Transcript of Inside The Fall Of Syria’s Brutal Dictator

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My name is Ruth Dendrishy. I'm 26 years old. I'm currently in Hans Serum. There are so many people on the streets, probably all of Syria. I'm not even exaggerating. Everyone's celebrating, they're singing, they're taking pictures, they're taking videos. What you're hearing right now are not bullets, actually. They're just more like fire It's not a good work. People are just shocked that we actually got rid of the brutal government that we were under. There is just this peaceful feeling that you get that it's okay. This is over. It's over. It's the end of a 50-year-old oppression that tortured us, that took away loved ones from us. We're all afraid that if we sleep, this might be a dream. Is this a dream?

From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernousi, and this is The Daily. Syria has been controlled by one family for more than half a century. It ruled by repression, devastation, and violence. But about two weeks ago, the regime began to falter. Then, over the course of one stunning night, it collapsed. Today, my colleague Carlotta Gaal, on the fall of Bachar al-Assad. And what comes next? It's Monday, December ninth. Carlotta, there's been an absolutely incredible turn of events in Syria. We're talking on Sunday morning. Walk us through what happened.

It has been the most incredible turn of events. In just 12 days, we have turned from what we thought was really a frozen conflict, going nowhere, to an uprising in this 13-year civil war. Army groups in Syria have reportedly attacked government forces in the western countryside of Aleppo province. 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 Syrian army concedes it has lost control of large parts of Aleppo.

Aleppo in the north, the second biggest city in the country, and then they started to move south.

Islamist forces are on their fourth day of a lightning offense through several towns and villages towards Syria's fourth largest city, Hamza.

Then they kept going.

Opposition fighters now on their way, going south towards Homs, that then leads to the capital, Damascus.

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.

Syrian rebels are telling media outlets they have entered the capital city of Damascus.

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. With the help of God, the city of Damascus was liberated, and the regime of the tyrant, Bachar al-Assad, was toppled. The rebels took the state TV, and they announced that they'd taken control of the whole of the capital, and that President Bachar al-Assad had got on a plane and left the country. Long live, free Syria.. It's really an incredibly swift movement of events from a total dictatorship to he's gone.

I mean, it was just unbelievable, really, that this country suddenly was leaderless. Yes.

Syria has had the same leaders, the same family of leaders for 50 years, a very authoritarian family. Bachar al-Alsad has been in power now, but his father was in power before him. They've ruled this country with an iron grip since the 1970s. It's really a big deal.

It is a big deal, and I want to unpack it with you. How did this Forever regime Syria suddenly, shockingly, just disappear overnight? Where should we start to explain that?

Well, this is the culmination of the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, when different countries started to rise up against the dictatorship. We saw it in Tunisia, and we saw it in Egypt, and we saw it in Libya. Syria joined that run of protests, people daring to come out onto the streets asking for for democracy, for human rights, dignity. Syria was the same as the others. But what happened in Syria was the government of Syria underAssad really cracked down, used violence against the protesters, but then did mass arrests, interrogations, torture, disappearances, a lot of executions. Then some of the protesters took up weapons, and it became an armed insurgency. A civil war, essentially, the country was fighting each other. 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. Then, Assad doubled down. He gassed civilians in some of the war to take control back of some of the cities. Then millions were displaced, fleeing the country, fleeing a lot into Turkey and Lebanon in neighboring countries, and heading for Europe or anywhere they could.

It was really a most costly civil war, and 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. Asaad, for all his brutal repression, is actually barely hanging on. That's when we started to see other countries that have stakes in Syria start to get involved.

Right. Okay, so that is also when Syria starts to get really complicated. So lay that out for me, Carlotta. What starts to happen?

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 to repress this very, very virulent jihadist group that was obviously interested in attacking Western countries.

And so what happened next? Who's the next big player that comes on the scene?

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. Russia came in in a very big way with serious firepower, planes, jets, fighter bombers, weaponry, and a a lot of advice and tactics, and they brought ships into the ports and so on. 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. The Iranians sent in advisors and military advisors who ran the campaign. They really did a great amount of actually retaking territory for the Mossad regime.

Why do Iran Iran and Russia enter the war like that?

For both Iran and Russia, it was very important to see the Mossad regime survive. Russia had long had relations with Syria, were going back right through the communist times. They wanted to be able to keep their access to the Mediterranean, their trade, their diplomatic influence. Iran had an equally important reason to be involved. They couched 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. For those reasons, they also wanted to seeAssad survive.

Bottom line, Syria becomes this cauldron of geopolitical rivalries.

Absolutely. Those two powers, Iran and Russia are propping upAssad. 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 locked.

How do we get from that deadlocked civil war to the rapid toppling of Sad that everybody just watched unfold?

The biggest change, of course, was the two main backers ofAssad, 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 expended all their efforts and men and money and weapons on that war. Then the second war is obviously Israel's fight, first in Gaza, but then in Lebanon against 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 Asaad's Syrian army. They were really hit hard in the recent months. And that was very debilitating for the Iranian effort to shore up Asaad. 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. That's when they pounced.

We'll be right back.

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Who are these rebel forces who just toppled Sad? Tell me about them.

They're a hodgepodge of lots of different groups, but the main mover and the main group behind this offensive is Hyatt Takharir 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, very strict, actually, organization civilization comes from the Jihad tradition, and it's designated by many countries in the West and the United States as a terror group.

Who leads it? Who's in charge?

It's led by a Saudi-born Syrian. He's in his 40s. He's called Abu Mohamed 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. He was a student when he then left to join the fight against America in Iraq.

Oh, wow.

