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- [00:00]
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Terry Gross
This is FRESH air. I'm Terry Gross. The unintentional inclusion of journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in the messaging app group chat of US national security leaders outlining US Plans to attack the Houthis in Yemen has certainly increased awareness of who the Houthis are. I realize that is not the main takeaway of this story, but it's kind of where my guest Robert Wirth fits in. He has been reporting on the Houthis for over a decade, most recently in the Atlantic, the same publication where Jeffrey Goldberg serves as editor in chief. Before Goldberg revealed his inclusion in the chat, we invited Robert Wirth to talk about his new article on the Atlantic, which is about Syria's new leader, Ahmed al Shirra. Sharra is something of a wild card. 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 Wirth 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?
- [02:23]
Robert Wirth
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, the administration has denied that it was. 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 child like this and not even notice that someone else was on there was just beyond belief.
- [03:09]
Terry Gross
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 Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, responds, I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It's pathetic with pathetic and capital letters. So, you know, just as background, explain what the Houthis have been doing, that these airstrikes were retaliation for the Houthis.
- [03:38]
Robert Wirth
Ever since Shortly after the October 7, 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, you know, 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 seemed 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 was strange to me, kind of pro rating 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.
- [05:10]
Terry Gross
How much does Europe benefit more than the US does by freeing up the shipping lanes in the Middle East?
- [05:19]
Robert Wirth
Well, I think a greater proportion Europe is closer to the Middle East. There's more that comes through into the Mediterranean 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 freedom of the waterways. The British used to see themselves as the guarantors of that, then more or less after the empire ended, that 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.
- [05:54]
Terry Gross
Yeah. So what message does this send to our European allies?
- [05:57]
Robert Wirth
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.
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Terry Gross
Was the strike itself controversial?
- [06:33]
Robert Wirth
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 on, 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.
- [07:41]
Terry Gross
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?
- [07:55]
Robert Wirth
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. 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 remote area. The leader of the Houthis, Abdel 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, you know, talking down the Biden administration, I think that's pure politics.
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Terry Gross
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?
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Robert Wirth
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 Ashara, 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 directly at Israel without really doing any damage so far, but more or less ever since the end of 2023. And they also, the Houthis, have been 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, 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.
- [11:15]
Terry Gross
So let's talk about your new article, which is about Syria and its new transitional president, who's a very, like, 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?
- [11:37]
Robert Wirth
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 could, 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. It used to define itself as Kolb al Aruba, 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 toppling of the regime that's been there for five decades, more than five decades, and we don't know what's gonna 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 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. He has been adapting for years. I mean, he was allied with ISIS at a time when that was politically convened for him. That was the way to survive in Syria at that time. He then detached himself from ISIS just at the right point. Then he was with Al Qaeda. Then he detached himself from Them. I think he's been reading the politics of the region. He's very, very politically astute. I think it's pretty certain that he does not want to lead this country in a jihadist direction. He does not want Syria to be a new Taliban. He has said, and I think he means it, that he wants good relations with all his neighbors. And that was a striking thing to say, because one of his neighbors is Israel, and he doesn't want a war. I think that's because he knows the country now is so weak after the civil war in Syria and then. And then the sanctions, which really brought the Assad regime to the point of total bankruptcy and starvation for many of its people. Syria is still under American and, to some degree, European sanctions. It's got nothing. I mean, the people in Syria are too exhausted for another war. And I think what Shira understands is that he has to rebuild the country no matter what he wants to do in the future. He may well take a stronger stance against Israel at some point, but for the moment, he has to keep the country together just in order to get the economy going again.
- [14:43]
Terry Gross
And he's talked about moving from beyond a revolutionary mindset which can topple a regime but can't rebuild a state. So how was he radicalized in the first place? You write that he grew up in a pretty wealthy neighborhood in Damascus. He was considered a studious and shy boy when he was in school. He became more radical, I think, at the age of 19. How did he become radicalized? And I'll repeat that he founded the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda.
