Assad fights back
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2024
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Russian and Syrian warplanes carry out airstrikes on rebel territories in northern Syria. Our BBC Monitoring jihadist analyst talks us through some of the history of Syria's conflict, and profiles Haayat Tahrir al Sham, the group that now controls Aleppo. We also hear from a resident about the fear gripping people living there.
Also on the programme: We hear from Georgia where there's been a third night of clashes between police and protesters, and get the government response to the claim it suspended talks on membership of the European Union. Also, why talks at the plastic waste summit in South Korea, appear to have failed.
(Photo: People inspect the damage after an airstrike in Idlib, northern Syria, 01 December 2024. Credit: Bilal Al Hammoud/EPA/Shutterstock)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service Studios in London. I'm Tim Franks. |
| 0:10.2 | And we're starting in Syria with a story that feels unproductive and unpredictable, |
| 0:16.1 | unproductive because it's been a shock just how far and how fast rebel forces have advanced. |
| 0:25.1 | Unpredictable, because working out where this now leads is phenomenally difficult. |
| 0:28.0 | At the very least in this programme, we'll try to ask some of the questions. |
| 0:35.2 | A very brief recap, it was a few days ago that an alliance of rebel forces in the north of the country launched their offensive. |
| 0:38.5 | They swept towards Aleppo, Syria's second city, |
| 0:43.3 | which now remarkably appears to have fallen into their control, or at least the forces of President Bashwell Assad have melted away. They've also headed south towards the city of Hama. |
| 0:48.9 | The Syrian civil war that had seemed stuck, frozen for so long, with Assad, most people thought firmly with the upper hand, |
| 0:56.7 | well, that civil war feels like it is burst open again. |
| 1:00.1 | And a reminder that it's a war which has since 2011 seen hundreds of thousands killed, many millions displaced. |
| 1:07.7 | First, let's get a look at the rebel group that seems to be leading the fight. |
| 1:13.3 | Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, it now controls Aleppo. |
| 1:16.7 | Mina al-Lami is BBC monitoring's jihadist analyst. |
| 1:21.6 | Hayat Tahrir Sham, which means it's an acronym, and in Arabic it means the group for the liberation of Syria, and it's interesting, |
| 1:29.1 | they use the term heya, which means more like a directorate, more of a neutral, mainstream |
| 1:34.2 | sounding name. So the group HTS, and I'll use the acronym HTS, has its roots in IS or the Islamic |
| 1:41.6 | state group and al-Qaeda. So it has jihadist origins. It appeared in Syria in 2011. At the time, |
| 1:49.4 | it was really an offshoot secretively. It was an offshoot of IS in Iraq. And at the time, |
| 1:54.5 | IS in Iraq was linked to al-Qaeda. But when IS emerged in Syria in 2013, it announced that Nusra Front at the time, as it was known, |
| 2:05.3 | Nusra Front was part of IS. |
| 2:08.3 | And so at that time, Nusra Front, which is the predecessor of HTS, they sought the assistance |
... |
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