Lawfare Daily: The Return of the Syrian Civil War

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Charles Lister: All of Idlib Province is now controlled by the opposition. They had ceded a fair bit of the south of that province in 2020. Almost the entirety of Aleppo Province is now controlled by the opposition, including Aleppo City and a significant portion of the north of Hama, which lies underneath both of those, is also now under opposition control.

Daniel Byman: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Daniel Byman, the foreign policy editor of Lawfare and a professor at Georgetown University, with Charles Lister, senior fellow and director of the Syria and Countering Terrorism & Extremism programs at the Middle East Institute.

Charles Lister: So the fact that it is now under their, under HTS and the opposition's control, is no insignificant thing. So even if these front lines freeze where they currently are, we are likely talking about a very significant, months, if not years-long military campaign, if the regime ever wants to take it back.

Daniel Byman: Today we're talking about the return of the Syrian Civil War into an all-out conflict.

[Main Podcast]

Charles, let me begin by asking you simply to lay the groundwork for what's been happening. Can you describe the conflict, an extremely complex one, in a relatively short amount of time, just to give us a sense of where the parties stood before the latest outbreak and hostilities?

Charles Lister: Yes, complicated is one word for it. In, I mean, in the period before this major outbreak of hostilities, Syria has been described by many as a frozen conflict. I think to the extent that the lines of territorial control were frozen, that's true, but the conflict and hostilities in general couldn't have been further from the truth in describing it as frozen. In fact, for the last two to three years, anywhere between 30 and 100 people have died per week, every week, for the last two to three years in conflict and hostilities in every corner of the country.

So, on a hostilities level, Syria has remained a hot conflict, in fact, multiple hot conflicts, since 2020, which was when Turkey and Russia agreed to a ceasefire in the north of the country. I mean, beyond that, beyond the conflict itself, the humanitarian crisis in Syria is worse than it's ever been, even at the height of nationwide conflict in 2014 and 2015, the humanitarian crisis, or arguably double as bad today in terms of the humanitarian need.

At the same time, the international community, as stretched as it is by Ukraine and war in Gaza and Lebanon and elsewhere, the international community's ability to respond to that aid crisis is worse than it's ever been. So the UN, which runs the whole aid response is only 27 percent funded for the next calendar year. So you can only imagine the kind of destabilizing consequences that has nationwide.

The regime has emerged as the biggest narco-state in the world, manufacturing tens of billions of dollars of illegal amphetamines and trafficking them around the world, but particularly around the surrounding region. The refugee crisis remains as bad as it's ever been. The latest UN polling indicated that just 1 percent of Syrian refugees would consider returning to a Syria ruled by Assad. So no matter where you look, no matter what angle you're looking at, the crisis was in a really bad place. It just wasn't getting the kind of international attention that perhaps we were used to in earlier years, and that laid the groundwork for what we saw develop just in the last week or so.

Daniel Byman: So let's now go to the present moment. You said that although the conflict has been quite intense, the humanitarian conflict has been even more disastrous. For the most part, the front lines have been relatively frozen for the last few years. How are they different now? What's changed?

Charles Lister: Well, beginning on Wednesday morning, a very broad coalition of armed opposition groups operating out of the northwest of the country launched an offensive.

They called it at the time Operation Deter Aggression. They used that terminology because initially the plan here was pretty limited. The plan was to take control of the countryside that lays to the west of Aleppo City from which the Syrian regime had a number of significant artillery launching points, from which it was, on a daily basis indiscriminately shelling civilians across the northwest of Syria. That was the initial plan.

Incidentally, this offensive was meant to happen in mid-October. At that time, Turkey discovered the plans and put a stop to them. So, of course, it's interesting that they've, that they nevertheless took place, a number of weeks afterwards. But the map has changed, as you say, in the sense that Aleppo City is now fully under opposition control. But remarkable, the city fell in and of itself within 24 hours of fighters first entering the western outskirts. But it's gone further than that.

So, to put a very complicated picture, very, as straightforwardly as possible, all of Idlib Province is now controlled by the opposition. They had ceded a fair bit of the south of that province in 2020. Almost the entirety of Aleppo Province is now controlled by the opposition, including Aleppo City and a significant portion of the north of Hama, which lies underneath both of those, is also now under opposition control.

