Kovac, Amassia, and thank you for joining me in the trenches.
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
It's a great pleasure, my friend.
We have built a number of friendships over the last few
years. Thanks.
Thanks actually to the whole lockdown thing.
Indeed. And back then, this was an
opportunity, in my opinion, for the people to come together and
connect together, especially that that era was supposed and
it was planned to separate between the people, to find
vertical lines among the people, to turn the people against each
other. So we needed also a coalition of
people, let's say, to push back against the trend of turning the
people against each other so that they would be busy with
these side fights. Meanwhile, the people in power,
they're grabbing all the power and all the money from the
people. Meanwhile, we were discussing if
we should wear a mask or not. If I look at my work as a
political cartoonist, I mean, I've got books published.
I was very, very mainstream in my views and I've only swung in
the last few years. And what worries me is why is it
that I held those views and not just me?
Why is it that so many in the mainstream held perhaps the
wrong side of history views? Is that is that a?
Is that a result of just Western propaganda?
I just want to say that I have never intended to become an
expert on Syria. This was not even in the corner
of my head or I didn't want to, let's say hyper focus on one
issue. It was the imposed war on us in
Syria and the injustices inflicted upon the Syrian
people. When you are, for example, in
2012 at the beginning of the war, you're in Aleppo and you
see with your own objective eye something is happening in front
of your eyes. And then when you turn on your
TV to the mainstream press and especially Al Jazeera or the
English speaking TV outlets, because I used to also speak
English back then, you notice a stark difference.
There is sometimes an 180° difference between what is
happening on the ground and what they're reporting.
So this starts like, out of curiosity, why are they doing
this? I thought that the naive me back
then in 2012, so we're talking about 13 years ago, that maybe
they don't know. Maybe these journalists really
do not know what is happening. So what I did, basically, I
contacted the mainstream journalists.
I contacted Abu Adaman of CNN, I contacted Hala Gorani of CNN and
back then one of them was in Damascus.
So I received a phone call and from the CNN journalist asking
me what happened today in Aleppo because there was a anti assault
protest somewhere and I reported about it.
I told her what I saw with my own objective eyes.
And at night when I read the article on CNN, for me it was
this, you know, the shock factor that all of a sudden you see
that you told her something and she reported completely
something else. So I started questioning, like,
are they really doing this on purpose or not?
So since then I started, I created a group on Facebook
called Syria Now News and Analysis.
Back then, it wasn't Syria Analysis, it was called Syria
Now. So we're reporting what's
happening in Syria now in English.
And since then, people started to look to alternative news
sources, coming to Facebook to read in the group what I and
other people are posting there. But this was more like an
activism because we were very young and we were very, you
know, like, let's say, sensational more than we're
trying to deliver all the facts because we want only to debunk
what the mainstream media is doing.
But this has developed through time that you become at the
point where you can stay as an activist or you take one step
ahead and study the the documents, for example, leaked
by the American memos, defence intelligence agencies, CIA
leaked documents, books, reading and reading to understand all
these things. I had professors and I had
mentors. Lots of people were teaching me
Syria. But the political analysis of
what is happening now in the country is, in my opinion, you
cannot really rely on scholars. And on the theories and the
people who studied the books studied the history of Syria
because most of the people in my experience were.
I call them prisoners of the. Books.
So you have a professor who studied 15 years as a historian,
political science, etcetera, but he studied it through the books
and who have who has written these books and why these books
exist in the library and not other books.
So I started questioning a lot. So I went into this rabbit hole.
Why this professor is telling me who is my supervisor that what
is happening in Syria is a democratic revolution.
Meanwhile my eyes tell it's otherwise, right?
So I, I, I, I went into this phase of rebellion, let's say
against this establishment, academia and historians and like
the, the, the so called strategic experts, like they
host them on TV outlets. So I told to myself that this is
an opportunity for me. To become someone who is giving
people also solid facts about what is going on in Syria, even
if these solid facts are sometimes subjective.
