Atlantic writer Robert Worth talks about Syria's transitional president, Ahmed al-Sharaa. He was the founder of the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, but is now advocating unity and inclusion. Syria borders Iraq, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, so what happens in Syria impacts the whole region. We'll also talk with Worth about the Houthis in Yemen, and the Trump administration group chat that accidentally included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who is Ahmed al-Sharaa and why is he significant in Syria?
Maybe he'll bring unity and stability to Syria, which he says is his goal. But he's a former jihadist and founded the Syrian branch of the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda. Shira led the attacks that overthrew the brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and he's now serving as the transitional president of Syria.
He says he wants to maintain peace, create unity and inclusion, and prevent revenge killings. Considering the ongoing revenge killings, the conflicts between militia groups, and the destruction of 14 years of civil war, this is going to be a very hard job to do. Wirth's article is titled, Can One Man Hold Syria Together?
A Former Jihadist Has Remade Himself in a Bid to Remake a Scarred and Divided Country." Robert Worth is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and has spent more than two decades writing about the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Robert Wirth, welcome to Fresh Air.
And I want to say before we start, we are recording less than an hour after the transcript was released by Jeffrey Goldberg of the entire chat that he was mistakenly included in. So what's your reaction to this Goldberg story? Not to the transcript, but to his inclusion in this and what that says.
Chapter 2: How did Jeffrey Goldberg accidentally join a U.S. security chat?
Well, it was staggering. I mean, journalists like me use Signal all the time to communicate with our sources and, for that matter, with friends. But I never imagined that a group of top government officials in the United States would just put together a chat like this in the same way that I do with friends and communicate the most sensitive.
I mean, they, you know, the administration has denied that it was classified, but that's a term of art that's subject to manipulation. The president can classify and declassify communiques as he likes. And the notion that they would put this incredibly sensitive information before the actual attack onto a chat like this and not even notice that someone else was on there was just beyond belief.
Part of the transcript that Goldberg did initially released has J.D. Vance, vice president, saying, I just hate bailing out the Europeans again. And Pete Hexeth, secretary of defense, responds, I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It's pathetic, with pathetic in capital letters.
So, you know, just as background, explain what the Houthis have been doing that these airstrikes were retaliation for.
Chapter 3: What actions have the Houthis taken in Yemen?
The Houthis, ever since shortly after the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel, began launching attacks on shipping in the Red Sea that rose up to the Suez Canal, which is one of the most important shipping channels for global commerce in the world. And so they're a small group, relatively small group in a remote place, Yemen.
But they have this incredible lever to damage the entire global economy that way. And they started doing it, I think, in October or November, shortly after October 7th, in the name of defending the Palestinians or defending Gaza. But it inflicted incredibly disproportionate damage. Now, the Biden administration did a lot of attacks on the Houthis to try to stop them. It didn't entirely succeed.
They still seem to have the ability to do some. But the Houthis had said, we're going to go back to doing these attacks. They hadn't done any attacks as far as I know for a while. And so the ostensible reason for this American relaunch of the war against the Houthis was to degrade their abilities to launch those attacks against global trade.
But that text makes clear that the principals and the Trump administration see this as a kind of favor to other people whose trade is – affected in a larger way than American trade is by these Houthi attacks. So it's a strange to me kind of prorating of a threat that's really a global threat. And they were saying, well, if anybody benefits more from this than we do, they need to pay us for that.
How much does Europe benefit more than the U.S. does by freeing up the shipping lanes in the Middle East?
Well, I think a greater proportion. Europe is closer to the Middle East. There's more that comes through into the Mediterranean, you know, that benefits Europe from that trade. But certainly the United States, first of all, has some share of that global trade as well. And secondly, has always seen itself as a guarantor of growth.
Freedom of the waterways that the British used to see themselves as the guarantors of that. And more or less after the empire ended, the United States tacitly took up that role. So it just seems pretty strange to be looking at that anew and saying, you want protection? You're going to pay for it.
So what message does this send to our European allies?
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Chapter 4: How does the Houthis' activity affect global trade?
Well, it's a message that was already broadcast pretty vehemently by Vance at the Munich Security Conference not long ago that he's disappointed in them. He feels they're free riders. He also feels that they're censoring free speech and they're not behaving as they should. They ought to be much more open to hard right-wing parties like Alternative for Germany.
So I think much of what was in that text has already been made clear, but it was kind of embarrassing to have their visceral dislike of Europe made so plain.
Was the strike itself controversial?
I don't really think so. As I mentioned, the Biden administration had done a number of strikes on the Houthis. The Houthis are, by any definition, a radical, dangerous group that has, first of all, within Yemen behaves in all kinds of terrible ways. They jail people, they torture people, they get rid of all kinds of rivals in the nastiest possible ways.
