Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Episode Summary
In this episode of One Decision In Brief, hosts Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain's MI6, take a deep look at the surprising rise of Ahmed al-Shura, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Jalani, from extremist militant and former Abu Ghraib prisoner to the new president of Syria after the sudden fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. The discussion examines the collapse of the Assad regime and Ahmed Al-Shura’s rise to power. The conversation also sheds light on the international intelligence behind the scenes of al-Shura's rise, including Israel’s military aid, the U.K.'s involvement, and what the U.S. actually knew as the events started to unfold. Finally, they examine the difficulty of running a country like Syria and whether al-Shura can survive the political, ethnic, and religious tightrope he now walks.
Episode produced by Situation Room Studios. Original music composed and produced by Leo Sidran.
Listen & Subscribe
- Watch on YouTube
- Listen on Apple Podcasts
- Listen on Spotify
Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Ruffini: Hello, welcome to One Decision in Brief. I'm Christina Ruffini joined today by my co-host, Sir Richard Dearlove. Sir Richard, how are you? Where are you? Are you in my house? In Cornwall. Yes. Don't worry.
Dearlove: I'm in my little cottage in Cornwall. It's a very beautiful early winter's day, and it's a great place to be. I love being here.
Ruffini: Oh, how lovely. I'm staring at a a dumpster across the street from my apartment in DC, but, you know, on we on we go. We wanted to take this opportunity to kinda dig in to an interesting character on the global scene, and that is Syria's new president Ahmed al-Sharaa, or as he was known previously, Abu Mohammed al-Julani. You know, he spent years as an Al Qaeda fighter in Iraq. He was actually in prison in in Abu Ghraib, that infamous US prison. He founded Syria's al-Nusra Front, which is an Al Qaeda affiliate, and he did all this before kind of overthrowing Assad in December 2024. I mean, I was I happened to be anchoring live coverage on a network that day, and this happened so quickly when we came up with our show plan Friday night. Syria was nowhere on the radar, and then by 1 p.m. the next day, the President Biden, because it was still Biden then, was walking into the Roosevelt Room to give a statement on the fact that the Assad government had fallen. So what is what is your impression of this guy? How he how he came to power? How all this happened? And I don't know. Do you think he's gonna last?
ANALYSIS WITH SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE
Dearlove: Well, I think the main point to make is the ethnic complexity of the mix in Syria and the fact that ruling Syria is not straightforward. But I think his emergence as leader has got pretty deep roots and I think his conversion from being a terrorist to being a politician and there are plenty of precedents for that has happened over a relatively long period. I mean, he gained power clearly because he was backed by the Turks, and the Turks put a huge amount of time and money into making sure that he would be the dominant dissident leader when it came to overthrowing Bashar's regime. What's just been publicized in the UK, which is really fascinating, is that the then we've just changed heads of the intelligence service, so my former job chief of MI6, and the previous head who's just retired was called Sir Richard Moore, and he had been ambassador in Turkey, speaks fluent Turkish, and had a relationship, a good relationship with Erdogan. It's just come out in the press, and this is rather surprising, that he clearly had been talking to this new Syrian leader for at least a year before the guy emerged. So I've got a feeling that there was a sort of process of conversion and grooming in which the US must have been involved, in which the UK was certainly involved, and the contacts in a case like that are definitely going to be handled by the intelligence community because the man has no official diplomatic status, and you know you've still got a relationship with Bashar in Syria. But on the other hand, they obviously were talking in parallel to this guy a long way before he took power. So I think that, you know, we're surprised by what happened, but the runes, if you read them properly, tell me that he was picked out as a possible leader much, much earlier on. And the Turks would have been promoting him as an interlocutor.
Ruffini: I covered the Syrian war at the start of it. I mean, I was in Lebanon on the border talking to refugees. We actually went up to the border. I was dying to cross. I didn't have a permit, and my fixer at the time said, well, can get you across. And I said, great. And he said, so if you just get in the trunk of this car and I've just covered way too many stories that start with, so they got in the trunk of the car and then you never saw them again, so I never got to go over. But I mean, even I had never heard of this guy before he was president. Right? So that's very interesting and does make a little more sense because to a lot of us, came out of nowhere, but he can't have really come out of nowhere. And to your point, either he is incredibly intelligent and naturally adept at this or someone has been coaching and grooming him because the first couple of things I noticed when he first started meeting with European and American diplomats, one of the first meetings I remember, it was the German foreign minister and a couple others flew to Damascus almost right away to meet with him, and I noticed he had on a suit, which is no small thing. Right? We have leaders you know, you've got Zelensky in his combat sweatpants. You've got Trump in his red tie. Like, leaders present the image they wanna present. He's very aware that the world's eyes were on him, and he clearly wanted to send a signal. I want to be a serious diplomat and I want to be part of this world. The other thing I've noticed is he receives female foreign ministers, but at least in public, he doesn't shake their hands. So that seems to be the line that he's willing to draw, but we've had people on this podcast, women who've spoken with him behind closed doors and said they felt very respected and he treated them like equals and were very impressed by him. But can you talk about kind of the the dance he has to play between appealing to European and American leaders playing this game so that he can get aid, so that he can get off, you know, all these sanctions list? I mean, the US had to delist him personally from the terrorist, but also Syria is a very multiethnic, multi tribal, multi religious nation. He's gotta play to that at some point too. Right? He's gotta look legitimate to some of those factions as well. Is this a tightrope that's that's tenable?
Dearlove: Yeah. I think it's really tough when you get into that area, is how does he distinguish himself as being, you know, tolerant given his background towards all of these communities. And, of course, the main problem of the Alawite sect having been the oppressive rulers of Syria for such a long time.
Ruffini: The privileged minority, yeah.
