HANNAH: Hi. This is Hannah (ph).
ARMAND: And Armand (ph).
HANNAH: We’re on the fifth and final day of our road trip from Boston, Massachusetts, to Phoenix, Arizona, accompanied by my dog, Finn (ph).
ARMAND: This podcast was recorded at…
SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
1:08 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, December 10, 2024.
HANNAH: Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but hopefully I’ll be settling into my new home in Phoenix. Here’s the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Ooh, congratulations.
MCCAMMON: That’s a long trip – and a lot of weather and geography changes. Hey there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.
GREG MYRE, BYLINE: I’m Greg Myre. I cover national security.
LIASSON: And I’m Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.
MCCAMMON: Today on the show, we’re taking a look at the major changes in recent days in Syria and what those events mean for U.S. foreign policy as a new administration prepares to take office in Washington.
Greg, let’s start with the big news of the weekend. Bashar al-Assad, the country’s longtime leader, has been deposed. What happened, and why did this happen now, after so many years of civil war?
MYRE: Yeah, it was quite shocking. And as somebody who’s followed Syria for a long time, I mean, we’re talking about more than 50 years of rule by Bashar Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, and now by Bashar Assad. So between them, they date back to the Nixon administration. A little aside – I saw a great picture posted just before Nixon resigned. He went to Syria in 1974, posed with Hafez Assad, and there’s little Bashar Assad, 8-year-old in short pants, standing with him in the photo. So quite an extraordinary image, if we think about that time till today.
MCCAMMON: Wow – and just reinforces how long this family has been ruling.
MYRE: Absolutely. And the Assad rule has been under threat since the civil war erupted back in 2011, but it looked like Assad had survived that. He was getting a lot of help from Russia and Iran. In the past four years, there’d been a truce that was kind of, sort of holding. And it seemed he had at least reestablished control over most of the country – the populated areas, the capital, Damascus. But then, just dramatically, in the space of less than two weeks, this rebel group known as HTS captured Aleppo, the second-biggest city, and then just came charging down from the north, capturing a new city every couple days, and rode into Damascus over the weekend. Assad fled. He has landed in Russia. Russia says they are giving him asylum there. And more than 50 years of this brutally repressive regime has just collapsed overnight.
And often you see this with really authoritarian regimes – is that they won’t fall apart gradually. They will look like they’re pretty stable, pretty steady, and then, all of a sudden, they just collapse overnight. That’s what’s happened here. And now there’s a huge challenge for this one rebel group, HTS, but many other factions as well, and elements of the ousted regime. Can they work together? Can they cooperate? Can they form a government and put Syria back together again after more than a decade of a really horrific civil war?
LIASSON: Greg, who is in control of Syria right now?
MYRE: Well, nobody’s in control of all of Syria. This group, HTS, which stands for Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham, is an Islamist group. The U.S. put HTS on the U.S. terrorist list back in 2012. The group was affiliated with al-Qaida. Now, the group has disavowed those ties back in 2016. They’ve tried to present themselves as a more moderate group. And they have ruled up in northwest Syria for the past several years, and most people say they’ve lived up to that. They don’t require women to wear the hijab. They haven’t cracked down on ethnic or other religious minorities. So it hasn’t been a really hard-line Islamist rule. But that’s certainly where they came from, and there are certainly all these other groups who are very skeptical, very suspicious, within Syria itself and the U.S. as well.
It’s still on the terrorist watch list, which means the U.S. can’t deal directly with it right now. It’s sort of working around it, it seems – maybe to an indirect party. So HTS is the group that’s in the capital, Damascus, and many of the big cities, but there are other factions – the Kurds in the northeast, for example, a Turkish-supported group up along the border between Turkey and Syria. So there isn’t just one group in charge, and, both politically and militarily, they have to sort this out. That’s going to be a huge challenge.
MCCAMMON: Right now, remind us – what is the U.S. role in Syria? What has it been in recent years?
MYRE: Yeah. You’d really go back about a decade. So it was 2014 when the Islamic State started rampaging across the Middle East. It took huge chunks of territory very quickly in Iraq and in Syria. And so President Obama, at that time, decided the U.S. needed to send in troops back into the region to battle the Islamic State. They did. They fought them for several years with some partners in those areas.
By the end of 2018, the U.S. had effectively defeated the Islamic State, in the northeastern part of Syria in particular. By now, President Trump is in his first term in office, and he said – he tweeted – back in 2018, we’re leaving. It’s time to get out. Now, that didn’t happen, but those U.S. troops have been there for a decade now. There’s about 900 American forces, most in the northeast, and their mission there is to prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State.
The remnants are still there. And just on Sunday, the U.S. carried out a huge airstrike – they hit 75 targets. U.S. officials said that they saw Islamic State fighters gathering to train and perhaps trying to take advantage of this turmoil in Syria. The U.S. called in this major airstrike against Islamic State, and so that’s why those U.S. forces are there. President Biden says they will remain for now.
LIASSON: Yeah. And, you know, the National Security Council did brief reporters today, and what was interesting is they said that, at least for now, the rebel groups are saying the right things about how they want to govern Syria and that it would be a sovereign nation, and the Syrian people could decide the kind of government they want. But, they said, we’re going to have to watch to see what they actually do.
MCCAMMON: So Greg, what is the objective for the U.S. at this point? You mentioned some of those strikes in Syria. Is it just about securing chemical weapons stores, keeping them from getting into the wrong hands, or is it something else – something bigger?
