Today, Explained - It’s never too late to understand the war in Syria

Episode Date: April 6, 2018

President Trump announced this week he wants to withdraw US troops from Syria over the next six months. The country’s civil war has killed an estimated 400,000 people and displaced around 13 million. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explains how an uprising led to what the United Nations calls “the biggest humanitarian emergency of our era.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

John Asante. Sean Romser. Stitcher. Yes. Friend of the show. Yeah. I wanted to ask you what kind of toothbrush you use. I use a manual.

Okay. Yeah, not, I guess, what do you call the other ones? You call them electric toothbrushes. Electra. You've never been to getquip.com slash explain to find out about Quip electric toothbrushes? No, I haven't. I've heard of Quip, but I haven't been to that website. We're going to have to talk about this.

Okay. Zach Beecham, host of The Worldly Podcast. Hello. Hi. So the crisis in Syria, the war in Syria, among the most brutal conflicts ongoing in the world right now, true, false? True. More than true, I would say. It's probably the single worst conflict ongoing in the world today.

Biggest humanitarian crisis on the planet among them or the one? Also true. Well over 400,000 people have died. We don't know exactly how many because the situation is so dangerous that human rights organizations have been unable to continue counting or the UN has in any accurate way. Over half of Syria's population, about 60 percent in most recent estimates, have been displaced. It's around 13 million people who are living somewhere that is not their home, either in Syria in internally displaced camps or outside of Syrian refugee camps in neighboring Turkey, Lebanon or elsewhere. It is the greatest humanitarian crisis on earth today. Proxy war for a number of other countries including the United States.

Is that a fact? Also true. Part of the reason the Syrian civil war has gotten so bad is a cycle of intervention and counter intervention on both sides. What started as a war between Bashar al-Assad's government and essentially its own population has turned into a war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, a war between Russia and various different other groups, between the United States and ISIS, between Turkey and Kurdish breakaway factions in the north. There are so many different sides and so many different axes of conflict that people are flooding weapons into the country. There are about 2,000 American troops in Syria. According to the State Department, the United States has spent more than $6.5 billion there

since the conflict began. And the conflict's far from over. But this week, President Trump said, I want to get out. I want to bring our troops back home. I want to start rebuilding our nation. We will have, as of three months ago, $7 trillion in the Middle East over the last 17 years. Think of it, $7 trillion over a 17-year period.

We have nothing, nothing except death and destruction. It's a horrible thing. But many of the president's military advisors and allies don't want to pull out. They say the United States needs to stay and fight a diminished ISIS. That the United States needs to stay and save Syria. It'd be the single worst decision the president could make. We got ISIL on the ropes. You don't want to let them off the ropes, remove American soldiers.

So how did this disaster start? And how could it end? Zach, I feel like the reason the war in Syria is so complicated is because of where Syria is. Where is it? It is basically right in the center of what we'd think of as the Middle East. It borders Israel. It borders Lebanon. It borders Iraq, it borders Turkey. And in the Arab Spring, this whole region all of a sudden became highly unstable politically. And is that where this conflict begins in Syria? Yes.

Yeah. Everything goes back to 2011 in the modern Middle East in a lot of ways, but especially in Syria. The world's attention now focused on Syria. Will it be the next domino to fall? The Arab Spring was a series of popular uprisings where people basically came out in large numbers and protested against repressive governments. Even with the brutal crackdown of the regime, demonstrators are on the streets.

Syria was not the first country to experience one of these protests, but it was one of the regime, demonstrators are on the streets. Syria was not the first country to experience one of these protests, but it was one of the biggest ones. Huge numbers of people started coming out in early 2011 against Bashar al-Assad's regime. Now, the important thing to know is that Assad's government was dominated by people from the Shia religious group. That's one of the two major branches of Islam. The other one being the Sunni? The Sunnis. And it was a minority in Syria. About 80% of Syria's population is Sunni. And the Shia government didn't seem to fairly represent their interests. And it didn't, objectively. So you had a government that was positioned against the vast majority of its

citizens, hence part of why there was such a massive public uprising when they saw uprisings in other countries that were actually effective. Was that government democratically put into power? Oh, hell no. Really, it started with the current dictator's father, Hafez al-Assad, who came to power through a military coup. It really goes back to French occupation of the country, which in the way that a lot of colonial regimes do, elevated the Shia minority over the Sunni majority.

