The Rest Is Classified - 4. The Rise and Fall of Assad's Mafia Spy State

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

What will western and Syrian spy services be focusing on following the fall of Bashar al-Assad? Is Russia and Iran’s withdrawal from Syria similar to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan? Were the security services predicting that the Assad regime would collapse so quickly? Join David McCloskey and Gordon Corera as they answer all these questions and more in this emergency episode of The Rest Is Classified. For further reading, check out David and Gordon’s recommended profiles below: Razan Saffour - @RazanSpeaks Aaron Zelin - @azelin Leila Al-Shami - @LeilaShami Charles Lister - @Charles_Lister Synaps Network - @SynapsNetwork Kim Ghattas - @KimGhattas Emma Beals - @ejbeals Steve Heydemann - @SHeydemann Rim Turkmani - @Rim_Turkmani Lina Ghoutouk - @linaagho Sednaya Missing - @sednayamissing Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. And this is a special emergency pod. We're breaking already our regular schedule. We've only been going two weeks and we're already shaking things up slightly because we thought it was important to bring you an emergency pod, a special pod, looking at those really amazing events in Syria in the last few days. We're going to go back to our regular schedule and you're going to hear the second part of the CIA in Afghanistan on Wednesday as expected. But we're recording this on the evening of Monday, 9th of December, because we

just felt that there was some things we had to convey and we wanted to talk about, not in our normal format of telling a story, but more of a discussion between me and David, because David has, as we'll hear, some real firsthand experience in Syria. So just to recap where we are, the Assad family had been in power in Syria for, I guess, more than half a century, ruling that country with what seemed like an iron grip. Then 2011, the time of that Arab Spring protests broke out against their hold on power, leading to a civil war, chemical weapons used by the regime against their own people. The West didn't intervene after that, but Russia did to prop up the Assad regime. And it

looked, David, didn't it, like it was frozen and nothing was changing until, I mean, this really remarkable set of events, which started on November the 27th, incidentally, the day we launched our new podcast, although I don't think there's any link between those two things. Butterfly effect, Gordon. Butterfly effect. When this coalition of opposition groups led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham began a march and I mean, in a matter of days had taken city after city and eventually on the weekend took Damascus and President Assad fell from power and flew his statues ripped down. I mean, David, as someone who spent time in Damascus, how did it feel watching that? Well, you know, I felt two emotions that I guess, at the time, I wondered if they were

mutually exclusive. I don't think they are. You know, the first one was just joy. I think at watching a regime that is murderous, psychopathic, exceedingly brutal, violent, enter sort of the dustbin of history. And to see, you know, the man at the top, Assad, turn tail and run was very satisfying as somebody who has watched this guy for a lot of his professional life and, you know, studied him for almost a decade at CIA. So there was a tremendous amount of joy in that moment. There was also, I think, joy in seeing that, and I think as we get into this conversation, Gordon, we'll talk about this group more, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS, which is sort of the primary rebel groups or opposition groups to Assad that has governed a big patch of the northwestern

part of Syria for most of the past decade, and that really kind of spearheaded this assault, although there were plenty of other factions involved, which we can talk about at due time. But in kind of watching this, I mean, I felt some joy in the fact that the people who overthrew Assad were not some constellation of foreign powers, but Syrians, and that Syrians will now have a chance to build a better Syria. You know, I think so real joy in those two dynamics. Now, I would also be remiss if I didn't say that I felt some amount of fear in that, you know, there will probably be more chaos to come. And it is so rarely the case in this region that things, at least it hasn't been the case recently, that things get better. And so you really hope we're going to be proved wrong here. But I do feel a real sense of fear at what's coming next and how, you know, sort of a better Syria can be reconstituted. But I think it's just really

important to stress that it is hard, I think, at this point to imagine a more odious, repressive structure than Bashar al-Assad's regime taking root in Syria, at least over the near to medium term. Well, let's talk about that a bit because, I mean, you were there in Syria, I guess, before the civil war. Tell us a little bit about what your role was as far as you can, given it was for the CIA. I was a CIA analyst. I started working on Syria in 2006 and worked on it all the way up until the day I left Langley. And I was working in Damascus in the time prior to the outbreak of the civil war. I was an analyst in the CIA's station in Damascus, just, you know, in office in the embassy, which got,

