The Team House - WTF is Happening in Syria? w/ former CIA Syria Analyst David McCloskey | EYES ON PODCAST

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

Today we're joined by former CIA analyst and author David McCloskey to break down wtf is happening in Syria.Find David here:⬇️https://www.davidmccloskeybooks.com/Subscribe to the new EYES ON YouTube channel.⬇️https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJytcQbSOEKLGyhNwkqpd3ASupport the show on Patreon:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseFind Jason here ⬇️https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-lyons-666873316?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_apphttps://bsky.app/profile/bgsilverback73.bsky.socialFind Andy Milburn here:⬇️https://twitter.com/i/flow/login?redirect_after_login=%2Fandymilburn8https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmilburn2023https://amilburn.substack.com/https://www.amazon.com/When-Tempest-Gathers-Mogadishu-Operationshttps://bsky.app/profile/andy-milburn.bsky.socialhttps://open.substack.com/pub/amilburn/p/journal-of-a-plague-year?utm_source=app-post-stats-page&r=emo6q&utm_medium=iosFind Mick Mulroy here:⬇️https://fogbow.com/https://www.loboinstitute.org/https://x.com/MickMulroy?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthorhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-patrick-mulroy-31198b52/https://bsky.app/profile/mickmulroy.bsky.social#syriaBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House. channel and podcast if you'd like to and we really appreciate that so go it and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house. Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Aizan. We're here, of course, with Andy Milburn, Jason Lyons. And our special guest is David McCloskey. David was a former CIA analyst focusing on Syria.

And he's an awesome author now, killing the game. He's written three books. my first book was damascus station second book was moscow x really good and the third one that just came out is the seventh floor right david yeah that's right it's available everywhere the link will be in the description check it out they're they're really great so hey guys how's it going what's going on in the world well let's uh since you've got david here let's talk syria and actually things seem to be popping off there david it's i know a huge question A huge topic, but let's plunge in.

What do you make of what's happening now? Yeah, well, first off, thanks for having me on, guys. It's fun to be here. I admit to have in some measure of PTSD, as I've read the news on this over the past week, because a lot of the fundamental questions, like, have, you know, are basically the same ones that we were trying to answer back in 2011 and 2012, 2013, right,

around how long can Nassau last, can he last? you know, which of these sort of, what does the, what sort of capabilities and sort of pull do these rebel groups have? So it's a lot, there are a lot of similarities. I mean, I think, please don't take this as a cop out, but I think one thing I do want to say just after having scrawled sort of the world of, you know, X slash Twitter and blog posts over the past few days is like the number of people sort of outside the situation who are willing to make pretty serious pronouncements about what is going to happen, you just can't take any of it in face value, right? There's so many really almost unknowable dynamics at play here that just to have any sort of

certainty about what will happen is completely insane at this point. So for all those listening who, you know, if you're consuming any media on this and someone is claiming to know what will happen, you should not listen to them anymore almost by definition. That's it. I mean, I think there's some really big questions out here now, right? I mean, like, it is pretty clear that the sort of Syrian military kind of more or less outposts slash garrisons that they were using to hold vast swaths of the north and kind of parts of the northwest of the country were, you know, complete paper tigers a la the Iraqi army in the run up to the Islamic State sweep into Mosul in 2014, right?

This is a military that had been in the Syrian context, I think as in the Iraqi, that had been completely hollowed out by corruption, sectarianism. So there's a story here about just how rotten things are in the middle of the Assad regime. It's a checkpoint telling me. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's just the way the Iraqis went. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, there's been a decent amount of bloodshed over the past week. But I will say that, you know, when you look at the number of sort of towns and villages, I'm certainly capturing Aleppo, the, you know, what had once been the largest city in the country and it's sort of industrial hub.

Like, you kind of look at that and think, oh, wow, this is a massive uptick in the amount of violence relative to the past couple months or whatever. And the reality is it's an uptick, but it's not actually a significant and increase in violence as you might expect because the Syrian army has essentially just cut tail and fled, you know, once this assault started. The other point that I would add on the military side of it is that if you look at a map of where Syrian military installations and bases are, they're not in this part of the country. Like they are in and around Damascus, in and around Holmes, the third city, and critically in and around that Holmes area, which may be hard to visualize without a map. But that is essentially the transit point to get to the sort of mountainous coastal heartland where the alibi, where the sort of sectarian group that the Assad's come from, where they have their, you know, they're a majority of the population and have their home base. So the parts of the country that the regime has really invested in protecting are not the ones that Hayatara Asham and the SNA have taken over the past few days. So I'm not trying to talk down the extent of the gains here because I think, frankly, these rebel groups were shocked as much as much, you know, grow they were able to take. But they have not taken the things that the Assad regime is most, you know, keen to defend.

