Welcome to Pushback. I'm Aaron Mate. Joining me is Peter Ford. He is the former British

Ambassador to Syria, now the co-chair of the British Syrian Society. Peter, welcome to pushback.

Thank you, Aaron. I feel a privilege to be on your show.

It's a privilege to have you, and a lot I want to ask you about. Let me start just with your overall sense of the state of Syria today. The bulk of the proxy war is over, but now there's a new front, these economic sanctions that are preventing Syria from rebuilding and

you still have rebel control of a major province idlib as well as a u.s occupation in northeastern

Syria what is your overall sense of where Syria stands right now nearly 10 years after the

proxy war began well the situation

has basically stood still for a year there's been an effective stalemate since the

Syrian government forces recovered a slice of southern Idlib back in March.

At that point, the Turkish army intervened massively and effectively brought hostilities to halt.

But the situation today is that the Syrian government forces control about 70% of the country.

There's that pocket of jihadi fighters controlling Idlib province and a couple of patches

patches of neighboring provinces.

And then you've got the big, what I call the wild east of Syria, the big triangle of land

up all the way along, a thousand miles along the Turkish border and then down the Iraqi border.

And that is effectively a US protectorate.

There are US forces there being helped on the ground by a basically Kurdish militia, the so-called

Syrian democratic forces.

And by their mere presence, they're preventing the advance of the Syrian government forces.

The result is that the Syrian people are denied the great oil and grain wealth of that triangle of territory.

And so the war over the last year has been more an economic war than a military war.

And the outgoing U.S. representative to the anti-ISIS coalition,

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