Ben Shapiro reacts to the breaking news of Bashar al-Assad’s regime being forced out of Syria—With terrorist rebels, and a region still plagued by risk and uncertainty, the situation is far from simple. Ben unpacks the power vacuum left behind, what this means for Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia. Sponsored by PDS Debt - PDS Debt is offering a free debt analysis. It only takes thirty seconds. Get yours at https://PDSDebt.com/reacts.
Chapter 1: What happened to Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria?
Folks, so we're here to talk about what just happened. Bashar al-Assad, the Assad regime in Syria, is gone. And chaos is about to break loose. We're going to talk about the upsides and the downsides. In this, Ben reacts first. Your reminder that this is the final day of our 50% off sale over at Daily Wire. Daily Wire Plus, 50% off, but it ends today. It's our best deal of the year.
When it's gone, it is gone for good. With Daily Wire Plus, you stay on top of breaking news. You get the truth behind the headlines, the facts others refuse to cover. Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe right now. Do not wait. This deal ends today. All right, so here's your actual update. On the ground right now, Bashar Assad is out. He apparently is already in Russia.
Bashar Assad has been the ruler with an iron fist of Syria for the last 24 years. He, of course, follows in the footsteps of his father, Hafez al-Assad. And the Assad family has been in charge of Syria for the last 50 years or so. Now, Syria was always a sort of bizarre creation.
Chapter 2: What is the historical context of Syria's leadership?
of the Sykes-Picot arrangement that emerged from the West, from France and Britain particularly, after World War I. And it's always been a bit of a mess. It has been particularly a mess given the number of different ethnic and religious groups inside Syria. So Syria has within it a large area that is controlled by the Kurds. It has a large area that is controlled by Shia.
It has a large area that is controlled by Sunni. It has Druze. It has Christians. It has all sorts of people who are living in this gigantic area. Geographically, Syria is located to the west of Iraq. It is located to the east of Lebanon and to the northeast of Israel. And Turkey is to its north.
Chapter 3: How have ethnic and religious groups influenced Syria's conflict?
Okay, so if you can sort of imagine all of that, that means that pretty much all of those forces are having some impact inside Syria. Now, Syria's civil war has been ongoing since 2011. And it has essentially pitted the Assad regime, which is backed by Iran and Russia,
on the one hand, against Sunni Islamic militants, terrorists, many associated with ISIS or Al-Qaeda, and then some other sort of hodgepodge rebel groups who are Sunni in origin, some Kurds as well, who are involved in this rebellion against the Assad regime. And those were backed predominantly by Turkey, not the Kurds.
The Kurds, as we'll see, are actually the rivals of Turkey, and Turkey has been using the Hassan Syria in order to launch its own incursions into the border regions of Syria in order to ethnically cleanse and move away the Kurds. So as we say, this entire state is a basket case. It's been a basket case for a long time.
But because Bashar Assad's regime was held up chiefly by Iran and by Russia, because it was used as a thoroughfare by Iran to smuggle arms into Lebanon, to Hezbollah, what that meant is that as Iran weakened and as Russia weakened, so too did the Assad regime. That's the real story of what's happening today and what's happened over the past few weeks. What changed?
Because the civil war has been raging at a fairly high level for the last decade and a half, over 300,000 people dead, over 12 million refugees. You remember, of course, the very famous pictures of toddlers watching up on the beaches of the Mediterranean who are trying to escape from Syria to get to Europe, for example. So what exactly happened that changed everything?
The answer is that Israel completely shellacked Hezbollah. Hezbollah is the Iranian-controlled proxy group in Lebanon. As we mentioned, think of the geography. Lebanon is to the north of Israel and it is to the west of Syria. And so Iran, via Iraq, had this entire Shia crescent that it was controlling territorially that extended from Iran through Iraq, through Syria, into Lebanon.
And then the kind of tip of the crescent went all the way down into the Gaza Strip. And of course, there are other Iran-connected forces in places like Yemen with the Houthis. Okay, but the predominant territorially integrous, the sort of unified area that was controlled by Shia, went from Iran all the way to the Mediterranean into Lebanon.
So when Israel decided it was gonna take out Hezbollah, because Hezbollah had fired some eight to 10,000 rockets at Israel in solidarity with Hamas over the course of the last year, when Israel completely destroyed Hezbollah, and that's really what happened here. Israel destroyed Hezbollah's capacity to make war. They destroyed their long range weaponry. They destroyed their short range weaponry.
They destroyed their capacity to even ship things into the south of Lebanon. They didn't just do that. They were also interdicting all sorts of material that was being sent from Iran through Syria and into Lebanon.
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Chapter 4: What role did Hezbollah play in supporting Assad?
Chapter 5: How has Israel's military action impacted Hezbollah and Assad?
And he attempted to play himself off as less of a terrorist, more of a moderate. He was apparently only going to focus in on situationally improving the lives of the people in his area. This, by the way, did involve significant human rights abuses against, for example, Christians. Again, there are no good guys here. Bashar al-Assad, really bad guy. Jelani, really bad guy.
