knowing the extent of it. But I'm also parroting a lot of the active talking points that

were going on during the war. There was this idea that this majority had been so specifically repressed by a minority regime that the Sunni majority suffered in some way that was specific and unique to the suffering of the rest of Syria. And I think that right now, even throughout the rest of the world there's almost like a carte blanche being given of we get it and it's it is i'm laughing a little bit because i think as someone who is a syrian christian it has been disillusioning beyond the disillusionment that i thought we already had experienced in resda so i i just think that there needs to be a little bit of critical thought in just the the broader public's engagement and how we view civil war.

Yes, there's a reconciliatory period. That reconciliatory period doesn't usually include several distinct episodes of targeted ethnic or ethno-religious violence. Right. And I think that that's kind of the wing that this is being flooded under. Just in the same way that the Syrian government investigated themselves over the March 2025 massacres, of primarily Alawite communities, just like, I mean, Amnesty, the UN have published reports on both the Alawite massacres and what they're still calling armed clashes in Swayda. Like, these are documented events, but the government is kind of hand-waving them as one-offs,

their independent parties, they're acting of their own accord, and we don't stand by that violence. So there is a little bit of almost double speak happening That Unfortunately, by this time next year, The Zolani government will probably have moved on And these will just be human rights reports That will eventually be brought up Whenever someone rebels against him

I think maybe if anyone has anything to add there Yeah, I just wanted to say when you watch an outlet like Al Jazeera or any media that's sympathetic to Jolani they'll sort of just blindly parrot his talking points about the violence against these ethnic

religious communities by saying oh well they were regime remnants which is just fundamentally just it's just completely misguided I think there's also especially in the West there was this talking point that oh you know if you are against the rebels in Syria, you are an Assadist, and that there are people in Syria who are also Assadists,

and there are people in Syria who are pining for the return of Bashar al-Assad. This is a complete misrepresentation of the internal politics within Syria. Most people in the country, whether they be Druze, Ali, Kurdish, they did not have this blind loyalty to Bashar al-Assad. what they did have was a commitment to their country's sovereignty and its secularism and its pluralism, which for all of bathism's faults was part and parcel to its ideological current. So I think when anyone will accuse you of being an Assadist, there's no such thing as Assadism. It's not an ideology. Nobody in Syria, in fact, is happy with Bashar for the most part from what I've been told

because they see him as abandoning his people. After years of sacrifice of war to keep Syria sovereign, he just fled to Russia. And again, we don't know the details of what happened in the final hours of his government. We probably won't for some time if we ever do. But I just want to be clear that whenever there's talk of regime remnants and the Jolani government moves in to quell it with a very swift hand, this is completely false. It's the Syrian equivalent of Israel saying, oh, well, they were all Hamas when they strike, you know, a civilian, when they strike civilian infrastructure. Right. Yeah, and your point about, you know, you know, Syrians not being Assadists, but understanding that they were fighting for their sovereignty, despite their differences with the government, there's an easy analogy there to what's happening in Iran currently, where, you know, many people internally might have various disagreements with their government, but a lot of people know that toppling their government and reinstalling the Shah or whatever U.S. Israel puppet will be installed in his absence is not. good for the sovereignty of the Iranian people and is not in the interest of the Iranian people.

So despite what disagreements they may have with their own government, they know damn well that the imperial overthrow and regime change is not going to lead to anything in their benefit. And so they might rally around the current government despite disagreements because they would rather have a sovereign government and handle that stuff on their own than have an external imperialist force come in and topple them. We'll get to that, I think, in the final question. as well when we draw more of these analogies. I know Nora, you raised your hand. Is there anything else you would like to say before we move on, or did that cover it?

I was going to add a point about specifically Al Jazeera. Someone mentioned previously, I think it's important to say that Al Jazeera specifically as a media outlet is funded by the Qatar government. It is Qatar. And Qatar is a state that has very big economic interest, in Syria, namely through the gas pipeline, right? This is a thing that's been very controversial, to say the least, during the Syrian Civil War, during Assad. And now with Al-Jolani in power, and with Qatar essentially backing him, reflecting back on the way that the war was reported on by Al-Jazeera,

there is a lot of sectarian-coded language. There is a report from 2012 that specifically says that the Aloites are a Shia offshoot that the president Bashar al-Assad and much of the ruling elite of Syria belong to. And this type of language that is used by Al Jazeera is something that also adding on to what Angela said is part of this narrative of the Sunnis, the majority of Syria, were so oppressed in a way, and they were ruled by the minorities and, you know, similar points that now, you know, this violence and these massacres, these sectarian massacres, are justified because of the way that they believe Sunnis were treated. So I think it's just very important to know that these narratives are also constructed by foreign governments who are very much involved in Syria to this day and who are very much in support of the new government.

And sectarianism as a whole is it's definitely a societal issue that's been in Syria for way longer. However, it was instrumentalized in a way and is still instrumentalized today that kind of, internally made the basis for the violence and the events that we are seeing right now. I think that's an incredibly important point because a lot of people in the West that perhaps understand the limitations of Western corporate media often seek perhaps alternative outlets or global outlets that aren't Western and, you know, Al Jazeera seems like an outlet that one might be able to trust. It's often demonized by Israel, for example. So if you're a critic of Israel and you see them demonizing Al Jazeera all the time. You might think,

okay, well, here's an outlet that, you know, is sort of objective or non-biased in some way. And on some things, of course, it's better than Western media. But I think, as you pointed out, it's incredibly crucial to understand that Al Jazeer itself has deep political interests and the backing of the Qatari government, which you need to take into account when you're using them as an outlet by which you're getting your information. So, I think that's very important. So I'm ready to move forward. If anybody wants to butt in, please raise your hand if you had anything else to say on that front.

But kind of moving forward, we have a few more questions here, and I really appreciate you taking, being so generous with all of your time today. I'm interested about the policy and leadership evolution of the new Syrian regime and the sort of wider governing project that's evolved and played itself out so far. We've touched on it in a myriad of different ways, but maybe we could kind of go a little bit more in depth. What's the day-to-day governance, the overall ideology, and basically what changes in government feel most consequential for Syria's future in particular? What I think has been most clear in terms of governance is that for Syria's future, it will be Islamic, which is, ironic given the situation that we'll discuss what they're on but within the first few weeks of that

interim government being established and the interim constitution being released the curriculum of public schools had become explicitly religious where it had priorly been secular uh there was a new regulation installed to ensure that certain positions in government could only be held by specifically Sunni Muslims. I think generally I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but I do believe there is a singular woman in the Syrian government at present, and there are no Christians. I do not know the numbers on Druze, but I don't, like, we just,

the representation has dissolved. There are rem, I don't want to use the word remnants. I'm sorry. There are members of the former party and of the former government that have remained and are still a part of the government. But writ large, we've seen changes to education policy. We've seen the removal of art, of various fixtures of the public universities that have been deemed offensive. I believe in both the University of Damascus and the University of Aleppo. all nude displays is the word that they use but nude statues, any art that depicts the new form was removed from the premises.