- [15:18]
Robert Wirth
Yeah, he became radicalized at a time when those are the winds blowing through the region. It was around the time of the second intifada in Palestine. It was the time of the American invasion of Iraq. There were lots of radical preachers in Syria. One of the strange things about Syria at that time was that the Assad regime was ostensibly secular and very much against political Islam. But once it became clear the United States was going to invade, the Syrian regime under the table was making use of these radical figures, encouraging them so that they could then take these young jihadists and send them over the border to destroy the American project. And Ahmed Al Sharah did hear some of these preachers, and it seems he, like many other young men, was excited by the possibility of going and fighting the imperialist invader next door. It seems the first time he went, he had a bad experience, ended up back home. But he went back again and joined the resistance. He ended up in an American prison, which These American prisons in Iraq function in a way, as sort of training academies for young jihadists. They got to know each other. They learned, you know, what you learn in prison, which is how to be patient and build networks. And he did that. And not long after he got out, he joined Al Qaeda. 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 Baghdad. He wanted very much for Sharra to be under Baghdadi's thumb. But as I mentioned earlier, Shara was an ambitious guy, wanted to run his own show and. 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 Shara 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, and a good relationship with Turkey, which was the benefactor of everything that was going on in that part of 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.
- [18:21]
Terry Gross
So, you know, you raised the question in your article, like, who do you believe? The former terrorist or the moderating force? Because Al Shira 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?
- [18:46]
Robert Wirth
Sharra, first of all, tried very hard to avoid revenge killings, reprisals, as his forces were moving from Idlib down to. Towards the capital. I had.
- [18:58]
Terry Gross
This is when he was taking over Syria and forcing out Assad.
- [19:03]
Robert Wirth
That's right. This was back in late November when his forces moved from Idlib first into Aleppo, the other, 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 and they were saying, nope, nope, it's quiet. These guys have been told not to mess with us. At the time it wasn't clear. Is this because the Turks have told them? So I think now it's pretty clear that Shahra himself does not want to be under the thumb of Turkey. I think it was his decision to say, if we start killing people in revenge, this is going to devolve very quickly into a mess and I'm going to lose control. So he knew that it would send a good signal to the west, which he knew he was going to need for economic reasons to exercise maximum discipline on these guys. And it worked up to a point.
- [19:59]
Terry Gross
We need to take another break here, so let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Robert Wurth, a contributing writer at the Atlantic. His new article is about Syria's transitional president, Ahmed Al Sharrah, titled Can One Man Hold Syria Together? A former jihadist has remade himself in a bid to remake a scarred and divided country. We'll talk more after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH air.
- [20:25]
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- [21:20]
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- [21:35]
Terry Gross
What are Shiraz biggest accomplishments so far?
- [21:41]
Robert Wirth
First of all, he conquered Syria without letting that devolve into a bloody mess, at least at the very start. And he did that because he's got very strong discipline on the core of his movement. He came into Syria with a coalition of armed fighters, and it's kind of a concentric, widening circles of discipline. The ones that are closest to him, I think, are very loyal and very disciplined. But he needed more than that to win. And so he had these other fighters who are allied with him, but some of them are a little better than criminals, and they did want revenge, and it was very difficult to prevent that. And especially after he came in, you know, eventually you did start to see revenge killings. He did try to stop that up to a point. It worked. The trouble is that he cannot crack down too hard on these guys because they are his supporters, they're his base, and he needs them to who stay in power. Nonetheless, I think he did a pretty good job. He reached out to Syria's minorities, who are obviously the people who are most anxious about their status in this new Islamic Syria. He's been talking to the Christian community, the Alawite community, the Druze, and others, and he has tried hard to send the right signals to the West. He has made clear he wants to get rid of the economic sanctions, to get rid of the designation of his former group as a terrorist group. He's sending the right message. The trouble is, what are his capacities? He doesn't have that many people who are capable of administering a large country like Syria. I mean, he. Remember, he was administering with a lot of success, a single province, and now he's gotta run the whole country, and it's a much more complicated country than what he was used to in that little province. It's got Israel next door. And again, I think that was one of his successes. He was, even with Israel, maintaining a pretty moderate message. He was saying, without singling Israel out, saying, we don't want trouble. Things got more turbulent after he'd been in power for a couple of months. But I still think he's doing an awfully good job.