They're classified now, again, as a terrorist group that's gone back and forth. based mainly on efforts to get humanitarian aid into Yemen. That becomes more difficult once you classify a group like that, which has full control over most of the population of Yemen. They can be a barrier to aid.
And the international community wants to get aid to Yemen, which is a desperately, desperately poor country where you have conditions of famine. But the Houthis have made clear that they intend to continue disrupting global trade.
They've said they're going to exempt certain countries who they see as less harmful to their interests and less closely bonded to Israel, which they declare as their main enemy. Still, there's no question that for much of certainly the West, the Houthis are a legitimate target and a dangerous one.
The Trump administration has been saying that the Biden administration's attacks on the Houthis, they didn't really accomplish much. They weren't well handled. Does that seem accurate to you?
No, not really. The Biden administration did everything it could. And again, you know, this is using the intelligence they have. You know, the Pentagon, the Fifth Fleet was directly involved in this. I don't think Trump and his team have any better intelligence. They have been bombing the Houthis for the past, whatever it is. 10 days.
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Chapter 5: What is Iran's involvement with the Houthis?
We'll see what they succeed in doing, but it's very difficult to get good intelligence. I mean, you know, Israel did tremendous damage to Hezbollah, the Lebanese group, back in the fall, right? A tremendous campaign that succeeded in killing their top leader and many other top figures. The Houthis are in a much more remote area.
The leader of the Houthis, Abd al-Malik al-Houthi, is this shadowy character who lives up in the mountainous northwest of Yemen. it's much harder to get good information about these people. And the missile units they have are mobile and hard to take out. So we'll see if Trump is any more successful. But as far as talking down the Biden administration, I think that's pure politics.
So Iran backs the Houthis. In dealing with the Houthis, how much do you have to take into account Iran and what Iran's response might be?
Iran has backed the Houthis for a long time. They see them as a part of their axis of resistance, as they call it. Israel succeeded in seriously degrading and damaging Hezbollah, which is the most direct and the most powerful threat to Israel. Syria was another part of that axis. It has been pretty much completely taken out because Bashar al-Assad is gone.
He was the one who allowed the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah to operate on his territory. The new regime in Syria run by Ahmed Asharah, loathes Iran, loathes Hezbollah. They were direct enemies of those groups. And it's already clear that they're not going to allow them access to Syria. So Iran has lost a very, very important piece of terrain there. Iran has lost a lot here.
And Hamas, of course, is the other big, big part of their axis. And Hamas has been badly, badly damaged. So what you have left, you have the Houthis, which has been launching missiles everywhere. directly at Israel without really doing any damage so far, but more or less ever since the end of 2023.
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Chapter 6: Why is Syria crucial to Middle East stability?
And they've also, the Houthis have been, you know, posing this serious threat to global trade, not just to Israel. So in a way, the Houthis are this last intact chunk of the Iranian axis of resistance. Now, Iran doesn't need to resupply them for the moment. Eventually, the Houthis will probably run out of weaponry supplied by Iran. But the Houthis have now
over time become pretty good at manufacturing their own missiles and weapons. So they don't need Iran quite as much as they did. And in terms of punishing Iran for what the Houthis are doing, it's not clear how effective that would be right now. Iran is already in a seriously weakened position vis-a-vis what they had a couple of years ago.
Israel did airstrikes last year on Iran that so seriously degraded Iran's missile defenses that there's not much they can do. If Israel decides to take out Iran's nuclear sites or anything else, they're very vulnerable to that.
So let's talk about your new article, which is about Syria and its new transitional president, who's a very interesting and kind of mysterious figure in a lot of ways. But first, I want you to tell us Syria's importance in the whole instability of the Middle East right now. Where does Syria fit in?
Syria, first of all, is in the center of the Levant. So it has borders with Iraq, with Lebanon. and Israel and Turkey. So just as a kind of crossing point between these other countries, it's incredibly important.
And that's why it was so crucial for decades and decades that under the Assads, Bashar al-Assad and his father, who was before him, Hafez al-Assad, that Syria was this part of this axis of resistance. It was a way for Iran to get directly at Israel. And that was fuel for the ongoing conflict. Syria has always been, you know, it used to define itself as the heart of Arabism.
It was central to the discourse of Arab nationalism. It at various points has maintained or been the ground for all kinds of jihadist movements. It's been at the center of almost everything happening in the larger Arab world. And what's interesting right now is you have this, you know, toppling of the regime that's been there for five decades, more than five decades.
And we don't know what's going to come next. To some people, it looks like a terrifying moment when the jihadis finally win, a bit like the Taliban taking over in Afghanistan or, you know, when ISIS took over big chunks of Iraq and Syria back in 2014. But Shara is not. the kind of figure he used to be. And a lot of people are so mesmerized by him.
