Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

We are recording a bonus episode today because of the truly historic events happening as we speak in Syria. Ben, is this the best news

bonus we've ever done? I've been waiting to record this bonus episode for over a decade, Tommy.

So I think so. Yeah. Yeah. It's really good to see a guy like Assad go down. So Russian state media

is now reporting that Bashar al-Assad has escaped from Syria and is in Moscow

with his family. Rebel factions have captured basically all the territory that was held by the

Assad regime just a few weeks ago. The Free Syrian Army is flying over Damascus as we speak.

It essentially took less than two weeks, around eight days, I think, from the start of this

offensive by members of this opposition group, HTS, from the start of this offensive by members of

this opposition group, HTS, and the Free Syrian Army, to sweep down from northwest Syria and eventually

take the capital. Incredibly, they seem to have done so without really encountering much,

if any, resistance. I think these Syrian soldiers underpaid, demoralized, exhausted by 13 years of civil war, mostly just chose

not to fight. There's these pictures all over social media of army uniforms, just littering the

streets because these guys stripped them off and ran away. On top of that, serious benefactors,

the Russians, Iranians, Hezbollah were too damaged and distracted by other wars to come to their aid.

And as HTS and the Free Syrian Army swept down from the north towards Damascus, other opposition

groups saw their moment here.

Some in southern Syria started taking territory.

The Kurds took some territory in northeast Syria.

And the net effect is that these groups just ended 50 years of brutal Assad family

rule in Syria. And they closed at least this chapter of Syria's 13-year civil war where Bashar al-Assad

...