1099: Syria | Out of the Loop

1099: Syria | Out of the Loop

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:01] Ryan McBeth: Turkey kind of made this happen. Erdogan is like Littlefinger in Game of Thrones. He has all of these pieces moving, all of these strings that he can pull and with his funding, with his help, he managed to take a dictator down. In Syria.

[00:00:22] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional astronaut hacker, real life pirate, or special operator.

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That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today. Out of the loop, Syria. Syria has been in the news lately. A lot of you have been following this, many of you have not. And even if you have, it might just be a little too darn complicated to wrap your head around.

There are so many different players. There's the dictator, he's gone now, but then there's this group, that group, there's actually over 70 groups or something like that at last count that were vying for power in Syria, and the situation evolves day by day. There's a heck of a lot going on here too. Cut through some of the noise and give us a great overview of this conflict and where it currently stands is YouTube or sub stacker, if that's a thing.

Ryan Macbeth, he's a good friend of mine and he does a lot of videos on geopolitics, military weaponry, these kinds of conflicts and all of the things related to this. I wanted an overview on Syria. I'm pretty well informed, but Syria is just one of those things where there's like 20 different balls in the air.

This episode seems a little bit disjointed. This is a very complicated conflict. The timelines are weird. There's a lot of uncertainty. There's fog of war. This is a really longstanding civil war that is, I guess, kind of, sort of still not quite over. So bear with us. We do try to make things as clear as possible and I wanted somebody who could, uh, juggle a lot of balls.

And that is Ryan McBeth. So here we go, out of the loop on Syria.

Thanks for doing this, man. I appreciate it. Coming back over the holidays. Absolutely. By the time this airs, it'll be 2025. Can you believe it? Oh my God. Yeah, I know. Where's our jet packs? That's right. New Year, new Syria, which is what we're talking about today. New year, new regime. In Syria or something that resembles a regime and you sent me an email with notes and I think it's just the best beginning 'cause you wrote to start.

Don't get wrapped around the axle if you don't understand what's going on. There are about 70 factions fighting in Syria right now, but it's best to think of them as two big groups, pro Asad forces and anti Asad forces. That was obviously before a relatively large event, which is Assad talking his tail and then flying one of his private jets over to Moscow forever.

[00:03:06] Ryan McBeth: Yeah, you're absolutely correct. When you think about it, there's still a lot to talk about 'cause you can talk about what's going on with Iran, what's going on with Russia, and why this happened in the first place. Who were the winners and who were the losers.

[00:03:20] Jordan Harbinger: I gotta wonder if Asad is sitting around in whatever five star hotel or wherever they moved him into in Moscow, and is he watching the news nonstop?

Looking at all this? Is he like, yeah, I got a meeting with Putin on Monday to see if they can go in and invade and get me my country back backers. He just like, it was a good run. I'm over it.

[00:03:38] Ryan McBeth: You know what's interesting about Bashar al-Assad is that he never really had much interest in doing this in the first place.

[00:03:44] Jordan Harbinger: That might be a decent point to talk about, but I feel like we're getting a little ahead of ourselves. 'cause some people are like, wait, who's Assad again? Alright, who are the players in Syria? What we know now from Syria is the government fell, the dictator Bashar al-Assad is gone. He fled to Moscow like we just mentioned.

And now there's another kind of proto regime in place ish maybe. But let's back up then and talk about who was Assad, because like you said, he wasn't very interested in running a country and then suddenly he became one of the most murderous dictators of our generation.

[00:04:15] Ryan McBeth: So this can turn into an episode of Dallas, or if you watch like more recent tv, an episode of Yellowstone.

So think of Yellowstone or even Game of Thrones, but set in Syria. So there is this guy, HAAD and Fsad was the ruler of Syria and he had two sons. The first son was being groomed to become the leader of Syria, and he was into cars, and he got into a car wreck one day and his father told Bashar, you need to come home and you need to take over for when I die.

Now, Bashar Asad, he grew up a quiet kid. He was interested in studying French and interested in medicine. Eventually he went to university, got a degree in medicine. He did his National Army service as an army doctor, and then he went to London and he became an ophthalmologist. He did his residency and I think it was called the Western Eye Hospital in London, and he was an ophthalmologist.

Then one day he gets a call from his dad and says, uh, Hey, your brother is dead and I need you to come back and start learning the ropes. So like a good son, but Char Assad comes back to Syria. And one of the first things he did was he joined the army again and he was in charge of the Syrian occupation later the withdrawal from Lebanon.

And the other thing he did was he was known as a guy who fought corruption. As it just so happened everybody who was corrupt was anyone who was opposed to Asad.

[00:05:56] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Like how do you fight corruption when your dad is the dictator? Because you can get rid of anyone you want. Oh wait, that's the pretext for getting rid of anyone you want instead of just, yeah.

My dad doesn't like or trust this guy. It's that guy's corrupt. So he has to go to prison forever. And anybody who's friends with that guy just to be safe should probably also go to prison forever. You're absolutely correct. So Bashar al-Assad, he's in charge of the occupation of Lebanon, so Syria occupied Lebanon.

And is it safe to say that Lebanon was almost like a puppet of Syria, or is that overstating?

[00:06:26] Ryan McBeth: No, you're absolutely correct. You could say that in a lot of ways, Lebanon was a puppet of Syria. Syria caused a lot of problems in Lebanon. Syria, let Iran come in and help fund what eventually became Hezbollah when the US was in Lebanon back in the early eighties to try to fix Lebanon's problems and allow stabilization so Lebanon's government can recover during their civil war.

Syria played a huge part in causing a lot of the trouble that we've seen in Lebanon. We're talking funding, we're talking weapons, we're talking training, and it didn't work out well for the us, especially the Marines who were in, uh, a barracks. So essentially the first time we had to deal with, uh, suicide bombing terrorism, a guy ran a gate with a truck and blew up and destroyed marine barracks.

