The Syrian Civil War: How It Started

Dan is joined by the Defence Editor for The Economist, Shashank Joshi, to explore the origins of the brutal Syrian civil war that has left the country in ruin and with an uncertain future. They unravel the complex political and cultural history of the region to explain why we're seeing turmoil today and what sense it could give us about what might happen now that the Assad regime has fallen. Written by Dan Snow, produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Max Carrey Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:15Speaker 01

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• 1:21Speaker 02

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• 2:07Dan Snow?

  This is Dan Snow’s History Hit, and this is the story of how and why Syria fell into civil war.

• 2:18Dan Snow?

  This week, the roars of acclamation seemed to shake the mosque. The crowd were pumped up.

• 2:30Dan Snow?

  The constant refrain of “Allah Akbar” echoed around the ancient building. This week, the leader of the main Syrian rebel group that has toppled the former president Assad, Abu Mohammed Al-Jalani, as he now calls himself by his real name, Ahmed Al-Shara, spoke to a packed crowd at the Umayyad Mosque in the centre of Damascus. He proclaimed that the Syrian people are the rightful owners of the country, only hours after President Bashar al-Assad finally, finally fled the country after a decade-long civil war.

• 3:14Dan Snow?

  Al-Shara also declared that a new history is being written for the entire Middle East. And as I watched it on TV, it certainly seemed like his followers felt that this was a seismic moment, a decisive break with the past.

• 3:30Dan Snow?

  And as I watched that, I was taken back to being in that mosque, in that same courtyard, that same space. It’s the most beautiful building. If there’s one place that really captures the tides of Syrian history, it really is that building. It stands on the site of the Roman temple of Jupiter. Then, in the later Roman Empire, it was transformed into a cathedral. And when Damascus was captured by Muslim Arab forces, it was gradually repurposed into a mosque. When Damascus was captured, it was by one of my favourite military commanders, you’ll have heard me mention him here before, Khalid Ibn Walid, the drawn sword of Allah. And he captured it in 634, and that really was the sign.

• 4:12Dan Snow?

  That the Arab invasion was no flash in the pan. It was a sustained and dramatic assault on the old order. Damascus was so important even then. In fact, you get a sense of its importance by the fact the first Islamic dynasty, the Umayyad dynasty, chose Damascus to be the capital of the Muslim world. And even when that capital moved elsewhere, it was always one of the leading cities. Saladin is buried next door. You can still go and visit his tomb. And the last time I was there, I was standing pretty much alone in that huge courtyard because I was there with a small BBC team to make a history documentary about the Syrian civil war that was raging all around the country. It was 2012. The war was, well, over a year old, perhaps 18 months old.

• 4:55Dan Snow?

  The fighting started the year before in the spring of 2011, when by total coincidence, I was also in Syria making a documentary about castles and we had to leave in a hurry. When I returned with the BBC to make a documentary specifically about the history of Syria and why it had driven the country to civil war, I remember standing in that courtyard and from that courtyard, with its huge view of the heavens above, the blue sky, I watched Syrian fighter bombers, holding their positions above rebel-held areas around Damascus. I remember the contrails that those aircraft produced. I remember them looking so anarchic. I was used to orderly aircraft patterns in the West. I'd never seen airspace over a battlefield before. And then I remember the sounds. It was so jarring.

• 5:37Dan Snow?

  We were in this peaceful, peaceful, ancient building. And I remember the dull thuds from a long way away as artillery and those aircraft pounded rebel positions. We had arrived in Damascus the day before. We'd driven about, I think it was 150 kilometres an hour from the Lebanese border and on this big, big, empty highway. I'll never forget the way the driver just gripped the wheel, his unwavering stare at the road ahead. I would occasionally stop at ramshackle regime checkpoints, usually manned by teenagers.

• 6:09Dan Snow?

  And the driver was concerned about rebel activity, banditry, violence on the road, and he drove like a bat out of hell. One of my memories is as we approached Damascus, there was a big, single, black smudge on the horizon, again, black against the blue sky. And it was above, I think it was an eastern suburb where a massive car bomb had just torn through some government target, some government complex. And then I remember him telling us through gritted teeth that the one benefit of this revolution is that everyone gets to be a rally driver. We stayed in a hotel right in the middle of Damascus, which was still open weirdly. It was this pretentious normality, even though it was completely abandoned. There was tape on the windows, saw them shattering. They had

• 6:49Dan Snow?