There have been several public campaigns documented for women to fully cover. Beyond that, I think, and more importantly, we've seen many prominent steps towards explicit Israeli normalization. And people will tell you that that's still far off. I think about six months ago you could have made a real argument that perhaps the government of Jolani was not in the position to make waves and just wanted to be established. I don't think you can make that argument today. We're in a very real moment where I think that it is possible we seed more of the south of Syria to Israel, land that my grandfather and my grandfather's grandfather have fought over for years and

years. You know, it's something that's very harrowing, I think, to speak of. It's land that really, truly are our bloodlines died of me. So I think we're in a moment of partition. That has been the key change to Syria's policy and leadership is that we are now in a Syria where partitioned, is an acceptable resolution to armed conflict, where previously Syrian sovereignty and Syrian nationhood and its boundaries and the solidification of that sovereignty and those borders had been paramount because we understood that vulnerability there meant collapse.

So we're now in a moment that beyond what's happening, in the northeast, in the immediate aftermath of the coastal massacres, despite kind of the attempts of the government to quell people's anxiety and to say that an independent investigation would happen. That investigation didn't happen. It was just the government investigating themselves, as I previously mentioned. There have been calls from every single one of these sects that we want autonomy, we want annexation. One of the moments that really, broke my heart very early last year was speaking to the survivors of the massacres in the coastal towns that were telling me explicitly we want to be separate. We can't be a part of Syria anymore

if this is how we're going to be treated. And that has been tolerated. That kind of dialogue has almost been tolerated, whether it's in conversation with the U.S. or with Israel or with Turkey, the erosion of Syria's sovereignty has been the cornerstone of its policy for the past year. And it's been costumed in our economic freedom and in, I don't know, whatever we're calling democracy these days, whatever that word evokes to your audience. That's what's been covering up this slow erosion of Syrian sovereignty. Yeah, incredibly well said. And of course, yeah, Israel's benefit here needs to be highlighted continuously. And that kind of feeds in well to this next question, which is about propaganda and the narrative warfare. We've alluded many times in this conversation so far about how certain things are discussed in certain ways in the Western media, but a lot of this is just not covered at all. I mean, without social media, without independent journalists, without these own little communities that we've built up on the anti-imperialist. to left to make sense of these events in real time using the technology we have. I mean,

think about how impossible it would be for the average person in the West to get anything like credible information on this situation, to be able to follow it in its nuances and complexity. To be educated on topics like this, if you're in the West, you have to go above and beyond and try incredibly hard to inform yourself and others about what's really going on. I hope episodes like this help, the work you all do, certainly help and the technologies we have to communicate, certainly help because without modern communicative technologies, we wouldn't even be aware of each other. And so I think just, you know, that's just worth saying, but there is still propaganda, there's still information war. And what narratives, here's my question, basically, what narratives are most aggressively being pushed right now by corporate media? you can talk about Al Jazeera, anything else, who benefits from them?

And, you know, what are some ways that people can kind of easily spot propaganda specifically on the topic of Syria? Some things that you've noticed in the media telling of these events that you can kind of point out and say, whenever they talk like this, you know, a red flag should go up or whatever. However you want to take that. So I want to start just with a very, I know we've gone a little bit overall, I'll bury over, but I, my background is specifically in terrorism. I've done my master's thesis as a critical review of the field of what we call kind of an international relations terrorology, which is the complete critical study of the act of terrorism, the policies that seek to counter

it, and the evaluation of those policies. And I chose to study it through the lens of criminology, because that is effectively what the international system has done. when it uses the word terrorism. I set all of this up to say that the propaganda on Syria has been explicitly one of weaponized language. Things like terrorism, like ethnic cleansing, like massacre, are words that throughout the course of our 14-year civil war were actively thrown at and weaponized against the, the Syrian government at the time and its allies, whereas now that we have equal and frankly greater evidence for the using of those words, you know, we see them just completely vanish from the lexicon of human rights organizations. Jalissa and I actually co-wrote a report on the Syrian network for

human rights and we investigated not only their reporting and their methodology, but we also also looked into their organizational backgrounds. And it's a sham, frankly. But what we found in their methodology was that they effectively had no definition for a civilian, no definition for a civilian victim. They had extensive definitions for what it meant to be a journalist or a medic or what it meant to be all of these various different things, how they classified sexual violence from plain violence. They had mechanisms of differentiating in later iterations. of their methodology, but they couldn't identify a civilian victim. And when we looked at their data, it was really clear why they didn't want to identify a civilian victim, because it allowed them to

inflate their numbers by including the death counts and the casualty counts of militia men and the opposition fighters from the Syrian regime. So there were a lot of different lenses of propaganda and a lot of different intricate mechanisms by which data was almost sanitized before it even got to the journalists. And I think that that report is a really great way to just get in touch with one mechanism through which that happened. But now that the regime has fallen, I think as, as Joma mentions as well, regime is a funny word to use now because we don't use it when we talk about the U.S. or when we talk about France or when we talk about the U.K. now that the Assad leadership is gone, there's a new propaganda of freedom and tourism and

openness and kind of this almost, the wall has fallen, come and see Damascus, where even when Amnesty publishes these multiple reports on the coastal massacres or on Swayda or now even on the ongoing, what they call to my absolute rage, armed clashes in the Northeast, they go completely ignored by public media and by popular culture because we're too busy celebrating the fall of this kind of boogeyman dictator that we built up for 14 years. And I think that is the victory of propaganda, is creating these sort of arrogance out of people where those people are really just, I mean, I think we do the same thing with Trump. I don't know that Bashad al-Assad had that much impact on Syria towards the end or towards

the beginning. He didn't want to be president. That party was doing things out of their own interest, out of his interest. It was absolutely not this political boogeyman that the West made him out to be where he was a pariah and seeking to exploit and really drain his people dry. while attacking and stalking out the West at every point. It just wasn't that sophisticated. It was really a white knuckle attempt to hold the state together. Whereas now we get to just celebrate his departure. And the success of the propaganda is that the majority of the world doesn't care what happens in the aftermath.

It all gets swept under reconciliation. When it comes to tells for spotting propaganda, I think that I would honestly pass that on to someone like Joma, because I think that the way that the Kurdish problem and the Rojava project is spoken about is just dripping with that kind of particularly neoliberal propaganda, which is the propaganda that we are most susceptible to on the left, I'm afraid. there's it's easy for us to make fun of QAnon but how many people in the past year turned around on Syria or are now saying something very different about Iran than they would have said about Syria a year ago so I think that it's important for us to start looking at you know how is el jazeera talking about things how are the small neoliberal kind of quote unquote woke Instagram pages posting about things versus how are the people who take maybe a week to publish their essay, a month to publish that op-ed, an extra two months to do that research? What are they saying? I don't, I think that

there is a expediency problem with the way that we want to consume our news and formulate our opinions. There is a desire to have immediacy. And that's just not how analysis happens. I think that if you are reading something that is trying to tell you how to feel about an event that happened within the past 12 to 72 hours, stop, think, look at their sources, look at that author, maybe, I don't know, I think that our analysis should be slower. Yeah. First and foremost, and that maybe is our fundamental tool to combat propaganda. Yeah, and I'll hand it over to anybody that wants to speak next and Jomo was mentioned.

But yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head with regards to the modern algorithmically pumped out immediacy, the deterioration of people's attention span, the reward you get algorithmically from an immediate hot take. And so much real analysis has to take time and also has to understand the history that led up to the present. So much stuff has talked about as if it's in that sort of vacuum from history. And one of the best things you can do to equip yourself to think critically about the media you're consuming is to understand as much history as you possibly can. Because that will inform your ability to understand the present and can help to some extent in combating common propagandistic tropes like regime, like the use of democracy and freedom, like terms like liberation, liberating the people, liberate Cuba, right? Free Cuba, freedom. These are all buzzwords.