So I think over 200 Marines were killed, and this was 82. I wanna say, but yeah, Syria's been kind of a thorn in the US aside in that region for a very long time.

[00:07:25] Jordan Harbinger: So Bashar Alad is like, I'm gonna be an eye doctor. Gets a call from his dad. That's like, just kidding. You're gonna be a dictator. And you gotta wonder, was he like, sweet.

I always wanted to be one of these powerful billionaires. Was he? Like, I was so looking forward to living in London and not being a dictator, but maybe borrowing a couple hundred million dollars here and there from the country. No big deal. That seems like the best place to be. You're not a dictator, but like your dad is.

So you're loaded and you have a security detail, and you have a life of luxury. But maybe not everyone in the free world wants to see you dismembered in public

[00:07:59] Ryan McBeth: Russia. Certainly didn't want that to happen, right? There is a reason for that. Syria and Russia go back to the Cold War when, uh, the US was on Israel's side.

So Syria received a lot of funding from the Soviet Union, weapons training, things like that. So there was this relationship going on and Russia really needed an ally in the Middle East, especially with ports on Mediterranean. And Syria was an excellent place to do that. But I don't know whether Bashar Alad wanted to be dictator.

He certainly rose to the occasion. One of the things that he did while in power was he created the, uh, Syrian computer Club.

[00:08:39] Jordan Harbinger: That doesn't sound very hard ass of a dictator. He is like, alright, my first order of business. We gotta get a land going, man. Have you seen Duke Newcomb when you have 12 players? It is awesome.

Oh, and we gotta murder a bunch of dissidents in brutal ways in public, but we'll get to that later. First land party. Yeah,

[00:08:55] Ryan McBeth: first the land party. And Bashar Asad was the guy that essentially brought the internet to Syria and people thought, all right, this guy's gonna be a reformer. Like we have someone who is on the side of the people.

Now, I should say we've skipped over this part here, that Shar Asad and his father, his family, there was what are called Aite, which is like a sect of a Shia Islam. And one of the things they believe in is a drink alcohol.

[00:09:22] Jordan Harbinger: Is that the belief or is that just a side effect of what are the beliefs They have their own interpretation.

[00:09:27] Ryan McBeth: Okay, gotcha. Of things. And some people don't really consider a whites to be Muslims, and all whites are technically a minority, but they gain control through the bath party. And they also gain control because they would take the other minorities, the Jes, the Christians. And stick with them and support them against the Shia Muslims that were inside of Syria.

So you're using all these smaller factions to try to gain power and try to remain in power inside of Syria. I see.

[00:09:58] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So the Allah whites are a minority, but they gain control and they help other minorities, which is why you see online some support for boar al-Assad. Because you see these people who are like, it's gonna be worse now because they're a small minority Christian.

Maybe they're ds, maybe they're some other secular minority, and they're like HTS who will get to in a second. The new regime is not gonna be better for us. Trust me, Bahar was a bastard, but this is gonna be even worse. You just watch. So this guy becomes the dictator of Syria. He continues the. Tradition of supporting minorities and pitching other bad guys against each other in some way and repressing everyone.

And you mentioned they're in the bath party. I heard about that from the Iraq war. Is that the same bath party that was Saddam Hussein? Yeah. It's

[00:10:43] Ryan McBeth: a splinter of the bath party. Okay. The bath party is kinda like this communist, or really more like a socialist Arab awakening organization. So there's a bath party in Syria.

There's a bath party in Iraq, but you could say it's two branches of the same ideals. What's really interesting is that Bahar Asad, when he became president, it was after his father died, which is in June of 2000, and there was a slight problem. Their constitution, the Syrian constitution said you can only become president if you're 40 years of age or older.

So the legislature lowered the age for serving as president from 40 to 34, which just happened to be Bihar's age.

[00:11:24] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that's a fortunate coincidence for him. Otherwise he would've been ineligible. Yeah,

[00:11:27] Ryan McBeth: imagine that. And he became president in July of 2000 with 97% of the vote.

[00:11:33] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Wow. He was so popular.

That's the thing with these dictators, they are just insanely popular. Lukashenko was like 90 plus or 80% of the vote. These guys, man, the mandate is really strong. Unless there's some fuckery, in which case all bets are off. But otherwise, the mandate man, they're really, it's a clear majority. Okay, so all jokes aside, isn't all an Arabic the or of Yes.

Okay. Yes, absolutely. Technically, al Assad means the lion. Assad is lion. I see. So this is not like the city where they're from. This is no their name. They've given themselves to sound tough.

[00:12:05] Ryan McBeth: Yeah, you can say it like that. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Now we actually took power. There were a lot of people who thought like, all right, this guy brought us the internet, and this thing called Damascus Spring started, which was kinda led by artists and intellectuals, and they started demanding reforms, and they had some pretty good feelings about this new president.

So Shar Sai created a state of emergency, started throwing people into prison. Oof. And he also is started to enforce the strict licensing of guns. Usually when the government starts doing that, it's not necessarily championing gun control for safety, right? It's so that they can stay in power. And then nine 11 happened, and Shar Alad was actually sort of like a US ally during this time.

Syria actually helped fight Al-Qaeda. They worked closely with the CIA. I'm sure you've heard of the extraordinary rendition,

[00:13:00] Jordan Harbinger: is that the, I won't sugarcoat it. The kidnapping program where the CIA was like, that guy's a terrorist, we're gonna put a bag over his head and he's gonna pop up later in a place that doesn't have constitutional rights or where we can get away with it.

You're absolutely correct.

[00:13:14] Ryan McBeth: And so he put a bag over his head. You could take him to Guantanamo, but as soon as you do that, they have rights. But if you take him to a Syrian prison, those guys will do anything to get a confession or intel out of those guys.