So Hafez al-Assad brutally repressed dissent and Bashar al-Assad learned from his father. And so when there were mass protests, unlike other Arab dictators who didn't, just send the troops into the streets. Bashar decided that the best thing to do would be to start gunning people down. Witnesses and human rights activists said government security forces had open fired directly on protesters with rubber bullets, tear gas, and live rounds. People might think that this accidentally turned into a civil war. That's not true. The strategy the entire time was to militarize the conflict. Assad knew that he could not win an uprising against roughly 80 percent of his population.

So he thought he could win a war where he had control over most of the guns and had most of the military on the side because he had been training and providing them with money for a very long time. The idea was that if you just kill everybody, then people will stop protesting or if it comes to a war, you'll win. OK. So that's how Assad's dealing with his own popular uprising. What's happening with all of the neighbors? How do they start to get involved? The two things are intertwined, right? So when Assad starts violently repressing the protesters, a large faction of the military defects and helps arm, supply, and create a rebel force to fight back. And that does create a serious threat to Assad. Most people early in the conflict believe

that Assad couldn't hold on. That was the general sense among Middle East observers. So Assad's allies start to get involved at this point. He has two major international patrons. The first is Iran. Iran sees Syria as a vital – one of its only allies in the region, first of all. Second, another Shia government that it can align with and an increasingly sectarian Middle East where the entire region is divided between Sunni and Shia powers. And third, it's a really important conduit to some of Iran's important other partners in the region, most notably Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. So they intervene quickly

in the civil war. They send their own troops. They send weapons to Assad. They send money. They're doing pretty much whatever they can to try to prop up the Assad government. OK. And so that's one of his allies. The other one is Russia. Russia has long – really going back to Cold War days, had a close relationship with the Assad dictatorship.

OK. has long, really going back to Cold War days, had a close relationship with the Assad dictatorship. Okay. And so it initially doesn't provide military support, but it provides anti-aircraft missiles. It provides diplomatic cover at the United Nations, vetoing Security Council resolutions condemning Assad. Generally speaking, Russia and Iran are from the get-go pro-Assad in this conflict. And both of Russia and Iran's intentions have to do with their own sort of militaristic aims in the region. Iran is principally geopolitics. Russia is partially geopolitics. And partially, they're very worried about the Arab Spring and in general, democratic protests spreading to different countries. Putin particularly believes that a lot of these protests due to his experience in Eastern Europe are American plots against authoritarian governments. He believes that it's important not only to prop up an ally but to show the democratic uprisings can fail.

So you've got Iran and Russia piling on in this conflict. Who's got the back of the rebels? I know the United States on some level but who in the region? Yeah, the US didn't do a big job early on backing the rebels. In fact, its support has been lukewarm the entire conflict. The key players on the pro-rebel side are the Gulf monarchies, most notably Saudi Arabia and to a lesser degree, Qatar. Saudi Arabia and Iran are locked in a kind of Cold War in the Middle East. They see each other as these fundamental rivals and existential threats to each other's governments for reasons deeply rooted in history and ideology. And as a result, when this uprising happens, the Saudis see an incredible opportunity to unseat a pro-Iranian government. For all of the reasons that Iran sees this uprising as seriously threatening to its regional position, Saudi Arabia sees it as seriously promising.

So the Saudis start flooding money and weapons to back the rebels. And other Gulf countries do the same. The complexity is that they back different players. The rebels are not a unified force. We talk about the rebels like they're one thing, but in reality, they're hundreds of different things. There are lots of different rebel groups. Sometimes they fold, sometimes they combine, sometimes they shift. It sounds hard to keep track of. There are experts who are dedicated to keeping track of just that. Okay. And amidst all of this insanity, I guess you've got the United States and Russia sort of staring each other down, right?

