The

The Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood, violating all convention, two topics

divided among three guests today. Trita Parsi and Joshua Landis will explain what's been going on

in Syria, and Tina Gerhardt will report on the recently concluded climate summit, at which

little of importance happened, which is important in its own way. I haven't paid much attention

to Syria on this program, in part because

so many commentators had an agenda, and I was not informed enough to sort them all out. But recent

events have made them possible to ignore any longer. After over decade of brutally resisting

and uprising against him, Bashar al-Assad, heir to his father's brutality, fell earlier this month

and would seem like an

instant. Why? Who and what did him in? What is Hayat Tarir al-Sharm, HTS, for now the most

prominent force in the country? And who is its leader, Ahmed al-Shara, known for most of his career

by his nom de guerre, Abu Muhammad Al-Jolani. We've got two guests to answer these questions.

First, we'll hear from Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute.

Parsi was born in Iran, but his family left for Sweden when he was four to escape political

repression. Parsi's father had the distinction of having been jailed both by the Shah and the Ayatollah

Khomeini.

Trita Parsi.

After a decade of surviving very intense opposition, Assad fell practically overnight.

Why such a sudden collapse?

It was quite clear, obviously, that this was not a popular regime, but was not as clear to anyone, including, I think, HTS and their Turkish backers was exactly how tremendously

hollow his military had become and how little desire to fight back actually exist within his own

...