Brian Carter
speaker
98 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Brian Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
But as the position unravels, I expect we'll see more and more Russian withdrawals from Syria.
I think if you asked me that question on Monday, I would have said, you know, I think the Rebels have had a lot of success. HTS has had a lot of success, but it's pretty unlikely. Today, I think it's greater than 50% and it's really getting higher every hour. The complete collapse of regime forces has been astonishing.
Personally, I've compared it to the way that the Afghan National Army began to collapse in 2021 and the ramifications of that. So I really think that he is in danger. And one of the key pieces that we're looking at right now is whether or not home city will fall here in the coming days.
Yeah, so Holmes, in my view, is probably second only to Damascus. Holmes is very important because if the opposition take Holmes, it cuts off Assad from that home country I was talking about, that western coast. So once he's cut off there, he is in very dire straits.
What is going on in Syria right now is a byproduct of what we have seen successive administrations do for the past going on 15 years. This isn't an Obama problem, a Trump problem, or a Biden problem. It's really all of them. The U.S. policy in Syria, especially since after the territorial defeat of ISIS, has been, in air quotes, defeat ISIS.
But we haven't actually been doing the things to defeat ISIS. We've been containing ISIS. And so I think we've looked at this conflict for so long as a frozen conflict and we're saying, okay, well, you know, the Assad regime has practically won and these borders aren't gonna change anytime soon and it'll just keep chugging along like this. But, you know, this situation just goes to show
you can't really freeze or manage a conflict that runs the risk of being surprised in this way. And, you know, I talked a little bit at the beginning of the program about how ISIS is is strengthening in some of these regime held areas. Well, U.S. Central Command and policymakers weren't willing to strike in those areas very often to really get at ISIS there.
So now you have a problem where ISIS knew it could be interfered with the regime, but the regime is far less effective than the United States and the SDF. And so it strengthened there. And now we got surprised. And I think we're going to have to really do some hard thinking about what our policy objectives are in Iraq and Syria going forward.
especially as it relates to ISIS, that if you look at Iraq, we're saying, oh, we're going to withdraw in 2026. Do you really want to withdraw in 2026 now, having seen what's happening in Syria? So I think this policy of, oh, we can just manage and keep chugging along is really a failed policy. And it was the easy policy to take, but it was the wrong one.
Yeah, sure. So it's not entirely clear to me why they chose to go now. I have a feeling that they probably had some sense that the regime around the Aleppo area was hollowing out and they thought they might have an opportunity to do this. I don't think they thought they would be as successful as they were.
The initial objectives of the campaign, insofar as I understand, was actually to push the regime a little further away from the HTS-controlled zone in northwestern Syria, centered around Idlib province, and push back regime artillery to prevent the regime from shelling civilian areas. Now, once the regime kind of just collapsed, they took advantage of that.
They exploited that situation, HTS did, capturing Aleppo and then driving towards Hama and capturing Hama. And now they're well on their way to Homs. So, you know, I think it started as kind of like a small scale, a relatively small scale campaign, of course, in a Syria that's had static lines of control for so many years, it would have been a big deal.
But it really exploited it and it's become something much larger, much quicker than anybody could have expected. Do we have any real credible or accurate sense of troop strength for the rebels? No, not to my knowledge, at least. The rebel coalition was forged by HTS over several years, and they had basically put together a conglomeration of different rebel groups.
And I'm not exactly sure the exact size of those forces. How well armed are they? They're pretty well-armed. They've been doing some things in recent years to kind of prepare for something like this. So, for example, they established a night fighting unit that's really been giving the Syrian Arab Army a lot of trouble.
So, fighters, I believe, they're equipped with night vision and that sort of equipment. They also have their own drone manufacturing capabilities, which is really impressive. They also have done some soft things. And what I mean by soft things is things like training. How can you... coordinate between these different rebel bodies? How do we professionalize our force?
So for example, HTS founded a sort of like a war college in their controlled areas that began producing more professional military officers. And I think that's really played a role in this offensive.
Coordination that's going on between HTS and SDF is very – very tactical in nature and very designed around making safe routes for evacuation and stuff like that. For example, when HTS took Aleppo, they created a safe zone for the SDF to begin evacuating their fighters from Aleppo.
In fact, one of the things HTS did was they tried to prevent some of the more, I'll say, thuggish and more militantly Salafi jihadi factions backed by Turkey from interfering with the SDF's evacuation.
Showing 81–98 of 98 · page 5 of 5
← Previous