Because this is my opinion based on certain realities which I saw
in my own eyes and then. You see, after 7-8 years of
consistent work like you, you are daily telling them what is
going on not only in Syria but the Middle East reporting.
I have over 1000, 10 or 1020 videos on on YouTube.
So people are not stupid. People can see patterns.
People can see that after seven years, someone X who works for a
think tank that receives funding from government A, Government B,
Donor A, donor B, which he has basically invested interest in
Syria, unlike someone who comes from Syria and he's telling you
something on his YouTube channel whose sole funding are the
people watching it. There is a big difference for
them to see that when I say if this happens, then this will
lead into this. And then in a few days or a few
weeks when they see that what I predicted based on these
realities that I'm trying to discuss actually happened, they
say, OK, what predicted it. But it's not like prediction
based on reading the stars. It's a prediction based on
reading the sequences of events and knowing the history of the
region, which is basically turning out to be to be true.
So that's how you gain credibility among the people and
that's why the people. TuneIn and they call you an
expert on Syria, although. I had no intention at all to
become an expert on this issue. My dream was to become a
diplomat representing my country in the UN.
My dream was to become an ambassador representing the
interests of my country. But those are all faded away.
I'm not like regretting to to have this current career, but in
an ideal world I wouldn't have become someone talking on
YouTube. I would have been a diplomat for
sure. When I was on Alex Jones's show
recently, he called me an expert and I said I'm not an expert.
And he said no, no. If you live there and you
experience something that is certainly a metric by which you
can be referred to as an expert. And I think that's quite, quite
true because everybody these days is an expert and they've
never even been or spent time in the area that they are reporting
on. Yes.
Look that that it is very important for someone, for
example, if this someone wants to become an expert on Syria, to
at least know the communities in Syria.
Syrians are not like one unique people.
There is this a concept that Syria is.
Like a nation, and I would like to say something about this,
Syria has never been a nation historically.
We spoke this also offline. The history of Syria goes to the
biblical times, and we know that Damas very.
Important. It's an extremely important
country, yeah. Yes, but there was no state
called Syria in history, right? And this is a new construct
after the independence of Syria from the French occupier.
But Damascus, for example, the current capital of Syria, is the
oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.
It is. It was mentioned early in the
Bible, for example in Genesis 14, 15 and is closely associated
with Abraham whose servant Eliser was from Damascus.
It is also attributed to the conversion of some Paul.
So Paul who underwrote to Damascus, he converted and this
was a pivotal moment in New Testament history.
For example, Syria nowadays includes.
A town called Malula, and Malula is up until this moment they
speak Aramaic, which is the language of Jesus Christ.
So it has a big significance from historical and biblical
perspective. I understand it.
But there was no empire which said this is Syria and this was
the Syrian empire. This was a new construct after
the French mandate. So in this case we had different
types of tribes, people, sects, religions, ethnicities,
etcetera. The French came and said, so we
decided today that you guys are all Syrians, you know, and this
was something that was very new. For the Syrians to have a
national identity because before that they lived on the French
occupation and before that 400 years of Ottoman occupation, and
before that Umayyad and Abbasid and Safaid and so many other,
the Greeks and Romans, so many different empires passed through
Syria. Now, under side circumstances,
we have a new country where you have over 2223 different
components coming together calling themselves Syrians.
Right. So if you're not in Syria and if
you haven't socialised with these different people, you will
not know that the people in the resort are very different from
the people in Aleppo. You will not know that the
people in Aleppo are very different from the people in
Damascus, very different. And they, we speak the same
language with different dialects, but we have different
mentalities. We have different cuisines, we
have different cultures, we have different music.
It's, it's a mosaic, as we call it.
It sounds like South Africa. Exactly.
