This is CBSI on the world.

I'm John Bachelor.

Syria.

I welcome Josh Rogan, writing global opinions for the Washington Post.

Josh introduced me to the horrors of Syria many years ago, more than a decade ago.

HTS, Hayat, Harir al-Sham. That is a new name to me.

Before this, it was the Nusufront, and before this there were elements of al-Qaeda and ISIS.

What do we know about HTS? What do we have doubts about, or what do we want to know about HTS?

Right. Well, HTS is sort of the lead group in what's a coalition of rebel groups that

joined together in a joint fighting force to take over the country and kick out the dictator in like

11 days. In 11 days, they revealed the Assad regime

and its forces to be so fragile that he fled the country and fled to Moscow. And most of the

Syrian army people either ran away or took off their uniforms and put on civilian clothes and went

home. And so HTS is a designated terrorist organization, but what's HTS today is not the same

thing as it was 10 years ago.

And what you have to understand is that, you know, these people have been fighting for 14

years.

That means if you're a 20-year-old man in the Syrian revolution, you've been at war since

you were six years old. So it's not as if these people

are connected to like global terrorism or really have any interests or ambitions other than frame

their country from the dictator aside, which they just did. And the reason that HTS, the successor

of Al-Nusra Front, became the most important group in leading the revolution, is because all of the rest of the people who were assisting them left.

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