I believe, shuttered in 2012. We eventually closed our embassy there. And I actually had the opportunity to be there as some of these other uprisings in the region began, you know, in Tunisia in late 2010, and then in Egypt in early 2011. And most of what my job was there was actually pretty similar to what an analyst would do at Langley, which is, you know, you're sort of watching all of these disparate sources of information that we're collecting to build a picture of what's going on in Syria and being able to answer very specific questions for our chief of station, the ambassador, broader sort of US policymakers on Syria. And it has struck me over the past few weeks that many of the questions that I would have been answering as the sort of Arab Spring initially broke out in 2011, are very similar to the bigger questions

that analysts are probably needing to answer today. There are big, big questions around the nature of the opposition. I mean, it's not even opposition anymore, I guess, the nature of the interim government. It's so hard for me to get out of that old verbiage. There are like real questions around the nature of the opposition, how cohesive it is, how capable it is, you know, what is going to happen to elements of the regime that are still out there and its militias, the sense of, you know, a security service from the Syrian side watching you watching the embassy? Did you feel that they had a kind of iron grip on the country? Because I think that was the sense people had before 2011, which was that this was a pretty tough dictatorship, which had used real violence to keep control of that country and was willing to do it. I mean, did you have that sense that the

Assad family willing to do whatever it took mean, did you have that sense that the Assad family were willing to do whatever it took to hold on to power at that time? Well, I'll tell you, you know, I mean, as an American working at the embassy in Damascus, you're going to experience surveillance. And I would say that it was almost more comedic than anything, right? I mean, you had guys in, you know, sort of government black cars that would follow you around and they wore poorly tailored polyester suits and white gym socks. And, you know, they were just sort of

keeping an eye on you. And honestly, you know, as an analyst, they're like, it didn't bother me all that much because it actually made you feel like, well, if someone tried to rob me or carjack me or something like these guys are going to stop that, you know, because they don't want that to happen to, you know, an American diplomat on their soil. I mean, you know, Syria is the kind of place where, yeah, they break into your hotel room and send you these sort of signals that they could do what they wanted. And I will be very curious if at some point, some of these archives get opened, what the profile on young David McCloskey, some poor analyst in some piece of Syria's security services had to write up, or the boring surveillance reports of following me around. Some surveillance photos of the young

David McCloskey, which might exist somewhere in the archives. Who knows who's getting all those now? I mean, it is always a big thing, isn't it? When a regime falls, one of the first things people go for would be who's going to secure the security service files, because that's where the secrets are. Well, right. And over the weekend, I think there was a big fire at one of these, an immigration and passport office in Damascus, which made me think initially of someone's burning files. I mean, if you see some of these photos that have come out now inside Syrian security services, inside their files. I mean, if you see some of these photos that have come out now inside Syrian security services inside their offices, I mean, they are full of files, right? I mean, there's a lot of stuff that is going to be there. But I guess what that tells you is, you know,

all those files is that, you know, they did have a tight grip on the country, it seemed, you know, they really were, you know, they were a pretty effective police state willing to use ruthless violence, you know, as they did after 2011, which I guess makes it surprising in a sense that then things have moved so fast now and that they've effectively run and fled and collapsed so quick. Well, it's probably worth a little bit on the Assad regime pre-Civil War and what that looked like, how it sustained power, and then comparing that to the Assad regime of late 2024, because we will see that this regime has changed and morphed massively in the almost 15 years. And the changes are, I think, the reason it's gone, right, or one of them. So the Assad regime of, you know, sort of pre-Arab Spring, there's four principal security

services, spy services. They've got wonderfully horrible sort of, you know, Stalinist names, the Political Security Directorate, Air Force Intelligence. They've got the General Intelligence Directorate. They've got the General Intelligence Directorate, they've got Syrian military intelligence, there's sort of a constellation of other smaller groups inside different organs of the state. You know, you think spy service, you're like, oh, they're spying on, you know, people outside the country. No, I mean, some of them had that role, but it was primarily about maintaining control in Syria. Assad had a number of elite military

units they used as sort of a Praetorian guard. There's a long history of coups in Damascus. And so you have this structure that operated on what we called kind of a hub and spoke model, which was all of these different groups actually in different security services spied on each other. And oftentimes, the regime would move people around inside the services. So you'd have like the deputy chief of the General Intelligence Directorate might actually have a direct line to Bashar al-Assad when the chief doesn't. And the whole point of the deputy being there is to keep tabs on the organization. They move people around constantly. But here's the key, Gordon. There are official instruments of state security, and it is a highly centralized system, even

though there are multiple actors. You fast forward to what has happened to Syria's repressive apparatus, really, over the course of the past almost 15 years. And because Assad had to essentially become a Iranian and Russian vassal in order to stay in power, you had a proliferation of militias, military groups that were not really under his control. And you had a whole system of kind of black market trading and war profiteering that had been stood up to essentially keep the place going in these really trying years of the war. And so what you ended up with, and this is a gross oversimplification, and there are great analysts like Charles Lister at the Middle East Institute who have cataloged this stuff really, really effectively.

