Atlantic writer Robert Worth talks about Syria's transitional president, Ahmed al-Sharaa. He was the founder of the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, but is now advocating unity and inclusion. Syria borders Iraq, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, so what happens in Syria impacts the whole region. We'll also talk with Worth about the Houthis in Yemen, and the Trump administration group chat that accidentally included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. The unintentional inclusion of journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in a messaging app group chat of U.S. national security leaders outlining U.S. plans to attack the Houthis in Yemen has certainly increased awareness of who the Houthis are. I realize that is not the main takeaway of this story, but it's kind of where my guest Robert Wirth fits in.
He has been reporting on the Houthis for over a decade, most recently in The Atlantic, the same publication where Jeffrey Goldberg serves as editor-in-chief. Before Goldberg revealed his inclusion in the chat, we invited Robert Wirth to talk about his new article on The Atlantic, which is about Syria's new leader, Ahmed al-Sharah. Sharah is something of a wild card.
Maybe he'll bring unity and stability to Syria, which he says is his goal. But he's a former jihadist and founded the Syrian branch of the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda. Shira led the attacks that overthrew the brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and he's now serving as the transitional president of Syria.
He says he wants to maintain peace, create unity and inclusion, and prevent revenge killings. Considering the ongoing revenge killings, the conflicts between militia groups, and the destruction of 14 years of civil war, this is going to be a very hard job to do. Wirth's article is titled, Can One Man Hold Syria Together?
A Former Jihadist Has Remade Himself in a Bid to Remake a Scarred and Divided Country." Robert Worth is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and has spent more than two decades writing about the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Robert Wirth, welcome to Fresh Air.
And I want to say before we start, we are recording less than an hour after the transcript was released by Jeffrey Goldberg of the entire chat that he was mistakenly included in. So what's your reaction to this Goldberg story? Not to the transcript, but to his inclusion in this and what that says.
Well, it was staggering. I mean, journalists like me use Signal all the time to communicate with our sources and, for that matter, with friends. But I never imagined that a group of top government officials in the United States would just put together a chat like this in the same way that I do with friends and communicate the most sensitive.
I mean, they, you know, the administration has denied that it was classified, but that's a term of art that's subject to manipulation. The president can classify and declassify communiques as he likes. And the notion that they would put this incredibly sensitive information before the actual attack onto a chat like this and not even notice that someone else was on there was just beyond belief.
Part of the transcript that Goldberg did initially released has J.D. Vance, vice president, saying, I just hate bailing out the Europeans again. And Pete Hexeth, secretary of defense, responds, I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It's pathetic, with pathetic in capital letters.
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