[00:13:25] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that's, I wanna be clear if that's protecting us from terrorism, fine.

But it sounds pretty terrible and possibly like one of those things that we're gonna find out later was just a big mess and tons of innocent people got tortured to death in Syria.

[00:13:40] Ryan McBeth: Hey, Syria, there is no such thing as a nice Syrian present. In fact, when the revolution, now, we're skipping ahead a couple of years, but when this 10 day offensive happened that resulted in the fall of Syria.

There were people who believed that some of Assad's prisons actually had secret rooms inside of them, where prisoners were super duper locked away, and they actually brought in the white helmets, which was an organization that would help people out in the lebo who had been trapped under rubble. They brought those guys into try to search the prison for secret entrances where there might be secret prisons inside, and you, you can just imagine if this was the case.

I don't believe they actually found any secret areas of these prisons, but, uh, you can just imagine dying from hunger or thirst in a free Syria.

[00:14:27] Jordan Harbinger: Uh, that's awful. Yeah. Hopefully they don't find that stuff in five years. Hey, there were 300 people down here. We had no idea. You know who won't slaughter your whole family.

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[00:16:39] Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it's because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over@sixminutenetworking.com. I know networking is like a dirty word these days.

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Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course once again, it's all free. I don't need your credit card number. There's nothing for sale. It's over there@sixminutenetworking.com. Now, back to Ryan Macbeth. They went into, what is it, said Naya. It's called Prison. And there were kids in there that had been born in there probably because their mothers got ~raped~ by the guards.

It was so gross on so many levels, and they showed the footage and it's like people lived in there for how long? And it looks like a dirty shower, and that's the whole room. And you just sleep on the floor in the dark and it's just like horrifying. The conditions that you would see in a place like this, it's hell on Earth, and people spent decades in there.

I followed the Syrian Civil War subreddit. Somebody had posted videos and news of the guys that they were finding in these prisons were saying, oh, are you from Saddam Hussein's army? And it's, oh, I got news for you, man. That guy's been outta the game for a while. And one of the guys made a comment, what are these things that everybody keeps pointing to?

And they're talking about the phones. They don't realize that it's a phone with a touchscreen. It's like they've never seen this. They've never heard of this. They didn't know why rock fell. That's how long they've been away from other people and other sources of information and just probably other humans, because they would've gone, Hey, what's new?

Since you got thrown in here a week ago? Oh, Saddam Hussein is gone. No, they haven't talked to anybody for 12 years or however long it's been. 20 years. Alright, so Halide becomes president. He gets 97% of the vote. You got the Damascus Spring question mark. Congratulations, but not really gun control.

Extraordinary rendition. Okay, so by this point. We can see that Sada is a monster, right? He's definitely gassed his own people, right? He's killing all these dissidents. He's throwing people in prison. This is not the ophthalmologist that everybody had hoped for, who likes the internet and computers.

[00:18:56] Ryan McBeth: No, you're absolutely right.

And the gassing of people didn't come until a little bit later. Later in January of 2011, there was a fruit vendor in Tunisia who got his produce confiscated by the police because he couldn't afford a license or the policeman's bribe. So then he lights himself on fire. And this was the beginning of Arab Spring.

Now this is where you saw Libya fall. This is where you saw Mubarak in Egypt fall and protests in Syria start and people start demanding reforms. They demand the end of the state of emergency, which has been in place in one form or another since like 1963. Syrian Security forces, they respond with violence, and the Shar blames outsiders for the protests.

So we all immediately established sanctions against the Assad regime. I think it was in April of 2011, and the EU imposed a travel ban. Even Canada imposed the sanctions on Assad, the nicest people on earth. The US proposed UN sanctions and Russia, which has been an ally in Syria, and also they're on the security council.

They vetoed that resolution every single time. Sure. So now you got mass demonstrations and pretty soon armed militants start rising up and the country starts heading down the path to civil war. You have some army units to defect and they pop up on the side of the rebels. Now in the middle of this absolute mess, this organization called ISIS starts to appear in Syria.

If you think of a map of Syria, think of the boot chicken McNugget. All right, take that boot Chicken McNugget and turn it at 45 degrees with the boot part facing up. And that's

[00:20:39] Jordan Harbinger: kinda what cereal looks like. I just wanna pause and let people who are now just learning that there is a regular shape for each chicken McNugget that is uniform across all of them.

That has to sink in for a second because no one's gonna listen to the next thing you say until they're like, wait a minute. My whole life I've been eating chicken McNuggets and now I realize the shape is not random. That's right. Those are molded.

[00:21:00] Ryan McBeth: That's right. They have four shapes and it's

[00:21:01] Jordan Harbinger: like the boot, the bell, and I can't remember the other two shapes, but, but two shapes should be enough to get most people off.

Chicken McNuggets the most part. Anyway, continue. So

[00:21:13] Ryan McBeth: at the top right of that boot is the intersection or the border with Iraq. And so now you have this group called ISIS forming, kind of Northern Iraq and Northwestern Syria. And that whole area, it's a very strange area. It's a very lawless area. It's always been that way.

And usually those areas have had a strong man in charge. There'll be rebel groups pop up in those areas. There's not a lot to do. Not a lot of major cities, not a lot of industry. And so they manufacture rebellion and revolution. So that's where a lot of revolutions and a lot of bandits and these near dwells, they hang out in that area 'cause it's hard to get to and there's not a lot of industry there, so people don't really care.

It's funny that you just described ISIS as Nair dwells isis. It's Yes, quite. And by now Russia's kinda looking at the ISIS conflict. This is in 2015. And they're like, all right, you know what? We can go into Syria and we can farm XP by fighting isis. Okay. Seriously, that's literally what they're doing. They send aircraft, they send special forces, they send Wagner.