But but the difference is that after World War 2, Syrians were
given this piece of land to, to govern themselves, right,
Supposedly. But the Syrians have never
governed themselves before. They were governed by other
powers. So this was a new experience
also for them to to manage a state and govern all these
people together. That's why between the 1948,
since the independence of Syria till 1970, this era was the most
unstable era in the history of modern Syria because they
witnessed around 10 coup d'etats.
Like every two weeks somebody turns against each other and
they're like, now I'm the leader, you have to worship me,
you know? And here we have the Americans,
the 11 of the first CIA LED. Coup d'etat in the history of
the CIA was in Syria and they brought Houston Zaim as a
president of the country because they wanted to for Syria to make
peace with Israel and they were creating a Middle Eastern
alliance, countries of alliances against the Soviet.
Union and Syria back then rejected it, so they engineered
the coup. The so the history of the coup
d'etat and regime change operations goes back 7080 years
back in history in Syria. It's nothing new, but these coup
d'etats, after 10 coup d'etats, the last one was done by the
father of Bashar Hafez al Assad. And since the 1970 Syria
witnessed, let's say, political stability, which means there was
a regime imposing its rule on the people, has established
political authoritarianism. It has given the people the
economic opportunity, cultural and societal freedoms.
But don't come close to politics.
We give you very cheap food, medication, fuel, healthcare.
You study tool till PhD for free with good education.
You get your fuel for very cheap prices.
You get your meat for very cheap prices.
People were happy mostly, but some people wanted more, wanted
political freedoms. But then the political people
who wanted political freedoms, they themselves were not
Democrats. So this is the this is the
problem with with Syria. The people who rise against the
political authoritarianism in Syria under the leadership of
Hafez, they themselves were not Democrats because they were
belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood.
And the Muslim Brotherhood never believed in democracy.
They believed in elections to reach to power.
Once they reach to power, which is like a train, you jump into
the train, which is elections, you reach to power and then you
jump out of the train and you create a theocracy.
This is what Jolani is doing nowadays, right?
Therefore, although Jolani didn't come with elections too,
he came also after a coup d'etat.
And this is something we could discuss later in our
conversation. So under such circumstances, the
Hafez regime, they cracked down on this Islamist scene,
completely crashed them in 82 after they created an Islamic
emirate in Syria, in Aleppo and in Hama, similar to what is
happening nowadays now under Bashar.
When Bashar came and succeeded power, he came from London.
He is an ophthalmologist. He married Asma, who was born
and raised in Britain. Although she is a Syrian.
Descent and her family are all Syrians, but they came from a
place where they studied and lived with progressive values.
So he came with a confrontational, let's say,
attitude towards the people, thinking that these people need
to be socially reformed. So he started opening up the
society, liberalising the economy, and this created him
lots of. Backlash and lots of enemies in
the country because. Many people were not ready to
accept these progressive values, and especially among the more
conservative people, and especially among the Muslim
people. That's why even under Bashar's
rule, at the beginning of the few years, the, the, the, the
clergies, they opposed his reforms.
For example, he opened the casino in Syria.
It was a big issue. It was a big issue.
It they made a big issue out of it because gambling is Haram
under Islam. I understand it.
I understand where they're coming from.
But my approach is you see gambling as a Haram and I don't
gamble. I'm not a Muslim and I could
join you in efforts saying I don't like gambling, but there
are people who like gambling and you should give them the right
to gamble. And this is the same thing with
alcohol. I don't drink alcohol, my
friend, not out of religious reasons.
I don't like it. I'm very sorry to hear, Kwok.
Yeah, I don't like it. I feel it's it always makes me
sick when I drink it and I feel it's a poison.
That's just me. But if someone, my father drinks
alcohol, my brother drinks alcohol, everybody around me
drink alcohol. I'm not coming to the to the
table and telling them my I don't preach the the how
horrible alcohol is because most of the time people who drink
alcohol, they're like, why are you not drinking alcohol?
You know, are you, are you pussy?
You know, you're sorry for, for the terminologies, you know,
like, are you not a man? Why are you not drinking
alcohols? Like, yeah, but it has nothing
to do with me being a man, you know.