  200 rooms, and there were six that were occupied. And when we were walking around Damascus, which was still under government control, people stopped us in the street. They wanted to practise their English. They hadn't seen foreigners for months. We visited various parts of Syria, both those under government control, and occasionally we were able to slip into areas of rebel control. We were taken by the government to see the Alawite heartlands. The Alawites are the ethnic group within Syria from which the Assad family and many, therefore, of their top officials have sprung. And we were shown the funerals of boys who'd been killed fighting for the regime. There was fury there, but there was also fatigue and hopelessness. I remember it was when we were filming in

• 7:31Dan Snow?

  that Alawite village that one of the grieving fathers just chased us off. He hated foreigners. He hated the BBC. He blamed us for stirring up trouble against the Assad regime. We managed to get into areas around the edge of Damascus that were controlled by the resistance to the Assad regime. I remember jumping out of cars and being taken into those parts of town, the terror, the dry mouth. And I remember going to apartment blocks, and they were just filled with refugee families, and so many of them were mutilated, so many had been wounded in the fighting. And I was very inexperienced. I'd never been a war correspondent before, and I found the whole thing overwhelming. I couldn't, I couldn't compute the stories of utter despair. I couldn't develop a detachment. I got too involved with the stories of every

• 8:14Dan Snow?

  single person we met. I was a recent father. My daughter was just under two years old, and I saw her in every distraught face, every orphaned child. And generally, I found I couldn't cope with the drip of adrenaline or cortisol, or whatever the stress thing is that keeps your body sort of hyper aware when you're in place of continuous threat. It was just exhausting. There was no light in Syria on that trip. And afterwards, it only got worse. Watching events this week in Syria, of course, I have no idea what the future holds. Two weeks ago, not a single expert predicted the precipitate end of this regime. We're not very good at predicting the future.

• 8:55Dan Snow?

  But this week, it is nice to let ourselves dream that there might be a time when peace will return to Syria, when millions of displaced people can return home and rebuild their lives and can focus on building those lives, on living, not just staying alive. There may come a time, once again, when we can walk through the old city Damascus and we can shop in the rebuilt, wonderful, covered market of Aleppo, and we can explore the greatest castles in the world. One day, I hope to go back. In this podcast, I wanted to revisit an interview I did in 2016, I think it was, a long time ago, with Shashank Joshi, who at the time was a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, RUSI, in London. He'd been at Oxford and Harvard.

• 9:40Dan Snow?

  He is the rock star defence editor at The Economist. There's not a day goes by when he's not interviewed on some illustrious news programme about what is going on in the world. And as we know, all too much is going on in the world. In this interview, I talked to him about why Syria had been plunged into war and why it was so intractable, so insoluble. Who were these different groups fighting? And what possible resolution might there be? And sadly, or interestingly, the things we talked about have aged pretty well. That grinding war, fought along the lines that you'll hear Shashank outline, endured for years and years after we'd finished talking. And now, for the first time perhaps, we have a glimpse of the future.

• 10:43Dan Snow?

  Syria has long been at the very centre of things. There was civilisation in Syria, there were people coming together and living in densely populated, complex groups before almost anywhere else on earth. Syria really is where it all began. Syria and its surrounding area, of course, including parts of Iraq, for example. That was where human beings first developed large-scale farming, where they first started living in complex cities. It's where the world's first alphabet was invented. Aleppo, we think, is one of the oldest continuously occupied cities on earth. Geography initially placed Syria at the heart of human history, at the heart of our story. It's in the Fertile Crescent, that famous region of the world,

• 11:26Dan Snow?

  where nature has conspired to make an earthly paradise. Mighty rivers bring abundant waters from the mountains of the north down onto great fertile plains. Periodic floods caused these watery giants to burst their banks. In fact, these rivers changed course. And as the waters fell back, the river assumed a new course for the time being. They'd leave a rich layer of sediment, which mulches back into the thick loam of the soil. It was abundant ground. The particular quirk of that corner of the planet meant that many diverse plants took root in that rich soil. It's at the right latitude, they get the right amount of water.

• 12:08Dan Snow?

