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Radio War Nerd EP #150 — Idlib & the Syria Endgame, with Joshua Landis (Patreon)

Published:
2018-09-27 22:54:14
Imported:
2026-06
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Guest: Joshua Landis, Director of Center for Middle East Studies & blogger

Recorded: September 23, 2018

From his new digs in Sicily, the War Nerd interviews Syria expert Joshua Landis (EP #118) to break down the situation in Idlib: the Russia-Turkey agreement, who the main rebel/jihadi groups are in Idlib, what are Israel's and the US's designs on Syria, and where do we go from here? 

At 1:29:00 the Nerd and Ames discuss other war news around the world: Erdogan's media propagandists . . . Israel's idiotic downing of Russian spy plane; separatist terror attack in Khuzestan, Iran, and attribution snafus . . . Trump regime's Raytheon lobbyist decides Yemen weapons policy . . . Saudi Arabia plans to expel millions of Egyptian workers . . . Islamist rebels in northeast Mozambique linking up with Al Shabab? . . . 

Joshua Landis is director at the Center for Middle East Studies and professor at U Oklahoma. Read his excellent blog Syria Comment and follow him on twitter: @joshua_landis. 

* Maps

* Map of Syria with Idlib

* Map of Al Qaeda (HTS/Nusra) control in Idlib 

* Map of Russia-Turkey Idlib agreement

Total time: 2:19:46

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

Files

Comments

Jafar Daniel

Mark 2:03 or so, silicon wadi was right there I was shouting at my radio

Scott H

Joshua Landis is a great guest, bring him back as a regular.

Francis Terpening

Landis is great, but no need to give Aron Lund a shout out - he's trash.

Russell Hopkinson

Regarding the MC5; “Mansion on the Hill” is a great book that details how radical politics in 1960s rock n roll got subsumed by the corporate mainstream music industry.

Ernesto Che

Lund spent years hanging out with Jaish al Islam and wrote a long feature about them, somehow avoided noticing the women in cages. Lund even worse than Lister in a lot of ways, because he's a genuinely smart guy who knows these first-hand, unlike Lister who's a dumb propagandist and doesn't speak Arabic.

Paul M

Absolutely fantastic episode. Landis is such a good guest. Though, Mark, the mental image of "[Erdogan] can straddle Trump and Putin for ages" was not what I needed this morning.

Sérgio Teixeira da Silva

Congratulations on becoming big enough fish that famous musicians tell you they're fans. (And social prison companies target you.) John, you meant "non-ethnic-Persians" - Iran the country, Persian the majority (maybe like 50%, according to some - it does make sense that their fertility fell the most) ethnicity. I don't understand - what's absurd about Al-Qaeda and the US coordinating false flag attacks? Also, it's weird: Landis marries an Alawite - then publishes Aron Lund. "Rojavahead" may be a good name for a 50% female metal band.

MoldyTolge

AQ/US false flag coordination doesn't even mean direct communication; we make noise about how the next gas attack won't be tolerated and that gives them the heads-up. Of course that theory is pretty much unprovable but hey, even the UN concluded that some of these attacks were done by rebel forces.

xnfec

Regarding your comment about Romania playing both sides in the cold war, I remember in the 70's or 80's reading two-page spreads in the Sunday Telegraph extolling the virtues of Ceausecu and his brave resistance to the Soviets. One got the impression that he was a secret freedom fighter, trapped by geography and history and that Romania would be just like western europe if only given half a chance. I think that at the time, people were beginning to go to Romania for their summer holidays. It was the new Spain.

radiowarnerd

Yup. But like a lot of much-hyped freedom fighters, he ended up blowing the national budget on gold bathroom fixtures. It's weird how they do that. Does it make the bath hotter or something?

radiowarnerd

I don't think we said it was absurd in theory, just very tricky to do in practice. AQ is not a group you can really trust to be discreet over the long term, and at the mid- or low levels, neither are the US Armed Forces.

radiowarnerd

The second comment is true. Much better to do it that way. Why have your people meet their people if it can be done deniably?

xnfec

I think they start to believe the hype is real.

Sérgio Teixeira da Silva

MoldyTolge: of course - but that doesn't rule out direct coordination either. John: IIRC, Landis used the word "crazy", which I interpreted as political, not technical, commentary. It being better (it is, and also plausible) doesn't rule out communication, and well, that would be sophisticated - maybe that's why you shouldn't consider it automatic from the US? :P

Sérgio Teixeira da Silva

Gold is acid-resistant. Maybe especially nasty people have especially nasty bodily fluids?

Paul Vd

He has good insights. But once agajn, he winks at the US imperial narrative. He said that the main reason why the Idlib offensive by Russia and Syria didnt happen bc it would be a humanitarian disaster. This is flatly untrue. The US did not want its proxy assets completely snuffed out. That is the ONLY reason why there was pressure. Landis even refers to Trumps tweet. Common man.. Both sides have flattened cities in this war. This would have been no worse than Aleppo.