And also a really grotesque form of this is the weaponization of feminism and the use of women's rights. You notice where it is and isn't applied with Iran, which we're going to get to here in a second. You know, there's legitimate grievances by women on the ground in Iran for sure, but the way that it is cynically weaponized by Western imperialist forces, as if they have any interest whatsoever in the human rights of women. And we can look over to how they treat women in Gaza to see that that was never, ever. part of the actual calculus. But time and time again, people are tricked by these words.

And honestly, well-meaning people often are tricked by these terms because who could be against women's rights? Who could be against democracy? Who could be against liberation? And these are exactly the sort of framings and phrases that should set off alarms. Not that they're always wrong, but that you need to address whatever you're reading with extreme criticality for sure. And it's sort of grotesque how a lot of these things are weaponized.

But I'd love to hand it over to Jome or anyone else who would like to talk about this. Sure. So for on the Kurdish question, we saw this, if you were following mainstream media, these very orientalists, like, look at these beautiful women fighters in their military guard, very sexualized, very gross depictions of women defending. their homeland. So there's that that just came to mind when I was thinking of conversations about the SDF or the YPJ or whatever. The second point I wanted to make is something that Brett was just talking about. And that is that there is not really a shortcut to deep reading. And in some ways, ways reading history

operates almost like math where it builds on each other. So you start to recognize patterns. You start to recognize even models or blueprints. And you'll be able to start to recognize even alliances

between either U.S.-led imperialism or anti-systemic forces that are trying to resist. And so I think there, I would be very suspect of anything I read on any mainstream media. Like, read it with a grain of, I don't know, the entire beach. Like, I mean, sometimes I will, and I know I think Brett does as well, we'll listen to NPRs up first or something just to kind of hear

how things are getting spun because we have the six sort of masochistic like need to like hurt ourselves and I think others can do it as well and it can be a useful I joke but I mean it can be a useful practice to hear and to start to like train your ear and analysis to be like oh like okay yeah democracy another thing I was thinking about is think about the silences which I think Brett was just saying Like where is this sort of women's freedom being appelled? And where is it not? Where is it? And honestly,

any time you see the U.S. State Department really caring about an issue, be very suspect. Ask why. And oftentimes it can lead into somehow to do with Zionism. And this is a longer conversation about, the petro dollar and all of these things, but it comes back down to maintaining hegemony, maintaining a U.S.-backed world system. And so we have to try to start to understand how to think world systemically,

start to understand history, and there's just not shortcuts. Now, I think we can all share if I don't know if this is even a good time to do it. So a couple resources, new sites or whatever, that I would recommend but even with that always with a grain of salt start to sort of train your analysis in ear and like others were saying there are like these sort of buzzwords

that you should be aware of if you hear the word regime like obviously be very suspect because this is never used for France or Britain or or the US regime so it even sounds funny to the ear because we've been so propagandized

And yeah, and I think it's also difficult. Last thing I'll say is, look, we're exhausted. So many people are working two, three, four jobs in the gig economy as well. And so it's hard to have this one media literacy, but also the time to like spend reading books and articles that are held behind paywalls. So I understand. And that's why I guess we're trying to build up this sort of. of anti-imperialist analysis in ways that people can start to deepen their knowledge,

their understanding of history. Yeah. A good shorthand is if there's anything happening in West Asia, you should immediately start thinking, what is Israel's interest here? You know, the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, the war build up to Iran situation in Syria, all of this, that's a critical first step you should take because there is always, you know, Israeli interests, which is synonymous in a lot of ways with the U.S. imperial interests. But you made a great point, too, of the way that our modern techno landscape keeps us distracted,

keeps us fragmented, you'll be very surprised that the stuff, I mean, maybe you won't, the stuff that we see on our algorithm is not what other people see. A big event will happen that, you or I or anybody listening will have their entire feed filled with. And I'll sometimes just look at, you know, friends or family who aren't particularly political. Hey, have you heard about this situation? They'll be like, no, not at all. Because their algorithm doesn't deliver it to them. And so people are now being fragmented in that very real way.

Constant assault of distraction. You know, how hard is it now to read a chapter of a book compared to even 10 years ago? Even I noticed it in myself because we're constantly, you know, sort of stimulated with novelty. and we could always swipe to the next thing and to sit down and spend time with a text and think about it and work through it, even especially challenging text, right? It's never been easy. It's even harder in our modern era. So that's a skill set that you have to increasingly actively cultivate, the skill set of solitude,

the skill set of being alone with your own thoughts, the skill set of not being hyperstimulated all the time, of reading long books. Obviously, I would say meditation is a great way to bring back control over your own attention and where it goes. Those are all things that are incredibly important. As an aside, and this is just amusing to me, there was a media chart put out. It's put out like every year by some liberal centrist apparatus

that pretends to be sort of looking over the terrain of media outlets and putting them on this chart that shows who is more or less reliable and trustworthy. There's the right-wing bias and the left-wing bias. And on the right-wing bias, you'll see like all the way down on the far right bottom side. You'll see Alex Jones, right, these conspiratorial outlets. And Rev Left made it. But Rev. Left was the furthest to the left and the furthest to the bottom. You know, shows like Joe Rogan, you know, Save America, whatever that liberal outlet is, those were all deemed more trustworthy than Rev. Left, right? The Ben Shapiro show, more trustworthy than everything,

CNN, MSNBC, all of that. And we were centered out. My daughter, who's in high school, She's in a journalist class. They present the chart in her journalist class. She takes a picture of it and sends it to me. Like, Dad, isn't this your show? And it's just, that is like meta-propaganda, right? That's like a way in which you zoom out and look at the entire terrain and say, these are the bad outlets and these are the good ones.

And of course, what are the good ones? The corporate media, you know, the centrist media, the liberal media. And you listen to a show like this where obviously we have incredibly educated people talking, you know, through principled lens of analysis of their experience in the region and history and philosophy and economics. And to say that this is on par with Alex Jones rambling for three hours straight is just, it's of course absurd to us, but, you know, a regular person might look at that and believe it. I mean, this was being taught in a high school journalist class that this is a chart worth taking seriously. And so, you know, the odds are always going to be stacked against us,

but I found that a particularly grotesque example of exactly that. But again, what should we expect? So this is the last thing I'll say here, just to put an exclamation point, and we'll move on to the next question. There is no one outlet that you can go for all the right answers. There is no shortcut, as Jomo is saying, to being able to think critically. You have to kind of build up a background base of knowledge,

a deep interest and curiosity and an ever-learning approach to history itself, and you have to remain critical of everything you, read. There is no magical source that you can go read to get the exact right take on everything. That's why reading widely, consuming media widely, understanding what the liberals think, what the corporate media thinks, what the economist thinks, what's Tucker Carlson thinks, is important just so you can get a lay of the land, of the terrain of ideology that you're operating within. And if you can understand your enemies, better than they can understand you, that will always be an implicit advantage for us to have. And so it's annoying. It's, it's,

It's masochistic, as Joma said, in many ways to sit through some of this stuff. It's infuriating. I find myself yelling at the radio in my car often, but it is an important skill set to develop. Adam? Yeah, I just want to say for people who are looking for a good launch pad for thinking critically about West Asia specifically. The two sources I go to is someone who is sort of outside the academy are The Cradle, which has a YouTube channel where they do a week. roundups twice a week on just all the happenings in West Asia

and Middle East Critique, which is the journal that Joma published their great article in. They have open access articles so you can just go to the official page on, I think it's a tanned what is it, Joma? If you just Google Middle East Critique, you'll find the journal. And you can pull up the open access articles tabs and you can

read incredible scholarly articles that delve very deeply into the history and geopolitics and political economy of the region. I'm not saying that they're always the most accessible reads, but they are incredibly useful to gaining independent insight into what is happening there beyond the agenda of, you know, whether they be golf-funded media outlets or ones that are amenable to. American imperialist interest. Those are what I would go to personally. The cradle and Middle East critique. Thank you. Joma. Yeah, I would just add in when we talk about, you know, listening to what is Tucker Carlson saying?