And frankly, the things that the cities, the roads, the pockets of territory that are most critical to regime stability. I don't know. So that's just a little bit of brushwork on kind of the regime military side of things. On the other side of things, you know, when you look at the states of these rebel groups and how much they have developed and matured in terms of capabilities and, frankly, doctrine over the past 10 years, it's pretty shocking. me. You know, when I compare the HTS, I had Tarragal al-Shan, which is sort of the principal rebel group that has taken ground over the past week, you compare them to, you know, the sort of earlier versions in 2013, 2014, and it's night and day. You know, I mean, they're essentially fighting as a conventional army in many respects. And that to me indicates that, you know, the

prospects for the regime to retake a lot of this ground in the near term, even to medium term, are pretty limited. Where are they getting that funding? Well, the Turks are a major sponsor. I mean, the reality of, you know, there's probably, I mean, from an external side of things, Turkey, there's always been this sort of, frankly, hard to pin down kind of set of funders in the Gulf and elsewhere in the region who, you know, support these groups because, you know, we can talk a little bit more about this. but, you know, this is a solifist sort of jihadist fighting force, right? And so there's fighting Iran and its proxies and Assad and Hezbollah.

So like there's a sort of Sunni private funding drip to HTS, I'm sure. They've also governed the northwestern part of the country for, you know, the better part of a decade. And so I'd imagine there's some ability to sort of raise cash through taxation, smuggling, things, things like that. But I'd imagine most of the military, I mean, I think frankly, most of the military sort of, you know, the combination of drones, the sort of recon and kamikaze types, the actual small arms, cluster of munitions, but those are coming from Turkey, right? these are Turkish supported and promoted groups that are in some sort of fitful form of partnership with Ankara. So where do you know, sorry, go ahead, Jason. Right, Dave. So given the mismash of players in this, and especially the key players, the, you know, a la Russia, Iran, etc.,

I was thinking about this last night. So my question is, how badly do you think Turkey really wants Assad out? Like, can they afford? Like, let's just say today he was gone. What does that leave as far as the vacuum is concerned, a possibility of a conflict with Russia or, you know, the Kurds? You know, how does all this play out? I'm not asking you to make a prediction because we've been talking about that.

Well, look, I mean, you know, I'd welcome any debate from sort of Ankara or Erdogan watchers on this point. But I'm not so sure that any of Turkey's, or as they see, a Turkey's critical security interests in Syria necessarily involve Assad having to be gone. In some senses that maybe creates more problems for them, right? if you're then having to deal with not just a sort of counter-curred and counter-refugee policy, but if you're having to deal with governance issues in Damascus and things like that, that starts to, you know, that creates opportunities, but it also creates a tremendous amount of risk. I mean, I think that Erdogan and the Turks right now kind of think about this as,

all right, one, they want a security strip. I think they've defined it like 22 miles inside. Syria that they effectively, the Turks effectively manage to control both, you know, sort of cross-border Kurdish activity as well as just refugee flows, right? So that's like one plank of what Erdog want. I think there's a second bit here around eliminating the, so the SDF is our main proxy in Syria. It is largely Kurdish.

The most effective fighting elements of it are remnants. or elements of the Turkish Workers Party, the old PKK, which is sort of the ultimate boogeyman for Erdogan and Ankara. And so they want, I think the Turks

want to leverage this crisis so that, I mean, ideally I think in Erdogan's mind, with Trump coming into office in January, he would want us pulled out of Syria. And he would want, would want to then shatter the sort of governance structures that the SDF has built inside the country,

the sort of, frankly, just mini-state. The Kurds want to smash that, right? And I think that this kind of chaos, everyone probably sees this helpful to making the point in Washington that, like, what are we doing in Syria, right? And then they want to, the Turks want to send all the refugees back, right? And get a guarantee from Assad that these, you know, I think three million plus. Syrians are in Turkey, that they can send them back without the Syrians arresting them en masse or sending them back at a later time. So none of those things necessarily involve Assad being gone, but it's now clear that Erdogan of all, I mean, compare all of the foreign sort of patrons and clients of any Syrian party

over the past decade, or 15 years, rather. and he's holding most of the cards, you know, in Damascus now. So he's, this is work tremendous. I mean, I think, you know, the Turks are in probably one of the best possible positions they could be in going into a new, you know, U.S. administration coming into office in January. Awesome. Thank you. What about the, what about the Russians on the, you know, obviously the war on Ukraine has,

has drained their ability to some extent to support a side. But it hasn't, you know, it hasn't had until this point as much of an effect as, you know, I think, you know, those in the West would hope. Is that because he's been able to rely on, on proxies and just a massive amount of fire support there? I noticed, you know, the defense of Aleppo or the rearguard action was not fought by Syrians. It was Russian air science, right? Yeah, yeah. But what about guys on the ground? I mean, we know he still has advisors and bed.