Anyways, what I'm trying to say, Bashar came with confrontational
attitude against this type of values and it didn't work out
for him. Well, so he started making AU
turn again. He realised that the people
cannot be reformed this way. So he started giving them more
mosques and more Islamic teachings.
You what you want is like he started just appeasing them.
And this has created more mosques in Syria than
universities, more mosques in Syria than schools.
And I'm not against the mosques, so nobody would misinterpreted
that. However, I believe when you are
a smaller country with smaller resources and when in the
region, the countries who have hijacked the Islamic teachings
are basically Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Qatar.
And when the money is in the hands of Saudi Arabia, of Qatar,
then they're the ones who are going to be able to project
their interpretations and and their teachings on the rest of
the region. And we have an experience,
history behind it in Afghanistan.
What did they do in Afghanistan? They brought all the Mujahideen
from all around the world into Afghanistan with the money of
Saudi Arabia. So we know that there is a
history behind it, that Saudi Arabia can and could radicalise
the youth in the Islamic world. And this was the, in my opinion,
the fatal mistake. When you build, we have 13,000
and 500 mosques in Syria for 24 million people.
Out of which of course you have 30 to 40% were minorities.
So you have built enormous number of mosques.
And then the the political money comes, the Petro dollar comes
Saudi Arabia and Qatar, they start inviting this clergyman,
the sheikhs, this imam, giving them free trips to Saudi Arabia
to go to Hajj and bring with them 50 people.
What do you think is going to happen through time?
They're going to buy influence in the country.
And this imam is going to go to the podium and talk to 203
hundred people and likewise 13,000 and 500 mosques.
And this is what happened in 2011.
This is what where I'm leading with this conversation.
The vast majority of the experts on Syria do not tell us that 99%
of the anti Assad demonstrations and protests erupted from the
mosques every Friday after the prayer they used to go from the
mosques. So who is funding the mosque and
who is urging this imam to call for the people to to demonstrate
and protest against the the political authoritarianism?
And if this comes from the mosque, where will this lead
when the regime change happened? Those are legitimate questions.
And I said, if the revolution starts from the mosque, then the
outcome will be that this is going to be an Islamic rule.
Where is the controversy in that?
And that was called an Assadist talking point.
So Fast forward in 2025, my friend, who turned out to be
correct because it's very, it's logical.
It's not like somebody needs to be really an expert or a genius
to understand that when you have 60,000 people, this is the the
most, the biggest number of people who demonstrated at one
time against Assad were 60,000 people.
And this happened in Hama. And why it is in Hama?
Because in 82 the Muslim Brotherhood uprising started
from Hama and this was the place where they started an Islamic
Emirate in Hama and this is where Hafez al Assad crashed
this Islamist uprising and insurgency in 82.
So if you don't know the history, you will not know why
most people demonstrated in the city of Hama also against
Bashar. Anyways, because of this let's
say context and background, it was easy to see that if they
remove Assad from power this is not going to lead into a western
style democracy or a Switzerland or not even a Singapore because
this is what the anti Assad people all the time say.
Once we remove Assad from power we will make a Singapore of the
Middle East out of Syria. And this is ridiculous because
if you need to create a Singapore, you need the
mentality of the people who built Singapore.
But when you see who are the people governing Syria nowadays,
like Jolani and Shibani and the Ministry of Interior and the
intelligence apparatuses and the multinational terrorists in
Syria, the maximum they could establish is Afghanistan. 2
point O. And I'm not trying to insult the
people in Afghanistan. I'm, I'm, I'm saying the, the,
the, the ruling party there, who are they?
It's the Taliban, right? And these people in Syria who
are governing now are worse than Taliban.
They are the Al Qaeda offshoot. They are the partners of Abu
Baker Baghdadi. They are the people who were in
Iraq and sending car bombs into a Christian and Shia
neighbourhoods. They are the ones who
decapitated countless number of people.