And so we are, in many ways, we have kind of pressed rewind to where the conflict was in perhaps 2017 and 2018, in the space of five days which is really quite extraordinary. The regime's front lines just collapsed one after the other and have only just begun to show some signs of stabilizing in the last 24 hours.

Daniel Byman: That collapse, for me at least, was a tremendous surprise, and your work, among others, has documented the, at times, you know, building by building nature of the fighting in the past, and how, you know, both sides, when they made advances, were doing so at, you know, really slow paces.

Either the opposition is significantly stronger than, at least I thought it was, or the regime much weaker. Can you kind of give your sense of both sides and why these significant advances were possible at this particular time?

Charles Lister: Yes, I think it's both of what you've just said. I think the, and I'll tackle one side and before tackling the other. I mean, the opposition led by, or not led by, but the most dominant group HTS or Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and many other allied and partnered groups, both on the extreme end of the spectrum and the more mainstream, have spent the last four and a half years intensively training and sort of, for want of a better term, kind of professionalizing their capabilities, their structures, their command and control. They've been showing it off, so none of it is a secret, but, you know, to take HTS as an example, they now have an entire dedicated unit that specializes in nighttime operations.

So, every single of their nearly 250 fighters are equipped with assault rifles, sniper rifles, RPGs, and others, all with night vision scopes. And their training regimen over the last four years has only ever taken place at night. So they are nighttime specialists. That is a capability, that is a breadth of equipment just in terms of thermal scopes, that the regime doesn't have.

Another example, HTS has developed an entire suicide drone unit with hundreds of very capable suicide drones, the like of which we see in Ukraine, where from the Ukrainian military, directing them into Russian tanks, into concealed artillery positions, is exactly what we've seen play out in their dozens per day over the past four or five days.

They have dedicated quote unquote special forces units that operate only behind enemy lines. So we've seen a senior IRGC brigadier general and a senior Syrian regime military intelligence commander both assassinated way behind enemy lines by some of these units. I mean, infiltrating 50 kilometers inside Syrian regime territory to assassinate high value targets within the regime.

These are the kinds of capabilities that no one in the opposition had prior to the 2020 ceasefire. And it has made a very significant difference on the ground.

Daniel Byman: Can I interrupt and just ask, was this self-training? Was Turkey involved? Like who's responsible for this increase in capacity?

Charles Lister: It is self-trained. I mean, you'd be amazed at the sort of democratization of information and experience you can gather by using the internet these days. There are a number of so-called jihadi mercenary, jihadi private military contractors in northwestern Syria. Most of them have Central Asian origin, manned by former, you know, government soldiers from Central Asia who have made it their sort of mission over the past five years to provide training, for a fee to HTS and other groups. But by and large, it is self trained.

You know, the other aspect that has made a significant difference is HTS and other groups have developed an indigenous weapons production capability. So they're producing their own suicide drones. One of the things that was also just revealed was that they've produced this kind of improvised cruise missile, with a range of about 80 kilometers, and a huge explosive munition on the front. That has removed the need for what you might have seen five years ago when you had a suicide truck bomb deployed to the front line before the troops move. These cruise missiles have been filmed flying over and creating these massive front line explosions before the ground troops move forward.

The regime, on the other hand, has been totally stagnant. They haven't developed any new capabilities of any meaningful effect on the ground, the regime security apparatus writ-large from the army to the air force to the intelligence directorates have also been, I guess, co-opted and corrupted by organized crime over the last five years, which I think is really kind of torn away at the cohesiveness of a already very kind of dissolved and challenged military, but now we're seeing the cost of that. So when there is kind of crisis mode on the battlefield, there was no cohesiveness. Every frontline fell, with little or no coordination.

And from what I have heard, speaking to contacts on the ground who have the frequencies of the walkie talkies of all of the regime's frontline units, it was total chaos. They had absolutely no idea what they were doing. Fall back, fall back, fall back, fall back, but no coordination. And so, yeah, in an ironic kind of way, we've seen one side significantly enhance its capabilities and another significantly degrade. And we're watching some of that play out on the battlefield.

Daniel Byman: A lot of the commentary right now focuses not on really the actors in Syria, but the actors outside it. So looking at Iran, Hezbollah, Russia, and explaining the timing and the success in part because the regime doesn't have access to the same level of support it might have had five or six years ago. How much credence do you give that?