in the Syrian army? Are there also, you know, is the Wagner group still active over then? That is a good question on Wagner. I do not know. Although you're right that, I mean, the Russians took casualties in this, in this assault, right? I mean, they, in some cases, have sort of served as Syrian ground forces. I believe they had, the Russians have had to evacuate a few bases or installations, although they still hold some of their kind of primary airfields. on the coast as well as the naval facility and Tartu. So, you know, from a strategic kind of installation standpoint, they're still holding a lot of stuff that they were before.

Although, frankly, what I'm sensing out of, you know, sort of Russian, you know, security land is like, this is Assad's problem. You know, there's a bit of that going on here. Like, this is, this guy failed. He needs to own this mess. Yeah. And it's undeniable that, you know, I mean, we've seen a version of this movie before in 2014 and 2015 when Assad's territorial control was whittled down to maybe, I mean, less than a third of, you know, Syria's square mileage he controlled.

And then Hezbollah and Russia stepped in, right? Right, right. And Hezbollah had been supporting the Syrians up to that point. And so the Russians in a small way. but it was the sort of critical really turning point in the conflict in September of 2015 where Putin decided he was going to go all in and effectively function as Assad's Air Force. And from that point, they worked, you know, the rebels back into this sort of enclave in Idlib where, you know, HTS has sort of, you know, metastasized over time. So, you know, there is a question here around can we replay that movie and can we just do it again? and it does seem like in a geopolitical context where, you know, 10 years ago, the Russians are not

involved in Ukraine in this way, right? They have not lost in 2014 and 15. They haven't yet lost 700,000 conscripts fighting in Eastern Europe. Hezbollah had not had its, you know, sort of middle ranks decapitated by major attacks. It had not just lost Nasrallah. It had not just lost maybe up to 80% of its sort of arsenal. And so you're looking at a world of like client, you know, potential sponsors for another push. Like, I would have some questions. I don't think it's going to be this kind of either or thing. Like the Russians just abandon him.

But are you going to see the level of air power and manpower from Moscow brought to bear to help him retake, you know, Aleppo, the northern part of Hama, government. Like, I'm skeptical. let's put it that way you know i think you're going to see substantially less than than you did a decade ago david what about the courts are they uh have have they you know since uh you know since our partnership with the sdf kind of came to an end uh in in 2017 also actually it was later in that 20 i'm sorry 2019 i mean it diminished right um are they are they playing in this at all or have they been shellacked by the Kurds to an extent that they just want to hold on to what they have?

Well, I do think they want to hold on to what they have. And that's an absolutely essential piece of, you know, protecting this, I mean, from their mindset, right, protecting the community inside Syria. You know, I guess there's a real question here around. you know, the Kurds have been part of, essentially the Biden administration has viewed, I mean, to the extent there's been anything actually approaching Syria policy, it's just been a continuation of like, it's all just counterterrorism, right? It's all, that's the only focus. And the Kurds are sort of the primary hammer there, right? To the extent that that's starting to change or might change in a Trump 2.0 administration, Kurdish calculations could change. I mean, it's sort of a. classic terribly so classic Kurdish conundrum of you know we come in we help we support we help build these structures we help create the geopolitical environment for these governing our military structures to thrive and then we abandon them right and um i have a hard time understanding how the kurds would get to a point where there would be anything approaching

sort of the sovereignty they've had and the ability to protect the community if you have, you know, a, if you have a group like HTS that's Turkish backed and promoted, that's taking over more and more of the country. It's a very threatening set of circumstances for the SDF, I think. I mean, it seems like it's probably one of the darkest positions they would have been in up to this point in the war, although that might be a bit of an overstatement. What about internal cracks within the regime? You know, there were flurries rumors in Twitterland, you know, a week or so ago about

potential coup, which came to naught. But I'm wondering at this stage of the war now with Assad taking steps backwards, whether there are perhaps there's there's dissension within the ranks or possible possible view to perhaps a coup or someone trying to overthrow him and making uh making peace yeah it's um i'll offer just some a few thoughts i guess in part based off of syria's history over the past you know 56 years is like it is true that almost all changes in governance have happened from sort of elite politicking and coups in Syria, right? Going back to the really the end of the French mandate and the end of the Second World War. So like that way of changing a government in Damascus has a good