What is Joe Rogan saying or whatever? Not only is it a good exercise to understand the propaganda that's being shared, but it also allows us to be able to talk to your non-politicized friend. Yeah. It gives an idea of sort of the schlap that there's kind of hearing through the ether. and so you can touch grass and try to be able to bridge the gap between what they're hearing on, you know, whatever they're getting their news, whether it's osmosis or whatever, or to, you know, what you're reading or hearing about or seeing from these great sources. I would also, I guess, recommend Mondal-wise and reading some of the journalists if you find someone that you find helpful. I would also recommend what Adam said, The Cradle and Middle East Critique. Al-Mayaideen as well is another great resource. But with any of these, don't read anything as gospel and read everything critically.

But as you do that, you'll be able to start to recognize these patterns. And then be propagandists for actual liberation. as you talk about the phrase liberation. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I work in the trades, construction site, blue collar environment all the time. You know, political conversations come up, and it is to my great advantage that I know, whether I'm talking, whatever sort of ideology that I hear come out of the mouths of my coworkers and, you know, fellow union members, I know what they're, I can almost, just by what they say,

I can tell where they're getting their information because I'm also familiar with it. And then I can sort of curate my approach based on what I know their background knowledge to already be and what will and won't work, right? What words I could say that will turn them off and shut them down and what avenues I might have to explore a contradiction or to, you know, not even push my entire worldview, but push a certain point that I think might hit on something that they might already have ambiguous feelings about it, et cetera. So it's just, I can't say enough how important it is to have that background knowledge

of where other people are coming from so that you can communicate with them effectively. If all you hear is like the echo chambers of like left wing stuff on social media, you will be sort of alienating and alienated from regular people when you try to converse with them because you just will have no clue where the hell they're coming from or where they're getting their ideas from. So again, it's a, it's a skill set. And when we have, we have the duty in this historical juncture to do all that we can to be effective and, incredible communicators, even and especially to people who don't agree with us or our worldview. So a couple more questions here.

Again, thank you all so much for your incredible generosity with regards to your time. I want to ask a question on the bigger lesson when we zoom out, and then I will finish this on a discussion of Iran and what we can learn about Iran right now based on what we've learned so far about Syria and how this is played out. So the bigger lesson, zooming out, what should Syria teach us about this political moment, about imperial strategy, and how people in the West broadly should think and act in solidarity with people of this region more broadly? So I preface this a little bit to say that I just have been in a headspace of thinking about the carcoral state of things. and I think that we as a left, if we want to say, have become incredibly punitive and incredibly carceral. And Syria is a glaring example. We talked about Syria being the litmus test. Syria has also become the stick that we're beating each other to death with in a way.

We're in one of the most vulnerable moments for Syrian solace. without a doubt. We're in one of the most vulnerable moments for sovereignty in general, I think, and that's evident in what we'll talk about with Iran, or we could talk about it with Venezuela and Cuba and Lebanon. I mean, we're in this moment where state power has become absolute and the right of the state to enact violence has become the paramount indicator of state power. So the states that are unable to meet the violence of the U.S. or the violence of Israel or the violence of health, like Saudi Arabia, any state that can outmatch another has entered into this Thucydides-type realist engagement of the strong do what they want and the weak endure what they must. And I think we need to reckon with that and take on the responsibility that comes with engaging with our allies. I think it is my bottom line. We need to decide if we are going to allow this wave of state power to chop us up into these tiny little pieces that are no longer able to fight against

anything meaningfully. Or if we want to be a unified front towards liberation. We need to decide if we want to be a carceral left that punishes each other over missteps taken when the knife is at our throat. I mean, we need to decide if we're going to hold the Kurds accountable for accepting U.S. help when they're in an existential crisis in the same way that we need to decide how we're going to hold accountable the actors that are involved in negotiating with Israel right now to end the war on Raza. So we need to be really honest with ourselves about the fact that we are aligned against an oppressor, and we need to reconnect with what that struggle means, with what our allies are doing and why, and with what meaningful action is.

I'm sorry, it's amazing that the U.S. has been able to rally thousands and hundreds of thousands of people at protests. But if you protest and your government does nothing, like you took a day off. I don't know what to say. That was not meaningful political action. It was performative political action. And we need more than that because it's not just Syrians who are done. dying anymore. It's not just us over there anymore. You have reason to be worried in the U.S. now. And the more that we can reconnect with that broader, I hate to say class struggle,

because that feels like a word that just as we're talking about people who are maybe disengaged from this political space, that is something that tends to turn people off. But we need to find ways to reconnect with that broader class international struggle because otherwise Syria has shown that we are all so susceptible to being divided and conquered. That's the biggest lesson that we can take away from this. It's that even when we have the best intentions and when we have the highest level of material analysis and when we want the best for our people, when we're put in a space of existential threat. If we have no allies, we have to capitulate. So we need to step it up, especially those of us who are in the West, those of us who live in the diaspora. I recently

wrote an essay specifically looking at how the diaspora plays such a huge role in manufacturing the narrative and often manufacturing consent for the violence against their homelands. And it's the paramount that we understand the responsibility we bear. for the privilege of speaking and being these voices. You shouldn't listen to me by nature of me being a Syrian. I'm, my Syrian voice means nothing if it isn't principled and, and understanding and rational to the historical and contemporary context of Syria and the region more broadly. It also means nothing if I'm just analyzing Syria in a vacuum or I just

to analyze Iran in a vacuum. Syria is right there, but Lebanon is there. We haven't really talked about Hezbollah, but the impact of Hezbollah, the impact on Hezbollah, rather, over the past year, has been immense and probably will continue to be for several more. We need to start understanding

the interconnectedness of our struggles and of our responsibility to each other outside of just the immediate communities that we have. Yeah, incredibly, again, said, and this isn't ultimately an international struggle, and we can never, ever forget that. Yeah, Nira, you're up? I think just, like, to quickly add on something, even though we are here, like, speaking within a crowd that is more or less aware of Western imperialism, of, you know, actually the

importance of anti-imperialism and those sorts of things, if there is anyone who is listening that might not be aware, something that really bugs me personally is seeing the amount of people, even on the left, if we can call it, fall for the propaganda advocating for regime change in Iran. Because if I could sum it up in just like one simple sentence, what we've seen in Syria, like since 2024, is that regime change, Western-backed regime change does not bring freedom to people. It does not bring liberation. It brings a government that serves the interests of the U.S. and more specifically in the region of the Middle East of Israel. And it's just very annoying because historically we know this to be true. However, in the modern

day, people still are repeating the same narratives that were used about Syria for Iran. And that is something that just, I hope to see less because if we just, if we just take a quick look at history, it will prove us differently. And even though the, the grievances of the Iranian people with their regime stand valid, we cannot put ourselves in a position to support a Western-backed an Israeli-backed movement. I think that's something that's important and that is not maybe talked about as much as I would expect it to be.

