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the All right. Hello and welcome to state of play on Mint Press News. I am your host, Greg Stoker, and we are doing a solo episode today, and we are finally talking about Syria,

a very polarizing and controversial topic.

I'm currently looking at the screen right now

and I don't know what's happening with my fancy microphone

being all fuzzy.

There we go.

And this is of course hugely emotional

and devastating for so many people. People have had almost a week to kind of figure out

what's going on. I mean, it's one of the most dynamic and complex conflict zones in the

modern world. So a week isn't enough, obviously, but know this. Syria is both a victim of its own government,

whose historic brutality is not just CIA propaganda, like, come on, guys, and great power

politics. The vision of a regime change in Syria died some years ago, and the Assad government isn't going anywhere at the

moment. We're going to be focusing on, you know, the latter, you know, the great power politics.

You know, the Arab League has welcomed back Bashar al-Assad or at least has started to tolerate

him again. Russia is, you know, here to stay in the region. Jake

Sullivan, the national security advisor to the United States, has accepted that Assad is here to

stay and not going anywhere either, relationship with Iran, the Gulf states, et cetera, et cetera.

I know that this is, this reality is hateful to a lot of people.

...