MYRE: Well, I think there’s multiple priorities. I think, first and foremost, is preventing the resurgence of the Islamic State. That’s why those troops are there. The U.S. is obviously very concerned about chemical weapons. Bashar Assad used those weapons against his own people back in 2013 and killed certainly hundreds and perhaps over a thousand, so that remains a critical issue. Now, a U.S. official has said they believe those weapons are very well-contained. They’re not really worried about them. Now, they haven’t explained where they are or who’s in control of them or how they can be secured. There have been reports that Israeli airstrikes in Syria the past few days have targeted chemical weapons facilities related to the weapons program, if not the weapons themselves.
And then, of course, there’s the humanitarian issue that so many people in Syria have been killed. So many have been displaced internally. Millions have gone across the border into Turkey and other countries. So all of these issues – the military issue, the political issue of putting Syria back together, the economic and humanitarian issue – the U.S. is involved in all of these things right now.
MCCAMMON: You know, quickly, Greg, you mentioned ISIS. You’ve mentioned ISIS a couple of times. Trump, when he was in office, I think in 2018, said that the U.S. had defeated ISIS in Syria. To what extent is the Islamic State still a threat there?
MYRE: Well, they have camps. They’re not large, as they were. They’ve been deeply degraded by the U.S. fighting in the previous decade, and the U.S. has kept them under wraps and has not allowed them to expand, but they are there. They do want to reemerge, if possible. And they’re a potential threat to Syria, of course, but also in neighboring Iraq, and they have factions in other countries as well. So that remains a concern. I think the assessment would be that if the U.S. or others left and did not keep an eye on them, that they could reemerge, especially in a country as shattered as Syria, where the central government may not have much, if any, security control.
MCCAMMON: OK, let’s take a quick break. We’ll have more in just a moment.
And we’re back. Mara, how could policy toward Syria specifically, and toward the humanitarian aid concerns that Greg mentioned, more broadly – how could all of this change when Trump comes back in office next month?
LIASSON: Well, there’s no area where Trump is more different from Joe Biden than foreign policy. He is an isolationist. His first reaction to the overthrow of Assad was a tweet on Truth Social, his social media platform, that said, the United States should have nothing to do with it. This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved. It’s possible that that will be his operating approach to this, but we don’t know because a unstable Middle East is bad for America, and he might change his mind.
We also have the question of the fact that Russia is weakened. He wrote another post where he said Russia was weakened in Syria because of Ukraine, where he says close to 600,000 Russian soldiers have been wounded or dead. And he’s very interested in getting Russia and Ukraine to the bargaining table, to the negotiating table, to get that war stopped. A lot of people, especially Democrats, are worried that he wants to stop it on Putin’s terms. So this is one of the things we’re just going to have to wait and see what happens when Trump gets into office, but it is very possible that the U.S. will pull back dramatically from providing humanitarian aid around the world.
MCCAMMON: Right. You talk about these noninterventionist, isolationist tendencies – I think more than tendencies – that have been a hallmark of Trump’s – at least his foreign policy positioning. At the same time, trying to achieve greater peace and cooperation in the Middle East was a major part of his foreign policy during his first term. He was very proud of his role in the Abraham Accords. How do these developments in Syria affect the way Trump may operate in that part of the world – you know, particularly with this desire, as we’ve mentioned, to sort of be a player in the Middle East and perhaps expand the Abraham Accords?
LIASSON: Well, one of the big things he has to do is get Saudi Arabia to actually sign them. And Saudi Arabia has always said they would only sign them if Israel agreed to some kind of a path to a two-state solution, which Benjamin Netanyahu is adamantly against. But he mentioned again that the only way he could get good press coverage was if he came out for a two-state solution, and that would never happen. So if Trump wants to move forward with those accords, he’s going to have to figure out how to make some kind of peace in the Middle East.
MCCAMMON: Greg, how do you see this playing out?
MYRE: Yeah. I would just add that I think that Trump will feel this sort of push-pull. There are things he wants to do in the Middle East. He would love to increase the diplomatic relationships between not only the U.S., but also Israel and some of these countries. If he wants to do that, he’s also going to have to deal with the security parts of it. You know, Israel has been bombing Syria the past few days. If that contributes to an unstable region, well, then he’s not going to be able to do some of the diplomatic or economic things that he wants to do. So I think that’s one of the issues he will run into very quickly.
MCCAMMON: Before we go, I also want to talk about Austin Tice. He is an American freelance journalist who was detained by the Syrian government more than a decade ago, believed to have been imprisoned there. U.S. intelligence has said he is believed to still be alive. What do we know? What’s the latest?
LIASSON: National Security Council spokesman John Kirby talked about this today. He said that their operating assumption is that Tice is alive. He says, we have no information to the contrary, but they don’t have any information about where he is or what his condition is.
MYRE: Yeah. And just a reminder, Austin Tice was a journalist. He was writing for a number of American publications, including The Washington Post, when he disappeared in 2012, shortly after or about a year after the Syrian civil war broke out. There was video of him that appeared shortly after his capture, so he was taken and was still alive. However, it’s been more than a decade now before there’s been any proof of life that we’re aware of publicly. And also, what we’re hearing privately is, as Mara noted, they believe he’s alive, but they don’t have concrete proof.
MCCAMMON: Will this have any effect on the Trump administration or the Biden administration for the next month – how they move forward in regard to Syria?
MYRE: I mean, I think it’s a very big deal for the Biden administration. In fact, the person who deals with hostages, Roger Carstens, in the Biden administration, is in Lebanon, trying to see if there’s anything more he can learn or anything we can figure out. We’ve seen these images of thousands – literally thousands of prisoners in Syria come out the many prisons in Syria as the gates are opened. Certainly, there was the hope that when this mass opening of the prisons took place, that we might hear something about him very soon. It hasn’t happened yet.
MCCAMMON: All right. We will leave it there for today. I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.
MYRE: I’m Greg Myre. I cover national security.
LIASSON: And I’m Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.
MCCAMMON: Thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
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