  There are dramatic variations in altitude, lots of little hills and middle mountains caused by tectonic convergence from the Arabian and Eurasian plates pushing into each other. So for many reasons, a great place for plants to take root. Africa, Europe and Asia literally come together here, and in more than just the tectonic sense. Flora and fauna from all over that vast landmass have found their way here to the centre. They've found a conducive habitat. And that's why it's home to eight so-called founder crops, which are the ones most suitable for domestication, the ones that our Stone Age ancestors found reasonably easy to cultivate. Things like wheat and barley and flax and peas and chickpeas and lentils. But there were more besides. On top of that, cows, goats, sheep and pigs were all here.

• 12:53Dan Snow?

  Horses were first broken on the steppe fairly nearby as well. So all the ingredients for civilisation were right here.

• 13:03Dan Snow?

  And as humans began to trade and move around, the fertile crescent found itself astride the great artery across Eurasia, the highway that runs east to west and back again, which we can roughly describe as the Silk Roads. Spices and fabrics and gold and ivory and other luxuries and ideas passed through the cities of Syria before going either east into Central Asia and China or heading west to the Mediterranean basin and beyond. And as ever, conquerors have followed those merchants and traders. Syria has been incorporated into every Eurasian empire worth its salt and a few others besides.

• 13:44Dan Snow?

  Parts or all of it were conquered by the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians. It was ruled over by one of the first great empire builders in history, the fabulous name Sargon of Akkad. Ramses the Great invaded it time and again. And his victory at Kadesh, which is in Syria, is the first pitched battle in history for which we have a name and a vague concept of how it was fought and who won. Then came the Persians, Alexander the Great and Pompey and the Romans. And then the Persians again, Islamic caliphs and crusaders and Mongols and Ottomans and Napoleon. And then later more Frenchmen and then the British. And they've all sought to dominate this important region. But this might be one of the most ancient places in the world.

• 14:29Dan Snow?

  It's a very new nation-state. It was born out of the catastrophe that was the First World War, the massive global reordering that came following the defeat of the Central Powers in 1918. That was the end of the Romanoffs, the Ottomans, the Hohenzollens, the Habsburgs. It brought the atomization of massive empires. They evolved, they transformed into strange, new, competing, ambitious, incoherent successor states. And that's where we're going to start to work out what is happening today and what might happen tomorrow. We're going to jump back 100 years. I know we always say that, but it's true, folks. Everything today happens because of what went before.

• 15:13Dan Snow?

  So here's my chat with Shashank and a gallop through Syrian history. Can we go all the way back briefly to the Ottoman Empire? I mean, Syria was... Part of this vast empire stretching right across the Middle East, multi-confessional, different communities living together because there was a boss.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  It was, but but also, and particularly after the eighteen sixties, it was in some ways a decentralized empire. It had local autonomy at the tribal level, at the confessional level. You had, in a way, autonomy for different religious and sectarian groups. And I think that's partly, of course, what allowed such an enormously diverse empire that stretched across that massive distance to sustain itself. And that was as true in Syria, which was as diverse as anywhere else in the Ottoman Empire, as anywhere else.

• 16:02Dan Snow?

  Then you have the rise of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, and that starts to, that sends ripples around the world that we're still living with today. During the First World War, the British try and harness Arab nationalism, don't they? And make some promises that have come back to haunt them.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  They do. They, the the British are trying to yoke Arab nationalism, Pan-Arab nationalism, right across the Arab world. As a sort of way to smash Ottoman power, to further the allied cause. And they succeed in that. And of course, they make a lot of promises to the Hashemite dynasty in particular. About the viability, about the the promise of a Arab state, either in a particular area or stretching across a large area. And eventually, of course, they face a tension between the promises they've made to the Arabs. And some of the other promises that they have made with other European allied powers, notably the French. And of course, that's in part, although not wholly, a relation to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of nineteen sixteen.

• 17:02Dan Snow?