So just taking on the example of Syria, since the regime fell until now, everything that we've mentioned so far, everything that has happened, everything that has the amount of violence, why do we think that in Iran it would go any better? So just put in very simple terms, that's sort of something that I would add.

Yeah, I think it's crucial to make that point. I call U.S. Israel the Fourth Reich, right, fully equipped with the genocide, with Laban's realm, with this really ambition of a global takeover, complete domination and hegemony. That's what we're seeing. Syria is an explicit domino on the way to Iran, you know, the undermining of Hezbollah, the genocide in Gaza, the attack on Yemen. And these are all sort of preludes, necessary prerequisites to the invasion of Iran, which seems, I mean, these things are hard to tell for sure, but it seems more or less imminent that a move on Iran is coming. And we can move in that direction.

I see a couple hands up, though. So if you want to move in the direction of Iran, let me know. And if you want to say anything else before we move in that direction, feel free as well. But Adam? Yeah, I just wanted to say one thing about what Angie said about connecting our struggles. I do think that especially on, you know, social media sites like Instagram or TikTok, you do see an effort being made to connect struggles, but they're not coming from a materially or factually informed place.

Like you see a lot of people, even on the left, sort of glorifying the protests in Iran and trying to create a link between those and the protests against ICE here. but what I think we need to be abundantly clear of is when you actually examine the situation, you're going to find that their interests are diametrically opposed to one another in some ways. Like we see people trying to say that we should adopt the tactics of, you know, like the Hong Kong protesters or the Belarusian protesters when they were happening in 2020. But the fact of the matter is those are all being bankrolled by the CIA. Those are being instructed from or they're being given.

instructions from foreign NGOs that again are linked to Washington, to the Pentagon. So I think we need to be clear that you can create a solidarity but you need to be factually informed about it. There's, you know, I think the broader tendency

on like the online left is sort of, there is one very prominent Instagram page I saw that said it's not left or right, it's authoritarian versus liberation and that's just not how the world works. That is, you know, as Engels said,

a revolution is the most authoritarian thing there is. Like, that is just completely ignoring the geopolitical depths of our world. We are not going to arrive at any kind of informed analysis if we do not account for the fact that the U.S. empire has infiltrated every state that is sovereign and will absolutely exploit any protests or discontent. So I just wanted to be clear that if we're going to, We need to create a connectedness, but we also need to be abundantly clear as to how the world actually is rather than how we want it to be. 100%.

Joma? Yeah. Before we move to Iran, I wanted to say that I think an important lesson with Syria and the current developments, I think looking at how the U.S. has responded, I think looking at Al Jolani's rise and blessing is, is really important. I mean, this is someone who had a $10 million bounty by the U.S. State Department saying, you know, catch this terrorist. Then you meet in December 2024, and all of a sudden you remove the bounty. And so I think it's very revealing about what, I mean, what the U.S. is as terrorism or a terrorist. And I think of the old adage of like, he may be a, quote, son of a bitch, but he's ours.

I don't remember. Was that Ford or Eisenhower? Someone. But anyways, so to have, I think, an analysis of what the U.S. interest is, on January 20th, the ambassador to, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barak, he's also the U.S. envoy to Syria. He tweeted out, or I say tweet because, I don't know, I'm not going to X whatever. He tweeted out that, quote, today the situation has fundamentally changed, and this is about the SDF. Syria now has an acknowledged central government that has joined the global coalition to defeat ISIS, signaling a westward pivot in cooperation with the U.S. on counterterrorism. And keep in mind, I'm going to pause here, keep in mind, this is the leader of Al-Nusra, who had a $10 million bounty on his head. And we'll go back to the quote.

This is the U.S. Ambassador Barack. He says, this shifts the rationale for the U.S.S. SDF partnership. The original purpose of the SDF as the primary anti-ISIS force on the ground has largely expired. As Damascus is now both willing and is positioned to take over security responsibilities,

including control of ISIS detention facilities and camps, end quote. And if anyone's been following, we have this, all of these former prisons where the SDF was guarding captured ISIS fighters at great cost because Europe and all these other countries wouldn't repatriate these ISIS fighters that were captured. And so now you have Anusra come to power, HDS come to power, and then all of a sudden all of these ISIS fighters are released from detention camps.

And so hopefully you can be able to then to unpack and see the the blaring contradictions that we originally partnered with the SDF to prevent ISIS's rise but clearly if anyone's looking you're seeing the rise of ISIS right now and so which should lead you to then think

okay, if it's not about preventing the rise of the Islamic state or ISIS, then what is it about? Why are they all of a sudden, why is the U.S. State Department all of a sudden fine with someone like Al Julani coming to power who's

removed his fatigues, maybe shaved his beard a little and wore like a suit? And it has to do with who was overthrown from power? The big bad Assad regime. And so we have to recognize that this is all interconnected. George Jackson once said that, quote, it is not a materialist to disconnect things.

So I think we have to understand the connection. As others have mentioned, that we haven't brought up Hasstabullah, that we haven't brought up other anti-systemic forces in the region and begin to even question how they relate to one another, How do these countries, we mentioned various Gulf states, we mentioned Saudi Arabia, we mentioned Qatar, how do they relate to the U.S. orbit? How do they relate to Israel as an outpost of U.S. imperialism in West Asia? We have to begin to understand these. And what is the cradle, talking about the cradle, right, what is the cradle for popular resistance?

to U.S. egemony and begin to then think about how they relate to each other. And hopefully you can then see, oh, wait a second, this was not about preventing the rise of ISIS, but it was about overthrowing any sort of anti-systemic

or any sort of state that has the capacity to constrain the dictates of U.S.-led imperialism. So I think that's crucial, that's something when you to take away from what we're seeing in Syria. And the other thing is the contradictions of a non-state project in the era of U.S.-led imperialism. We can potentially maintain our political project, our liberatory political project, but it's very difficult.

Rojava has done an incredible job. I'm saying from my armchair, sitting in the West, defending their project. And also, I would also caution against sort of pessimism and to say, like, so even if the Rojava experiment territorially ends and we're seeing this sort of large loss of territory, I think any organizer, or anyone that's participated in political organization

knows that when you come home, you as a person are changed through political struggle, through taking action. And so I think also, I don't think that it's something that preceded Rajabahua 2012, but the Kurdish freedom movement isn't like gone just because the now transitional government or the HTS-led Syrian government is forcing a capitulation

and forcing the disintegration of the SDF, but there is an ongoing show that preceded 2012 that goes way back. And so I would also add in that sort of a push for revolutionary optimism, but also a sober analysis of... what can happen to your political project when you sort of refuse the state as a terrain of struggle. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So important.

