I'm John Batchel. Bill Rajah, my colleague and co-host, Foundation for the Defense of Democracy is a senior

fellow, and we're looking at Syria and Jordan, thanks to the eyes of Ahmed Harari of the FD as well.

Immediately, Hezbollah. Hezbollah is a dominant organization in Lebanon. My understanding those years of the

Syrian civil war with the Assad regime

in place in Damascus was that the Hezbollah were ground troops to supplement to Augment

and in fact often replace the Syrian army defending Damascus and the Assad's. But now,

Ahmed, you report that the Syrian forces under Al-Shara are hostile to the Hezbollah

and confrontational.

How so and why?

Good afternoon, John.

Hezbollah, as you correctly stated, was the ground force that Assad relied on, of course,

with other Shia militias as well as his own armed forces to suppress this, initially the Syrian

revolution and then to fight during the Syrian civil war.

And so, Hasbullah was complicit in a lot of the war crimes that were committed against the Syrian people,

and Shara himself fought against them in Syria until November 24, when he launched the campaign against Assad.

And so there's, there was, there's been reports.

Of course, some of them have been credible, some haven't, that the U.S.

was planning on using the Syrian forces to disarm Hezbollah in eastern Lebanon,

which borders Syria, of course.

But apparently the Syrians rejected that because they don't want to engage in a conflict

that can be, that can erupt.

And they also don't want to spillover of any conflict in Lebanon to get into Syria and become a

...