And I think we'll include some links to some of these other folks and experts in the show notes so listeners can go in and get kind of spirited to a lot of the people who've been doing this day to day over the past 10 years. But what you had happen, Gordon, was very similarly, I think, to the way the Iraqi army in 2014 essentially was just vaporized or melted away, rather. When the Islamic State came and they just disappeared. Mostly just disappeared. that had become totally hollowed out, riven with corruption, riven with sectarianism, totally lacking morale or any purpose of fighting. It was a paper tiger. And so you have these maps of Syria from a month ago that show where Assad is in control, quote unquote, and it's total

garbage. He has a garrison there. He's got poorly paid conscripts, or even if they're paid at all, who are stationing different posts and military bases and all this. And it was nothing. He could not use any of that anymore to attack Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HDS, to sort of resist this push that they made out of Idlib, down into Aleppo, and finally to Damascus. Yeah, I think that's really interesting, this idea. As you say, it was hollowed out. I mean, I was reading a fascinating piece about the drug trade that comes out of Syria, Captagon, which is this drug which is widely used in the Middle East. And you realize that the kind of drug trade and criminality had become intertwined with the upper reaches of the regime and kind of criminal groups were, if you like, using the regime to make money. And there were these kind of mafia-like kind of arrangements at the top level.

And you realize, you know, none of these people really cared about the state or the Assad family anymore. They were in it themselves. And so, you know, you're right. All it took then was this kind of one push for it all to fall over and to kind of topple in an amazing speed. I mean, it's still though, even with that, you know, context, it still feels remarkable how fast it collapsed. I mean, you kept on thinking, well, when they get to Damascus, then, you know, the last Praetorian Guard,etorian Guard will put up a fight and stop it. And yet, even at that point, it didn't seem like there was anyone there willing to fight for them. That is one of the pieces of the last three days that had given me some hope, I think, because I really was expecting there to be a battle for Damascus, you know, between some of these Syrian units. And I'm sure, you know, as more information will come out, we'll get more indications that military officials,

pieces of the regime effectively understood that this was just, it was done, and it wasn't even worth it, and probably reached out to these different opposition groups to sort of hasten the decline and protect themselves in the aftermath. I mean, you bring up the drug piece is a very interesting one, right? Because they were making Captagon. I've read estimates that had essentially drug income being equivalent to all of the rest of Syria's GDP in recent years. And Captagon's like a party drug. It's an amphetamine. It's, I guess, called the poor man's cocaine. I mean, essentially, Assad had become the like Adderall supplier to most of the people and the groups involved in this were not under his control, really. There are these very interesting stories that have come out about Syria really since about 2020, when there was kind

of a national ceasefire. And a lot of the lines of control in the country were kind of, they date back to about then, is that you have these incidents of like, you know, a lot of these militias, they need to raise money. And so they operate checkpoints to raise money on people who go through them. And the Assad regime, at some point in the past couple years, had attempted to get rid of some of these checkpoints, because, hey, you know, they're supposed to ostensibly be the government. And you don't want there to be checkpoints in kind of regime held territory, right? I mean, that is effectively lawlessness or warlordism. And when Assad tried to get rid of some of those checkpoints, there was a spate of bombings around them that Syrians,

many Syrians believe were actually conducted by a lot of these black market sort of traders and war profiteers, people running the checkpoints because they didn't want to have their sources of income sort of removed. And so the Captagon trade is an interesting example of Assad effectively turning his state, and it always had elements of sort of mafia tactics. And you could look at the regime as a mafia prior to the war, and you were analytically on pretty solid ground. But it really became a much more caricature, I would say, of a sort of mafioso clan in the years since. And as a result, really ceded, I think, a lot of its

