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The Ben Shapiro Show
Ben Reacts: The End of Assad in Syria
00:12:45
Ben Shapiro reacts to the breaking news of Bashar al-Assad’s regime being forced out of Syria—With terrorist rebels, and a region still plagued by risk and uncertainty, the situation is far from simple. Ben unpacks the power vacuum left behind, what this means for Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia. Sponsored by PDS Debt - PDS Debt is offering a free debt analysis. It only takes thirty seconds. Get yours at https://PDSDebt.com/reacts.
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Folks. So we're here to talk about what just happened. Bashar al Assad. The Assad regime in Syria is gone and chaos is about to break loose. We're going to talk about the upsides and the downsides in this. Ben reacts. First, your reminder that this is the final day of our 50% off sale over at Daily Wire. Daily Wire plus 50% off, but it ends today. It's our best deal of the year. When it's gone, it is gone for good with Daily Wire. Plus, you stay on top of breaking news. You get the truth behind the headlines, the fact others refuse to cover. Go to DailyWire.com subscribe right now. Do not wait. This deal ends today. All righty. So here's your actual update on the ground right now. Bashar Assad is out. He apparently is already in Russia. Bashar Assad has been the ruler with an iron fist of Syria for the last 24 years. He, of course, follows in the footsteps of his father, Hafez al Assad. And the Assad family has been in charge of Syria for the last 50 years or so. Now, Syria was always a sort of bizarre creation of the Sykes Picot arrangement that emerged from the west, from France and Britain, particularly after World War I. And it's always been a bit of a mess. It has been particularly a mess given the number of different ethnic and religious groups inside Syria. So Syria has within it a large, large area that is controlled by the Kurds. It has a large area that is controlled by Shia. It has a large area that is controlled by Sunni. It has Druze, it has Christians, has all sorts of people who are living in this gigantic area. Geographically, Syria is located to the west of Iraq. It is located to the east of Lebanon and to the northeast of Israel, and Turkey is to its north. Okay? So if you can sort of imagine all of that, that means that pretty much all of those forces are having some impact inside Syria. Now, Syria's civil war has been ongoing since 2011, and it has essentially pitted the Assad regime, which is backed by Iran and Russia on the one hand, against Sunni Islamic militants, terrorists, many associated with ISIS or Al Qaeda, and then some other sort of hodgepodge rebel groups who are Sunni in origin, some Kurds as well, who are involved in this rebellion against the Assad regime. And those were backed predominantly by Turkey, not the Kurds. The Kurds, as we'll see, are actually the rivals of Turkey. And Turkey has been using the hass in Syria in order to launch its own incursions into the border regions of Syria in order to ethnically cleanse and move away the Kurds. Okay? So as we say, this entire state is a basket case. It's been a basket case for a long time. But because Bashar Assad's regime was held up chiefly by Iran and by Russia, because it was used as a thoroughfare by Iran to smuggle arms into Lebanon to Hezbollah, what that meant is that as Iran weakened and as Russia weakened, so too did the Assad regime. That's the real story of what's happening today and what's happened over the past few weeks. What changed? Right, because the civil war has been raging at a fairly high level for the last decade and a half. Over 300,000 people dead, over 12 million refugees. You remember, of course, the very famous pictures of toddlers watching up on the beaches of the Mediterranean who are trying to escape from Syria to get to Europe, for example. So what exactly happened that changed everything? The answer is that Israel completely shellacked Hezbollah. Hezbollah is the Iranian controlled proxy group in Lebanon, as we mentioned. Think of the geography. Lebanon is to the north of Israel and it is to the west of Syria. And so Iran via Iraq had this entire Shia Crescent that it was controlling territorially that extended from Iran, through Iraq, through Syria into Lebanon. And then the kind of tip of the crescent went all the way down into the Gaza Strip. And of course, there are other Iran connected forces in places like Yemen with the Houthis. Okay? But the predominant territorially integris, the sort of unified area that was controlled by Shia, went from Iran all the way to the Mediterranean into Lebanon. So when Israel decided it was going to take out Hezbollah, because Hezbollah had fired some 8 to 10,000 rockets at Israel in solidarity with Hamas over the course of the last year, when Israel completely destroyed Hezbollah, and that's really what happened here. Israel destroyed Hezbollah's capacity to make war. They, they destroyed their long range weaponry, they destroyed their short range