The mercenary group, Wagner, for people who don't know the mercenary group, Wagner, correct, and they start fighting ISIS and sometimes fighting the rebels as well. But the whole idea here is that, all right, if you're a Russian and you want to learn how to be a J tac, like a joint terminal air controller, call in bombs onto bad guys, you have essentially a big live fire range in northwestern Syria when you want to fight isis.

So it's a way literally to farm XP to get your special forces and get your terminal air controllers trained on how to drop bombs. It also allows your pilots to get training as well. During this fighting, the major fighting was around the Syrian city of Aleppo. This city is a major city. It's a major trade route.

The M four and M five highways run through Aleppo and it became like the focus of a lot of fighting between the rebels and the Assad government. And so the battle over Aleppo essentially rages from 2012 until 2016, and basically turns Aleppo into an Arab Stalin Broad and Asad started indiscriminately bombing.

Now he bombed to the point where they essentially kinda ran out of bombs. I dunno if you've heard of the term barrel bomb. That's the helicopter bomb, right? Yeah. They would take 55 gallon drums, stop 'em with explosives, push 'em out the door of a helicopter, and now it's a bomb. They're not very surgical.

They would push these out into civilian areas or onto what they thought were rebel forces. And with Russian help, they started to take back the city of Aleppo. This is essentially Russian close air support, and by 2016, government forces are in control of Aleppo and ISIS starts to collapse by April of 2017.

That's actually when we start seeing the use of chemical weapons, specifically in rebel controlled towns. And actually, in one case, Assad used SAR and gas against this one town, and in the Russians found out what he did and they thought we have to destroy any evidence. So Russia actually bombed the hospital.

Oh gosh. Wow. Okay. That's where people were going to be treated.

[00:24:40] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. It's interesting because it's like they had another option for getting him to stop using chemical weapons, but instead they were like, what we need to do is make sure that everybody who's been hit with this chemical weapon is dead and can't say anything.

[00:24:53] Ryan McBeth: Which it's a very Russian way of doing things it, because if you take a lung sample, you're still gonna find scarring. But when there's no lungs, can't argue that logic. Geez. It is a very Russian way of doing things. So since roughly 2022, the lines between the rebels and the Asad forests have been mostly stable.

Now we should talk about the Rebels and the Pro Asad people. On the Pro Asad side, of course you have Russia, right? Russia. They need that warm water port. It's a great way to refuel their ships when they're in the Mediterranean. It's a way to get supplies in when they're in the Mediterranean. It's also a part of the land bridge to Africa.

So Russia can make a refueling stop in Syria before they head on to some of their interests in Africa. Now, Iran, they supported Syria and Assad as well, mainly because they needed Syria to exist, because Syria was a road that went from Iran through Northern Iraq, through Syria and directly across the border into Lebanon.

So that's how weapons got to Hezbollah in Lebanon. So, and the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they used the war again to form xp to train on how to fight these bad guys and to train their militias on fighting bad guys. Hezbollah was a big supporter of Assad as well. I think they had about roughly 2000, roughly a brigade of, honest to God, genuine, honest to God, special forces.

These are genuine operators. Hezbollah special forces that were fighting in Syria on the side of the side. 'cause again, it was a way to train so that when they fought Israel, they would have all the training they needed.

[00:26:44] Jordan Harbinger: I have heard that a lot of people who are Hezbollah supporters were pretty pissed off about the fact that they were sent to Syria to kill civilians on behalf of Assad who kills tons of Muslims.

[00:26:57] Ryan McBeth: Yeah, I have not heard that. But I would not be surprised when you're a soldier and this is a training opportunity, go do what you're told to do. And I've said before, Hezbollah is the varsity team. Hamas, they're jv. Hezbollah is the varsity team. They are genuine, honest, to go soldiers with training programs, with pay, with benefits.

So if they're told to go, you go, that's right. And you get a free pager when you sign up. You get a pre pager and you sign up. Now, on the other side of that, the anti Asad forces, you essentially have three different groups. All right? You have the Islamist groups and HTS or Hayat al, which basically means like the organization for the liberation of the lavant, or Levant Liberation Committee, HTS, which is the organization that's ruling Syria right now.

That was one of the Islamist group factions, and they were an offshoot of Alqaeda, and then they backed away from Al-Qaeda. In fact, they even arrested

[00:27:54] Jordan Harbinger: Alqaeda members because that doesn't bode well. HTS is an offshoot of Al Qaeda and now runs Syria. Not something you wanna read or see.

[00:28:01] Ryan McBeth: It's not, although we can get to the fact that they don't seem to be as bad as we thought they were going to be.

Okay, good news ish. There is another group called, which is essentially like the guardians of the religious organization. They're another offshoot of Al-Qaeda, although those guys consider ISIS heretics. So like they mainly fought isis, but they also fought Assad. So that's one faction. You have your Islamist groups, you have another anti Assad faction, which are Kurdish groups.

And for the most part, the US supported these Kurdish groups. Now Kurds are Muslims as well. You had the SDF, which is the Syrian Democratic forces. It's the main US ally, and it's probably the largest group fighting. It had about a hundred thousand or so fighters. Unfortunately, this particular group is tied to another group called the PKK, which is a Kurdish militant movement that's in Southern Turkey and northern Iraq, and Turkey considers them terrorists.

So the SDF was fighting against Assad, but sometimes it would also fight against Islamic forces and sometimes it would fight against Turkish forces. And there was another unit called the YPG or People's Protection Unit. Which was like a component of the SDF as well. Those guys mainly fought the Turk cell.

Now the third type of group that is anti Assad are basically moderate opposition groups who just don't like Assad. So there's the Free Syrian Army, which is a bunch of rebel groups, including defectors from the government, so people in the army switch sides. Then you had the Syrian National Army, which you might be hearing a little bit about, is they were essentially a Turkish back coalition that was operating mostly in northern Syria, but the Syrian National Army or SNA mainly fought the Kurds.