sovereignty and power to a lot of really local groups, and it never got them back. Yeah, there just wasn't as much there as it looked like on paper or on the surface. I mean, it is a bit like the fall of Kabul, the fall of Afghanistan in 2021, when suddenly the Taliban just surprised everyone at the speed through which they raced through Afghanistan and the Afghan army, which of course had been backed by the West, by the US and the UK for so many years, and to such great investment. And suddenly it just collapsed like that at a speed no one expected. You had those amazing chaotic scenes at Kabul airport with people trying to cling to American aircraft as they flew out. And of course, that's the subject of Afghanistan is the one we're currently halfway through, the story of the days right after 9-11, when the CIA first went in, which is, I guess, where that story

started before it ended in 2021. And there have been extraordinary images and stories on social media in the last couple of days as well, David, of the prisons being kind of opened up and people being liberated. And I mean, some prisoners, I think, who'd been in there, it sounds like for decades, are now being released as the regime fools. Yeah, I think the social media coverage of this, and look, you can talk all day about sort of the ills of social media, but in these kind of incidences, right? I mean, it's actually really fascinating what can come to the fore immediately. And you have, I think, this interesting, really sad dichotomy about the sort of autocracy of Bashar al-Assad,

right? Because on the one hand, you have these horrendous videos of these prisons. And Gordon, I mean, there's probably still almost 100,000 people in this kind of prison system that are unaccounted for, right? Oh, who might be dead or might be... Right. And who have been kind of forcibly disappeared into these, I mean, just dungeons. And the reality of some of these people who are being brought up is like, the first time they're going to see a smartphone is the person taking the video, right? Because they've been in there for so long. They've been in there for so long. There were counts of prisoners who thought that Hafez al-Assad, who was Bashar's father,

was still in power. I mean, there's this there's this gut wrenching, this kind of, I mean, really the sadism of the regime on full display. And then on the other side, you have these insane videos of kind of almost like the, I guess, fallen dictator porn of a massive house with weirdly enough, the houses are like, no, there's like no furniture. I don't know why it was the same in Saddam's palaces. I don't know why. Do the dictators take the furniture with them? I'm not exactly sure. Or do people lose it? I don't know. There's a massive fleet of luxury vehicles. I think when Yanukovych, the Ukrainian, I guess, autocrat fled in 2014, there was like an ostrich zoo. I don't think we've found an ostrich zoo in Syria yet. But I think that kind of the luxury of Assad at the top and then just the depravity of these prison systems.

Yeah, there was some person who had been imprisoned, I think, in the 80s, aged 18, finally reuniting with his family. So it's really emotional, I think, to see those scenes. Okay, with that, let's take a break, David, and we'll come back for more on Syria afterwards. Welcome back to The Rest Is Classified and this special emergency pod in which we're looking at the unfolding situation in Syria. So looking at it from the perspectives of MI6 in the UK, the CIA in the US, David, I mean, they will be pleased to see the back of Assad, there were no friends of Assad. But they will be worried, won't they about this group HTS, because it did come out years ago of a group which was affiliated to Al Qaeda, you know, the terrorist group, which, you know, was behind 9-11 and behind those terrorist attacks. And even though it's now changed, I mean, that is a big question, isn't it? Like, I that the security service in the UK, MI5, will be thinking, what are the potential implications of that? MI6 will be wanting to understand it. I imagine it will be the same in the CIA as well. And your kind of successors as analysts on Syria, that will be one of the kind of top things that policymakers are asking, aren't they? It's like, who are these guys guys and are they dangerous? Can we trust them? Can we work with them? I do not envy my analytical progeny at CIA, Gordon. They have- I don't know what analytical progeny look like, but I've got the image of little baby

McCluskey. I've never met them in person either. They're in the skiffs at Langley. That's the sensitive compartmented intelligence facility. Is that right? I believe it's information. Information facility. Thank you for that. Yes. Yes. That's where the secrets happen. That's right. Also known as the vaults, which is where the workstations and safes and all of that are inside skiffs at Langley. Inside the skiffs then, what are the Syria analysts kind of looking at, do you think? The poor Syria analysts in the skips. So let's take the question of interim government governance and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham HTS being

one of, but not the only kind of group or faction that needs to be considered in that equation. I mean, that is a massive question. There is another question though, and probably more around the United States has 900, I mean, that is a massive question. There is another question, though, and probably more around the United States has 900, I believe, soldiers in eastern Syria right now. Doing counterterrorism work, aren't they? Yeah, against ISIS, the SDF, which has sort of Arab components and Kurdish components, Kurds being one of the other ethnic groups in Syria. And there are all kinds of issues. We've seen, I think Donald Trump went on Truth Social maybe over the weekend, I believe, and basically said the Americans, we're not gonna have anything to do with Syria. This is not our problem. So there are these other dynamics around what happens out in the East if 900 US troops

