EP 57 - The Blood Between Us: Syria After the Fall of Assad w/Robin Yassin-Kassab

Yeah, and I think in that sense, you did a great job at breaking that down.

And so...

You write about the siege and subsequent fall of Aleppo on the hands of the Russians and the Iranians and the Assad militiamen and forces.

And in so doing, you allude or maybe argue that this particular event This was key, basically, to how Islamists came to dominate the scene, basically.

And so I think before coming across that particular argument in your book or seeing an allusion to it, how I looked at it was a bit philosophical in the sense that when you're tortured and robbed of your humanity...

You aren't likely to be balanced and moderate in really any sense.

You're not expected to, especially when exposed to this level of brutality and this scale really of brutality.

So I feel like regardless of what did in fact happen, in a way or in a sense, this was almost poised to happen.

And so what do you think basically of this assessment?

Well, I don't want to say that the fall of Aleppo in 2016 was...

the main cause of the rise of Islamists.

Because, of course, ISIS was already there.

Jabhat al-Nusra was already important.

The Islamic Front militias, including Ahrar al-Sham and Jais al-Islam and all of these Salafist groups were already important.

They were becoming important from 2012 on as the revolution militarized, as people got more desperate, as you... suggested as people became more traumatized and it became much more of a military battle and these guys came in who had their own funding networks they had their own they could plug into international jihadi networks where people had military experience access to weapons access to funds and so on so that it was already an important factor and was becoming more so But by, I think, 2016, the fall of Aleppo was really the beginning of the end of the revolution, if you like.

I know that Esed eventually fell, but the revolution was crushed some years before he actually was toppled.

So we can't really say the revolution or the original revolution won, but we can say that eventually Esed was removed.

So it kind of half won.

But yeah, the fall of Aleppo was the beginning of the end.

And by 2018, it was kind of the proper end because by then the Russians had helped Assad and Iran to recapture the Damascus suburbs and Daraa in the south and other key parts of the country until only really Idlib was and parts of Aleppo were left.

But when Aleppo city fell in 2016, 80% of Assad's ground forces were foreign Shia militiamen.

So they were militiamen from Pakistan, from Afghanistan, from Lebanon, from Iraq, who were commanded and trained and armed and organised by Iran, by a foreign country and by a Shia Muslim country.

So that really reinforced the sectarian aspect of the revolution.

In the first couple of years of the revolution, the sectarian aspect was not so important.

But by the fall of Aleppo, it had become absolutely crucial that...