Right. And this gets worse as the conflict goes on. So the first few years of the Syrian civil war are defined by swings back and forth. OK. The Iranians come and help out Assad and it looks like Assad is winning and then Saudi and Qatar step up their support and it looks like the rebels are winning again. And so it teeters back and forth. And this is during the Obama presidency. This is during the Obama presidency. But perhaps the most decisive event to date was Russia's intervention in the conflict in 2015. When Russia decided to stop being on the sidelines and start directly participating.

Six weeks now, Russian bombers have been taking off around the clock from an airbase near Latakia. Their mission, airstrikes on what Moscow calls terrorist targets. Russian planes particularly, but also coordination from ground forces, have played a vital role in turning the conflict around for Assad. Even in 2013, after Assad crossed a red line the Obama administration had set up for military intervention, that is the use of chemical weapons on its own population, Obama didn't act. The U.S. didn't intervene. With so many players and conflicts and fronts to this war, is it even still about a popular uprising at all? Is that just a forgotten facet of this conflict? The demonstration stage of this conflict is long over. That ended in 2011, really early 2012.

By then, it was a civil war. Now, it's not even a civil war anymore. It's so much more than that. It is a place where the Middle East's largest powers and some of the world's largest powers come to blows, and they fight out various different grievances. Some of them are domestic. Some of them have to do with their foreign policy goals, and in which these countries come into conflict with each other and support local forces or even directly fight them based on what they perceive as being good for them. And the people who suffer the most from this aren't Americans, they're not Russians, they aren't Iranians, they aren't Turks, they're Syrians. They're the roughly 24 million people who lived in Syria prior to the war. These people have been devastated by their country turning into a geopolitical violent playground.

All of these competing interests in Syria, Assad, the rebels, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, they're all taking part in one war. But in the north of Syria, there is an entire other war being waged. That's after the break. Okay, so John, how old are you? I'm 30. 30? Yeah.

30 years old. Been brushing my teeth for a long time. Have you? As long as I can remember. I assume, but I don't want to assume. Yeah. Yeah. So you've never used an electric toothbrush before?

I have. There was some time when I was younger. 98, 96, something like that. Something like, yeah. Okay. So would you believe me if I told you that technology has dramatically changed in the world of electric toothbrushes? Get out. I mean, these things, they give you little pulsing alerts to tell you when to like start brushing a different part of your mouth. Whoa. Okay. That's helpful because I usually treated an electric toothbrush like a manual toothbrush and never felt like I got quite the right scrub in, the right brush brushing in. Getquip.com slash explain. These things start at $25 and you get free brush heads

every once in a while if you sign up now. That is good. I was going to ask. I'm going to need to replace those things. Exactly. Well, your first set is free with your first purchase there. Getquip.com slash Explained. All right. So wrapping my head around everything you've just said, you've got a popular uprising being squashed by a dictator. You've got a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia and each of their allies. Then you've got the two biggest nuclear powers in the world staring each other down. And this isn't even just contained inside Syria, right? Oh no, there's more. Another really important part of the conflict is the Syrian Kurdish minority.

So in the north of the country, there are a bunch of people from a different ethnic group, the Kurds. OK. And the Kurds early in the conflict decided basically fuck this and created their own kind of country up there called Rojava. And the Syrian government decided basically to leave them alone. Really? Pretty much, yeah. There was a kind of soft truce between the Kurds, who Assad didn't really care about, and the rebels, who he really wanted to crush.

Okay. Now, this really freaked out Turkey, who's the northern neighbor of Syria. Turkey also is a Kurdish minority, which also has separatist tendencies and is home to a militant group, the PKK, that the Kurdish government has fought on and off for years. A roadside bomb has injured at least a dozen soldiers in eastern Turkey. The country's seen daily violence since July when a ceasefire with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, broke down. The Kurdish government worried that Rojava would be a base for the PKK.

So the Kurds ended up becoming a target for the Turks. Not only that, but the Kurds have been the principal U.S. ally in Syria fighting ISIS, which is in northern and eastern Syria for the most part. So the Kurds have been a key U.S. ally in the north, right? And the U.S. has given them tremendous amount of military aid. This is by far our biggest intervention in the Syrian conflict. But now the Kurds are also fighting Turkey, which is a NATO ally. So you have this whole other kind of conflict that is largely but not entirely independent from the civil war and the other interventions where two U.S. allies are fighting each other while one of them is also fighting ISIS.