And that's why we say that when you analyze these global events, you have to understand that the primary contradiction is Western-led, U.S.-led global imperialism, and that that is always a part of the analysis that needs to be undertook. And you look at these incidents and you isolate them and you try to make sense of them, you literally can't. And if you at all have any sort of skepticism about the evils of U.S.

imperialism, a simple question you can ask yourself is when has U.S.-led regime change efforts that have succeeded ever, ever led to a robust democracy where the people of that society have a robust set of human and civil rights that are respected and that are institutionalized at any level. You name me a U.S.-backed-led regime change operation, and I will show you you inevitably and inexorably a mountain of corpses, of human rights violations, of corruption, and of the undermining of democracy in virtually every instance. And so if we do not combat on the global level and support the forces that are actually on the front lines combating on a global level, the forces of Western-led and U.S.-led

imperialism, no world that we want, no ideal set of conditions can ever take hold when the dominant hegemon is Western imperialism and where these societies are allowed to exist or are toppled based on the whims and interests of Western imperialism. We will never get to a good world where that is the situation. And so whatever world you want, anarchist, Marxist, liberated in any way, shape, or form, it can only come in the wake of the defeat of U.S. and more broadly in Western imperialism and neo-colonialism. And that has to be the center of your analysis when you're analyzing global events. And I think that leads in perfectly to this final question here,

which is the question of Iran, right? As I said in the beginning of this conversation, we see a buildup of U.S. military assets in the region. We know that Israel is not at all finished with Iran. We know that the attacks on Hezbollah, on Yemen, on Hamas, and on Syria are lead-ups to an attack on Iran. They're never going to allow Iran to exist. current way, shape, or form. You'll hear talks about these democratic protests, and I'm sure there are

factions within Iran that genuinely want democracy and the Iranian people deserve genuine democracy, but the Western led forces are talking about the installation of the Shah monarchy. I mean, there's not even a pretense, really, in any substantive way of democracy and freedom when you're talking about the installation at the point of attack by the U.S. and Israel forces of a monarchy with just like in Venezuela, no real popular support. The support for the installation of Machado in Venezuela is like the support for the installation of the re-installation of the Shah in Iran. It just doesn't exist.

And so if Israel and U.S. go in and topple the Iranian regime, you're not going to get a robust, modern Iranian democracy. You're going to get a brutal U.S.-Israel proxy monarchical dictator state. And that is not in the interests of the Iranian people by any way, shape, or form. So I'm going to keep this question broad and take it in any direction you want. But based on everything we now understand about Syria, you know, what can we understand about Iran? What does this portend for Iran? Do you agree with me that strikes are imminent?

Some people say that they're not going to happen. I'm on the side that I think that they will. We've seen recent protests and riots, which has caused a lot of confusion and cynicism across the world with how these things. are discussed and talked about. But I'm just kind of opening up the floor and letting you all say whatever you want about the Iranian situation. I think with relation to Iran in particular,

but also just in relation to political revolution generally, there has become this, I don't know, tendency, perhaps, let's say, within the era of globalization, to treat revolution within a state, like it's this international group project. I don't know if that started necessarily. I don't know if anyone has sought to trace the historical root of that.

I don't say it to say that there's never been foreign backing for internal revolution, but the rate at which the lay person in America thinks that they should have a really literal say in the governing bodies of foreign nations is astounding to the rational brain. And I think perhaps that there's just a little bit of political non-education happening in the world. Not necessarily exclusive to the West. I think that the world as a whole has experienced a deeply traumatic century, perhaps. I would love to cap it off at, you know, the past 20, five years, but I think the world has seen a really traumatic 100 years and has not had a moment

to breathe and has just been one thing after the other. So there needs to be this kind of come-to-home moment. With Iran in particular, I think there needs to be an understanding that there are a lot of people in Iran. And the U.S. and the people that are speaking on the Iranian issue have not not had access to Iranian human beings by and large. And I don't say that in the kind of listen to Iranian voices, but I say that in the sense that how can you advocate for the liberation of a people or the liberation of a state or a nation that you don't fundamentally know or understand beyond what has been fed to you by your state? Or even curious about it, even curious to understand.

Absolutely. And I think going back to a little bit to our conversations on how to understand propaganda and recognize it, if your state or a body that your state or another state is funding is telling you how to feel about another state's political activity, we, woo, we, woo, we, like, sirens should be going off, red flags should be popping up. You should be thinking to yourself. What is the interest of the people versus the interest of the author writing this to me? What is the interest of the people versus the interest of me pontificating on the internet?

And with, yeah, I don't want to kind of loop that back and forth. I want to give other people maybe an opportunity to speak more before I really just hunker down. But there's 100% a need for people to re-engage. with the ideas of sovereignty and agency in history. Not in the modern day, because I think they've been propagated into the tradition of individualism. But historically, sovereignty meant the understanding of a people, a community, and the relations between sovereign communities were relations that were bound upon a level of true, genuine respect

and theoretical understanding of each other. That line has completely blurred, and I think that that is what is allowing things like a possible U.S. strike on Iran. If we cross that line and we enter that World War III, people aren't wrapping their heads around the fact that we're going to enter this era of like starvation and detachment and breakdown of trade. That's a really heavy line. And we're right there because that line of understanding people and communities outside of just the interest of the homeland has completely dissolved. Yeah, anybody else can raise their hands. I just wanted to make a quick point.

Propagandistically, things to look out for. Listen to the voices of blank. I always say the immediate way to undermine that nonsensical argument is that if any event happened in the United States, any event, these ice protests, let's say a civil war broke out in the U.S. And somebody in a different country said, listen to American voices. The first question we would say is, which fucking ones? Tucker Carlson, Bill Ackman, Rev. Left Radio? You talk to a million Americans, you'll get like a million different opinions. So it's just on its face, a nonsensical, a logical argument, and it is almost always marshaled in defense of some sort of imperialist project that seeks to tie in the mass majority will with this imperial project.

And it's never, ever done in good faith or is a serious, even logical step to take. And then the other thing I just want to say about Iran is if you don't think that the U.S. and Israel are going to make, make a move on Iran, we have to ask ourselves, why would Israel and the U.S. do everything it's done in the past two years, in the past 20 years, in the past 50 years, right? Everything that it's done. Why would it do all of that just to, at the last moment, stand back and let Iran survive? It seems like logically, from everything they've done and all the resources they've put into this, this has all been a move to eventually topple Iran.

They're trying to take advantage of protest. They're trying to infiltrate them. Massad has been on the ground throughout Iran, launching sabotage attacks on infrastructures, burning down mosques, killing security forces, trying to destabilize the community, plus the sanctions regime that has been imposed on them, destroying their economy and the real. This is all a buildup to something. And if you don't think it is, then you have to argue that they're doing all of this just to, at the very last moment, say, okay, we're good.

And that just seems, that just seems insane to me. I want to add on to what you said about the listen to X voices. Just very quickly, something that I find very problematic about this rhetoric as well is that a lot of the times the voices that we are being told to listen to are not even voices from the ground. Like saying listen to Iranian voices, but they don't actually mean the voices of Iranians from Iran. a lot of the times the diasporas are centered and their rhetoric is centered. And to tie this to Syria again, you know, Syria and Iran are both countries that have suffered under sanctions. And if you talk to people who lived under these Western imposed sanctions and who lived under these economic conditions and talking to people who are, are Syrian or Iranian living in Europe or living in the U.S., you will clearly get very different

responses in different opinions. So I think that, you know, the whole listen to their voices rhetoric should include, I mean, obviously with its problematic points and everything that was already mentioned, it actually doesn't include a lot of the voices that are underground, but rather the collective narrative of the diaspora, which tends to be extremely western washed, if I can frame it that way. And there's something grotesque about members of the diaspora calling for the bombing invasion and toppling of their home country, somebody in Miami calling for the destruction of