longstanding historical tradition, right? It's how the boss has came to power. I mean, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, you know, there's a long, storied history of coups in Damascus. Now, that said, you know, the regime has become more of a sectarian animal and much more like a militia and, frankly, a criminal group than it ever was, although certainly some of those comparisons would have been apt, even in the time I was looking at it. It has become much more brazen, just as essentially a mafia. So crew and a militia. in the intervening decade. And the sectarian component is, I think, hard to under, hard to overstate, rather,

because it has been the case up to this point in the war that you had opposition groups fighting the Syrian regime who were deeply sectarian themselves. And when Al-Oli, when Christians, Kurds to some extent, some of the other smattering of small minority groups kind of looked at that. They said, this is like an existential threat. They are going to kill all of us or push us back into the mountains if they take over. And, you know, there's a massive, unanswered question right now on the way that HTS would govern multisectarian populations. You know, we're getting some hints in the very early days here in Aleppo that the leadership of HTS, in particular,

Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, you know, understand this dynamic and are trying their best to make sure that these minority groups understand that they will be protected in whatever this new kind of governance structure is. But if they can't hold the line on that front, I think a lot of logic for a military coup of some sort. Now, of course, you could always just have like individual people inside the regime who want to grab more power and just, you know, you don't need maybe more motivation than that. But if you're trying to conduct a coup for purposes of policy to change the government's policy, it's going to be much harder to generate energy for that in a world where Alawi Christian, you know, are being killed or persecuted or harassed.

under this umbrella, you know, sort of HTS governing structure. So I keep an eye on that because I think the more sectarian this gets, the tighter the structures around the regime get it and it becomes harder to imagine they're being a few. So can you talk a little bit about, you touched on it, the fact that the regime has become more and more like kind of a mafia, a criminal enterprise. And, you know, there is much publicity about,

I don't know there's much publicity, but certainly, you know, you can read about there are income from drugs. Yeah. But I find that kind of fascinating how the power structure that has built up and how it is run. And the last piece that Assad is not his father, right? He's not, I mean, he was never perceived the same way. His father was commonly recognized as being a strong man. Assad was thought of to be.

begin with is being kind of a little bit of a wimp. And so, you know, the question that dovetails into the dissension within the ranks is how much of this is he a kind of a figurehead? And he's kept in position because it suits these various criminal enterprises to do so. And by the way, criminal enterprises, I understand that they are also generals and such within the Syrian military and relatives of Assad. Yeah. I mean, so the, the principle. sort of profit center for the regime in recent years has been the production of a drug called Captagon, which is a party drug that they've, I think, you know, exported largely to the Gulf or maybe even into Europe as well. And the, from, yeah, there you go. And the estimates that

I've seen are that, you know, it's generating several billion dollars of revenue a year for the regime and the people around it. So in some ways, you know, it's like more effective to think about, you should kind of think about the Syrians like you do the North Koreans, right? The North Koreans are, you know, they counterfeit money, they rob banks, you know, they do whatever they need to do to raise cash, a bunch of cyber crime, ransomware attacks, things like that. Syrian regime needed cash, right?

It had been cut off, I mean, a massive amount of its population fled or was, you know, in opposition held territories, a lot of the, you know, sort of petroleum, you know, sort of the oil infrastructure and refineries, all that kind of stuff was either sort of broken or under the control of other groups. So you're losing massive amounts of, you know, sort of your revenue base. So it's very logical, but it does something, of course, to you as a governing entity if your primary focus is on the production of drugs. Like, are you a government? You have a housing ministry, but you're really more like, you know, you're really more like a mafia enterprise.

And I think Assad, on the subject of him personally, I think the view of him is like sort of this. wimp or punk or kind of, you know, I think it's, it was wrong. It was wrong. You know, he, he kind of looks the part of the, the loser. You know, he's got a long neck. He's got goofy ears. He's got a thin mustache. He speaks Arabic with a lisp. You know, he's not, he's my doctor. Right. He's an ophthalmologist by training. But, but the, the, the, the, the, ophthalmologist thing and the training in London, his residency in London, like, what it all ignores is the fact that he was boarded, raised in a system in Syria where the family business was running the country. And when his brother died in a car accident in 1994, he came back to Syria