Okay. So it is like Game of Thrones. It's a serious civil war.

[00:29:55] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, like we're having a, a little bit of a laugh, but it's a really serious subject with multiple parties fighting the government, but also fighting each other and just doing it in horrific ways. It's not like when a real national army says, look, we got all the manpower we need.

We have naval support, we have air support. We're just gonna cordon this off. This is like house to house. Let's burn this entire village down and kill everyone in it, and then we won't have to worry about it anymore. Kind of fighting.

[00:30:22] Ryan McBeth: It wasn't nice and everyone was fighting each other usually, and sometimes they would also fight Asad sports.

That kind of leads us to present day, and now that we're at present day, Hamas attacked Israel. Israel fought back, invaded Gaza, and then they turn around and they go north and they go after Hezbollah. And so Hezbollah starts pulling their fighters out Syria back into Lebanon. To start fighting the Israelis.

So now you are Bashar Asad, and you have one very reliable, very experienced brigade of special forces that is suddenly gone out of the fight. And one of the other issues that you saw in Assad's army is that he didn't have a particularly good army. It was an army of conscripts, somewhat professional officers, but by this point, the Syrian pound, it's running at a Rateably, 15,000 Syrian pounds for one US dollar.

So their economy collapsing. It's really tough to purchase goods from outside of the country with that. So you had some soldiers who were not getting paid very well. So they would actually pay a bribe to their commander to say, just mark on the list that I showed up. And then they would go work a civilian job or get their side hustle on.

So you have these units that are essentially ghost units. You have people who aren't very well motivated to fight. If they're even there at all. And since the army was so corrupt, you have officers taking payoffs. They're taking care of themselves, but they aren't necessarily watching the front lines. So that happens.

And then those troops move back to Lebanon, the ones from Hezbollah, and then the third thing happens, and that's President Trump gets elected. So now, if you are an organization and you want to take over Syria, you essentially have 50 or so days to take over all of Syria before a new US regime comes into power and might change the dynamics on the ground because President Trump has always been a wild card.

President Trump might fund the Kurdish forces more, or he might remove funding from the Kurdish forces. Either of those things could change the outcome on the ground, because if you are a part of an Islamic rebel group, you might think, all right, if the Kurdish forces don't get any more funding, then we should try to attack Assad now to weaken Assad because the Kurs aren't going to have as many weapons.

Or we get attack Asad and then turn north and attack the Kurds. Once we capture enough land as a buffer zone, or if the Kurds do get more funding from the us, now you're gonna have to compete with the Kurds because the Kurds are gonna start taking land. So I believe what happened is that the Islamic forces thought, you know what?

The peace treaty with between Hezbollah and Israel has just been signed. That means that Hezbollah is not gonna be back inside of Syria to cause trouble. We need to push as hard as we can to take Aleppo, and they did. If you take a look at the casualties that Assad's army sustained in defending Aleppo, it was essentially like maybe 200 dudes.

[00:33:57] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, they just cut and ran. I saw the videos. I saw dudes stripping down, literally stripping their uniform off and running away with like shorts on in a t-shirt because they didn't wanna be known as military. I assume their first stop was someone's house to get a decent set of clothes on so they could blend in with civilians and pretend that they were also running from this offensive.

[00:34:20] Ryan McBeth: One of the reasons why you see armies collapsed slowly and then really fast is that the average unit needs resupply every 36 hours or so. So who are the first soldiers who are going to leave? They're gonna be the supply people. They're in the rear. They have access to things like radio or internet or cell phone service.

They have a way to charge their stuff. If you're in a foxhole, you probably don't have a way to charge your cell phone. And so these guys start hearing like, Hey, HTS is attacking. And they start thinking like, you know what? I'm done. And so they leave and then the guys at the front line, they haven't been resupplied in 36 hours, 36 hours, turns into 40 hours, and that turns into 48 hours.

And now they go, you know what? We haven't eaten in two days. I'm leaving to go find food. And so that doesn't create a very defensible position, right when people start leaving 'cause they're looking for food. And as it just so happens, what is Aleppo? The intersection of Highway four and Highway five. So now you have a straight shot down that highway

[00:35:25] Jordan Harbinger: right toward Damascus.

Speaking of ISIS and Sharia Law now for a word from our sponsors, we'll be right back.

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Now, back to out of the loop, Syria with Ryan Macbeth. Aleppo is essentially. Isn't that kind of the New York of Syria, whereas Damascus is the Washington DC Is that fair?

[00:38:54] Ryan McBeth: Yeah, no, that's a fair comparison. Aleppo was a manufacturing

[00:38:58] Jordan Harbinger: hub, intellectual hub. Yes, you could say that. Okay. So they capture this big city, this main city, the main city that's not the capital.

And then they decide, let's roll to city of government, because if that's how they defended Aleppo, maybe Damascus, we could at least encircle it. And I think that was their initial plan. And it looks like since everybody just cut and ran, they just kept moving.

[00:39:18] Ryan McBeth: Absolutely correct. They just kept moving.

Took him about 10 days to finally secure the capitol. Geez, that is

[00:39:24] Jordan Harbinger: nuts. And like we said at the beginning of the show, Assad gets in one of his jets and flies to Moscow. And I think, didn't he have a fake press conference where he pretended to still be in the country, but he was already gone?

[00:39:34] Ryan McBeth: I actually don't recall seeing that, but that's a little Baghdad Bob right

[00:39:38] Jordan Harbinger: there.

That that could have been Fog of War stuff like Reddit Post says this, but truth says that, I don't know. I just remember hearing that he had a fake press conference where he was like, all right, we're dug in over here. And he's like, yeah, dug into my four seasons. Stay over here in Moscow eating caviar while you suckers.

Hopefully shoot your way out. It was just nuts. Okay, so they get rid of Assad, but what does this mean for the world? Who is in charge of Syria right now? Can you even answer this question?