  In nineteen sixteen, one hundred years ago, it was our dealings with the French, we we effectively divided up the Middle East. We said, if we can beat these Ottomans, the French can have this bit, we'll have that bit. And that, of course, jarred with what we told the Arabs, which is that they could have the whole lot, effectively, or they thought they'd have the whole lot.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  And of course, even the French tell the Arabs that they can have an independent state. But having conquered what is now modern day Syria with the help of those Hashemite Arab forces. You then have a, effectively, a Syrian kingdom led by King Faisal. To whom the British have made these promises, to whom the French have said you can have an independent kingdom. But then in nineteen twenty, what we see is the French kick out King Faisal. And they split Syria up into various different bits governed along pretty different principles to those that it had been governed under for hundreds of years under the Ottomans.

• 17:56Dan Snow?

  So a Christian bit, if you like, was hived off and made an independent sort of entity, Lebanon. A little bit was given to Turkey and many people traditionally, if you were living in the area that's now Syria, would have thought that parts of Palestine, parts of Transjordan, parts of Iraq should be part of Syria. So Europeans drawing the lines all over the map was quite controversial, was it?

• 18:16Speaker 03

  It was, and you were talking about the dismemberment of places that were very closely connected. And this gave rise to all kinds of problems. So for example, once the French kick out King Faisal in nineteen twenty, a few years later, you have the Great Syrian Revolt. It's closely connected to one of those communities in the south, the Druze community, who are still around in Syria, still a very important community in Syria. But it was also related to the fact that tribes in Syria, who had been accustomed to wandering across many of these borders, now found themselves penned up in states that had fixed borders. And in fact, where they used to roam, well, suddenly there's a country called Turkey, suddenly there's Iraq, suddenly there's all sorts of other borders that constrain their movement. And that's one of the factors in the rebellion against French rule in nineteen twenty five.

• 19:01Dan Snow?

  Now, also, the French, did they not give certain groups within this new place called Syria privileges? And one of those groups would be the Alawites.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, so you're looking at a period of, we talked about Arab nationalism. And one of the important communities that was powerful in Arab nationalism was the Sunni majority community in Syria. And like colonial powers anywhere in the world, the British, the French, the Belgians, the colonial powers knew the way to counteract a large majority community is to build up a minority. Minorities are the best vanguard forces for any colonial power. Look at the the British doing that for the Punjabis in India. You could look at it with communities in Africa as well. And so. This small heterodox sect that is related to Shia Islam, it's not quite the same Shia Islam, was built up as a powerful force within the armed forces.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  And they were very economically backward, so they found the army was a natural conduit for social upward mobility in a way that would have big effects decades later.

• 20:05Dan Snow?

  And quite threatening to the Sunni majority, who were the sort of commercial reins at that stage. They were the sort of dominant social and economic force in Syria at the time.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  They certainly were. They were the sort of what we might call the merchant classes, controlling capital, controlling large areas of economic control. And in fact, we still see very powerful Sunni communities in Syria, a large number of whom have still pinned their master Assad's ship.

• 20:31Dan Snow?

  But the Alawites are these newcomers, a minority sect who there's religious problems, they think they're not proper Muslims, I suppose. And suddenly they've got all the plum jobs in the armed forces and they're working with the colonial overlords. So you can see that, I guess, is sowing seeds of discord in the relations within Syria.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  It is. They successfully put down a number of revolts in Syria. I should stress, they certainly are not some sort of dominant class, but they come to be disproportionately represented in the armed forces. And it's a very robust finding in social science across countries. When you have ethnic or sectarian minorities overrepresented in the armed forces relative to the population, it is a recipe for trouble.

• 21:14Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History at There's More Coming Up.

• 21:20Dan Snow?

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• 22:04Speaker 01

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• 24:00Dan Snow?

  The French, after an allied conquest of Syria during the civil war, because the French, the Vichy French briefly was sort of aligned with Hitler after the French defeated 1940, Syria gets independence, doesn't it?

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Eventually, after many, many twists and turns, after many false promises to the nationalists, they eventually are forced to leave. But not after some very, very messy, brutal fighting in which cities are shelled, many rebels are killed, and eventually the French do leave and Syrians get their state.

• 24:28Dan Snow?

  Why has post-war Syria, why did independent Syria, why was it a bumpy ride? Because of course historically Syria was one of the great, of the world's great entrepots of trade and innovation and civilisation if you like. So why has it been such a tricky country to run and has seen so little economic development since it gained independence?