Cuba or Venezuela, knowing that that entails the murder of people in their own country. they're pretending to give a fuck about. And yeah, every time the diaspora, and you think about where the diaspora runs to from an enemy state of the U.S., you know, the U.S. welcomes them with open arms because it builds up this constituency within its own borders

for ostensible democratic support for these regime change wars that the U.S. has already wanted to engage in. So they open up their arms willingly to, you know, most recently and most cartoonishly, we've seen the opening up, of the U.S. immigration system to like white South Africans, you know, and like, you know, anybody fleeing Cuba, anybody freeing Venezuela,

fleeing, quote unquote, they're all going to be to welcomed in in that regard if they can serve that function domestically and they often do. Joma? Yeah, several points that are striking me. One is the centrality or the importance of wrestling with the effects of sanctions. and the role of sanctions in crippling and fracturing both a state but also a society. I mean, if we look at the developments in Iran, and what began as a popular upset from everything that I can tell,

from sort of the middle class shopkeepers, etc., that I've been dealing with crippling, inflation, the valuing of currency, none of this, and I'm going to keep repeating, none of this is isolated. And so we have to keep these things interconnected. And so when you see, and this also is relevant when we talk about Venezuela, when we see popular grievances, we have to, one, recognize the legitimacy of how hard it can be to be under the boot of U.S.-led imperialism to have your currency devalued to, I mean, you're working

long days and then you can't buy, I mean, we know the feeling even in the U.S. of how much things have gone up. And so to keep in mind like, yes, there are popular grievances, And there are also material and concrete reasons for these grievances. And so we have to recognize the role, even as a blueprint of sanctions and how the U.S. has weaponized sanctions to be able to foment popular unrest and then to capitalize on it. So that's number one. And the other thing, I was thinking of some of you have probably heard of this that General Wesley Clark famous. in 2007 comes on Democracy Now, and folks can look this up if you just look up Democracy Now

and Wesley Clark. And he comes down from the Pentagon and says, this is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran. And famously, like, Amy Goodman asks the good question of who gave you that paper or who told you that?

And he's like, I'm not going to tell you that. But I think it's, you know, revealing of sort of the early strategy of the U.S. State Department to destabilize these regions in West Asia and North Africa. And to take it seriously. Like, okay. And so, as you were saying, Brad, I don't think anyone is going to think, oh, as Israel has been seeking for. this vision of a greater Israel and the occupation of the entire region, this is a sort of expansionist vision. Of course, like, we're not going to see the U.S. then back off. In fact, I think as we're coming on, Trump is saying, you know, we're standing at ready or we're sending warships over

to Iran and we're at ready to, and I think flippantly he said, well, we'll see, like, you know, if we're going to use them or not. And so don't be surprised. I don't think anyone should should be surprised what the U.S. wants. I mean, they've been saying literally a general saying, you know, exactly what sort of the plan was. And so then the question to think about is why. That's one. And number two is, okay, so what can we,

so we have a great analysis, then that's great, but how are we going to enact and build the capacity to do anything to enact some sort of move on world history? And so I think that's the fundamental question that we're all, that I'm wrestling with and that we're all wrestling with. And part of it has to come through political education, through building up the capacity. It starts simple, but building up the capacity to even meet your neighbors and your community and organize around concrete things that we're all struggling with. And so obviously a lot of us are very busy with the terror that ICE has been reigning on our communities. So that's a way to start to them start to build on what people are already recognizing.

And then we have to help them expand their political consciousness to see the interconnections. Yes. All on the path to building actual political power that can contend for power within this society so that we can, you know, use it to combat the imperial apparatus itself. And of course, the way that the U.S. weaponizes its dollar as the reserve currency makes these sanctioning regimes possible in the first place. There's these attempts like bricks to try to get away from that. And I think that the more the U.S. has weaponized it, the more motivation the large parts of the rest of the world have to move away from it. The interesting and ironic thing would, of course, be that if the U.S. loses reserve

currency status. It would be devastating economically here at home, but it would in so many ways weaken its ability to use these sanctions regimes as a pretext for regime change around the world. And so we would have to take the, we'd have to take the fight home. And that's something that I think we should be willing to confront as a necessary part of this global struggle. Adam? Now, I think it also just bears repeating, and Joma can speak to this better than I, as they're a scholar on political economy, but I do think that it's important to note that even these countries that are being targeted by the United States for being authoritarian dictatorships or what have you, like Iran and Venezuela, their citizens still enjoy a social safety net

that most Americans would dream of. Like they are still, you know, even though they are being sanctioned and essentially under siege, their economy is being strangled, part of the reason for the recent unrest in Iran was specifically because the government canceled the subsidies for basic goods. And I'm just going to oversimplify the situation here. But basically, even though Iran is not a traditionally socialist government, it was still doing its best to provide for its citizens under the context of the United States, trying to make sure that it stayed out of the world economy and that it remained underdeveloped or even de-developed. So I think when we, talk about these dynamics within Venezuela of their being genuine popular discontent.

And part of that is because, again, as Joma would say, the U.S. has crippled their economy. And in the case of Maduro and in Iran more recently, they have had to introduce some neoliberal market mechanisms to try to stabilize it. And I think a very superficial sort of surface level analysis will just say that that's opportunism, that they're selling out the country. but if you know you look into the history of you and what the Soviets did with the new economic plan I think you have to understand that there are moments when the revolution has to take tactical retreats and those are going to be met with discontent because they are going to impact the lives of everyday people

but you really have to ask yourself what would you do in their position and how do you develop an economy and execute a revolution in the context of a siege when you are being strangled. So I think those are things to keep in mind as leftists try to chime in on both the discontents among the Iranian and the Venezuelan people. Truly. Angie? This is something I'll say, and I say it almost slightly ingest, but also very seriously not. if people look at the situation in Iran or in Syria or in any of the number of countries where the West has kind of propagated the need for regime change and an individual can be persuaded that, ah, yes, the threshold of state violence, repression, and economic hardship that I would be willing to tolerate is that has far gone and these people should change their regime. it's time to take a really, really hard good look at the American government and the state that it has created. Because I personally am advocating for the foreign intervention for the regime change of the U.S.

I think that the conditions that Americans live under are absolutely horrific. I think that the level of repression and economic disparity, and corruption and horror is beyond the threshold of understanding. And frankly, beyond the threshold that should be acceptable for the most developed nation on the world. So I think that, and I've said this since the early years of the Syrian Civil War when I was in high school, if you think that the violence Assad committed upon his people is deserving of the result that Syria has endured, then America deserves about 15 Syrian civil wars. And I say that just out of the objective reading of American history.

