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Hello and welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey.

And this is a special emergency pod. We're breaking already our regular schedule. We've only

been going two weeks and we're already shaking things up slightly because we thought it was

important to bring you an emergency pod, a special pod,

looking at those really amazing events in Syria in the last few days. We're going to go back

to our regular schedule and you're going to hear the second part of the CIA in Afghanistan

on Wednesday as expected, but we're recording this on the evening of Monday 9th of December because we just felt that

there was some things we had to convey and we wanted to talk about, not in our normal format

of telling a story, but more of a discussion between me and David, because David has, as we'll

hear, some real first-hand experience in Syria. So just to recap where we are, the Assad family had been

in power in Syria for, I guess, more than half a century, ruling that country with what

seemed like an iron grip. Then 2011, the time of that Arab Spring protests broke out against

their hold on power, leading to a civil war, chemical weapons used by the regime

against their own people. The West didn't intervene after that, but Russia did to prop up

the Assad regime. And it looked, David, didn't it, like it was frozen and nothing was changing

until, I mean, this really remarkable set of events, which started on November

...