• 24:46Speaker 03

  I think one of the major reasons it was never given a chance to politically develop. Its political institutions were hollowed out very, very fast. And so for almost, right from the late 1940s, certainly from the 50s and 60s, you cycle your way through large numbers of governments and parliaments, one after the other, in a way that precludes the formation of robust, competitive party politics. But that of course is not just true of Syria, it's true of many of its neighbours as well. The ethnic diversity aspect is part of it, but that's not really the only reason. That does complicate governing Syria, but ethnic and religious tension is not really something that plagued Syria in the post-independence period. We shouldn't read back into it something we see today.

• 25:28Dan Snow?

  Then we do find this Alawite sect who have gained prominence, gained positions of importance under the French colonial rule and have sort of come to dominate the armed forces as you say, they effectively seize control of the country, don't they?

• 25:43Speaker 03

  Yes, you have the, you have elements associated with the Baath Party, the Pan-Arab Socialist Secular Party that most of us would know from the context of Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi Baath Party, but there was a huge rivalry between these two parties. And you see, Alawites seize control, not just as a, not really as a sect, but through the Baath Party and particularly through the air force. And it's one particular officer in question who's important here, and that's Hafez al-Assad, who seizes control, he's a very prominent air force officer, and that in a way brings to an end this long period of coup after coup after coup.

• 26:21Dan Snow?

  So Hafez Assad, who is Karim Assad's father, as you may have guessed, how did he maintain his grip? How did he bring some stability to the country? Was it through despotism and terror? Or did he rule with some legitimacy? Were people grateful that he brought some stability?

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Legitimacy is a dangerous word because it's never quite clear what it means. But he certainly had international legitimacy. You know, there's photographs of him shaking hands with Richard Nixon meeting him. He cultivated relations with the Soviet Union. He also changed Syria's policy in the region. And I think that was a very popular move at the time. For example, this is from before Hafez Assad's time, I should say, but it's worth noting here. From 1958 to 1961, Syria merged with Egypt, which is remarkable. You know, we forget this now, but they became one country, the United Arab Republic. And that failed. But after that, Hafez Assad did still pursue some of these pan-Arab policies. He tightened the relationship with the Soviet Union and he pressed Israel, of course.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  He went to war against Israel in 1973 and lost a good chunk of his territory in the Golan Heights for his troubles.

• 27:25Dan Snow?

  To what extent, we should mention the Israel thing. To what extent did fighting Israel become a way of unifying the Syrian people? Was that a useful thing to do for the government, to mobilize the people behind the government?

• 27:38Speaker 03

  Every Arab regime, almost every Arab regime, thought it was useful. Some did it reluctantly, like Jordan, others did it with great gusto, like Nasser. But it was a gamble. You know, people like Nasser, confronting Israel was fantastic. In the Suez War, of course, 1956, it immeasurably increased Nasser's stature then. But then you go to 1967 and the Six Day War and you've comprehensively been smashed by the Israelis and your air force is gone, your government's in tatters, and then it's not so good. And with Hafez Assad, we see some of the same thing. Seventy-three was a gamble. He didn't quite lose or win, but he did lose the Golan Heights. He did lose a lot of his territory. It wasn't a comprehensive loss of, it wasn't a loss of existence. It wasn't a massive defeat, but it was embarrassing.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  And I think it did lose some of that legitimacy at home as well.

• 28:25Dan Snow?

  During this time, were the tensions between these communities in Syria, were they notable under under Hafez Assad?

• 28:33Speaker 03

  I don't really know the history of sectarian tensions in Syria over this period. What we did begin to see in the 70s and 80s, though, this is more prominent, is religious dimensions of conflict. So, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood, which is an organisation that was a pan-national organisation founded in Egypt years before, begins to grow more active in challenge Hafez Assad's rule, not on an ethnic basis, but on a sectarian basis. And the Muslim Brotherhood are a Sunni organisation, and therefore challenge him not just as Sunni Muslim seeking an Islamic state, but also in a sectarian way. They see Alawites as some sort of heretics, as people to be challenged. So this rebellion gained steam over the 70s. They begin assassinating members of the Baath

• 29:18Speaker 03

  Party. By the way, just as other Islamists in Egypt are knocking off Egyptian politicians. And in the 80s, this reaches this fever pitch with a massive campaign of assassinations against Baath Party officials. The Baath Party views this understandably as a campaign of brutal terrorism, prosecuted against a secular, legitimate, stable country, how dare they? And it reaches its climax at the Battle for Hamer, which is a huge uprising in the city of Hamer in 1982. It's surrounded, and it is absolutely crushed by the brother of Hafez Assad in a most brutal way that kills tens of thousands, but that's the end of it. There's very little trouble for decades after that.

