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Brian Lairn on WNYC now, what the revolution in Syria might mean for Syrians and for everybody else.

People are asking so many questions.

Will the new leaders respect democracy and human rights?

More than the two generations of brutal rule by the Assad family.

Can the many refugees, millions, safely return home?

Why have the United States and Israel already staged military operations there in the very first

days of Assad being gone? Could the revolution come next to Syria's ally Iran? And as our guest on

this today laments in a new article,

why wasn't the UN doctrine of the responsibility to protect ever enforced over the last

decade and more as the regime's war crimes mounted? Our guest is Muhammad Sergi,

Persian Gulf regional editor for the news organization Semaphore. He is also from

Syria's second largest city, Aleppo. Mohamed, thanks so much for your time today. Welcome to WNYC.

Thank you for having you, Brian. Would you tell us some of your own story? First, I see you grew up

in Aleppo, Syria's second largest city, like I said, population around two million,

if I have my numbers right. And you were working as a journalist in New York in 2012,

covering finance, but switched at that time to document your home country's revolution.

You wrote that you had left Syria after high school because you could. So what year was that?

And why did you want to leave? Yeah, it was in 1997. So I was actually born in the United States.

My parents are both doctors and they were doing the residency there. They wanted to go back to

their country and contribute to their people. So they moved us back. I was seven years old,

went to Syria at a time in the mid-80s where it was a pretty impoverished place, just came out of a different war, a different civil war and another brutal war by Assad's father,

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