[00:40:05] Ryan McBeth: Yeah, that's actually a pretty darn good question. Right now it seems like the de facto leader of Syria is Hamed Alani, who was the head of H-T-S-H-T-S, would nominally be in charge.

Alani kind of an interesting dude. Alani actually means Golan. So AL'S family was originally from the Golan Heights of Syria. When Israel invaded during, uh, the 1967 war, his family fled. Eventually they ended up in Saudi Arabia. So technically Alani isn't even Syrian. He's from Saudi Arabia. I guess he was ethnically Syrian, but he was born in Saudi Arabia.

So eventually Alani returns to Syria and decides I'm gonna become a medical doctor. He does that for a while. When the US invades Iraq, he decides that he's gonna go in Jihad.

[00:41:01] Jordan Harbinger: Well, yeah, he was gonna say, you know what happens when a Syrian studies medicine abroad and comes back to Syria? Nothing good, nothing good, nothing good,

[00:41:08] Ryan McBeth: right?

So, uh, he decides he's gonna go Jihad and he joins Al-Qaeda. He ends up in Iraq and he starts fighting US forces. Eventually we capture him, and this was in 2006 and we held this guy until 2011, and he was released. Supposedly he might've joined isis, but maybe not. And then he swore off Al-Qaeda. But he essentially at that time when the US invaded Iraq, Iraq was easy to get to and it was like Woodstock.

So if you were a dude who wanted to Jihad, who wanted to like show in front of your friends, like I'm a real man, I went and fought the Americans, you had two choices, right? You can go to Iraq, you can go to Afghanistan, Afghanistan's a one-way trip, right? Even the Afghans don't want you there. From what I understand, there were Chein who were ethnically Muslim Russians who tried to go to Afghanistan to teach the Taliban sniper tactics, and the Taliban killed them.

Like, you know, we don't want you Eater, but if you go to Iraq to fight, it's a bus ride away. You get air conditioning, right? You get familiar food. You can fight. And then when you're done fighting, you go back to college and show all your friends, Hey, I'm the man. It was like Woodstock, Iraq was like Woodstock for all the Jihadists, like everyone wanted to be there, or at least wanted to say they were there.

So this dude comes back and after a certain set of circumstances, he forms HTS, and they were kind of in Al-Qaeda then. They kinda weren't anymore. In some cases, they fought isis and then this guy starts fighting Syrian loyalists. And right now it seems like he is in control of the country and all of the things that people thought would go wrong, haven't gone wrong yet, and might not.

This guy is still on the Terror watch list. He was in an American prison for six years. Was it roughly 2006? Five years? Yeah. 2006, 2011. He was in American prison, so he was on our radar screen. He was a known affiliate of Al-Qaeda, which kind of puts you on the naughty list. But if you wanna get technical, Nelson Mandela was a terrorist, and he was invited to the White House when Nelson Mandela was part of the African National Congress.

The African National Congress was this communist organization that also believed in kinetic action. They tried the peaceful route that didn't work, so he actually went and got trained in small arms and insurgent tactics, I believe in Cuba. So Nelson Mandela was a terrorist before he was the president of South Africa.

In fact, I believe he was on America's terrorist watch list, I wanna say, until 2008.

[00:43:56] Jordan Harbinger: A friend of mine who has been a guest on this show, Bradley Stein, S-T-E-Y-N, if people wanna search for him, he was recruited by the Apartheid government to go undercover in the communist movement. Went to Angola, got trained.

I. Flipped sides because he was like, oh, act maybe we're the baddies white supremacists. And then he ended up uncovering an assassination plot against Nelson Mandela. His super interesting story, not that there weren't a zillion assassination plots against Nelson Mandela, but he uncovered one of them and ended up being his bodyguard for a while, which is pretty cool.

So

[00:44:31] Ryan McBeth: Mandela believed in violence at one point, so maybe Gelani has given that up. Maybe he's not a terrorist anymore. I guess people can change. And you look at Mandela, he was a terrorist. He became president of South Africa. Some of the things like Sharia law, it doesn't look like that has been implemented or that the HHTS is interested in either factional infighting or they're interested in implementing Sharia law that might come later.

Right now, it seems like their main issue is getting the power back on. I've talked with people from Syria who said, honestly, I don't care if we're Islamic. I don't care if we're Democratic. I just want the power back on for more than two hours.

[00:45:19] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Make it so that I can walk down the road without getting shot at by Bandits or isis.

Yeah. Look, he's got his work cut out for him to pacify Syria and make it a civilized place again after all of this war. Yeah. Maybe he'll call him the rhetoric a little bit. Wasn't it him who said, I want a peaceful coexistence with Israel? That is not something that Islamic terrorists generally put in the news.

[00:45:41] Ryan McBeth: It's not, and one of the things Israel did, I understand why they did it. Israel bombed quite a few loyalist Aircraft Depots, supply depots. In a way, it's a shame they did that because if I was the US government, I would be more than happy to hand the Syrian government some money and say, let's take these jets and get 'em over to Ukraine.

They know how to use 'em. Assuming those jets are any condition to fly. Maybe they use 'em for parts. But, uh, he was a little annoyed that his Israel did that because that is now free Syrian property, and I think Israel did it because the gloves have come off. They're not letting anything bad happen essentially ever again.

[00:46:20] Jordan Harbinger: I think they just don't want to not do it and then find that they're now being used to run bombing raids towards Israel and they have to shoot 'em outta the sky. I'm not trying to excuse it, but that's probably the logic here. Oh, there's chemical weapons. Should we let those go into HT S'S hands and hope for the best or destroy them right now and not have to worry about it anymore?