weaponry, they destroyed their capacity to even ship things into the south of Lebanon. They didn't just do that. They were also interdicting all sorts of material that was being sent from Iran through Syria and into Lebanon. That meant that Israel's air force was actually doing some pretty heavy lifting inside Syria as well, bombing particular targets in order to stop the Iranians from shipping materiel via Syria into Lebanon. Well, when Hezbollah got completely destroyed by Israel, Hezbollah was a major force that was upholding the Assad regime. And when Hezbollah disappeared, there went one leg that was the support for the Assad regime. Then there was another leg and that was the Russians. So you'll recall back during the Obama administration, there's a lot of talk on what was going to happen with regard to the Syrian situation. You remember that Bashar al Assad used chemical weapons on his own people. And Barack Obama, in all of his great wisdom, suggested that we had a red line, the west had a red line with regard to the use of such chemical weapons. And then it turns out that the violation didn't actually mean anything to Barack Obama. And so he basically handed over control to the Russians. The Russians came in, they said, don't worry, we'll take care of the chemical weapons problems. We'll take care of everything. And so that became a preserve of the Russians. So much so that when Israel was flying sorties over Syria in order to prevent materiel from reaching Lebanon and Hezbollah in Lebanon, they actually had to get Russian permission, so they didn't come into wreck conflict with the Russians. Okay, so there's a problem. The Russians have been a little busy lately. You may have noticed they are bogged down in an interminable war in Ukraine in which they themselves have lost hundreds of thousands of troops. And so what does that mean? It means the other support leg for the Assad regime was basically gone. And that meant that the Assad regime itself was basically gone. And that's why you've seen this lightning offensive from these Sunni terrorist groups. I mean, that is essentially what they are. Anybody who's trying to soft pedal. Exactly. The people who are now in charge of Syria, I think, is whistling past the graveyard, to say the very least. The leader of the Sunni Islamist rebels is a guy named Abu Mohammed Al Jelani. How much of a terrorist is this guy? The US State Department has a $10 million reward on his head. He is, according to Jerome Dravon, a senior analyst of Jihad and modern conflict at the International Crisis Group, the most important player on the ground in Syria. Originally, he was a member of both Al Qaeda and at one point, isis. He's kind of bouncing between the two of them. And then he launched his own terror group called Hayat Tahrir al Sham, and he took over some areas of Syria. And he attempted to play himself off as less of a terrorist, more of a moderate. He was, he was apparently only going to focus in on situ situationally improving the lives of the people in his area. This, by the way, did involve significant human rights abuses against, for example, Christians. Again, there are no good guys here. Okay, Bashar al Assad, really bad guy. Jelani, really bad guy. All these other Terrorist groups, really bad. There are some people on the ground who presumably aren't as bad. That'd be, you would imagine, the Druze, the Kurds. But those are not the main forces that we're talking about right now. So according to the New York Times, Al Jelani is now attempting to position himself as a sort of moderate. He was running a place called Idlib, which is in sort of the northwest of Syria, and then he kind of swept down across the rest of Syria and took over Damascus. Yesterday and today in Idlib, Hayat Tahrir Al Sham has espoused a government guided by conservative and at times hardline Sunni Islamist ideology. So basically similar to the Taliban, sort of. Since the rebel offensive began, however, Al Jelani has sought to reassure minority communities from other sects and religions. These are the kinds of words that were being said, as you recall, by the Taliban before the United States pulled out of Afghanistan in the first place. So is this going to be a perfect situation? Of course. There are no perfect situations here. There are no perfect situations. What does it mean? I'll tell you what it means in one second for kind of all the players involved. Because there's, as always in the Middle east, some upsides with Assad being gone and some significant downsides with Assad being gone. There are not a lot of wonderful players in the Middle East. Get to that in a moment. First, no one wants to think about debt. The whole the cold, hard truth of it is many of us will get deeper in debt during the holidays. My friends at pds, debt can help with a personalized solution just for you. If you're making payments every month on your debt, your balances aren't going down. PDS does have solutions for you. Everyone with $10,000 or more in eligible debt qualifies. No minimum credit score required. Bad and fair credit