And they talk about him as if he were this kind of mystical figure. He, I think, ultimately is about power. It's true that he's an Islamist. But I think what really guides this guy is wanting to stay in power. And he's a pragmatist. He has been adapting for years. I mean, he was allied with ISIS at a time when that was politically convenient for him.
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Chapter 7: How did Ahmed al-Sharaa's past influence his current leadership?
He became the leader of Nusra, which was the Al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria. He moved with the help of Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, from Iraq to Syria. And he built up the group in Syria, eventually detached himself from Baghdadi, who wanted very much for Shahra to be under Baghdadi's thumb. But as I mentioned earlier, Shah was an ambitious guy, wanted to run his own show.
And he was more astute than Baghdadi. He saw that there was no future in this caliphate, that it was going to get destroyed by American bombs. And sure enough, it was. And then Sharaa moved on to Idlib in the far northwest corner of Syria. And he was a leader of a movement there that originally was a jihadist movement. But again, he read the political winds.
He knew he had to keep in a good relationship with Turkey, which was the benefactor of everything that was going on in that part of it. It was the opposition, the one opposition part of Syria that was not controlled by the Assad regime. And what he did over the years was to moderate very successfully. He got rid of the most dangerous jihadist groups, either killed them or forced them out.
He created an academy to train his own jihadists and impose some discipline on them. And he created a measure of law and order, even a measure of tolerance. People could, you know, by 2020 and a little bit after, people could actually criticize – and they did publicly – his regime in Idlib.
And instead of killing them, he would listen to them and they had a hall of grievances for listening to criticisms and responding to them.
So, you know, you raise the question in your article, like, who do you believe, the former terrorist or the moderating force? Because al-Sharab embodies both. But your observation seems to be that he really did moderate. And maybe it's just because he wants power and he's being a pragmatist. But the fact is that he moderated. What are the signs of that that you see now in Syria?
Shara, first of all, tried very hard to avoid revenge killings, reprisals, as his forces were moving from Idlib down towards the capital.
This is when he was taking over Syria and forcing out Assad.
That's right. This was back in late November when his forces moved from Idlib first into Aleppo, the second city of Syria, which is up in the north. And I have friends there. And I was worried. I was thinking, you know, these are... dangerous, radical characters. I have friends who are Christians and Alawites and Druze, and I was getting in touch with them.
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Chapter 8: Has Ahmed al-Sharaa moderated his extremist views?
He went into one of the security centers and suddenly he was in a room that he said looked to him like a barber shop because it had these chairs with mirrors and this whole array of – I mean it sounds almost like the back of a theater. Fake beards, adhesives, all kinds of clothing, makeup. It was all designed to –
help people who had been recruited to be informers to get away with it, to sort of pose as a homeless person, as a Bedouin, as a foreign tourist, you name it. They had everything in this place. And then adjoining it were – All kinds of technical equipment for surveilling phones, for surveilling the mail. It was just this whole enormous apparatus for spying on people.
And by the way, this apparatus was tens of thousands of people across Syria. You know, a lot of people are wondering how many names are we going to get people brought out and tried for these crimes. We haven't seen that yet.
So Shara is now trying to run a really large country with this, as you put it, this skeleton crew of a government made up mostly of people he's known and trusted for years, including his brother, who is the acting minister of health. And here's an example of what's happening now.
The superintendent of schools in a region where the Alawites are in the majority and the Alawites are the minority group that Assad was part of. So they're a minority group, but they were in power for years. And there's a lot of hatred of that group because of the Assad regime. So the superintendent of schools is in a region where the Alawites are in the majority.
And a video had emerged of him delivering a sermon in 2023 in which he said, "...I ask Almighty God to cleanse our eyes by purifying our country of the filth of the Alawites, Shiites, and Jews." What has the reaction been to that, to the uncovering of that video?
I think these things are especially frightening to – I mean, they're not entirely shocking because it was an Islamist-run enclave when Sharad was running it. And now they're in charge of the whole country. And if you're an Alawite, that, as you mentioned, is the sect to which the Assad family belonged. These people are terrified.
Sometimes the only local security force is some jihadist guy who probably wants to kill you. And the only reason he's not doing it is because his boss has told him not to. But that kind of discipline has broken down a lot over the past couple of months. There have been so many people abducted and murdered even before the massacre that took place. in early March.
So I think this is a big reason that many people do not trust Shara, that they fear that, you know, all of his talk about wanting to build a tolerant society is just a cover, and that once he has the power and the ability to step forth and be who he really wants to be, he'll just slaughter them all.
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