Hello and welcome to state of play on Mint Press News.

I'm your host, Greg Stoker, and whether you follow Mint Press or my personal platform at Colonial Outcasts,

I know I haven't been very present over the past two weeks, personal stuff, but also Syria is a very difficult issue to try and cover.

As you've noticed, it has entirely fractured what we could call the pro-Palestine movement.

There are a lot of policing of the tone and emotions of Syrians who are jubilant that Assad is gone.

For many Syrians, he was like Big Brother.

He was brutal, always watching.

He was the air you breathed.

Also, the government was important for the axis of resistance.

I mean, it will continue on just in different forms than what it was before.

And yes, this Al-Jolani guy, entirely problematic, former al-Qaeda, a deputy to al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State in Syria.

And apparently he's reformed now. He seems more like a political animal.

But I know a lot of people within the U.S. intelligence apparatus literally want to shoot themselves.

Because fighting Al-Qaeda was the entire premise behind the unfortunately named Global War on Terror.

Of course, it was completely an imperialist exercise. But yeah, I don't know, a lot of people, myself included, like sacrificed their youth and buried their friends to fight like this exact organization.

So I'm not exactly pumped, but the focus in the media and on other similar channels, the analysis has been like just focused on, oh, this guy's former Al Qaeda, you know, these, this HTS, the incoming HTS government is going to be some sort of like Sunni, Salafi jihadist exercise and it's going to be horrible.

We don't know that for sure.

We're going to start to try and unpack what is actually going on now that we've had a couple days.

The entire news cycle has been insane, but now that we've had kind of a couple days to kind of reorient and

get a pulse on what's going on. Yeah, so we're joined to that effect by Robert in Lakesh, who is a political

analyst, journalist, and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He was reported from and lived

in the occupied Palestinian territories and has worked for RT, Mint Press, memo, Cuds News, TRT,

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