Okay, I get it. It's understandable,

[00:46:40] Ryan McBeth: right? But it, it seems like HTS, they haven't tried to fight the Kurds, which is good. Now what's interesting is when you look at the major winners here. The biggest winner is Syria, but the second biggest winner is actually Turkey, because Turkey kind of helped make this happen through funding militias, funding things like the Free Syrian Army, a Syrian national army.

So Turkey kind of made this happen. So Erdogan is like little finger and Game of Thrones, right? He has all of these pieces moving, all of these strings that he can pull. And with his funding, with his help, he managed to take a dictator down in Syria and he might have a lot of influence over how the new government is formed.

Supposedly, they're not gonna try to form a new government or run a new constitution for three or four years, I believe the reason behind that is if they try to do that right now, there's gonna be all these little factions in political parties that are gonna try to gain power for power's sake. They hold off for a couple of years and actually write their constitution correctly and and get the services back on and figure out what people actually want out of government, then you might end up with a more stable government instead of a crazy constitution like Lebanon has, which always causes friction.

[00:48:02] Jordan Harbinger: So what does this mean in conclusion here? 'cause this is super confusing for a lot of people. Hopefully we've cleared up a lot of the players and what's going on here now that Assad is gone, but what does it mean for the world Israel? Okay, they've got a neighbor that is not Assad, which were they better off with Assad who was secular and maybe the devil, you know?

Now they've got HTS next door, the devil you don't know. But that says we want peaceful coexistence with Israel, which is okay, status quo slash better than Assad. But what about the US Russia, China, the Middle East? Do you know all the other neighbors that are definitely relevant that people never talk about?

[00:48:37] Ryan McBeth: So major losers here are Russia. From what I understand, Russia evacuated some bases, but I believe they still have forces at one port and one airfield. Now, Russia is the major loser here. They may have actually evacuated a good number of troops in aircraft from that region, and that makes it very hard for Russia to refuel planes on the way to Africa or to refuel ships in the Mediterranean.

That's kind of, it's bad for Russia in one way, but it's good in another because if you have a squadron of aircraft sitting in Syria, that's one less squadron that could fight in Ukraine. In Ukraine. So in some ways, like one headache has gone away for Russia and they can just concentrate in Ukraine.

Russia's definitely a loser. Now any nation is allowed to make any sort of pact they want with another nation. One thing Syria could do is allow these Russian bases to stay, come up with a new lease agreement. Then they get hard currency for whatever the ruble is worth. They get hard currency, maybe oil from Russia in exchange for lease.

So that is one thing they could do. Another loser, Syria does have its own oil, but I can only imagine what the royal industry is like now. One of their major industries

[00:49:55] Jordan Harbinger: was illegal drugs. CAPTA gun. Yeah. We did a whole episode on CAPTA gun. People should will link to it in the show notes. Fascinating.

Syria

[00:50:03] Ryan McBeth: was making $5 billion a year off CAPTA gun 'cause they could make it for a couple of pennies, sell it for 20 bucks a tablet. And a lot of jihadist spiders were on this stuff. Supposedly Hamas was on, might have been CAPTA Gun, might have been some other amphetamine when they actually attacked Israel on October 7th.

[00:50:21] Jordan Harbinger: If you haven't heard of Capta Gun, don't worry. I did a whole show about it. Again, it's linked in the show notes. The reason you haven't heard about it is we have better stuff here in the United States, and I put that in air quotes of course. But it's basically like crappy Adderall,

[00:50:34] Ryan McBeth: I suppose. Yeah.

[00:50:35] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, he wouldn't do it if you had access to Adderall, cocaine, meth, whatever.

Speed. 'cause my question is, how come we don't have a ton of it here if it's so cheap and easy to make? And the answer is, 'cause we have other stuff that's better. That's cheap and easy to make. Wamp wmp. Yeah. But the busts with capta gun are mind blowing. They'll find like $200 million worth of tabs in a shipment of washing machines or something that goes to Dubai.

It's just nuts.

[00:51:00] Ryan McBeth: Yeah. Another major loser I ran, essentially they've lost their way to get weapons over to Hezbollah. That's a big deal. And I ran, they didn't try to shore up the saw regime after they saw it falling, because like they had bigger problems. They just got a bloody nose from Israel attacking them.

Either with the air launched ballistic missiles, perhaps the F 35 we're still not sure if the F 35 was used in that attack. And I ran a couple of months ago. So right now Iran is looking at their air defenses and going, you know what? We can put money toward helping Hezbollah, or we could put money toward our own air defenses.

Where do we want our money to go? It's probably not gonna be Hezbollah because that was extremely embarrassing for Iran.

[00:51:46] Jordan Harbinger: That attack on Iran. That was when the Ayatollahs, I always separate the Ayatollahs from the people of Iran who are awesome and have some of the best food. The Ayatollahs, they talked a bunch of smack and then they were immediately got their entire country's worth of air defenses knocked out by Israel in two days.

[00:52:00] Ryan McBeth: Not only their air defenses, but also planetary mixers, which are essentially mixers for rocket fuel. That was one of Israel's major targets, so it's gonna take at least a year or around to order more mixes, most likely from China, and get those things installed so they're not gonna be able to build any rockets for at least a year.

[00:52:21] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, poor Hezbollah. No toys, man. No weapons, no rockets, Hamas, whatever's left of 'em. No more rockets for them than either they get all that stuff from Iran, correct.

[00:52:30] Ryan McBeth: Yeah. Mostly smuggled across the border from Egypt. Yeah. Some stolen. Yeah, for the most part, yes. From ira. So what does it mean for the us? The US has always supported the Kurds, so I gotta tell you, the scary part is, I've often said this, I, if you think it's sucks to be an enemy of the us, wait until you're an hour.

I'm surprised the Kurds even talk to us anymore.

[00:52:53] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. We have screwed them over so many times. The only reason that they haven't lost our number is because they don't have that many options.

[00:53:01] Ryan McBeth: That's correct. And so for the us, well, all right, we might give less money to the Kurds. You might see a stable Syria.

