Hello and welcome to another episode of Realpolitik. I am your host, Firas Madad. As has become usual now, I think. We are live. So if you have any questions, please put them into the chat and I will happily address them. Today we're going to be talking about the roots of the Syrian Civil War and be doing a little bit of a deep dive

on that. To understand Syria, the first place to start in any geopolitical analysis is, well,

the geography. And if you look at a map of Syria, this is one by Suriyak, who is an excellent mapper on Twitter, on X. Where's his name?

Oh, it doesn't appear here. But he's really, really good, and I love his maps, and I use them all

the time. And I'm not getting paid to say this. But anyway, this is a good map of who's controlling which bits of Syria.

And what I want to start with is the geography and the importance of Damascus.

If you look at Syria and Lebanon and Israel, there is the West Lebanon mountain chain that starts somewhere around here in today's

Turkey and Eskandarun goes all the way along the coast, hugging the coast, into the country

of Lebanon itself and ending somewhere near northern Israel.

So that's the West Lebanon mountain chain.

And then there's the East Lebanon mountain chain.

It's considerably shorter and ends with the Galilee Panhandle.

And behind those two mountain chains is the city of Damascus.

And Damascus is really important because it has an abundance of water,

excellent agricultural land, at least before the population exploded.

And it is the place that you want to place your military forces.

If you are to try to dominate Syria itself, as well as Lebanon, Jordan, and modern-day Israel. So the importance of Syria

really rests on the city of Damascus. It's protected by these mountain chains. It's protected by the

Golan Heights. It's got an abundance of water. The desert is to its rear. And this is where you want to

place your forces to dominate the whole Levant region, and really it's the centerpiece of the

whole geography of the Middle East. There isn't anywhere like it until you get to Baghdad,

which is why historically the two most important cities in the Levant have been Damascus,

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