leave in February. And let me just pick you up on that, because I think one of the things I know that UK counterterrorism officials worry about are the fact there are a lot of ISIS prisoners in camps, which are run by SDF and those groups. And there's been longer fear that particularly, you know, the Turks who've been backing HTS, you know, want to go after the Kurds because they're long time enemies. The Kurds are worried about being cut loose by the Americans. If the Americans withdraw, they're saying, well, we won't be able to guard these camps. And then the risk is, and I think that will be the real worry from the kind of counterterrorism professionals, is that then, you know, there's less security around those camps, people get out, ISIS fighters, some of them hardened,

you know, dangerous fighters, as well as women and children, a kind of mixer in there, you know, could get out and that could pose a threat, you know, a kind of counterterrorism threat. So I think there are, you know, there are worries about the fallout from this, aren't there? No, absolutely. I mean, in there, there are Islamic State cells operating in central Syria and these kind of desert regions that the Assad regime, frankly, is purposely not targeted. I think because A, resources were scarce, obviously, and they didn't quite have the military capacity, I'm sure, to do it effectively. And B, the existence of a sort of an Islamic state in Syria provided a kind of raison d'etre for the regime as flawed, I think, as that logic is. You've got the Islamic state and sort of, I guess, what you'd call a problem of, will that presence grow either under a new government in Syria or,

frankly, because, more likely, because the new government is unable to enforce its kind of writ throughout the country, right? And then there's the other related question, which you posed up front around, what do these different factions, HTS, first and foremost, what do they really want? What kind of government will they install? And will there be room for, not necessarily in the government, but I guess maybe a wink at an otter looking the other way, I think this would be the fear toward these kind of transnational global jihadist groups like the Islamic State, who, you know, oftentimes have external attack plotting groups inside them who are trying to come up with creative ways to kill Europeans

and Turks and Americans. And, you know. Yeah, that's bound to be the top question, isn't it? For those, right, those analysts. I mean, it's interesting as well, because there's a lot of debate in the UK about, you know, should we talk to this group because it's been prescribed as a terrorist organization? And, you know, can we work with them? Should we work with them? You know, one of the things, you know, if you go back and look at the history of these things, you see groups fall in and out of favor and the state being willing or not to talk to them. I remember particularly Libya, there's a group called the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. And there were years when actually Britain backed them secretly, even though they're a kind of jihadist group in the kind of, you know, 80s and 90s, because they were against Gaddafi, and we were against Gaddafi. And they were kind of Gaddafi

opposition group who was ruling Libya. And then Gaddafi became our friend after 2003. And these guys were the enemy. And then Gaddafi became our enemy again, after kind of 2011. And then they became, you know, and then and then they became our friend, and then they became a threat to us and became our enemy again, you saw how actually, you know, the British state and Western states sometimes can quite quickly move from considering some of these groups to be friends or enemies, depending on the circumstances, and needs must. So I think we'll see. And I think a lot will depend on the leadership of HDS have kind of made the right noises that they want to be inclusive and involve other groups. And they're not going to be, you know, in any way kind of jihadists like the past. But I guess that's the

question everyone's gonna be watching, isn't it? That is. I mean, I think that is one of the biggest questions about the future of Syria that, again, those people locked in skiffs at Langley right now are trying to sort through is what does Jolani, the head of HTS, what does he want? What does he really believe? What does he really believe? 15 years, because this is a guy who fought the US in Iraq, was in prison for a while at Abu Ghraib, was the sort of Syrian franchisee of the group that created the Islamic State, then called Al-Qaeda in Iraq. He turns on them and joins forces with sort of Al-Qaeda Central. And then when Al-Qaeda Central tries to build a franchise in Syria, Jalani turns on that franchise and essentially destroys it militarily.

And so you've got a guy who's maybe he's evolved, maybe he's a chameleon, maybe he's both. I think he's obviously politically very cunning. He's saying the right things right now about dealing with minority groups in Syria. He's saying the right things about governance. But saying the right things doesn't mean... No. Now, but what we do have, though, is the seven or eight year track record of HTS running Idlib, this Northwestern province that they sprung from. Yeah. And more pragmatic rather than if you like totally jihadist, I suppose.