Dearlove: Because the Assad family were Alawites, and of course there's been huge problems in some of the Alawite villages in Latakia already, whereby there's been fighting, there has been murder, and you know the Alawites have accused us of the new Syrian forces of being sectional and not, as it were, respecting the ethnicity and their grouping and their representation. And of course, you've got many many other groups, not the least being the Kurds up in the North which are so important or who are so important. So, I think he's got a massive problem welding this group into a single country, and at the moment, I think the progress they're making is probably extremely slow. I mean, some of the areas, my understanding, in Syria are still virtually self governing with no central government authority really operating at all. But I guess over time, they'll be trying to, as it were, create some sort of national unified identity under this guy who is a former extremist, but in a different context with a different map and a different history, you can see a similar sort of development in the Irish Republic, you know, with the emergence of Sinn Fein as one of the ruling political parties from having been directly associated with the Provisional IRA. And of course, in South Africa, if you go way back to apartheid, the African National Congress, the ANC certainly had a terrorist wing, in the period of the struggle for independence, which was backed by the Soviets and by East Germany and by other communist states.
Ruffini: I did just look it up because I knew he went to university, but I couldn't remember what he studied. He studied media studies, which might explain a little bit why he is quite so media savvy before enrolling in medicine for two years and then kind of disappearing to Iraq without telling his family, and that was when his, you know, his stint with extremism started, and then he was captured by US forces in 2006. The thing that I've found really striking is what Damascus looks like the day, the hours after Assad fell, you know, women with headscarves, women without headscarves, you know, people playing traditional music, people playing rock music, kind of the plurality that had always made that such a vibrant and amazing city, before these conflicts started snapping back into place. And we talk a lot in foreign affairs about migrants and immigrants especially now, and the other startling image was the lines on the highway from Turkey, from other places of people trying to go home because people could go home for the first time in ten years, and they wanted they wanted to go home. That was really startling to me, and it has been so long since they had a country that they felt like they had a voice in and had a part of. They're so, so hopeful. I think they're they're realistic, and I think they're all a little cautious. But I'm I hate to be Pollyanna, but I'm hoping just the exhaustion of war and the hope of something better can can give him a little bit of a lift and and maybe some help.
Dearlove: I think we're actually we're seeing that happening at the moment, and I think that the international support for the new regime in Syria is pretty encouraging. And, okay, there have been some ghastly incidents and very violent incidents, particularly concerning the Alawites, but it seems that there's a sort of almost an agreement amongst the various ethnic communities to try to give it a go and build a new country. And it's interesting because quite a lot of Syrians I've read have been returning from areas of London and going back, and they are a really mercantile nation. They're traders, and they're keen to see the country get back on its feet. So in in some respects, having Syria as a country with which the West can do business will make a big difference to stability in the Middle East if the experimentation works.
Ruffini: What does this mean for former Syrian proxies? You know, I don't think this happens if Russia isn't mired down in Ukraine. You know, Russian support was such an important part of Assad's regime. I don't think without Russia pulling back that this happens. And I also I wonder where Iran factors in. I mean, I remember when I was up on the border in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, you know, kind of all these these areas that that bled across the borders, they had huge banners of Assad, and it was, you know, it was all Hezbollah and, you know, Iran this, that. Those are those are all down now. That's not taken down anymore. How does the relationship with Russia go? Is that is that toast? And and what is new Syria's relationship to Iran?
Dearlove: Well, the Russian relationship, to my understanding, is pretty much being closed down. So they've taken their military out, and the naval base that they had, they've moved to the extent that one's available as an alternative to one of the two parts of Libya. So I think their remaining access to the Med is or their their remaining base on the Med is now effectively in the Western part of Syria, if I've got my geography right, and that they've pretty much closed completely. But the fact is that the whole paradigm in the Middle East has shifted because of the defeat by Israel of the axis of resistance. So the Iranians are certainly no longer gonna be significant players in Syria, and I think that those sort of Shia elements that exist, particularly in Iraq, are very much asserting their identity as Iraqi Shia and not Iranian Shia. And the other thing, of course, which is crucially important, which hasn't received a lot of publicity, the Israelis have just been getting on and destroying the capability of what was the Syrian military. So the naval craft of the Syrian which were largely repurposed from Eastern Europe and Russia, have been sunk. The air force has been completely decimated and a lot of the military equipment has been taken down. So what you've really got now as a ruling authority under the new regime is a sort of extended militia that doesn't have heavy equipment, doesn't have air cover, because the Israelis, I think, were determined to make sure that the new regime couldn't threaten it.
Ruffini: Yeah. That was not a popular decision even among the Trump administration. You know, to everything we're talking about, they're trying to support this new government, and it just weakens them immediately to to bomb within the city that finally you know, the guns had finally stopped in Damascus, and then all of a sudden, it's dropping from the sky.
Dearlove: But one of the reasons for, you know, chaos in post war Iraq was the lack of central authority, and you have to have a balance between, let's say, a military in Syria that doesn't threaten regionally, but on the other hand, can can keep the peace amongst groupings that have, in certain areas of the country, pretty conflicted.
Ruffini: You know, no leader is perfect, but I think the people of that country deserve a chance. And I have a lot of Syrian friends, and I I really I hope as we progress into the New Year, they continue to get support, and and they are able to to get their hands around this because it's no it's no small task.
Dearlove: Absolutely.
Ruffini: That's it for this week's One Decision in Brief. Of course, be sure to stay tuned for our regularly scheduled episode this Thursday. Leave us a comment. Ask a question. Send us some feedback. And, of course, visit our website, onedecision.com, for a whole lot more content as well as our page where we've got shorts, explainers, interviews from conferences we've gone to, and a whole lot more. I'm Christina Ruffini. That other guy, Sir Richard Dearlove. Thanks so much for listening.