- [23:49]
Terry Gross
So, you know, when Shirah was trying to stop sectarian violence, he called in reinforcements. And you say thousands of gunmen poured into the region, including foreign jihadists who helped capture the capital in December. That doesn't sound like a recipe for stabilizing the country.
- [24:06]
Robert Wirth
Yeah, this is Sharad's big problem, is that he needed these guys to capture Syria, and he still needs them to some extent in order to maintain security. One of the things I think Sharad did wrong was that he abolished the entire Syrian police force right after he took power in December.
- [24:23]
Terry Gross
Was that because they had been under Assad's control and they were horrible?
- [24:28]
Robert Wirth
Yeah. The pretext was either they had blood on their hands or. Or they're totally corrupt. That was the reason given to me by a bunch of lower down people in hts. HTS is the core force that Shahra led. Those are his most loyal people. That's what they told me. And that may be true, but I think it left this terrible security vacuum. And when you have a crisis, as he did, when, you know, in early March you had a group of Assad people attacking the HTS forces, things devolved very quickly.
- [24:59]
Terry Gross
There's also like conflicting militias in Syria because there were different militias fighting the Assad regime. But now that the country seems more stable and Assad is gone, what's happening with these different militias? Are they still fighting each other?
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Robert Wirth
They're not really fighting each other. The biggest problem he faces is in the east, where you have this Kurdish led militia known as the sdf, the Syrian Democratic Forces. And they had carved out really their own statelets. They had gotten American weapons and training, and that means they can defend themselves. And they even have their own left wing ideology that's very different from Sharaz. So the question he faced was how to deal with these people. And that's another thing where I think he's been very successful. He made certain concessions and they agreed to join Syria to become part of the state. That just happened earlier in March.
- [25:53]
Terry Gross
Under Assad, there was a culture of informing, informing on friends and neighbors and people you work with. And you write about the shop that handled a lot of that, including like the costumes, the makeup, the wigs as disguises. Can you describe what was in this surveillance center?
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Robert Wirth
Sure. Ever since Assad fell, people have been digging through, they've been opening the prisons, they've been looking through the security centers. All of these sort of monstrous secrets of the Assad regime have come to light. But to me, this is one of the most revealing because everybody knew that this was a police state. Everybody knew that everyone was spying on everybody else. There's kind of a parallel with East Germany where everybody was encouraged to spy and other police states to spy on each other. In fact, the Syrians got direct help from the East Germans. And so some of that is a direct transfer. But what you didn't see was behind the scenes. And so this guy who I spent time with in Syria and write about, Rami Al Said he went into one of the security Centers. And suddenly he was in a room that he said looked to him like a barbershop because it had these chairs with mirrors and this whole array of, you know, I mean, it sounds almost like the back of a theater. You know, fake beards, adhesives, all kinds of clothing, makeup. You know, it was all designed to help people who had been recruited to be informers, to get away with it, you know, 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, you know, 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 gonna get people brought out and tried for these crimes? We haven't seen that yet.
- [27:58]
Terry Gross
So Schirra 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 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?
- [29:00]
Robert Wirth
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 Sharra, 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.
- [30:01]
Terry Gross
So who's doing the massacring?
