Carlotta Gall
Appearances
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
There's possibly some people who were who had disappeared. So it's a pretty ruthless group who were set at first on gaining complete control. And now they're trying to reform themselves and appear softer. But their first years, when they were establishing control, they were pretty ruthless.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
Absolutely. It's very fluid. We know that Assad has left the country, and we've seen that Jalani has arrived in Damascus. He's made a statement to the nation. He's called on his troops to behave, not to pursue people, not to destroy things. But I think it's very clear that for him, this... It's the liberation from the Assad regime that was the main aim. And he's achieved that.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
So now what does he do next? There are a lot of different groups. They're sort of under an umbrella of his. But of course, you know, in these sort of events, you often see different groups turning on each other for power. So that's the 64th.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
million dollar question of what happens further but he does seem to be someone who has the sternness and the charisma possibly to manage that but we'll have to see and he's he's really not been out there a lot all these years he hasn't done a lot of interviews so we don't even know how much the syrians will will like him and accept him so there's everything's up in the air at the moment
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
Absolutely. And this is, you know, a very powerful, important country in the Middle East, a crucial place on the map if you look at it. All the countries around are going to be deeply concerned and want to influence. You've got Turkey in the north involved already. with troops inside Syria.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
You've got Iran, of course, hurting and pushed out, but already saying it wants a role in Syria in the future. And then you've got Israel actually taking action. Just this morning, we learned that they've moved in troops and taken control of a buffer zone on its border with Syria. And then Russia is also saying it still wants a role, although...
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
that remains to be seen if the jihadis would accept that. And then, of course, the United States, which has 900 troops still in Syria, and has made some strikes just to remind opponents not to come and attack them. So it's a huge, as we mentioned before, a huge cauldron of geopolitical rivalries, and that's going to be Something to try and work out and decipher in the coming days and weeks.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
It's like all of the cards have just been thrown up into the air. I think you're right, yeah. And that's also, for the Arab world, this was so interesting and important because they were steadily moving towards acceptance of Assad staying in power. And now that's been completely turned upside down.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for me, and for a lot of the Syrians I've been talking to in the last week and a half, it's the sense of liberation, the relief, the excitement. And the most compelling has been the release of people from prisons all over the country. There have been extraordinary scenes of people staggering out, and some of them barely able to walk, but so happy.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
And some of them have been in prison for more than a decade. including children who've been imprisoned with their mothers. So that's a huge release for the entire country. And that's why they're all celebrating on the streets at the moment. But of course, the Syrians are saying this is a great relief lifted, but we're also very fearful.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
It has been the most incredible turn of events. In just 12 days, we've turned from what we thought was really a frozen conflict going nowhere to an uprising in this 13-year civil war.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
I think for Syrians, you know, we've had 400,000 people die in this 13-year civil war. 14 million people left the country as refugees abroad. And the fear, of course, is everyone that it's going to go back to that or more or different ethnic groups, God forbid, start fighting each other, you know, whether it's for power in a city or in a whole region or over oil fields or wealth.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
So that's what the Syrians fear. They're telling me we're celebrating today, but just for one day. Then we're very worried, you know. So we have to see what goes forward. We don't know what's going to come next. Carlotta, thank you. Thank you.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
It started with a small rebel group come up from the northwest of the country. And very rapidly, in just a matter of days, they took three cities.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
Aleppo in the north, the second biggest city in the country. And then they started to move south.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
This is when suddenly it seemed that they were ambitious enough to actually topple the government. And so by Friday, we knew that the capital was in danger. And Saturday, you saw reports of gunfire in the city.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
Then you saw these reports of the army leaving, abandoning the airport, some of them abandoning their uniforms on the roads. And then overnight, Saturday night, suddenly, in a rush,
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
The rebels took the state TV and they announced that they'd taken control of the whole of the capital and that President Bashar al-Assad had got on a plane and left the country. Long live Free Syria. So it's really an incredibly swift movement of events from a total dictatorship to he's gone.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
Yes. And Syria has had the same leaders, the same family of leaders for 50 years, a very authoritarian family. Bashar al-Assad has been in power now, but his father was in power before him. And so they've ruled this country with an iron grip since the 1970s. So it's really a big deal. It is a big deal.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
Well, this is the culmination of the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, when different countries started to rise up against the dictatorships. We saw it in Tunisia, and we saw it in Egypt, and we saw it in Libya. And Syria joined that run of protests, people daring to come out onto the streets, asking for freedom, for democracy, for human rights, dignity. And the
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
Syria was the same as the others, but what happened in Syria was the government of Syria under Assad really cracked down, used violence against the protesters, but then did mass arrests, interrogations, torture, disappearances, a lot of executions. And then some of the protesters took up weapons, and it became an armed insurgency. And a civil war, essentially. The country was fighting each other.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
And then this sparked the introduction of really radical extremist jihadist groups. The most well-known and largest was Islamic State. It got very, very brutal in Syria. It has a brutal past, but this was something on a different scale. And then Assad doubled down. He gassed civilians in some of the war to take control back of some of the cities.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
And then, you know, millions were displaced, fleeing the country, fleeing a lot into Turkey and Lebanon and neighboring countries and, you know, heading for Europe or anywhere they could. It was really a most ghastly civil war. And by 2014, hundreds of thousands had been killed and wounded. At this point, who is winning that war? Well, that's the interesting thing.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
Assad, for all his brutal repression, is actually barely hanging on. And that's when we started to see other countries that have stakes in Syria start to get involved. Right.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
Yes. So ISIS was a huge concern, especially for the West. They were already in Iraq and they were expanding their territory and they were recruiting massively. So that's when, in 2014, American troops entered the fray, particularly to fight ISIS and to repress this very, very virulent jihadist group that was obviously interested in attacking Western countries. And so what happened next?
