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Chapter 1: What led to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria?
Well, folks, the Assad regime in Syria is gone. We'll bring you all the details, how it happened, what it means. First, I have some major news to share with you today. Starting in January, Jeremy's Razors will become an official partner of UFC. That's right. The Daily Wire is stepping into the octagon with the world's premier mixed martial arts organization.
More details coming up later in the show. Very cool stuff. Alrighty, so... A tectonic shift in the Middle East just happened over the weekend. On Sunday morning, Syrian rebels finally took Damascus. They took Bashar al-Assad's palace. The Assad regime is no more. Assad has fled to Moscow where he is being granted some sort of asylum because the Russians, of course, backed the Assad regime.
There's a lightning campaign that basically came from nowhere. I want to show you a couple of maps so you understand exactly what's going on. Because when we talk about what's happening in Syria, what we have to understand is that Syria is an artificial creation post-World War I by the West, by the French, by the British.
And because of that, like many other states in the Middle East, it is unworkable and has been unworkable for a very long time. You have a large number of groups of various religious belief systems, many of them unbelievably radical, many of them terrorists, all fighting one another. And the Assad regime was a secularist, Ba'athist regime, like Saddam Hussein, with a wild,
left-wing view of economics. Essentially, it was just a fascist dictatorship engaged in mass human rights abuses at scale. Over the course of the Assad regime, some 12 million Syrians were displaced. Many of them ended up in Turkey. Many of them ended up in Jordan. Many of them ended up in Europe.
The Syrian refugee crisis had massive ramifications for European politics, and that was driven by the civil war that happened in Syria between 2011 and just ended over the weekend in Although, as we'll see, I think the civil war is likely to continue for a long time to come because this is an unworkable patchwork of various groups in various areas of the country.
But we'll start with the actual region, because in order to understand what's going on in Syria, you have to understand that there are a lot of hands in Syria, a lot of different countries, a lot of different interests who had their hands in Syria. So let's look at the regional map of the Middle East. So you understand where Syria is placed on the map.
So the regional map of the Middle East, you will see that Syria is located alongside the Mediterranean Sea. It stretches all the way from Iraq in its east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. The sort of southwestern border of Syria is Israel. The very tip of the southwest part of Syria borders Israel.
Because Syria had repeatedly invaded Israel in 1967, Israel won its war against Syria and ended up taking the Golan Heights. The Golan Heights have been annexed to Israel as recognized by the United States specifically because they're being used as basically a vantage point from which to shoot into Israel. So that is one border of Syria. Another border of Syria is Lebanon.
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Chapter 2: How did foreign involvement shape the Syrian conflict?
Chapter 3: What were the consequences of the Syrian civil war?
That's HelixSleep.com slash Ben with Helix. Better sleep starts right now. So this was not that the Sunni Muslim terrorist groups suddenly became good at war. Again, remember those maps. They were at a low ebb at the beginning of 2024. That's not what happened here. What happened here is that Assad was basically an eggshell skull. They tapped him. He fell. There was no one to come to his support.
Russia couldn't come with its historic levels of support because they were weakened in Ukraine. Iran has been totally hamstrung. Iran's air defenses are gone. Iran is totally vulnerable. Its own regime is tottering. And so the rebels took advantage and they toppled the regime. That's effectively the story here.
So any story about how it's like the innate charisma of the HTS leaders, Abu Muhammad al-Jalani, that's not true. That's not what happened here. What happened here is that Turkey, backing HTS, backing many of these Sunni Muslim terrorist groups, hating the Assad regime and wishing to expand its own sphere of influence into Syria, backed HTS in taking advantage of the chaos
caused by Iran's withdrawal and Russia's withdrawal. And HDS then took over large swaths of Syria. Okay, so who are sort of the big winners and who are sort of the big losers here? Well, it depends on what emerges. The biggest losers, pretty obviously, Russia is a big loser. Russia loses a lot of impact because, again, Russia had backed the Assad regime.
Now, Russia is attempting to broker something with regards to the new regime because they always do. But Russia is a big loser. The biggest loser by far is Iran. Iran has lost its entire crescent of Islamic Shia terror. Like it's gone. It just doesn't exist anymore. Hamas, gone. Hezbollah, gone. Assad, gone. These are all massive blows to the Iranian regime, all caused by Iran. Iran started it.
This is one of the ultimate F around and find out in human history. Iran launches a seven front war on Israel and they end with three of their proxies off the map completely. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Assad, gone. That's what happens when you F around with a first world country. If you F around with the United States on September 11th, we destroy your forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
Regardless of what comes after, that's what happens. And if Iran decides they're going to launch a multi-front terror war against Israel, Israel will hit back and hit back hard. And the Iranian regime is in serious trouble right now. They have failed on every possible front.
And with the Trump administration coming in and presumably increasing sanctions on the Iranian regime, the Iranian regime is going to have one of two choices. Either they are going to have to cut some sort of deal with the West in which they abandon their nuclear efforts and presumably move towards some form of non-tyranny, or they're going to be forced to collapse.
Because I can promise you that the state of Israel is not going to sit around waiting to see what Iran does next with its nuclear weapons, not after Israel already took out their air defenses. So who's the big winner in Syria? The big winner in Syria is Turkey, mostly. Turkey took an enormous amount of territory. HTS, obviously a very big winner in all of this.
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