within hours and was quickly put to the task of apprenticing as the future dictator. of the country. And he did that for six years until his old man died. So it wasn't like he got taken, you know, the chronology is really important because it wasn't like he was all of a sudden flown from, you know, cutting open eyeballs in London to like running Syria. He had six years where he increasingly was given more and more authority. By the end, he was managing the sort of politics of Lebanon for his dad. So, you know, God help you. if you're stuck with that job. It's very complicated. So he had a lot of responsibility. And he, I think, has consistently shown over the course of this unrest, going back 15 years,

that he's, they're perfectly willing to kill a lot of people if and when they consider it to be necessary to remain in power and to protect, I think as they see it, protect their family, protect the people around them and protect their tribe, you know, this sort of, you know, is Alawis who have come down from the northwest of the country and now live in, you know, most of Syria's major cities thanks to the Assad regime. So we underestimated him, you know, we really did. I have a question. This was reported from Reuters yesterday, I think, and this was before the rebels, like, launched their attack about the U.S. and the UAE taking place talking about lifting sanctions on Syria if they were to be.

break with Iran. Yeah, I don't know if that's changed since like the rebels taking Aleppo and stuff like that, but So I think since I've been out of government now,

I, as I look back on our track record in the Middle East over the past 25 years, I kind of just come to shit, David, since you're out of government. Since I've left, yeah, exactly, I was holding it up. Like, I don't, we are so, we're so bad at foreign policy in the Middle East.

We're so bad at it. And we are, for some reason, enthralled by fantasy over and over again when we are doing what seems like the fairly basic effort. And it's not actually basic. But there's some simplicity to say, here are the things we want to happen. here's the resourcing and time and energy we're willing to devote to accomplishing things and making sure that there's not a massive gap between those two things, right? But time and again, like I laugh at the Iran one because we wrote papers at CIA.

Like as soon as I joined the organization, we were writing papers in 2006 and 2007 and 2008 of like, what would it take to kind of break the Syrians away from Iran? And, you know, the best answer we could give, and this is almost 20 years ago, was like the kinds of things that you'd have to do to get the Syrians to, you know, sort of detach themselves from this defensive, as they say, a defensive alliance with the Iranians, was like to basically reshape the entire Syrian-Israeli relationships so that they no longer felt threatened by Israel. Well, you know, 20 years on, with the Iranians even further, you know, sort of enmeshed in Syrian domestic politics and, frankly, having kept the regime on life support for the past 10 years, some sanctions relief. It just hardly seems like it's going to cut it, right? I think the Syrians are really good, though, at using any amount of leverage they have. to get something. And so I think in this case,

you have a kind of classic example of, in order to get the sanctions removed, there's probably some symbolic stuff that they were willing to say, look, oh, look, you know, this or that, you know, Kud's Force colonel is no longer in Damascus. Like, or this or that small podunk, demobilized militia is no longer here.

We're separating from the Iranians. Please give us our sanctions, relief. So the Syrians are more than willing to kind of play these games and get into these processes of negotiation because they feel like even if they're not going to materialize, create real benefit for them immediately over time they might be able to get something. But the actual, like in point of fact, the idea of like separating the Syrians from Iran is, it's an utterly delusional aspect of our policy at this point of time. It reminds me, David, so when, you know, when you just,

join the agency. Remember, Syria, we were always trying to get concessions from Syria about letting jihadis traffic across their country into Iraq. And the people in the administration were always keen to say, look, they've changed, you know, they're backing our policies, but they really weren't. But to your point, even before they're, even before 2011, they were very good kind of this slate of hand. They have never been leaning towards or enthusiastic to create this stronger relationship with the United States. They just, they want to get concessions from us and are willing to pretend to alter their

behavior in order to do so. That's right. That's right. And you have to, I think, realize when you're approaching the Syria topic that, like, this is a country that effectively has no, no, heft beyond its proximity to more important strategic theaters in the region and its ability to sort of help or frankly to make them worse, right? Like just by virtue of its geographic position. And so the Syrians come to almost every negotiation with anybody, be it the Iraqis, be it

us, be it the Iranians, the Turks, the Israelis with a shitty hand, the Lebanese, with a shitty hand. Now, Lebanon might have been the one sort of exception to that because they had, Lebanon was the one neighbor that had managed to be more feckless and, you know, decomposed than Syria. So, um, but they, they like, they come at these negotiations with a bad hand. And the only thing they have to trade in is the sort of geographic proximity. And they're just, they're frankly very patient because they feel like over time events might change. You get new administrations, new changes of government in some of these capitals.