It deserves a Syrian civil war from every single, like, sliver of marginalized group that it has victimized. Every international context it has invaded. So I think that we need to re-contextualize what it means to need or demand regime change, particularly when we demand it for a country on the opposite side of the world, where we don't have to reap the direct repercussions of its dismantling. I mean, in the literature of political violence, regime change revolution, Civil War is practically an infectious concept. We see in the literature and we don't have consistent theories or a particular like this is the reason we believe that this happens. But we understand

that when revolution breaks out in one country, when a civil war begins in one country, it doesn't just stop at the border. It spills over. It increases the likelihood that neighboring states will experience some type of intrastate armed conflict within the next decade. It has a real and bloody impact on the region that it exists in. So we need to be a lot more critical of ourselves and the nations that we reside in and the nations to which we benefit the ones that we pay taxes towards literally the ones whose military budgets we fill before we start going around to police the governments of others. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Joma? I was just thinking like, dear Xi Jinping, Kulamani, please rescue us. Please give us democracy. Exactly. Genuinely. And the Lebanese will say that. The Lebanese have said that as early as recently rather.

as the Beirut Blast. That's a real concept of people will say, people will bring up. Mm-hmm. And I wanted to also recommend somewhat and just give them their flowers, but Dr. Helia de Tuggi, who does a lot of important work in Iranian legal scholar on sanctions. Folks should read Helia's work as well. Yeah, I think I'll leave it there.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, kind of to wrap up this conversation, I'll give everybody one more chance to say any final words. I just kind of wanted to touch on something that was said earlier. I can't remember who said it, but sort of the prospect of World War III. And if Iran gets attacked, it will almost certainly lead to that. And there's a way in which I think history will look back and no matter what happens from here on forward, kind of see this as already a World War III, right? We have a brutal, ongoing multi-year war in Europe. We have this continual war throughout the Middle East. We have neo-colonial attacks. and wars and, you know, brutalizations on the continent of Africa. The U.S. just kidnapped the sovereign leader of the state of Venezuela. You know, there's talk of invading Greenland, and now he's backing off that, talk of invading and toppling the regime in Cuba. The U.S. imperial hegemony is waning, and in the context of that waning is getting desperate,

and there's already a world war, no matter what happens next. But certainly, any more aggression going on a full direct, conflict with Iran would signal a sort of formal shift into a world war. But I think that we are kind of in the midst of one. And over a century ago, we had America had a gilded age. We had Great Depression. We had World War II. And in so many ways, I think we're not reliving that exact history. So many things are different. So many variables are different. But I think we're looking down the barrel of our own World War III. We're looking down the barrel of our own global or at least domestic economic collapse because this system is fundamentally unsustainable.

And as it lashes out in its weakness, it destabilizes the entire global order. So we're living in, I mean, in a cynical way, interesting times, but very scary times. We're living through history. And, you know, the idea that we wouldn't, the idea that we would be spared a lifetime where we would just live in comfort and ease was always a delusion. It was a temporary sort of product of a post-World War II order, specifically only in the Imperial Corps, where people had perhaps the luxury to not be concerned about politics. But politics is concerned about you, and politics is knocking on our door. It's kicking it in no matter where you live around the world.

And the system as it currently exists globally, as well as domestically, simply can't go on. It's just a matter of how that process that were already in the middle of. will continue to play out. And the role that we have as historical subjects to influence and push that trajectory to a different outcome, you know. You know, it's truly the old world is dying and the new one struggles to be born and it's the time of monsters. Gramsci had a bar and it still applies. But I want to give each of you go around the horn here. We can go, we can go just because of my Zoom outlay, Joma, Angie, and then Adam.

Let people know where they can find you online. and if you have any last words, you can articulate them now. Sure. Less words. I think that it's important. We talked about the massacres that we're seeing right now. We opened with the torture and at the hands of the HTS-led Syrian government. If you're wondering what the regime change looks like, it's literally happening before our eyes.

And so we have to drive that home. So I'll leave that there, but you can find my work I've published in Middle East Critique, as well as review of African political economy, Joma Henesedon. And I also have a podcast that we haven't been active because it's been so busy with ice raids. We've been touching grass, but it's called JD Pod. And so you can find me there as well. I'll link to that in the show notes. Angie? My last thoughts, I think I have been meditating on a lot of Quamontore's thoughts recently,

and I think that we are entering an era where we're not building our world anymore. We are building the world of our children. And I think that that's just, we need to start thinking like that. This is not individualism. This is not campism anymore. We need to reach out. we need to find community. We need to recognize oppression when we see it and we need to live in that pedagogy more often. We need to build that bridge from oppressed group to a press group much more

deliberately and with much more intentional analysis. And I think that we need to do that with our children in mind. That will make us much more conscious, I think. So I hope that that's what we can take forward into this new year. People can find me published on The Fair Observer. You can find my report with Jalissa there and on Admeyadeen. You can also find me on Substack at Angie Vitar or from a Levantine library or on Twitter at Levantine Witch. And that is all from me. I'll link to that in the show notes and incredibly well said, thinking about building a world for those who come after us. Our own children, which is James Baldwin famously said, is all children. And, you know, it's easy. It's easy. to say, you know, sitting in a relatively comfortable, you know, shed in the back of my

friend's house recording this episode, but I've come to terms with the fact that it's not about me, you know, the struggles that we're engaging is not so that I can have a better life. I will truly, from the bottom of my heart, sacrifice my life if it means that I can move the needle to create a better world for my children, for their grandchildren, and for future generations of humanity. And to start thinking in those terms, not necessarily that you have to sacrifice your own life, but you have to sacrifice your time, your energy, your attention, focus it on what actually matters in this world and think about what you're building for those who come after us. And think about if you can conceptualize dedicating your life to building a world that you

might not even benefit from, but that those after you will. That is worth it, truly. And so I want to just kind of echo what you said beautifully there, Angie. And finally, Adam, can let us know any of your last thoughts and where people can find you online. Yeah, no, that was beautifully. beautifully put, Brett. I just want to say that, you know, I think it's important that we continue to study. I think that part of the reason we are in the state we're in as left-fists is not only purely due to state repression, but I also think we are at present a little bit politically underdeveloped. I think people need to keep refining their application of dialectical materialism.

I think we need to start seriously studying what scientific. socialism can mean in the United States. And I think that podcasts like yours are where people go to start that education. I think, you know, we need to be more clear about what we need to do in order to successfully build a better world. And I also want to say, I know Jalisa had to leave, but she was actually flashbanged while covering the unrest in Minnesota a few weeks ago, and she is still in recovery.

So I'm going to ask that we put her GoFundMe in the episode show notes, if that's okay with you, Brett. Yes. Because she's, you know, unfortunately, probably not going to be able to work for a bit. She might have had a concussion from the state violence. that even though she was clearly marked as press,

and even though she was wearing eye protection, didn't stop Trump's, you know, secret police from brutalizing her. So, yeah, I just want to say, that's all I have to say about that. Yeah. That's horrific. I did not know that.

And we'll absolutely link to that GoFundMe so that we can come together as a community and support people putting themselves on the front lines of this Nazi ICE assault on the public. I mean, today we're speaking in the immediate, wake of another murder caught on camera in Minneapolis of a legal observer being disarmed, held down by several agents, and then murdered in cold blood and full view of several cameras. And there's no doubt that the right-wing monsters of our society will justify it.

They will justify anything. No matter what we've seen this time and time again with police and ICE violence, no matter what they do, these Cretans will defend it and come up with some thin pretext or justification for it and it's it's grotesque but um you know jillissa being on the front lines and trying to documented and getting injured is is horrifying and so we'll link to that and continue to shout out everybody in minneapolis um fighting against this ice terror it's it's it's beyond words um but but i do want to say almost three hour episode here i really appreciate all of you your knowledge your generosity with your time having these conversations you know going off script

and having these organic back and forths, I really think that if somebody sits down and listens to this full episode, they will come out the other end with a definitively better understanding of what's happening not only in Syria, but in the broader region. And I can't thank you all enough for coming on and making that possible. So I'll link to all the stuff we've talked about in the show notes. It's going to be a long link list.

But it's worth it. And I encourage people to follow up on this stuff. Continue to deepen your knowledge. Follow each and every person who was present on this call because they do, you know, great work getting information out online and through their various platforms. So love and solidarity. We'll talk to you soon.