Charles Lister: So I don't give so much credence to the idea that they don't have as much practical support. I mean, like, material support, you know, they have the same. So, you know, there's been a lot of reporting, particularly in Arabic language media, that then melts into English media, that has suggested, for example, that since the war in Ukraine, Russia has pulled out hundreds, if not thousands of forces from Syria. It's removed air defense systems and fighter jets. None of that's the case. Russia retains exactly the same troop levels. They've conducted the same number of air sorties over Syria with the same geographical breadth that they did prior to the war in Ukraine.

Now, the one difference on the Russian side is that the professionalism, the level of officer class, the kind of West Point-equivalent officers and generals that were running the Syrian campaign before Ukraine aren't spending nearly as much time on the ground in Syria as they used to.

So Russia's ability to kind of strategically influence and direct the trajectory of the Syrian crisis on the ground has reduced, but they still have the same number of resources, on the ground, on the front line. And incidentally, on the first morning of this offensive west of Aleppo, there were Russian special forces on the front line. They were all ambushed. So it wasn't that they weren't there.

On the side of Iran and Hezbollah: no question that they have been distracted by events in Gaza, and particularly in Lebanon. So no question about that. But they also maintained the same front line positions, and many of the front lines that were attacked were heavily staffed by Hezbollah and Iranian militias is one of the reasons why we had a very senior IRGC brigadier general killed on day one, and a number of Hezbollah fighters killed on the frontline. So the distraction, I think, probably did play a role, but not in terms of their quantitative and qualitative ability to influence and support the regime on the ground.

What made the difference was that they had lost the cohesiveness. And they'd spent four and a half years thinking that they had won, only suddenly to be attacked in a very dramatic way by the enemies that they assumed had become more or less irrelevant, or were becoming more or less irrelevant with time.

Daniel Byman: I want to go back to your description of the rebel groups, and you mentioned that one of the lead groups is HTS. And that's the one that's gotten a lot of attention in mainstream U.S. media. Are there others you would highlight, though, that you feel haven't gotten the attention they deserve?

Charles Lister: Well, so this is an important question. HTS is, by a country mile, the dominant actor here. You know, they developed the plans, they've coordinated the frontline maneuvers. It's been their specialist units that have been the kind of tip of the spear. And it is important to acknowledge that.

But they are part of a wider coalition. The various factions that belong to a coalition called the National Liberation Front, which are, sort of, I would guess I would describe them as a broad spectrum of both nationalist and nationally-oriented Islamists, kind of Muslim Brotherhood type factions. The National Liberation Front has been around for a long time. Those were factions that opposed HTS in its early days, but were willing to stay in Idlib and to be, kind of, living alongside HTS nevertheless.

There are small jihadist factions also present, certainly on the more extreme end of the spectrum than HTS: the Turkestan Islamic Party, which is a more of an internationally known jihadist outfit, has a sizable presence and have been on the front lines. Another large group called Ansar al Tawhid which is also similarly more internationally-oriented and have developed quite a specialism in indigenous weapons capabilities. But again, just to stress, yes, it is a broader coalition. But HTS is the actor that really is making the difference here. And they're the ones calling the shots.

Daniel Byman: So HTS, of course, previously was, even previously, it's difficult to describe, but had, you know, a relationship with Al Qaeda, and since then has distanced itself. How would you describe the relationship today?

Charles Lister: With Al Qaeda? Broken.

The falling out that developed in 2016 and 2017 was really quite significant. It was very public. Al Qaeda's leadership right up to and including Ayman al-Zawahiri made it very publicly clear that HTS had severed its ties and in so doing had broken their kind of religiously binding oath of allegiance. And according to some of Al Qaeda's prominent scholars around the world, HTS had become apostates.  So the falling out was very, very real and very bitter and very personal. And as I say, it played out in public.

Now, none of that is to say that HTS has become some, you know, moderate actor in the years that have passed. It remains religiously very conservative. But it has unquestionably done away with its global agenda. That has made a difference in terms of it being able to slowly recoup some of the kind of credibility losses, or insufficiencies that it had inside Syria.

And it's also done a lot. I mean, it's run a kind of PR effort, frankly, to try to sell its image as a changed actor, including to Western audiences, a whole feature documentary on PBS Frontline, in which its leader revealed his face for the first time. Although, undeclared, HTS has an ongoing line of dialogue with a number of key European governments, and I have very little doubt there's been contact with parts of the U.S. government as well.