And, you know, I mean, frankly, the opening from a bunch of Arab states, including the Embirates, to Assad over the past few years, is, would have been unthinkable 10 years ago, but they just waited and waited and waited. And soon enough, you've got, you know, you know, he can go to Abu Dhabi again. Stuff changes. David, any ideas to why now? why this went down? Well, from what I can tell, HTS had been essentially planning an operation for some time and had been,

I think it had actually potentially attempted to do this over a month ago. And I think the Turks got wind of it and might have pushed for a delay or a change of, you know, sort of targets or strategy or something like that. But there's been an operation. I mean, you know, we, Syria has disappeared from the front pages of most Western newspapers unless like the Israelis are bombing it or an Iranian is dying in Damascus. The Syrians and the Russians have continued to shell Idlib and to conduct Kamikaze drone attacks against civilian areas in Idlib.

And so you had a fighting group in HTS that's like, we want to stop this. And this attack, I think, was the result of them trying to eliminate some of these Syrian positions that were threatening in Lipp government. And they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. I don't think any of them understood the extent to which the Syrian army was going to fold. But I think that's the why now is they wanted to hit back with the Syrians for this continuing. kind of campaign of, you know, targeting civilians and some of these HTS structures inside it live. So Andy and David, this is kind of a, for both of you, with the proximity of the timing of

this ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, do you think Hezbollah can afford to get involved and to what extent do you think that they're able to provide any kind of support or false multiply. What do you think, Andy? I just don't, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, so all I mean, all I know the interesting points here were that because I don't know, I don't know a percentage of fighters pulled back into Lebanon to counter the Israeli threat. That's the question I can't answer. I do know that has been. Syria was useful for Hezbollah. Yes, they were taking casualties there, but they were getting some great combat experience. And they had some very capable, you know, their most capable guys were being sent to support Assad, a lot of their most capable commanders. So I, there's your question, which is a great one, leads into two other questions. You know, how many Hezbollah guys, you know, would they pull back to Lebanon or was a, is there still a significant force? there. And if there is, that's bad news for Israel as well as as well as for Syria. I don't know.

I don't know how much they were depleted. I know that's the mantra in Twitterland is that, oh, look, you know, Israel put his bowler on the ropes. So HDS arose because there has to be a very simple cause and effect for most nil bloggers that you can sum up in, you know, in a tweet. But I would be very, I don't think it's as simple as that. And I think there are, you know, those questions that remain unanswered is is his bollah in Syria indeed on the ropes undoubtedly it's affected the organization uh you're losing nazrallah and we talked about that losing a lot of their higher commanders and a lot of their mid-level commanders but those guys mid-level guys were lost in Lebanon we don't know how it has follow in Syria looks unless david you know

I think that is the kind of one of, if not the fundamental question on the regime side of things is, can they fill a manpower gap with militias? And I would include Hezbollah as part of that. And it would seem, it's not a satisfying answer, but it would seem safe to say that, again, if you're kind of comparing this to the dynamics of a decade ago and how Hezbollah and the Russians and the Iranians contributed to help Assam take a lot of the same ground that has now just been lost again, you would have to assume that Hisbalah has less to contribute today, I think. You just have to assume it's less. And I think you've also got to assume or believe, and I believe it based off of the sort of

what I know about HTS is that the capability of the enemy, from the standpoint of the Assad regime has gone up also. So I think you probably have a deeper manpower gap. Or frankly, maybe it's not a deeper gap, but you have a less, your foreign sort of patrons have less of a desire or an ability to sort of fill the gap. And you're fighting somebody who's better equipped and trained and capable than you were fighting a decade earlier,

which is that those are not good sort of long-term trends to be, playing. Yeah, I was just curious. And you kind of just spoke to it, like the willingness of Hezbollah based on what's, you know, has happened in the recent weeks and months. And also, too, would they even, if Iran was to say, hey, you know, get off the bench, get in there, you know, would they be willing to say to hell with you? No, we just can't do it right now. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I think it is more of a genuine kind of interplay between Syria, Iran, Hezbollah. Like, I think there's, you know, not very many cases where someone's being ordered necessarily in that way to kind of do something. There's an understanding, I think, on all sides of who has what to contribute and all that. I have to think at this point that, you know, in the same way that any of us, if, you know, you're having a conversation with a buddy and you need help when your buddy is just, you just. been, you know, just had his wife leave him and, you know, had his house robbed and got laid off, that you're, you know, you go to ask your friend to help you, you know, they're probably going to

be like, I can't do as much as I could before all these terrible things happened to me. So I'd imagine that kind of dynamic is in play here. Although, again, I think, you know, to Andy's point, the size of that manpower gap is, you know, sort of the $64,000 question and we just don't know what kind of resource. they think they need to, you know, hold Damascus and homes and to potentially kind of push further north if they're even capable of doing that. From the point of view of certainly the West and probably Western intelligence agencies that have limited resources to Syria has become kind of a steady state dumpster fire, you know,