All these other terrorist groups, really bad. There are some people on the ground who presumably aren't as bad. That'd be, you would imagine the Druze, the Kurds, but those are not the main forces that we're talking about right now. So according to the New York Times, al-Jilani is now attempting to position himself as a sort of moderate. He was running a place called Idlib,
which is in sort of the northwest of Syria. And then he kind of swept down across the rest of Syria and took over Damascus yesterday and today. In Idlib, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has espoused a government guided by conservative and at times hardline Sunni Islamist ideology. So basically similar to the Taliban, sort of.
Since the rebel offensive began, however, al-Jilani has sought to reassure minority communities from other sects and religions. These are the kinds of words that were being said, as you recall, by the Taliban before the United States pulled out of Afghanistan in the first place. So is this going to be a perfect situation? Of course not. There are no perfect situations here.
There are no perfect situations. What does it mean? I'll tell you what it means in one second for kind of all the players involved because there's, as always in the Middle East, some uptides with Assad being gone and some significant downsides with Assad being gone. There are not a lot of wonderful players in the Middle East. Get to that in a moment. First, no one wants to think about debt.
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Start planning today. Get a free debt analysis right now at pdsdebt.com. It only takes 30 seconds. That's PDS. D-E-B-T dot com slash react. P-D-S debt dot com slash react. Okay, so that is the situation on the ground right now. So what does that mean? Okay, well, what it means for Christians is a much more fraught existence. It was already pretty fraught in Syria.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of Russia's involvement in Syria?
All this pretend that Bashar al-Assad was wonderful to Christians, that is not true. Okay, there were significant human right predations against Christians on the ground, not only in the areas controlled by Sunni terrorists, but also in the areas that were controlled by Shia terrorists. Syria is about 10% Christian. Okay, so is it about to get worse?
It definitely could, which would, of course, be a terrible thing. And then you have the question of what Bashar al-Assad was doing to the country, which is killing hundreds of thousands of people, using everything up to and including chemical weapons. Well, he's gone now, and Israel has been striking a lot of the chemical weapons depots to prevent them from falling into the hands of the...
new rebel alliance over here. Okay, so Again, is any of this wonderful? It isn't. But the one thing that is an upside is that the Iranian crescent is dead. The Shia crescent that, again, stretched all the way from Iran all the way across to Lebanon, that is now dead. What does that mean? It means that the Iranian regime is actually in quite real trouble here.
All of their biggest proxies are gone. Hamas, gone. Hezbollah, gone. Assad, gone. That means the Shia influence game is beginning to wane. It's beginning to end. The Houthis are basically isolated down there in Yemen. The Shia... regime in Iran still has impact in Iraq, but internally they are much, much, much weaker right now. So the border countries, what are they doing?
Chapter 7: Who now controls Syria after Assad's fall?
Turkey is doing incursions into northern Syria. They were probably behind much of what's going on right now. They're attempting to grab territory in northern Syria. They're creating their own buffer zone. They're attempting to encroach on Kurdish territory, again, in the northeast of the country. Meanwhile, Israel in the south has the Golan Heights.
And anybody, by the way, who thought that it was a good idea for Israel to give up the Golan Heights, yeah, you're an idiot. It's a good thing Israel has the Golan Heights. Otherwise, you'd have Sunni terrorists sitting up top over the Lake Tiberias and firing down into the valley in Israel. So Israel controls that area.
They've been moving up into their own buffer zone over at Mount Hermon, which is in Syria. It's kind of the strategic height of the region. And meanwhile, again, you have the Syrian government, which has now abdicated. They are turning over control to this rebel alliance. Unclear exactly what's going to result.
Because again, you still have all of these players on the ground who are fighting one another. They may be united against Assad, but now Assad is gone. So Assad's family is out. The rebels, again, arrived in Damascus. Meanwhile, you have the Kurds who are still controlling a large swath of territory. What does it really mean? It means that Russia is weak. Iran is weak. These were paper tigers.
And their attempts to invade Ukraine and invade Israel, respectively, those went really poorly for them. What you are watching is the complete collapse of the Russian-Iranian alliance in Syria, and it is indicative of the interior weakness of these countries, which is something to remember going forward.
President Biden said this is the first time ever either Russia nor Iran or Hezbollah could defend a foreign regime in Syria. This is the direct result of the blows Ukraine and Israel delivered. This is what he said in a statement. No thanks to Joe Biden, by the way, who's continuing to slow walk weapons to both Ukraine and also to Israel.
So if it had been up to Joe Biden, presumably those allies never would have been properly armed. It is a very good thing and indicative, again, of the weakness of Russia and Iran, what has happened in Syria. Now, net-net, I think it'll probably be a good thing, but there are no great things in the Middle East. It just doesn't exist. A lot of bad people in a lot of areas in the Middle East.
So it'll be fascinating to see what happens next. And it's going to be very difficult to sort of see and foresee what happens from here on in. Because there's too many competitive groups. Many of them are terrorists on all sides of the aisle. And so everybody's sort of happy talking this thing. Oh, it's a day of liberty and freedom. Just hold your horses.
It's certainly not a day of liberty and freedom for many of the Christians who are living in Syria, unfortunately. It is not a day of liberty and freedom, I think, for pretty much anybody who's living in Syria. But it wasn't in the first place. It turns out, as always in the Middle East, a lot of bad answers to a lot of very difficult questions. We'll see you here tomorrow. I'll recap all of this.
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