Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zezanne Munchank and Jack Smith.

Today we would like to talk about Syria, the fall of Assad and the geopolitical consequences.

What happened here was without a doubt one of the big, if not the biggest event that has happened recently in the world. It came as a total

shock to even experts. Jack, tell us how we should think about this. I think from a kind of general

point of view, the first thing to say is that it confirms that even what you think are relatively

stable geopolitical situations in the world can shift extremely quickly when the right

conditions present themselves. Of course, for a while, it looked like Bashar al-Assad, you know,

he didn't have obviously authority over the entirety of Syria, but he was going to be able to

maintain power. That with the help of Iran and Russia, he had managed to not totally get rid of the rebels, but beat

them back to a small corner of the country. Then this happened pretty much overnight. It will

become clearer in the coming weeks and months why this has happened, maybe even coming years and

decades, why this has happened, the fact that it was so quick initially

had something to do with it, the sense that when this kind of group of Syrian rebels that's been

backed by Turkey took over Aleppo, it was quite shocking, and that almost seemed to have a chain

reaction where they started to make these other advances extremely quickly as a result. Of course,

when you are a soldier officer in the pro-a-sad forces and you see

this happening, you start to think, oh my God, this is really the end. And that process can

accelerate the end. I think that's been a big part of it. And it just confirms that these

things can happen extremely quickly. It happened in less than two weeks.

A regime that had been there for an extremely long time through the previous phase of this civil war and had killed a huge number of people to achieve that, completely disappeared.

What was also kind of interesting, I think, for me is how it disappeared without a really

bloody and protracted last stand.

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