with guards from Lebanon being forefront within the Middle East. and it's a war that, I mean, it's been going on 14 years and the scale of the scale of the tragedy, it's easy to for, it's easy for the media to kind of, okay, that's old news. Yeah. Of course, it isn't for countries throughout Europe and especially Turkey, you know, who are still dealing with this massive refugee problem. Well, and it's kind of historically an ungovernable place in, you know, in general, like, it's not an easy country to administer and hold together in many respects. It's like, it's not even a real country. I mean, these lines were, that's not fair, but the lines were drawn by the French, you know,

so you're sort of dealing with an entity that is very difficult to govern because it's just kind of lines drawn on the map. And it's probably worthwhile for all of us to sort of go through the mental exercise to like disentangle our view of the conflicts from just those borders, right? Because that thing, Syria, doesn't really exist anymore in the same way. You know, one of the, we did a big project at CIA, one of our offices did a big project at CIA around just, looking at as a comparative analysis of civil wars over time and how long they last and how the dynamics of the civil war impact its duration and like the reality is that most civil wars go on for at least 10 years and the more foreign intervention you have and the more sort of the proliferation

of you know groups inside the civil conflict it goes up pretty significantly so like I think actually the miracle would be the war ending right not on to continuing. It continuing is actually the sort of natural order of things, in my opinion. Because the dynamics are far more than simply rebellion against the regime. Yeah, exactly. I mean, a lot of, I mean, remember, we talked about this in last episode, the Islamic State and now on the Zahra Front battling it out for territory. And those were two similarly aligned groups, you know, let alone the Kurds and all these other other religions and nominations,

each of which has their own their own aspirations. Yeah, I mean, possibly complex. It is. It's like if you, if you thought about the different kind of cleavages in the war,

you would say, okay, there's a pro-regime, anti-regime one. There is a inside the opposition, there's a sort of more sort of, I guess, secular type leading, and then there's a more kind of solofy jihadist, Islamist leading, and there's a spectrum all, you know, up and down that. There's a sectarian

lens to this thing, ethnic lens to this thing. There's an Eric Kurd dynamic. There's a Syria, there's an Alawi Christian, you know, Sunni, little Shia, Drew. And there's an urban rural thing. And then you layer on all the foreign elements to this as well. And you're dealing with, you know, a tremendous amount of systemic complexity that makes it with a whole bunch of different unresolved conflicts inside all of that. You know, I don't know how Humpty Dumpty is pretty broken. I don't know how you put those pieces back together again. It's very interesting what you just said because it doesn't fit into a neat kind of encapsuled

media story, right? No. And so listening to commentators now, and there are a few great ones out there. I mean, Jeremy Bowens with BBC, who spent a lot of time in Syria can explain this. But listening to them to try and explain it in a three to five minutes sound bike is just, you know, it's impossible. It's impossible. Yeah. Most people just lose interest. Yeah. Yeah, no, for sure, which is, you know, I think that's a bit of what. But like the Russians and frankly Assad, they've traded this over the past 15 years and certainly the last 10, which is the conflict is so hopelessly complicated that unless you actually spend a decent amount of time to try to understand it, you can't. And so a lot of people just shut down and say, oh, it's too much. And so because of that complexity, it's actually in a weird way.

it's more alluring to layer a very simple kind of us versus them or good guy, bad guy dynamic onto it. And what we're seeing happen right now on, you know, sort of tanky Twitter or some of these groups that are more pro-Russian pro-Assad is like this desire to paint the HTS, you know, assault as like, this is the jihadis versus sort of the good guys, right? which is very much a Russian and Assadist talking point that's been easy to kind of layer on this war, right? Because it's so complicated. It's like, oh, that's a clean narrative. You know, let's just go with that. And it's, you know, there's some truth in it,

but it's not a good way to understand the conflict. How much more time you got, Dave? We're going on to hour two right now. You ready? We're going to go deep, deep into like Syria. We're going even further. Yeah. I can, uh, I'm joking.

I'm kidding. I know. It's like a please, I can't go any deeper on Syria. I got a few more minutes. I could probably chat for another, yeah, 10 or so. Did you pick Syria? How did that work? So I did not pick it.