The United Nations has established a permanent office in HTS's capital in Idlib, and they work together on a daily basis to coordinate humanitarian aid delivery in northwestern Syria. HTS and its leader, Julani, have spent a couple years intensively engaging Idlib's small Christian community, including rebuilding Christian churches, and bringing in clerics who had previously exiled from Nusra control.

So again, none of this is to soften what this group represents, but it is to underline that it has changed, and that change has allowed it, as we're seeing play out, to co-opt and to work and coordinate alongside actors that previously were essentially its enemies, and it has also, frankly, accomplished the kind of victories that the more mainstream part of the opposition never did. And so they are starting to curry more credibility and favor in circles that, years ago, had very much burnt those bridges.

Now, are those kind of, if you want to call them, moderating steps, going to sustain themselves when Julani realizes that he can be a much bigger kind of godfather figure than he previously thought? And there's no doubt he has big ambitions. He's smart, he's young. And everybody knows, who knows him, is that he wants to do more than he already is doing.

 So will he be able to restrain those original, more aggressive, and problematic tendencies? I would say that remains to be seen. Some of the early signs in Aleppo City are encouraging. They've opened up a hotline for public complaints, which has already been active and responded to a number of complaints about criminal activities.

They have made a point to welcome the Christian community of Aleppo, including allowing them to celebrate a number of recent festivals just in the last 48 hours. But again, the test's not in the first five days. The test will come three months from now when things have settled down, and that remains to be seen.

Daniel Byman: Given the pace of advances, and I know it's hard to predict the future, but is the next step for the opposition really to consolidate their remarkable gains, or do you think they have a chance of pressing significantly further and that the regime is quite brittle and they can continue to make very rapid advances?

Charles Lister: Well, I mean, I think unquestionably the regime has revealed itself to be very brittle, but they still rely, or they can still rely, on a handful of more capable military units. The 4th Division, another one called the Special, the 25th Special Tasks Division, which used to be known as the Tiger Forces, and a few others.

Now, none of those factions were, significantly present in the northwest just immediately prior to this offensive, but they've all been sent to the Hama frontline, which I mentioned earlier. And that I think is where we're starting to see a frontline harden a little bit. But I think, for now, no question the opposition and HTS at the front, appears to want more. You know, the lines in other areas are still moving forward, but, you know, there will come a point when their 30,000 fighters-ish, will simply not be able to continue to take territory and hold it sustainably.

It's not frankly, I don't think really realistic to expect them to continue to seek to march towards Damascus, as you know, we might be hearing from some, so I suspect we're at that slow point now, when the surge has slowed, and it may come to a stop. And let's not forget that when, in, for example, 2015, the Syrian opposition and the Syrian regime, each held about half of Aleppo City, it took the regime five years of ferocious conflict to retake half of Aleppo City. So the fact that it is now under their, under HTS’ and the opposition's control, is no insignificant thing. So even if these front lines freeze where they currently are, we are likely talking about a very significant, months, if not years-long military campaign, if the regime ever wants to take it back.

On the other hand, they may not, and what I suspect here is that Turkey, which hasn't really played a direct role until now, I think they've allowed this to happen rather than directed it. This is great from Turkey's interests, and it really significantly strengthens their negotiating hand, which everyone knows they have wanted to, for a while. And I think Turkey at some point will step in, and say it's time to negotiate. What that negotiation will be over, I think remains to be seen and will depend a little bit on whether the U.S. and the Europeans decide, as well as the regional states, that we want or don't want to be part of some kind of a Syria negotiation.

So whether this becomes a, you know, Syrian-Turkish or Turkish-Russian bilateral negotiation or an international process is up to the international community and I would certainly say it should be an opportunity for us but, you know, with a change of administration here in the U.S., I'm not counting off my bets for anything so soon.

Daniel Byman:  So if the administration were to heed your advice, what would they be doing?

Charles Lister: I mean, for starters, the international community just needs to get together to talk about Syria. Funnily enough I'm convening a meeting like that at the Doha Forum in a week's time, where we'll have the U.S. government, all the key European governments, the UN and the regional Arab states all in the same room for the first time in a couple of years to talk about Syria policy.

But something official, not convened by a think tank, is what's sorely needed. It's been sorely needed before these latest hostilities, but otherwise we'll be in a place where what we saw happen last year, where a majority of the Middle East decided to re-engage the Syrian regime, and it just catastrophically backfired.