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
Who's the next big player that comes on the scene? So there were actually two big players that came in the scene, and they came in on the side of Assad. That was Russia and Iran. And Russia came in in a very big way with, you know, serious firepower, planes, jets, fighter bombers, weaponry, and a lot of advice and tactics. And they brought ships into the ports and so on.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
And then Iran had the foot soldiers on the ground. There were a lot of them who came in from Iran. But they also had Hezbollah, very experienced, very accomplished fighters who came in from Lebanon. And the Iranians sent in advisors and military advisors who ran the campaign. So they really did a great amount of actually retaking territory for the Assad regime.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
So they, for both Iran and Russia, it was very important to see the Assad regime survive. Russia had long had relations with Syria, going back right through the communist times. And so they wanted to be able to keep their access to the Mediterranean, their trade, their diplomatic influence. And Iran had an equally important reason to be involved.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
They couched it in religious terms, but it was very clearly a geopolitical desire to have good relations with Syria and influence, but also to have a very important land bridge through Syria to their allies Hezbollah, the militia in Lebanon. So for those reasons, they also wanted to see Assad survive.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
Absolutely. And those two powers, Iran and Russia, are propping up Assad. He's in power, but he's got all these rebel groups around the country pushed to the edges. And it's since 2016, it's been like locked.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
So the biggest change of course was the two main backers of Assad, Russia and Iran, became massively distracted by other events and weakened. It was the wars in other countries. that caused this. Russia is engaged in a really tough war in Ukraine, and they've had to move troops out of Syria, deploy them in Ukraine. They've expended all their efforts and men and money and weapons on that war.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
And then the second war is obviously Israel's fight, first in Gaza, but then in Lebanon against Israel. Hezbollah and the attacks that Israel has meted out on Iran in Syria. They've done a large number of airstrikes on Iranian elements, but also particularly Hezbollah, who had been the foot soldiers for Iran to help Assad's Syrian army.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
They were really hit hard in the recent months, and that was very debilitating for the Iranian effort to shore up Assad. And so the moment those things were happening, the Syrian rebels were obviously watching and noticing. They could see that the resistance was weak, that Russia and Iran were distracted and struggling, in fact, in both their wars. And that's when they pounced.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
So who are these rebel forces who just toppled Assad? Tell me about them. So they're a hodgepodge of lots of different groups. But the main mover and the main group behind this offensive is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, it's called, HTS for short in the West. Its name means the Organization for the Liberation of Syria or of the Levant. It's a very Islamic organization.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
Very strict, actually, organization. Comes from the jihadi tradition. And it's designated by many countries in the West and the United States as a terror group. And who leads it? Who's in charge? It's led by a Saudi-born Syrian. He's in his 40s. He's called Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. That's his nom de guerre, his chosen name for the war. He lived in Saudi, then he grew up in his teens in Syria.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
He was a student when he then left to join the fight against America in Iraq. Oh, wow. And he joined al-Qaeda. And then he got arrested by the US forces in Iraq. And he spent several years in Buka Jail, which is a famous prison camp where a lot of
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
The al-Qaeda and Islamist militias were detained and kept, and of course it became a great meeting place for them all because they were all in there together for many years. So that is his history.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
What we know is that he eventually returned to Syria and he set up an al-Qaeda affiliated group at the beginning of the civil war. And then he was among the groups that were gradually pushed back as the Russians and the Iranians helped the Assad government take control. The rebels were pushed back into the northwestern corner of Syria in Idlib province. And that's where he ended up in 2016.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
And then there's something really interesting happened. They're down and out. They're under bombardment. They've really got their backs to the wall. And he, as a leader of his group, he starts reforming. He changes the name of his group. And then gradually he breaks from al-Qaeda. And he turns himself into a Syrian nationalist leader.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
And it's been a steady thing since then, over the last eight years. And we're all watching to see, is it a big PR push or is it really serious?
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
Well, I think it is interesting. In Syria, I think, you know, I've followed jihadi groups all over the world, and a lot of them, they talk tough talk for several reasons, to look strong and to look aggressive, but also because they think it ticks some boxes where they can get support and financing and so on. And I think the Syrian groups were just the same.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
I've never met Jolani, but I've asked many people who have met him, and some will say he's a diehard. Others say he's more pragmatic. And I actually went four years ago on an embed with HTS to their stronghold in Idlib. Wait, Claudia, you went on an embed with HTS? I did, several times, in fact, because there were some things they decided they needed to tell the Western world.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
So they invited journalists like me, I was based in Istanbul, to come and see. And the trip includes always a long lunch and a sort of long political discussion. I mean, it's not quite a long diatribe, but where they explain what they're about and what they believe in. So what was it like there, Carlotta? They are super Islamic, and you could feel they are authoritarian.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
They controlled everything. They controlled where we went. We could talk to whoever we want, but they were very cautious to be in charge. And of course, between the lines, we could understand that these guys rule it, but they are of their society. There's not much freedom of speech, certainly in the media. But there were other things that I think people felt they were running quite a good ship.
The Daily
Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator
To tell you the truth, when you go to Idlib, most people are destitute. So quite frankly, they won't talk to you about Islamist rules. They'll talk to you about they haven't got enough food for their kids. But we did reporting on some of the women who felt very threatened by this group and felt they had to leave. There were people who were arrested. There were people who were beaten.