He joined Al Qaeda. Then he got arrested by the US forces in Iraq, and he spent several years in Jail, which is a famous prison camp where a lot of the Al Qaeda and Islamist militias were detained and kept. Of course, it became a great meeting place for them all because they were all in there together for many years. That is his history.

That's really interesting because it probably means he had some pretty serious jihadist credentials, but he clearly got out of prison. What did he do next?

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. Then he was among the groups that were gradually pushed back as the Russians and the Iranians helped theAssad and 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. Then there's something really interesting happened. The down out, they're under bombardment, they've really got their backs to the wall. 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. It's been a steady thing since then, over the last eight years. We're all watching to see, is it a big PR push or is it really serious?

Yeah, that's what I want to know. I mean, can one be former Al Qaeda? How does that even work?

Well, I think it is interesting. In Syria, I think I've followed Jihad 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. I think the Syrian groups were just the same. I've never met Jolani, but I've asked many people who have met him, and some will say he's a very hard. Others say he's more pragmatic. I actually went four years ago on an in IDlib.

Wait, Claudia, you went on an in IDlib with HTS?

I did several times, in fact, because there were some things they decided they needed to tell the Western world. They invited journalists like me, I was based in Istanbul, to come and see. The trip includes always a long lunch and a 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.

What was it like there, Carlotta?

They are super-Islamic, and you could feel they are authoritarian. They control They controlled everything. They controlled where we went. We could talk to whoever we want, but they were very cautious to be in charge. 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.

How were they, for for women? How is life for women there? Often an indicator with Islamic regimes.

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. There was possibly some people who were disappeared. It's a pretty ruthless group who were set at first on gaining complete control. Now they're trying to reform themselves and appear softer. But their first years, while they were establishing control, they were pretty ruthless.

It sounds like not quite Taliban-like, but some hard edges.

Yes, I would say that. Exactly that.

In other words, very unclear what this group could mean for the future of Syria, or even really if it's going to be the future of Syria.

Absolutely. It's very fluid. We know thatAssad 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, it's the liberation from the Mossad regime that was the main aim, and he's achieved that. Now, what does he do next? There are a lot of different groups They're under an umbrella of his. But of course, in these events, you often see different groups turning on each other for power. That's the $64 million 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. 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 like him and accept him. Everything's up in the air at the moment.

That's Jelani. But of course, there's this geopolitical earthquake that this is causing, right? That is happening at the same time.

Absolutely. This is 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 You've got Turkey and the North involved already with troops inside Syria. You've got Iran, of course, hurting and pushed out, but already saying it wants a role in Syria in the future. 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. Then Russia is also saying it still wants a role, although that remains to be seen if the jihadis would accept 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. It's a huge, as we mentioned before, a huge cold of geopolitical rivalries, and that's going to be something to try and work out and decipher in the coming days and weeks.

It's like all of the cards have just been thrown up into the air.

I think you're right. That That's also for the Arab world, this was so interesting and important because they were steadily moving towards acceptance ofAssad staying in power, and now that's been completely turned upside down.

Carlotta, I want to just pause for a moment and think about what just happened from the perspective of Syrians. I mean, as we said, this place has literally been under this regime for about half a century. That's just changed. That's an incredible moment for the Syrian people. It's like an entire country just suddenly gets to wake up from this long sleep or something. I would guess that while that is potentially hopeful, it's also a really perilous moment because as you and I both know, when dictators collapse, violence and chaos can ensue.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for me and for a lot of the Syrians I've been talking to the last week and a half, it's the sense of liberation, the relief, the excitement. 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. Some of them have been in prison for more than a decade, including children who've been imprisoned with their mothers. 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. I think for Syrians, we've had 400,000 people die in this 13-year Civil War. 14 million people left the country as refugees abroad. 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, whether it's for power in a city or in a whole region or over oil fields or wealth. That's what the Syrians fear. They're telling me, We're celebrating today, but just for one day, and then we're very worried.

We We have to see what goes forward. We don't know what's going to come next.

Carlotta, thank you.

Thank you.

On Sunday night, PresidentAssad surfaced in Russia. Russian state media said thatAssad and his family had been granted political asylum there. Meanwhile, the US military carried out one of largest series of airstrikes in Syria in months, saying that it would not allow ISIS to take advantage of the collapse of government there to regroup. We'll be right back. I gave my brother a New York Times subscription. We exchange articles calls. Having read the same article, we can discuss it.

She sent me a year long subscription, so I have access to all the games.

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Here's what else you should know today. In his In his first sit-down broadcast network interview since winning re-election, President-elect Donald Trump outlined an aggressive plan for the early days of his second term.

You promised to end birthright citizenship on day one. Is that still your plan?

Yeah, absolutely. Speaking on Meet the Press on NBC, he said he would try to end automatic citizenship for children of immigrants. We'll maybe have to go back to the people, but we have to end it. He said he would pardon supporters who stormed the Capitol on January January 6, 2021. First day.

First day.

First day. Yeah, I'm looking for- First day. These people have been... How long is it? Three or four years. He said that members of Congress who investigated his role in that attack on the Capitol, like Republican Liz Cheney, should be put in jail. He said he would not direct his new attorney general or FBI director to pursue the matter, but indicated that he expected them to do it on their own. Today's episode was produced by Claire Tennis-Sketter, Carlos Prieto, and Rochelle Bonja, with help from Lindsay Garrison. It was edited by Patricia Willens, with help from Ben Calhoun. Contains original music by Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansberg of WNDY. Special thanks to Yara Bayumi. For The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernousi. See you tomorrow.