David Daoud
speaker
530 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 15 Aug
David Daoud’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Because look, the Alawites are not properly Muslim in their eyes. If anything, they are infidels who have the choice of conversion or death. And if these people are that ideological, is this their ability, making them taking the chance to hit at the so-called infidels? The question remains whether, again, Ahmad al-Sharaq gave the order. If these orders came from top down, he's denying it.
He's claiming there's going to be punishment. Again, it's hard to tell if this is some kind of post facto covering of one's rear end by Ahmad al-Sharaq or if he genuinely, you know, if this is something that just got out of hand and he's trying to put a lid on it.
I mean, look, HTS themselves are not jihadists, right? So they're all kind of a collection of jihadists. It really depends on how much he can get them to accept this new reality in Syria.
If, and again, this is a big if, if we take him at face value that he has changed, that he wants to be the leader and president of all Syrians to usher in a new civil state in Syria, the statements he's made since taking power, How these people signed up to fight for different reasons, how much can he get them on board with this new project called post-revolutionary Syria remains a question.
Like you noted, they're all there for different reasons. I think if he can offer them different incentives or maybe if he's trying to offer them different incentives to bring them in line, kind of a carrot and a stick.
There was talk, for example, of the foreign fighters, the Uyghurs, the Chechens, of offering them Syrian citizenship for having fought on behalf of Syria, that they would lay down their arms and integrate into Syrian society. Is that something that they would accept? I don't know.
Would they accept the very notion of having fought what, in their mind, it could have been a religious war, now transitioning to a post-revolutionary state building exercised Again, those are question marks. I don't know what you could offer someone who is that much of an ideologue to say, we're laying down the weapons. The holy war is over.
Now we get down to the nitty gritty, mundane, banal business of state building. And that state will include people that... have religious beliefs that you don't like and who may be outside of the ambit of acceptability according to Islamic law. And that just has to be the case. So it depends on whether he can mobilize his carrots and sticks properly against these groups to get them in line.
On paper, it's going well. If it succeeds, it's critical because you have foreign interests. You have the Turks who have a problem with the SDF. This gives Turkey less reason to intervene in Syria, at least on that angle. The SDF, while it has been allied with the United States for some time,
has kind of gone back and forth between alliances with the Assad regime, kind of playing footsie, if you will, with the Iranians. So this could kind of take an excuse away from the Iranians or a foothold for the Iranians if the Kurds or the SDF properly consolidates under Damascus' control for a foothold for the Iranians taken away.
The Israelis have also talked about protecting the Kurds to a lesser degree. The main focus from the Israeli side is the Druze. So this, again, this prevents a lot of foreign intervention and helps a critical part of this consolidation process.
It moves forward a critical part of this consolidation process, again, with the caveat, if it holds, you can put a lot of things on paper, it doesn't mean in five years or two years or even less that this won't fall apart. Right.
As of yesterday, there are negotiation committees, I think three in total that are meant to settle outstanding issues between Lebanon and Israel, namely 13 border points along the land border. Now, there's no official internationally recognized border between Lebanon and Israel. There's what's called the blue line that was delineated after the Israelis withdrew from Lebanon in May of 2000.
And the Lebanese refused to certify that, saying that Israel continued to retain what they alleged was occupied Lebanese land in Shuba Hills and the Shuba farms and so on and so forth. After 2006, additional points were added to that, the northern part of the village of Bajar, which the Lebanese claim is their own. So a total of 13 points. They're not big points.
I mean, they're probably the size, some of these places are the size of my table. So this is part of the outstanding issues. There are also the five positions that the Israelis have retained in South Lebanon that after the February 18th extended withdrawal date for the Israeli forces after the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah. So, these are the issues that are about to be deleted.
Now, there's talk of normalization or that this will be a platform for normalization, at least unnamed sources close to the prime minister's bureau in Israel. According to Channel 12 News, Israeli Channel 12 News has said that this will be a platform for normalization. There's been no confirmation or official denial from the Lebanese side.
Al Mayadeen, which is a pro-Hezbollah outlet and which has an interest in denying such things, again, based on unnamed sources, said that this is absolutely false, that these committees would be dealing with technical issues alone rather than with more substantive issues like normalization. To me, again, even though I'm skeptical of anything that comes out of a Mayadeen,
Again, they don't have an interest in Israeli-Lebanese normalization moving forward for obvious reasons. It would really put Hezbollah in more of a corner than it is now. But all this talk reminds me of the lead up to the October 2022 maritime border negotiations between Israel and Lebanon, where because of an off-the-cuff remark by former President Michelin, no relation to the current president,
There was all this talk that this would be the stepping stone to including Lebanon in the Abraham Accords. Then the Lebanese denied it. And as we saw, this was really just a resolution of technical matters.
So, the significant factor is the drubbing that Hezbollah took at the hands of Israel in the recent conflict. Now, Hezbollah is not the only impediment to Lebanese-Israeli peace or Lebanese-Israeli normalization, but it is a significant impediment.
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