• 29:59Dan Snow?

  Hamer in 1982 is almost a case study, isn't it, in urban counterinsurgency? I mean, it's extraordinary, it's still studied today.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  There's a famous, there's a book by New York Times correspondent, Thomas Friedman, called From Beirut to Jerusalem, where he famously talks about Hamer rules. And it's his way of summarising the Arab dictator playbook, the idea of crushing your opponent through overwhelming military force and showing no quarter. And it became a very famous summation of the brutality, the willingness to show no compunction in crushing your opponent. But unlike rebellions in the last 40 years, it worked, and it did succeed in quelling Brotherhood who were scattered outside, many of them fled to Turkey. And actually, you did have stability. And in fact, by the time of the 90s, so we're talking 10 years on, Syria is rehabilitated.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  By 1991, you know, guess who's fighting alongside the Americans and the Brits against Saddam Hussein? Against another Baath party to push out Saddam and his army from Kuwait? It's the Syrians, and they participate also in the peace conferences with Israel in 1991, which are really historic conferences. So, you know, you crush a rebellion, but if you do well, you stabilize everything, you know, it's all forgotten in 10 years' time, if you're careful.

• 31:11Dan Snow?

  So then, Hasid has an older son, very charismatic, good-looking, heroic figure, who still lots of posters and things in Syria. He's killed in a car crash.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  In 1994, that's right.

• 31:20Dan Snow?

  And the heir to Syria is the younger brother, who was never really, no one paid much attention to him before.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  No, he's a mild-mannered ophthalmologist who says, you know, he went into ophthalmology rather than other types of medicine because he didn't like blood. So he's, you know, he's the unlikely successor. You know, second sons in these regimes are often very interesting because they don't have any hope of power until the older ones die. And his uncle, Rufat Assad, is also exiled. So really, Bashar assumes this prominence over the course of the 90s. As Syria is becoming more rehabilitated, and then gets his chance in 2000. His father dies, Hafez Assad dies. By this point, Hafez is seen as a sort of statesman of the Middle East. His crimes, the blood in his hands has been slightly washed out.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  And the Syrian parliament immediately changes their laws to say, you know, that thing we said about people below a certain age can't become president? Oh, we've changed it. And, you know, just to the right age to allow Bashar Assad to sneak in as president.

• 32:16Dan Snow?

  Bashar had a secular wedding to a woman of a Sunni background. You know, he tried to heal Syria, bring some sort of unity to Syria, as I understand it. And yet, he's ended up presiding over a... Brutal civil war. Why is that? Why did it break out?

• 32:35Speaker 03

  Well, there was a Damascus Spring in 2000 where it looked as if he might be liberalising. That one of the arguments, and we no one really knows, is that the people around him, the hangers-on from his father's era, shut all of that down for this young naive man who didn't know what he was doing. And then we've had ups and downs since then. It had to withdraw from Lebanon in 2005 after 30 years of occupation because it was accused of assassinating the Lebanese prime minister. Its nuclear reactor was bombed in 2007 by Israel. So up and down, up and down. By 2011, Bashar's looking all right. You know, he's in peace talks with Israel, in part secret back-channel talks. He's off the acts of evil list. He's worked with the Americans to be a little bit cooperative in Iraq, although he's also sent jihadists in. Why did it break out in 2011? Well, the honest answer has to be the

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Arab Spring. Don't forget, Libya was erupting in revolt. Tunisia had had a major change of government. Egypt had had a change of government. So it was a demonstration effect, and that prompted protests in the south of the country, in a city called Deir, where security forces responded. The story is, of course, that kids wrote graffiti, anti-regime graffiti on a wall. They were picked up and tortured, provoking a massive outcry against the regime, and the regime responded with overwhelming force. And although there were very few aspects of conciliation, a few governors were sacked, you know, there were a few changes in parliament, really Assad's choice was sealed when he decided to militarise

• 34:00Speaker 03

  the rebellion, turning overwhelmingly peaceful protests into an armed revolt of defecting Syrian army officers, peasants, and other hangers-on.