I mean, every aspect of the Syrian crisis deteriorated after Assad was brought back into the Arab League. Nothing got better, and there's been no political process to speak of. And there's a reason for that, and that is because Turkey and the U.S. hold the most leverage. The U.S., through its partnership with the SDF, holds 25 percent of the country and 80 percent of the energy resources, as well as our sanctions basically holding the Syrian economy around its neck.

And then Turkey controls about another 15 to 20 percent of Syrian territory and about 45,000 armed opposition fighters in total. That is real leverage that hasn't been brought to the table since John Kerry was the Secretary of State. So, first of all, just getting at the table, convening conversations and dialogue that come up with shared interests, shared priorities, shared positions and principles, and then taking those to, whether it's through a UN process or through a parallel bilateral U.S.-Russian dialogue that then leads to something else.

It could go in a number of different directions. But the first thing is just to get involved. The U.S. has spent too many years disengaging from this issue, and frankly, it needs to catch up.

Daniel Byman: So, some of those who are listening to us may not remember much about the U.S. relationship with the SDF, especially because it has not been in the headlines. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship and also the role, if any, that the SDF has been playing in the latest round of conflict?

Charles Lister: Yeah, it's a good question. So, I mean, the U.S. has had an open, cooperative, effective relationship with the SDF and before that its Kurdish-dominant constituents since late 2014, early 2015, in terms of working together to combat ISIS. That relationship has probably only strengthened with time, although there were some bumps along the road through the first Trump administration, a number of withdrawals, and then returns or withdrawal, but not quite a withdrawal.

But it is a vital relationship. The U.S. has 900 troops on the ground in a number of military positions. We also, through the SDF, have a part in controlling about 55,000 ISIS-related men, women, and children. So it's a vital relationship. As to the SDF’s role in recent events, minimal until now. The SDF does control areas, small pockets of areas in Northern Aleppo, including a strategic town called Tell Rifaat, which the opposition has long and consistently seen as essentially stolen, because it is an Arab-majority town longtime town within the revolution, within the opposition.

And there has been a move by a different opposition outfit, the Syrian National Army, which is much closer to Turkey, to try and retake Tell Rifaat. Right now, there are negotiations between the SDF and the Syrian opposition to either secure a safe exit for the SDF, or see a whole new line of hostilities break out. And that would then threaten to spread east where Turkey, and the Syrian National Army have other territorial holdings all along SDF front lines.

That's frankly a problem that I don't think the U.S. has a great deal of leverage over. Every time Turkey has launched ground incursions into Northern Syria, we haven't done anything about it, in large part because they're a member of NATO. They're the largest, second largest standing army in NATO, and we're not gonna want to get in a standing fight with the Turks anytime soon.

Incidentally, that is probably the biggest challenging aspect to our bilateral relationship with the SDF. So it's complicated, but more broadly, the relationship with the SDF is increasingly vital because ISIS is showing signs of a real resurgence in Syria. And if we do away with that relationship, or God forbid, if we disengage from Syria altogether, ISIS will reap the rewards very quickly.

Daniel Byman: So, talk us through that. I think that's an important point as a new administration comes in and thinks about its Syria policy.

Charles Lister: Well, I mean, you know, to rewind a little bit, we, as the United States, alongside other partners within the coalition, and alongside the SDF on the ground, did a superb job at liberating a very large tract of territory from ISIS control. We won that territorial victory in early 2019. But at that time, ISIS had in fact, two and a half years before then, ISIS had made a public decision, to conduct what it called a retreat to the desert. And that retreat to the desert was primarily to Syria's central Badiya, the central desert in Syria. Largely unpopulated region, a very familiar area for ISIS and its predecessor movements going back to the Iraq War.

And that retreat to the desert basically allowed ISIS to survive over the last several years. And it's in that central desert that ISIS has very slowly rebuilt itself, taken advantage of the fact that the Syrian regime is, as we've been discussing about the northeast, militarily very weak, militarily very incapable in terms of sophistication. There's really nothing much the Syrian regime's been able to do to challenge a widely-dispersed entity like ISIS operating in a vast expansive desert. So they've rebuilt.

Now those of us who pay very, very, very close attention to this have been warning for a while that rebuilding would eventually spill across the Euphrates River, into the U.S. and SDF controlled areas of the northeast. And that happened basically in January this year. And since then, ISIS has conducted, or ISIS is on track to more than triple its rate of operations in Syria compared to 2023. And equally, more than triple its rate of operations specifically in the U.S. and SDF-held areas. So that spillover, you know, what happens in areas that we can't control, has now become a very real and very dangerous reality.

