The Sense in Syria's Senselessness
War on the Rocks
War on the Rocks
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 27 October 2019
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw U.S. special operations forces in advance of a Turkish offensive into northeastern Syria continues to roil the region. Gayle Tzemach Lemmon of the Council on Foreign Relations, Nick Danforth of the German Marshall Fund, and Sam Heller of the International Crisis Group join the show to help us understand why this happened, how it affected people on the ground, and what happens next in this long-running civil war. We also preview a WarCast with Aaron Stein of the Foreign Policy Research Institute on the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the self-proclaimed Islamic State.
Further reading and listening:
Aaron Stein, "U.S. Officials Ignored Trump on Syria and Now We're All Paying the Price"
Sam Heller, "America In Search of an Un-Geneva for Syria"
Nick Danforth, Doug Ollivant, Elizabeth Saunders, and Ryan Evans, "Mayhem and Misadventures in the Middle East"
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. |
| 0:15.7 | My name is Ryan Evans, I'm the CEO of War on the Rocks. |
| 0:18.2 | In this episode we talk about the situation in Syria, specifically the U.S. withdrawal that might have become a not withdrawal from |
| 0:24.8 | Northeastern Syria in the advance of a Turkish offensive and what that means for the |
| 0:29.0 | future of the conflict. But something important happened after we recorded this episode, |
| 0:34.0 | the killing of Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph |
| 0:38.0 | of the self-proclaimed Islamic State. |
| 0:40.0 | So what I did is I had a conversation with Aaron Stein for our warcast series. |
| 0:44.0 | That's our members only podcast. You can become a member at war on the rocks.com |
| 0:47.8 | slash membership and Aaron and I talked about the killing of bagdaddy and what it means for all sorts of things. |
| 0:54.3 | I have a clip from that episode of the war cast here for you to listen to, and then we jump straight |
| 0:59.1 | into the main show. |
| 1:01.3 | But keep in mind, we recorded the main show before that daddy died. |
| 1:05.8 | And here's Aaron. |
| 1:07.8 | The compound you can quite clearly see just on pictures floating around, you have coordinates, |
| 1:13.1 | was less than 10 kilometers from the Turkish border. |
| 1:17.2 | You know, this is a place, you know, |
| 1:18.8 | the people who are more reversed |
| 1:20.1 | in sort of the kaleidoscope of groups in this part of Syria where there's a heavy |
| 1:25.2 | al-Qaeda presence. |
| 1:26.6 | He was rumored or at least reported to have been sort of living with or living alongside |
| 1:32.2 | somebody from Khuras al-Dadin, which is supposed to be, or at least is the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria. |
... |
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