Peter Louis

Landis definitely lost me when he said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights was the "best we have". He kind of contradicted his sentiment when he said the guy was "not transparent in any way", so I really don't understand where Landis was coming from. Journalists who were actually in Syria like Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, or even Syrian citizen Kevork Almassian of Syriana Analysis always say that the SOHR is a fraud. Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal on Moderate Rebels talked about how the guy has not been to Syria in two decades and just makes phone calls to Syria and those are the figures he uses. Nothing like Seymour Hersh and the two Turkish MPs Eren Erdem and Ali Şeker did to expose the Turkish government's role in giving the terrorists chemical weapons for the 2013 attack. I know I already messaged you about this but I think it would be awesome if you had Kevork Almassian on to talk about Syria's domestic and war policies. <a href="https://soundcloud.com/moderaterebels/syria-regime-change-gang-trotskyists-episode-19" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://soundcloud.com/moderaterebels/syria-regime-change-gang-trotskyists-episode-19</a>

radiowarnerd

I think what Landis means is that there's no consensus source of statistics on casualties of the Syrian war. I don't think Eva Bartlett can really be considered a neutral observer at this point. She did a good job pushing back against the regime-change agenda but, speaking as someone who has been called an 'Assadist', I have to say that she actually is an Assadist.

Peter Louis

I apologize for the long post (I maybe left a comment on a Patreon post once before over a year ago, I don't know Patreon etiquette), I would appreciate your input because I am honestly curious on account of these confusing times. I am really not sure what Landis meant, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights was started not even a year after Christiane Amanpour's interview with Assad in 2005, when she said "Mr. President, you know the rhetoric of regime change is headed towards you from the United States." With the added fact that the guy running it in his house in the UK was not in Syria for over two decades... I'm not necessarily blaming Landis for not being aware of those things and making such a claim, Patrick Cockburn said the reporting on Syria has been the worst he's seen in his 40+ years of journalism. I don't know what Landis has been exposed to, it wouldn't be fair to put that against him with what I know about him now. As for Eva Bartlett being called an Assadist, I mean it's no secret that the bar for being called an Assadist is so low. Mehdi Hasan has been called an Assadist and he is probably the biggest pusher of regime-change in Syria that still has all the indie-cred, for some reason. I wouldn't take Mehdi's word on calling people Assadists. I may have even been called an Assadist but i'm not totally sure. As a Green Party of New York state committee member, after the Imperialist Solidarity Organization (ISO) endorsed 2018 gubernatorial candidate Howie Hawkins, I said that (paraphrased) with members like (I did not name members but i'm just letting you know where I was coming from) Anand Gopal, Ashley Smith, Dan La Botz, and others pushing neocon talking points about Syria, Nicaragua, Venezuela, as well as opposing every successful socialist revolution after the Spanish Civil War, putting nothing into context, and they only supported fascist revolutions, ISO sucked. Some months later, ISO messaged Howie's campaign staff complaining about Jimmy Dore endorsing him being Islamophobic and including my message about ISO sucking, as well as my tweets I think on a heated Jimmy Dore thread about Syria. They were threatening to pull their endorsement of Howie if I was not taken care of and if Howie did not denounce Jimmy Dore and make a statement on Syria supporting the "revolution". So I might just have been called Islamophobic (even though ISO's boys in Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham and other regime-change militants in Syria are blatantly Islamophobic) but the Assadist sentiment was there and I wouldn't trust myself to bring forth any news of my own about Syria or say who is an Assadist and who is not unless there is conclusive evidence for it. I was never there and I don't have any reliable friends over there, never mind any friends over there. So the bar is incredibly low for being branded an "Assadist". In any case, maybe both of our minds will be changed by the end of the war or after, but I don't see what Eva would have to gain in being an Assadist. She went to Gaza, Syria, North Korea to understand what really goes on in those nations. I watched a lot of her videos in Syria, interviews with people who didn't know who the White Helmets were or if anything, associated them with terrorists like (then) Jabhat al-Nusra. She seems to just call for peace like other reasonable people who were in Syria, like Rania Khalek, Kevork Almassian, etc. and Eva's reasoning to me seems to line up with the things they said as well. She (and the aforementioned people) said the people of Syria during this war don't necessarily care about Assad, they just want a secular government that isn't going to behead them or do them harm for ridiculous reasons. Whoever voted in 2014 overwhelmingly voted for Assad as confirmed by the international delegation, including representatives from Brazil and Uganda. Almassian said that even though the Syrian government is rather authoritarian compared to other governments like Switzerland, the stage Syria is in politically, post-colonial and still fighting Western imperialism, Syrians generally want a sort of strong man government. He said Hafez ruled with an iron fist, but he was really popular. He did free up Syria a lot when it was in its more immediate post-colonial stage and did good things for Syria (I could argue for the Eastern world as a whole). Almassian is still critical of the Syrian government domestically, as are many people. Like any government nowadays, it has its issues. If you think Eva Bartlett is an Assadist because of the crisis actor claims, that seems to line up with what (Osama's former champion) Robert Fisk said about the 2018 attack, or adds up with what Sy Hersh and the two Turkish MPs Eren Erdem and Ali Şeker proved about the 2013 attack, or the dubious Bana al-Abed being the poster child of Syrian regime-change, as discussed by other outlets like Grayzone Project. Bartlett was the first I heard point out how sketchy Al-Abed's deal was.