From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Tuesday, December 10th.

Now, what the revolution in Syria might mean for Syrians and for everybody else. People are asking so many questions.

Will the new leaders respect democracy and human rights? More than the two generations of

brutal rule by the Assad family? Can the many refugees, millions, safely return home?

Why have the United States and Israel already staged military operations there

in the very first days of Assad being gone? Could the revolution come next to Syria's ally Iran?

And as our guest on this today laments in a new article, why wasn't the UN doctrine of the

responsibility to protect ever enforced over the last decade and more as the regime's war crimes mounted?

Our guest is Muhammad Sergi, Persian Gulf regional editor for the news organization Semaphore.

He is also from Syria's second largest city, Aleppo.

Muhammad, thanks so much for your time today.

Welcome to WNYC.

Thank you for having you, Brian.

Would you tell us some of your own story?

First, I see you grew up in Aleppo, Syria's second largest city, like I said,

population around 2 million, if I have my numbers right.

And you were working as a journalist in New York in 2012 covering finance, but switched at

that time to document your home country's revolution. You wrote that you had left Syria after

high school because you could. So what year was that? And why did you want to leave? Yeah, it was

in 1997. So I was actually born in the United States.

My parents are both doctors, and they were doing the residency there.

They wanted to go back to their country and contribute to their people.

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