There's one other element here that had an impact, which was post-October the 7th, the surge of Iranian proxy attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria, from October 2023 to February 2024, had a really significant effect on the ability of our troops in Northeastern Syria to be on the ground, out of their bases, conducting operations, collecting intelligence. And that brief vacuum also appears to have, you know, provided ISIS some breathing space to launch this very significant resurgence.

So I guess that to sort of conclude the point, I would say the U.S. troops, even being just 900 of them, are playing an enormously significant role here. We are, frankly, the glue holding together the only meaningful effort to counter ISIS in Syria. The Syrian regime has been completely incapable, even when it's been willing to try. So much so that the U.S. has conducted three rounds of very heavy airstrikes in the Syrian central desert in the last eight weeks or so, targeting ISIS training camps that have sat there in the desert for the last three years and never been touched by the Syrian regime or the Russians.

So we're having to take actions into our own hands, but we're fighting a battle. We're fighting a struggle here that is like 15 steps ahead of us. So we've had over 100 CENTCOM operations against ISIS in the last eight weeks, and yet ISIS's resurgence continues on an upward trajectory. So if we left, really truly all hell would break loose.

And that's before we take into consideration what I mentioned a minute ago in having a network of 26 makeshift prisons in this northeastern region containing 10,000 ISIS fighters and two major IDP camps containing about 45,000 other, mostly women and children, who came out of the ISIS territorial state. So if those camps and prisons were to empty, truly all hell will break loose.

So, you know, our presence remains vital and it's totally affordable. It's on a risk level. It's marginal. We've had nine combat deaths in 10 years and none for three years. You know, when you look, when you do the numbers, as I wrote in a recent article for the Middle East Institute, you know, our troop presence represents about 0.2 percent of all U.S. troops deployed abroad. About five times that number are in Spain. Right now, as an example, it accounts for about 0.1 percent of the entire U.S. military budget. So this is not a mission we cannot afford. And it's not a mission that's taking away from great power competition or our ability to do anything anywhere else. So it should be something that we continue to invest in.

Daniel Byman: Let me ask you one last question, which is really almost, you know, a broad ethical question. When this latest offensive happened and there were the rapid gains, I'm always delighted when a brutal regime like Assad's in Syria suffers setbacks, but it also means more years of war. How do you think about that trade off?

Charles Lister: That's a great question. I mean, I agree with you entirely on the ethical level and how it makes you feel, especially now we're watching Russia conduct these kind of punishment air campaigns. They've hit five hospitals in 24 hours, a number of schools and IDP camps. So that is tragic. It really, really is.

But, you know, as someone who works pretty intensively on Syria and has for 15 years, it's also what most of what we're seeing play out is also tragically predictable. As I say, you know, the HTS and all these armed groups haven't been arming themselves to the teeth and developing all of these enhanced capabilities because they want to defend their territory. They're doing that because they wanted to go on the offense.

And at the same time, watching the proliferation of the regime's drug trade and infighting between regime militias and all of these other things, as inevitably was going to mean that the regime was fraying at the seams internally on the security levels.

So there was always going to be a return to serious violence. It was always just a matter of timing. And so there's also that part of me that just had saw this coming to an extent, perhaps not quite this dramatic, but certainly saw hostilities returning. And so, I'd, kind of, gamed that in my head already

But ultimately, big picture, this is just more evidence, if we don't collectively, not just as the U.S., but collectively as the international community, work to genuinely resolve these big crises, they will always blow up again at some point. Gaza on October the 7th was a lesson of that. Lebanon was a lesson of that. Yemen, and what the Houthis are doing around the Gulf right now, are a lesson of that.

We can't paper over crises or ignore them and hope they'll just be contained or go away. The world doesn't work that way. And Syria in 2014 and 2015, as I said earlier, fundamentally transformed international security and stability in politics. There was never any reason to believe that couldn't happen again. And, you know, I'm not saying we're at that truly dramatic moment right now, but we are at a very dramatic moment inside Syria that could have an effect on a number of other things that would affect us. 

Daniel Byman: Words to live by. Charles Lister, this has been a fantastic primer. Thank you so much for spending your time with us.

Charles Lister: Great. Thank you so much for having me, Dan.

Daniel Byman:

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