- [30:03]
Robert Wirth
A lot of them seem to be from these militias that are at the outer rings of Sharad's coalition, the people who are much less disciplined, the people who essentially were criminals probably before. And again, he needed a large force of people to conquer the country. And now the question is, how do you bring these people in and discipline them? If you crack down too hard, they may go off and, you know, form militias that fight you. It's a real problem because people know that they're there. They've just seen in the past month terrible massacres. Up to that point, there had been revenge killings that had been taking place in the Alawite areas of Syria. But what happened in early March, I think it really, for a moment made people think this isn't going to work, that the worst has begun, that Syria is falling into a terrible cycle of sectarian killings. And for the moment, that seems to have been arrested, that they did put a stop to it, that Shara did respond well. But, you know, the death toll may end up being in the thousands and most of those civilians. And now, you know, the question is, are those perpetrators going to be punished? What is Sho Ra going to do about that? He has appointed committee to investigate, and we don't yet have the results of that investigation.
- [31:17]
Terry Gross
If you're just joining us, my guest is Robert Wirth. He's a contributing writer for the Atlantic. His new article is about Syria's transitional president, Ahmad Al Sharra. We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH air.
- [31:30]
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- [31:46]
Terry Gross
Of Shiraz efforts to moderate in Syria, there's still plenty of signs of radical Islam. And I want you to describe the Dawah who were in charge of spreading Islam with songs and recitations and your encounter with them.
- [32:06]
Robert Wirth
Yeah, I ran into these guys in a couple of places. One of them was in Homs, which is a town north of Damascus, one of the major towns in one of the major cities in Syria. And you can say what you like as the leader of Syria, you can put out all kinds of civil messages. But if the actual presence of the government that people see is a group of guys reciting the Quran and talking about how Islam is the solution and then playing these hymns, they're called nasheeds in Arabic, but these hymns over loudspeakers that include some pretty nasty sectarian language. The line that I noticed was, we will liberate Tartus, which is a town on the coast in Syria that's majority Alawite. We will slaughter the Majus. Now, majus is a term that can be used to describe Shiites, but it can also apply to Alawites. I mean, it's a kind of a broad term that means, like. Basically for an Islamist, it means, like, you know, heretics. What are you supposed to conclude if you're a Alawite or Christian or another minority? I bumped into these guys, as I said, in the main square of the town. You could hear their loudspeaker for hundreds of yards away. And, you know, some of the people were happy to be hearing it. There was a young guy there who was reciting the Quran. But once they started playing the hymns, I gotta say, it was pretty creepy to hear that. And I couldn't help thinking, Humps is a town that has a large Alawite population, and I'm sure some of them were there. What were they thinking?
- [33:38]
Terry Gross
So where do Alawites fit in in terms of religion?
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Robert Wirth
It's an offshoot of Shiite Islam that goes back a long way for many mainstream and especially hardline Muslims. They don't even think it's part of Islam. Bashar al Assad's father, Habez al Assad, pressured a Sunni imam to make a public declaration, an edict, that Alawites were indeed Muslims. But that's been in dispute for a long, long time. And so, you know, irrespective of the fact that the Assad family is Alawite, you had Islamic theologians from the Middle Ages onward who were saying, these people are heretics. These people are dangerous. These people are the enemies of real Muslims. It's been a point of tension in Syria and beyond for a long time.
- [34:25]
Terry Gross
You did something that I thought was incredibly brave. You asked to join a truck with two dozen armed men. These are in pickup trucks. And they were gearing up for a raid on a mission to seize and destroy hidden drugs that the Assad regime was using as their main source of revenue in the final years of their regime. They were all armed. You didn't know them. How did you find out what their mission was? And why did you decide to take the risk to go with them?
- [34:55]
Robert Wirth
This thing happened completely by chance. So I happened to be in the middle of Damascus and suddenly these guys drive up in pickup trucks. And the translator and fixer I were working with said, wait a minute, Those guys are HTs again. That's the main group, Shahraz militia, as it were. And so we went up and said, what are you guys up to? Can we join? And they said, sure, why not? So we jumped in. Actually, I rode with a Syrian journalist who had also found out about this last minute. And we followed the militia guys who were, you know, swerving and driving very fast outside of the capital. And they get to this military base of sorts that was run by Bashar al Assad's brother, who was his real, you know, his hammer, his right hand man in security matters, A feared character named Maher al Assad. And on this base, he had warehouses that were used to manufacture and store drugs, especially captagon. This was the main revenue source for the Assad regime.