I was, believe it or not, when I was recruited as an undergraduate intern by the Middle East Stalytic shop at CIA, I got a note, I think it was actually to my life. like college email before I joined that said, you're going to work like, you know, topic or desk. It was like Syria. It just got picked for me. And so I started working on it in 2006. And despite a couple attempts to abandon ship was dissuaded and ended up working on it the entire time I was there. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah, this is great, man. uh guys do me a favor check out david's books the newest one seventh floor i actually need to read it you should read it yeah he's been how long did it take you to get those books cleared somewhere between one and two weeks really yeah yeah very fast very fast if i had written number one i think they used different standards for fiction and nonfiction uh number two i've convinced myself that whoever's reading these must really love the books, you know, so they're just plowing through them, probably reading it in their spare time.

But in all seriousness, like, if I had written a memoir or something like that of like, oh, this is my time working on Syria, I mean, that would have been hopelessly probably tangled up. I was also super careful, like, especially with Damascus Station. I sourced that thing. I had like 300 footnotes when I sent that book to them. I said, look, I got this from this, you know, Wall Street Journal article, this from this academic, that kind of thing. just so it was helpful to me to make sure I could anything specific I could say like I didn't get this out of the classified part of my brain yeah um and I was shocked I mean they had they had a few minor you know redactions but it was as these things go fairly painless yeah it took it took me

nine months I think it was nine and a half months and I thought you know I was told that that was relatively quick I mean in fairness they didn't they didn't redag there's a couple of things they asked me to take out. Was it with CIA? Do you? No, DOD. Oh, DOD is way worse.

They're way worse. Like, I've seen, like, so Jack Carr, who writes those James, James Reese novels, like he,

former SEAL, he used to send his stuff through the DOD process and I think it actually became like a real commercial problem for him because he was having to delay books

because they weren't getting through the publication or the DoD review process. It seems like it's, I'm not sure if it's different or just more bureaucratic or some combination, but the CIA process is pretty streamlined. At least it has been for me so far. Cool, yeah, you guys can check out the books.

The link is in the description. They're all great. Well, I don't know. I know only one Moscow Exide right now. That was fucking great. That was really good. Like it should be a TV show or a movie. And you have a new podcast.

The rest is classified. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so the podcast is pretty much, it's me and a co-host. His name's Gordon Carrera. He's the longtime kind of national security and intel correspondent for the BBC, right? Yeah, so this is sort of a transatlantic venture. And the idea is basically we're just going to tell spy stories. So it is not scripted, but it is going to be a conversation where we go in depth on a particular story.

It's not a format where we have guests. It's like Gordon and I talking back and forth over 30 to 40 minutes, depending on the story. And we're really trying to do, and it will test it out, of course, over the next few months. Like we're trying to tell a lot of different kinds of spy stories. So we're going to do, you know, classic kind of Cold War stuff. The episodes we launched last week are on the CIA and SIS, MI6, as they're more commonly done, efforts to underwerex. remind the Iranian government in 1953. And all the way up to like present day stuff with Russian illegals, we've got a couple in

the bank that we'll come out with the next few weeks on North Korean spy services, conducting bank robberies and cybercrime. So kind of be all over the place telling interesting spy stories. And yeah, it's out. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts. And if you guys, you know, as you listen or if you do, please let us know. we're early days so we're trying to make it as compelling as possible yeah i really enjoyed it the uh the iran one oh thank you thank you of course andy milburn his book when the tempest

gathers the links are all in the description jason lines his socials are in the description best place to support the show is patreon dot com slash the team house that's it because youtube is crushing us continuously it's it's brutal Is it really? Yeah, it's not been great the last, I'd say, nine months. For us on YouTube, monetarily-wise, like, our views are around the same, but we're about, like, 70% chopped in money. What? Is that a, is that a YouTube policy change about how they?

So, ever since, like, January, they changed the back end of how you can populate your ads, like, put in ad breaks and stuff like that. And ever since then, we've seen a mark drop. And like I've seen a mark drop where they split up. You have Google Ads Sense, like the ads you watch, and then you have the YouTube premium. And the YouTube premium from last year, I would say it's probably 95% gone. So my assumption is they're probably overpaid YouTube channels, and they're fixing that this year.

So we're seeing that as being like the big dip. But we do take direct donations. Yep, patreon.com slash the team has. That's the best way to support to show you get the full. show ad free and early. So anything else, boys? Appreciate you. No, for me. No, that was great. We solved the Syria question. Yeah, David, thanks so much. Yeah. No, you bet. I will have to consume a handle of some kind of liquor tonight to recuperate from talking about Syria, yeah, total PTSD. No, but seriously,

this was fun, guys. Thanks for having me on. Always love talking about these topics. And, yeah, this is a blast really appreciate it thanks david thanks guys yeah thanks