This is CBS Island the World.

I'm John Batcher.

Bill Rajov, Foundation for the Defense of Democracy.

Senior Fellow joins me as my colleague and co-host,

and we're very pleased to have an understanding of what is going on in darkness visible Syria.

We welcome Ahmed Shurawi, a researcher for a foundation for the

defensive democracy. And we're going to begin this story with what the first moment I realized

something unusual was going on in Syria when I saw a video in the dark. It was night time.

And there was gunfire going everywhere.

What appeared to be somebody wearing a press shirt or press tag was riding away from it

on a bicycle, but the video kept rolling.

And at some point it said this was an ambush, but I didn't understand it till now.

Ahmed, this is Thursday, March 6th, at a village called Jabla and Latakia government.

Who attacked and why, and who were they attacking?

Good evening to you.

Thank you for having me, John.

So who attacked their Assad loyalists, loyalists of Bashal Asad, the former dictator of Syria?

And the Syrian coast or the area of Latakia and Jabla is the Al-White heartland,

which is the ethnic and religious group that is, it's the area where Bashar and

Hafez al-Assad come from.

So there's a lot of loyalists in that area, and they've been conducting these ambushes for

the past three months, ever since the downfall of the Assad regime against members of the HTS led

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