accepted. Start planning today. Get a free debt analysis right now@pds.com react it only takes 30 seconds. That's pdsd.com react PDS debt.com react okay, so that is the situation on the ground right now. So what does that mean? Hey? Well, what it means for Christians is a much more fraught existence. It was already pretty fraught in Syria. All of us pretend that Bashar Al Assad was wonderful to Christians. That is not true. Okay. There were significant human reparations against Christians on the ground, not only in the areas controlled by Sunni terrorists, but also in the areas that were controlled by Shia terrorists. Syria is about 10% Christian. Okay, so is it about to get worse? It definitely Could. Which would, of course, be a terrible thing. And then you have the question of what Bashar al Assad was doing to the country, which is killing hundreds of thousands of people using everything up to and including chemical weapons. Well, he's gone now. And Israel has been striking a lot of the chemical weapons depots to prevent them from falling into the hands of the new rebel alliance over here. Okay. So, you know, again, is any of this wonderful particular. It isn't. But the one thing that is an upside is that the Iranian crescent is dead. Okay. The Shia Crescent, that again stretched all the way from Iran all the way across to Lebanon, that is now dead. What does that mean? It means that the Iranian regime is actually in quite real trouble here. All of their biggest proxies are gone. Hamas gone. Hezbollah gone. Assad gone. That means the Shia influence game is beginning to wane. It's beginning to end. The Houthis are basically isolated down there in Yemen. The Shia regime in Iran still has impact in Iraq, but internally they are much, much, much weaker right now. So the border countries, what are they doing? Turkey is incursion, is doing incursions into northern Syria. They were probably behind much of what's going on right now. They're attempting to grab territory in northern Syria. They're creating their own buffer zone. They're attempting to encroach on Kurdish territory, again in northeast of the country. Meanwhile, Israel in the south has the Golan Heights. And anybody, by the way, who thought that it was a good idea for Israel to give up the Golan Heights. Yeah, you're an idiot. Okay, It's a good thing Israel has the Golan Heights, otherwise you'd have Sunni terrorists sitting up top over the Lake Tiberias and firing down into the valley in Israel. Okay, so Israel controls that area. They've been moving up into their own buffer zone over at Mount Hermon, which is in Syria. It's kind of the strategic height of the region. Okay. Meanwhile, again, you have the Syrian government, which has now abdicated. They are turning over control to this rebel alliance. Unclear exactly what's going to result, because again, you still have all of these players on the ground who are fighting one another. They may be united against Assad, but now Assad is gone. So Assad's family is out. The rebels again arrived in Damascus. Meanwhile, you have the Kurds, who are still controlling a large swath of territory. What does it really mean? It means that Russia is weak, Iran is weak. These were paper tigers and their attempts to invade Ukraine and invade Israel, respectively Those went really poorly for them. What you are watching is the complete collapse of the Russian Iranian alliance in Syria. And it is indicative of the interior weakness of these countries, which is something to remember going forward. President Biden said this is the first time ever either Russia nor Iran or Hezbollah could defend a foreign regime in Syria. This is the direct result of the blows Ukraine and Israel delivered. This is what he said in a statement. No thanks to Joe Biden, by the way, who's continuing to slow walk weapons to both Ukraine and also to Israel. So if it had been up to Joe Biden, presumably those allies never would have been properly armed. But it is a very good thing and indicative again of the weakness of Russia and Iran. What has happened in Syria now, net. Net I think it'll probably be a good thing, but there are no great things in the Middle East. Just doesn't exist. A lot of bad people in a lot of areas in the Middle East. So it'll be fascinating to see what happens next. Man, it's gonna be very difficult to sort of see and foresee what happens from here on in because there are just too many competitive groups. Many of them are terrorists on all sides of the aisle. And so everybody who's sort of happy talking this thing, oh, it's a day of liberty and freedom, just hold your horses. It's certainly not a day of liberty and freedom for many of the Christians who are living in Syria. Unfortunately, it is not a day of liberty and freedom, I think, for pretty much anybody who's living in Syria. But it wasn't in the first place, it turns out, as always, in the Middle East, a lot of bad answers to a lot of very difficult questions. We'll see you here tomorrow. I'll recap all of this. I'll bring maps, I'll show you the whole thing and see you tomorrow.