- [35:57]
Terry Gross
Yeah, I've never heard of captagon before. So would you explain what kind of drug it is?
- [36:01]
Robert Wirth
Yeah, Captagon is an amphetamine and it's very common across the Arab world. It was taken actually by some Islamists to keep them going during the ISIS period, you know, and it's sold. A lot of captagon is sold in the gulf. Some of it makes it to Europe. And the Assad regime was so bankrupt in its final years with the, you know, the economy really cut off by sanctions, that drugs were its main source of revenue. So the regime itself was manufacturing these drugs and then smuggling them overseas and selling them.
- [36:34]
Terry Gross
So what do they do, like, burn all the drugs?
- [36:37]
Robert Wirth
Yeah, we got to this base and there were a couple of warehouses and they invited us in. I mean, it was funny, at some point they said, oh, maybe we should be wearing masks because there's this sort of cloud of powder coming up from these drugs. You know, there were no safeguards. But they, I think, wanted me to see this. You know, it was pretty clear that, you know, they could have sold these drugs and made a lot of money. And they were saying, no, that's not what we're going to do. This is what the, the Assad regime did. Right. They were merchants of death. That's the phrase they actually used, you know, when they talked about it with me. They profited from death, from drugs, and we're gonna do the opposite. We're gonna get rid of it. So it took about an hour for them to, you know, bag up this stuff and haul it to a ditch. And then they backed up a fuel truck and, you know, drenched it in gasoline and set it on fire.
- [37:27]
Terry Gross
Well, let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Robert Worth, a contributing writer at the Atlantic. His new article is about Syria's transitional president, Ahmad al Sharah, a former jihadist who's now advocating for peace, unity and inclusion. We'll be right back. This is FRESH air. So Syria really needs money to rebuild. I mean, after 14 years of civil war under, you know, a brutal dictator, a lot of Syria is destroyed. People are living in fear. So they need money to rebuild. What do they want from the Trump administration? Has there been an ask yet?
- [38:05]
Robert Wirth
Yes. Sharra has been saying since December, since he took over the country for the Trump administration and for the Europeans to remove the sanctions, which, after all, were levied on the Assad regime, which is gone. So he's got a pretty good argument there. And I should say the Europeans have removed a lot of sanctions. The trouble is that I think they are, as often happens, sanctions are then seen once you have them in place as a kind of lever for good behavior. So there was a reluctance to take them off right away because people weren't sure who Shaara was. And I suppose there was a calculation, who knows, Maybe he's going to be just as bad as Assad. I think the reality that he's not as bad as Assad has penetrated. And I think part of what's going on is that the rest of the world is so distracted by everything else happening in the region.
- [38:53]
Terry Gross
What has the Trump administration's reaction been to Sherra and his leadership in Syria?
- [39:02]
Robert Wirth
They have made pretty clear that they, at least initially, they distrusted him. They were very skeptical of him because he was an Islamist. Members of the Trump Cabinet had said things like, you know, this guy's a jihadist. We can't trust him. The Biden administration had in December lifted some done a temporary lift of some sanctions in order to get humanitarian aid in. There was no indication, at least initially, that the Trump administration wanted to follow up on that. However, just in the past couple of days, the Trump administration has signaled that it would be willing to lift more sanctions in exchange for Shara doing abiding by a number of conditions. And those include helping out in the search For Austin Tice, an American photographer who was kidnapped, I think 10 or 12 years ago in Syria, it's not clear whether he's alive or not. And then there were other conditions, like making publicly clear that they were going to help in the fight against ISIS remnants in Syria and a few other things.
- [40:05]
Terry Gross
What about Syria and Israel? What do you know about Netanyahu's reaction to this new Syria?