• 34:11Dan Snow?

  Was it a genuinely popular revolt, or were we seeing these older religious and ethnic divides within Syria sort of breaking out?

• 34:19Speaker 03

  All of the above. The old religious divides, as I said, they'd been exiled. They weren't really core part of the original rebellion in 2011. They were all sitting in Turkey. There were certainly ethnic aspects to it. We're seeing the Kurds, for example, say, "We are tired of being treated as second-class citizens by Damascus. Here's our chance to declare an autonomous Kurdish state." Rojava in the north of Syria, "Let's defend it, let's carve it out." You had the Druze who've also been on the fence but have also tried to push for their autonomy. But overall, I would say it was a broad-based and diverse rebellion that brought together many different people. Although it was Sunni-dominated, there's no doubt about that. It did also come to have the participation of many ultra-conservative Salafi jihadist elements, including Al Qaeda

• 35:04Speaker 03

  and what would become the Islamic State later on. And that, of course, terrified groups like the Alawites, the Christians, minorities who had been protected, if you go hundreds of years back, under the Ottomans, and of course also in part under the French. What will Syria look like as a state under this?

• 35:22Dan Snow?

  Because there was no resolution to this civil war, things happened as they often do in civil wars. It just got worse, it just got more extreme. And then you see that the emergence of these into a kind of vacuum, into the kind of chaos, is when you see things like Islamic State.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  So two major factors here I'll have to highlight and emphasize. One of them is, I mentioned to you how Bashar Assad had handled the Iraq war. He'd said he'd cooperate with the Americans. Actually, he'd sent foreign fighters, Islamists, into Iraq using well-known smuggling routes from places like the ungoverned border areas in order to give the Americans a bloody nose. Look, you wouldn't like it if the Americans called you, you know, put you in on the axis of evil either. So he encouraged Islamists to go into Iraq, kill American troops, destabilize Iraq. Some of those networks came back to bite him because they were reversed. You know, people he sent in these rat lines into Iraq, they knew all the roads, they knew the border guards to bribe, they knew the safe houses along the way, they had ties with military intelligence in Syria.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  So this was part of the reason why Islamists got a foothold. The other reason is outside powers also backed the rebellion. Sunni Islamist powers like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, all gave support to the rebellion because they didn't like Assad's alliance with Iran, who of course is an adversary of the Arab states. And they all gave their weapons and arms to different competing factions. So in a way, it promoted discord within the uprising, prevented the formation of a kind of cohesive liberation force and discord everywhere.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  Inside the gap, who slips in? It's Al Qaeda and it's ISIS. You know, groups like Al-Hilal Shan, they're very conservative, ultra Islamist, but they're not Al Qaeda. Russia is focused on helping Assad consolidate his rule. Why? Because Russia doesn't want us to overthrow another regime and because Russia has a port that it wants in Latakia and it wants to secure access to that. Iran is helping on the ground as well. Huge importance for Iran because it needs Syria to maintain access to Lebanon and its ally Hezbollah. Whereas what the French, the Brits and the Americans are doing is of course to bomb ISIS. So these are two separate campaigns, but they are very, very closely related because the more that Russia supports Assad, the more that ISIS says, "Look, you can need to join us.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  This brutal dictator is killing you by the hundreds of thousands." So ISIS gets stronger the more that Assad roots himself down.

• 37:50Dan Snow?

  Well, that brings us to the end of my old interview with Shashank. And I've got to say, listening to it again, I'm struck by how perceptive he was and he is. He even mentions Hayat Tareel Al-Sham. He mentions that the group that was this Al Qaeda affiliate is now the newly rebranded pluralist Syrian newly minted government. Well, certainly they just seized power. We will see how they all get on. So enormous thank you to Shashank. I think that interview stands up very well. Please follow him on social media, Shashank Joshi. In this mad world, there's a source that is clear and trustworthy. As for the future, I will be watching Keenly like all of you. And trust me, as soon as we are able to, as soon as we get the green light, History

• 38:32Dan Snow?

  Hit will be back on the ground in Syria, looking at some of the most remarkable heritage sites on earth. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.

• 38:45Speaker 01

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• 39:36Dan Snow?

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