And how much of Syria does ISIS control right now? Very little. It used to control a huge chunk. You can see this on maps. Usually they get illustrated with a giant black blob. They have a black flag and stuff. And I'm looking at one right now and the black blob has basically disappeared. Does that mean the United States is sort of succeeding in this effort to quash ISIS in Syria?

The Kurds are fighting ISIS well on our behalf? Yeah. I mean look, on a narrow counter ISIS level, American policy in Syria and Iraq has been a great success. ISIS's territorial control is basically down to zero at this point. The Iraqi government just declared victory over ISIS and it's part of the conflict. OK. That was a plus in terms of literally taking away their territory. The question is whether you can prevent them from restarting.

And a lot depends on the eventual outcome of the Syrian conflict and how the Assad government, which seems likely to hold on at this point. It's not guaranteed but seems likely to hold on, how it manages the territory in which ISIS had control in the past. So what is the latest going on in the Syrian conflict? What's going on right now? The biggest development in conflict between the regime and its allies and the rebels has been happening in the Damascus suburbs of Gouda. So Damascus is the capital of Syria. But rebels have held a lot of territory near it for quite some time. The Assad regime, with the help of Iranian and Russian forces, have nearly completely taken back Ghouta from the rebels.

And some 125,000 people living there have been displaced. And what about that conflict in the north involving Turkey and the United States and the Kurds who are fighting ISIS but also fighting Turkey? Has that simmered down? No. So the past month or so has seen serious fighting between the Kurdish factions in the north and Turkey, which has intervened essentially to try to take some of their territory and demonstrate that it will not tolerate an independent Kurdish presence that supports the pro-Kurdish independence forces in Turkey. So there's been fighting over the city of Afrin, which is a city in the north held by the Kurds, that Turkey has used its, frankly, superior military to seize that territory from the Kurds.

You said the United States went from unwilling to straight up scared to intervene? How does John Bolton entering the administration and Mike Pompeo being elevated to Secretary of State change that? Does it? Oh, yeah. Those are some pro-war guys. But here they run up against President Trump's instincts. So Trump has long believed that the U.S.'s only goal in Syria should be fighting militant groups. OK. So you got to kill the terrorists. Somebody criticized me the other day because they asked me what I do. And I said, I'm going to bomb the shit out of them.

It's true. I don't care. I don't care. And he's floated even partnering with the Russians and the Syrian government. He did during the campaign. And now he said he wants to pull US troops out of Syria. But then the military said they were maybe planning to possibly do that at one point, but it doesn't seem like it's happening anytime soon.

So you've got Trump's instincts running up against the government's instincts and his new advisors who both, I think, support a more confrontational stance towards Russia and Iran. I mean, is there an end anywhere in sight to this war, to this conflict? No. No. I mean, we think Assad is going to win. We have no idea what reconstruction could begin to look like. We have no idea how long peace would hold. And even if we get there, we have no idea when we might get there to that terrible outcome, I should say. A brutal dictator winning a civil war is not a thing that anyone should want.

And yet it looks like that's where we're going, but at some indefinite point in the future. Civil wars sometimes last for a decade or more. And this war started in 2011. You could see even more suffering and even more death in Syria than we've seen already. And you could see it for a long time. Zach Beecham is a senior reporter at Vox. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. So have I convinced you, John, to make the switch to an electric toothbrush?

Are you ready 22 years later to try it again? I think so. I think so. Are there any other features about this electric toothbrush you could fully sell me on? I think there are. I think the bristles have been like dentist approved. I think it's really quiet. It's not like clunky like your old school electric toothbrush. And I think you can choose what kind of color it comes in too. Okay. I like that. The quiet part really does help.

It speaks to you? Definitely. Great. And don't forget getquip.com slash explained. I will. You won't. I mean, I won't forget. Thank you.

Thank you. All right.