- [40:13]
Robert Wirth
Netanyahu? The Israeli government seems to be very skeptical, very distrustful. They took advantage very quickly the opportunity to do hundreds of airstrikes across Syria to get rid of the remnants of the weapons that the Assad regime had, whether those were classed as weapons of mass destruction or not. A lot of them were just weapons, cases of one kind or another. So there's been continuing airstrikes. And the other thing they did was to claim more territory on the border, that claim a kind of additional zone by the Golan Heights, which, you know, Ahmed Al Shara's government has condemned. It's kind of a takeover of Syrian land without any real pretext apart from Israeli security. And then the most aggressive thing Israel has done is to say, we're not going to tolerate any military force, any weapons in southern Syria. We want this to be a demilitarized zone. And again, as with everything else Shara's government has said, that's unrelia unacceptable. You can't be dictating this to us. I think the big question is, is Israel longer term going to accept this new government? There is a concern that Israel is going to do what it has often done in the past and kind of to believe that it's only strong when its enemies are divided. So in other words, to foment division and chaos in Syria, to have its enemies divided against each other rather than allowing Syria to consolidate as a state and to become stable.
- [41:49]
Terry Gross
But Syria is no longer aligned with Iran, is that right?
- [41:54]
Robert Wirth
It's not at all aligned with Iran. And so that's an automatic win for Israel. Israel, you know, sees Iran as its biggest threat and it saw Hezbollah as an arm of Iran. Hezbollah is massively weakened as Hezbollah and Iran cannot operate in Syria anymore. That's a big, big win. But I think they now feel, well, you know, we don't like jihadists either, so why should we trust this guy?
- [42:18]
Terry Gross
So what are your takeaways and impressions after going to Syria and doing this in depth reporting?
- [42:25]
Robert Wirth
You know, one of the most striking things about being in Syria now, I've spent a lot of time in Syria in the past. You know, I used to report on it frequently. When I was based in Beirut and in the past, you never got a full view of Syria. There were always restraints and restrictions. You know, the, the regime would say, you can't go here, you can't go there. And this even really, in a, in a way applied to Syrians themselves. You know, it was a police state. It was difficult for them to get to know each other. And that was by design. I think the, the, the Assad regime wanted to keep people divided in order to, you know, keep them afraid of each other. And that helped them, as they saw it, to run the country. Well, all that's come down now. You get to Syria and you can go anywhere. Syrians can go anywhere. I mean, there was one moment that really stuck with me. I was on the coast visiting a couple of Assad villas and palaces, which were totally inaccessible to Syrians in the past. And there were these Syrian families running around looking at this. And this was a part of the coast that was totally pristine. There was such a villa and then this beautiful coastline. The parts of the coast that were accessible to Syrians were, you know, there were ports and there was garbage and there was junk. And they were stunned at the beauty of this. And they were thinking, wow, you know, what else have we not seen of our own country? It was kind of a beautiful moment.
- [43:50]
Terry Gross
Robert Wirth, thank you so much for talking with us. I really appreciate all of the knowledge you were able to bring to this conversation.
- [43:57]
Robert Wirth
It's a pleasure to be here.
- [44:00]
Terry Gross
Robert Wirth is a contributing writer for the Atlantic. His latest article is about the former jihadist who is now the transitional president of Syria. You can find his recent articles about the Houthis on the Atlantic website. If you'd like to catch up on fresher interviews you missed, like this week's interviews with Amanda Knox and with New York Times congressional reporters Luke Broadwater and Annie Carney about their new book on what they describe as the first MAGA controlled Congress. Check out our podcast. You'll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews and to find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show and get our producers recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to. Subscribe to our free newsletter@why.org Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberto Shorrock, Anne Marie, Bo Donato, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Theresa Madden, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. Our co host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
- [45:32]
Steve Inskeep
Hi. This is Steve Inskeep. Our team is in China, inside a historic Chinese trading city where people come from all over the world to buy wholesale goods to import to their countries. And we're here to find out, among other things, how people are responding to tariffs on goods that go to the United States. Listen for that report on up first from NPR News.
- [45:55]
Capella University
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NPR Politics Podcast
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