Welcome to Pushback. I'm Aaron Mate, here with Max Blumenthal, editor of the Gray Zone,

author of many books, including his latest, The Management of Savagery. We are talking now about

Syria, a number of new developments, the killing Max of the ISIS leader, Abhdaddi in Idlib,

coupled with Trump's announcement of basically reversing

this troop withdrawal that he had said would happen and announcing that the U.S. will, quote,

defend Syria's oil reserves in northern Syria. Let's start with Baghdadi. So he is killed in

Idlib, which has been described as the largest

Al-Qaeda safe haven since 9-11. That is, according to Brett McGark, the former special U.S.

envoy to the coalition fighting ISIS. And we have been told all along that ISIS and the al-Qaeda groups that control Idlib were supposed to be enemies,

but then Baghdadi ends up living there. What is your assessment of the fact that the significance

of the fact that Baghdadi, the ISIS leader, was living in Idlib? I mean, to many people,

this might not seem that significant, but if you've been following

the way that the Syrian opposition has been marketed to the U.S. public and throughout the

West, especially by a coterie of regime change propagandists and think tankers

and by U.S. officials, it really is because we've been constantly told by this kind of

think tank cabal that Idlib was home to a moderate opposition or an opposition that was Islamist but was not jihadist,

and which had to be supported as a tool against the Syrian government in Damascus.

So it had to be protected.

Tom Friedman, who is not the brightest bulb, did refer

explicitly to Idlib as the home of a moderate opposition. But then you have people like Charles

Lister, whose job was to kind of vet the moderate rebels and be in touch with them constantly

and tell the U.S. government and British government who's

...