There'll be fewer weapons trafficked from Iran into Lebanon for Hezbollah use. So it's a net wind for the us. But how Syria is gonna play out is up in the air. We don't really know which direction they're going to go in, although it looks like they might be going into a moderate direction, but. For the most part, the one thing that should concern us is what's going to happen to the Kurds.

'cause we have been supporting them. But with this new administration might say, okay, well you got your free country.

[00:53:40] Jordan Harbinger: Good luck, man. What a mess. I assume there's still light skirmishes are fighting happening somewhere in Syria? I haven't really heard much about it.

[00:53:49] Ryan McBeth: It seems like the rebel groups have pretty much stopped shooting at each other.

This includes the kds. And that's a good thing. If these factions can just get along and form one Democratic government in s sha law, that would be the best

[00:54:04] Jordan Harbinger: possible outcome. That would be absolutely incredible. I would love to see Syria. My friend went and he said it was just incredible. He was like, the people are great, the food is great.

And of course he was a Kiwi from New Zealand and he's like, look, I don't mean to be dark, but everything is really cheap right now because it's a little bit of a crappy way to to describe things. He was a little more tactful than I was just now. But one of the things that he did is he went around to a lot of people and bought their family heirlooms from them and said, if you want this back, here's my phone number and address, and I will give it back to your family in 10 years or whatever if you want to.

And he put the price paid for it. He has like a museum ish thing in his house in New Zealand full of all this old Syrian stuff. And he's like, yeah, I'm just expecting these people to call me back and be like, can I have my great-grandfather's backgammon set that he made? Out of marble or pearl or whatever, and he'll be like, yeah, 50 bucks.

That's what I gave your dad for it. Here you go. 'cause these people needed money to escape anyway. He said it was just the most incredible country, one of the most incredible countries he's been to besides Yemen. Another place that none of us are going to in the next 20 years. I don't know, man. You wanna go to Syria once this thing dies down.

Are you a traveler?

[00:55:14] Ryan McBeth: I am a traveler. I've been to that area before. I have been to Israel. I have been to Iraq, but not as a tourist.

[00:55:20] Jordan Harbinger: No, I didn't go as a tourist. Now it might be more fun when you can go as a tourist instead of when you're worried about people shooting at you.

[00:55:26] Ryan McBeth: Yeah. Considering I have a job doing contracting for the government, I have to inform my security manager every time I travel.

They probably won't like that one too much.

[00:55:36] Jordan Harbinger: I wanna go to Iran, Syria, and Yemen, and I might die of old age before I get a chance to do it. Syria though looking a little more promising than the other two so far.

[00:55:45] Ryan McBeth: I hope so. I really do. These people have suffered a lot and I think that they want to create.

As close to a democracy as they can get in that region of the world.

[00:55:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, more power to him. Ryan Macbeth, thank you so much for coming on and explaining this very complicated set of moving parts in Syria. This episode is like juggling 20 different objects at the same time. This is just a really crazy amount of things to keep in your head.

I can only imagine what it's like if you're actually in Syria trying to deal with all this as well. It's just a complete cluster that frankly could have been a lot worse than it ended now. I mean, look, the Civil War was terrible. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is we could have had HTS take over and turn this place into something terrible.

We could have had it turn into 10 more years of civil war. Maybe it's too early to say, but so far it looks like that's not happening, which is just a miracle. If there's any positive news coming outta Syria these days, it's this.

[00:56:42] Ryan McBeth: Absolutely, and thank you so much for having me on. I believe this is my fourth time, so the fifth time, do I get a.

Bathrobe like in Saturday Night Live.

[00:56:49] Jordan Harbinger: That's right. We'll have a bathrobe made for you. Yeah, a slightly too small bathrobe that you have to wear on appearance. Number six. Thank you so much for inviting me up. Thanks Ryan. You're about to hear a trailer for our interview with Bill Brower. He was one of the first investors in Russia after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

And became a thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin, who to this day has him looking over his shoulder after he uncovered a massive fraud inside the Russian government. This is one of our most popular episodes, so if you haven't heard that yet, you'll wanna check that out.

[00:57:21] JHS Clip: Making 10 times your money is the financial equivalent of smoking crack cocaine.

And once you do it once, you just wanna repeat it over and over and over and over again. It was completely, absolutely wild west chaos, gold rush type of situation. The companies were run by these oligarchs and these oligarchs said, well, we might as well just cheat everybody on everything. And so while I was sitting there down 90%, they were gonna steal my last 10 cents on the dollar.

I took a decision, which nobody had ever taken before, which was to take on one of the oligarchs I did. I fought back big time, and I ended up with 15 bodyguards. There was a lead car, a lag car, a side car, three arm guys in my car. When we got close to the home, they would go and scout the rooftops for snipers.

They would look for bombs under the cars and secure the stairwells, and then escort me into the apartment. And then I had two guys with automatic weapons sitting in my living room. It was very, very, uh, intense, very scary. And after that, I hired a young lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky to help me investigate it.

Sergei and I exposed. Lose the crime. The same people who Sergey testified against, arrested him and then tortured him to try to get him to withdraw his testimony. And they thought, you know, here's a guy. He buys his Starbucks in the morning. He wears a blue suit and a white shirt and a red tie, and he works in the tax practice of an American law firm.

He'll buckle in a week, and it turns out that they got him wrong completely. He's the most principled guy in the world. He was really a man of steel. On the morning of November 17th at 7:45 AM I got the call from Sergei's lawyer and it was the most horrifying, life-changing, soul destroying news that I could have ever gotten.

[00:59:05] Jordan Harbinger: And if you wanna hear more about how Bill Browder took on one of the most powerful men in the world, Vladimir Putin. And continues to fight for change. Check out episode three of the Jordan Harbinger Show. All things Ryan Macbeth will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals.

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