They have a technocratic government in Idlib called the Syrian Salvation Government. But there are also plenty of instances where the religious ideology comes to the fore. And I think it's very clear, at least to this point, that he is not a Jeffersonian Democrat. They do not believe in popular sovereignty. Minority groups are not represented inside the political structures in Idlib province. So there are a lot of questions, right, at this point. Before we finish, I mean, I guess we should say a quick word about the geopolitics of it. I mean, it's hard not to see this as a blow to Iran and Russia, you know, for whom Assad had been their ally. I mean, they propped him up clearly at some point in the last, you know, 10 days, they decided, you know, the game was up, he wasn't worth expending any,

you know, more effort over. I mean, Iran obviously has been on the back foot because it's lost its proxy Hezbollah, or at least it's not lost it, but it's been done enormous damage by Israel, you know, in the conflict there. Think about the Pages and all those other attacks. And Hezbollah had been used by Syria to fight in its civil war by the Assad family to keep in power. And Russia has an interest with a naval base and an air base, but at some point thought this guy's done and that's it. And it is a blow to them, isn't it? I mean, they might be able to salvage something out of it, but it's hard to see it as anything else. Yeah, I think for both Russia and Iran, it does obviously seem like it's a massive

geopolitical blow. Although I do think you look at the Russians, let's take them to start. I think this is a case where, you know, the sort of old dictum about how there are enduring interests, not necessarily allies, right? The Russians are keen to maintain their naval facilities on the Syrian coast of Tartus, which I believe the airfield on the coast and this naval facility are used to resupply Russia's efforts in Africa, including Wagner. That's right. The airbase, I think, especially is important for cargo flights going from Russia through to Africa. Yeah. So it's important. It's important. And it's also possible that either these opposition or these sort of newly formed governing groups, whatever we want to call

them, will just allow it to continue, will potentially extract a price from the Russians to allow it to continue, or may not be able to actually enforce their writ along the coast. That's also a possibility kind of as you get going that they may not fully control that territory. So the Russians might be able to keep a lot of what they got from Assad under a new regime. I mean, it's certainly a shakier prospect at this point. And I guess, you know, trying to predict the future at this point, I mean, no one could have predicted the last couple of weeks, your progeny, if that's the

right word, in the analytic units at the CIA who are working hard. I mean, you wouldn't want to be predicting, would you, at this point, you know, what's going to happen? Because I think it's a kind of range of outcomes. And if some policymaker, if the President of the United States were to come to the mini-Maklowski today and say, what's going to happen? I mean, you'd have to go, we don't know. There's a range of outcomes, aren't there? And it would be hard to predict, I guess. There's probably a scenarios piece. And when Assad began to totter in 2011, you know, me and some colleagues, we were the ones who wrote the sort of scenarios for Syria piece. And we came up with four of them, because the way you do these analytic scenario exercises,

there's typically four. And then we shaved it down to like three to make it a little bit simpler to communicate. I guarantee you that that piece has been updated and used a ton in those prior years, but also right now. I mean, there's probably a piece that an analyst wrote inside CA like two or three years ago on that exact thing that they are dusting off right now and working on to write up in the PDP. Yeah. President's daily brief. Yeah. So it's absolutely a question of scenarios at this point. Absolutely. Well, I guess the one thing is we finished to say it's in the hands of the Syrian people in a way no one thought it would be.

And it's, you know, they're the ones, as you said earlier, they're the ones who've been, you know, instrumental in overthrowing this family, this regime, which has ruled over them, oppressed them for so long. And it's in their hands to some extent. I mean, there'll be geopolitical players trying to influence it, but it's in their hands to see what happens, isn't it? That's right. Well, and I think just, I would make one more point on that because I do think this, as our listeners consume media on this over the coming days and weeks, I just would really encourage everybody to really make an effort to not view this first through the lens of geopolitics. There's a time and a place for that. And it's, of course, valid to talk about all of these dynamics with respect to Russia and Iran and counterterrorism and all of that. But I think that there is time here to just take stock of the fact that it has been really the struggle of a lot of very ordinary

Syrians and the sacrifice paid by so many Syrians to see this regime finally come down. And I would really encourage people to prioritize listening to those voices in the coming days and weeks as we all try to make sense of this and what's coming. Yeah, that's a great note on which to end. So, well, thank you, David. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Just a reminder, we'll be back Wednesday, which is for our regular episode. And that will be the second half of our story of the CIA in Afghanistan in the extraordinary al-Qaeda prisoner revolt that led to the first death of a CIA officer in the country after 9-11. But thank you for listening to this emergency

pod on Syria and to the rest is classified. Thanks for listening.