They are the ones who executed women in the streets, accusing
them of adultery, all documented on videos.
The defence minister of Syria, he has an old video film 2014,
breaking the statue of Virgin Mary on on the floor.
Those are the people who are in charge of the country.
So what do you expect really from this type of mentality?
Then somebody like Charles Lister, who is considered an
expert on Syria for working for a think tank funded by the Gulf
countries, he comes and tells you that don't listen to Kivuk,
this is paid by Assad. This is a projection because
they are paid by people with invested interest to distort
these realities and present what is happening in Syria as a
progress. This is the worst chapter in the
history of Syria. This is the darkest and the
bleakest chapter in the history of Syria.
And the Syrian people are paying a very, very high price for this
choice. Maybe they didn't choose it.
I don't know. But now, after that Jolani came,
many people like, act like it's the acceptable thing to accept
Jolani. No, it's not.
It's not. Imagine your president is the
founder of the al Qaeda offshoot in Syria.
Do you understand the gravity of the issue?
Do you understand I'm talking to the Syrian people what type of
image you are giving about your country to the outside world by
having a president like him? Because there wasn't consistent
effort since 9:11 to say all Muslims are terrorists, right?
You remember the era of after 911 and equate them all to Osama
bin Laden. And if you accept someone like
Jolani as a president, you are proving the point.
You have fallen into the trap. They have said for you by now
they will come and say every time we gave them the
opportunity to govern themselves, we freed them from
the from the tyranny. And they have picked and chose
the al Qaeda leader, although they didn't choose him.
They were the CIA and the MI 6 and the MIT behind Jolani.
They brought him to power, but the people celebrated him.
That's the problem. So it's also, this is not only
politics, you know, you have public opinion in the West, in
the east, in the South, in the north, watching what is
happening there. And they were like, oh, Syrian
people want Jolani, OK, which means they're also like Jolani,
right? If you want Jolani, you're like
Jolani. But Jolani comes and says, I
have, I have informed like, like the last person which I
decapitated 1010 days ago. I, that was a phase.
I reformed. I'm a diversity friendly, accept
me the way I am. And now I'm going to govern the
country with 22 different components and I'm going to be
fair with them. I'm going to treat them well.
Nice words, right? Those are about all rhetoric.
It's talk. The moment he came to power, he
killed 1500 civilians in three days.
In three days, all were Alawites.
He massacred them based on their sectarian affiliation because
they associated them with Assad. Assad was an Alawite, so they
killed them and they they came after the Druze in the South,
and the Druze had the the United States and Israel on their back,
so they shielded themselves. The same goes with the Kurds.
They shielded themselves with the Americans, but who is in the
back of the Christians and the Alawites?
No one. If Jolani kills every single
Christian and Alawite in Syria now, nobody will blink an eye.
They don't give a fuck about them.
A big portion of the post independence Syria seems to
relate to to Islam a lot. So.
At the current moment, the Christians of Syria, the
percentage of the Christians of Syria dropped 90%, which means
we have moved from around 2,000,000 Christianity in Syria
into 200,000 Christians in Syria.
This is a very small number anyways.
So they don't present any obstacle to the rule, to the
government, to the regime or to the Islamists.
Now, in my experience in Syria, I have lived there most of my
life. I have never encountered in my
life racism or prejudice or any type of negative behaviour
because I was a Christian from anyone Muslim, Christian drusa.
It was a situation where people don't care what what religion
you are because they said El Din Muhammadi in Arabic, which means
religion is how how you treat me.
So the the way you treat me, I treat you.
I don't care if you believe in Muhammad, if you believe in
Jesus, if you believe to Isa, it doesn't matter.
As long as you treat me well, I treat you well.
And the Christians in Syria and especially the Armenians of
Syria, they had a brilliant reputation among the Muslim
people to the extent that my father used to be in an
industrial zone and we were like a second class business doing
businesses. It's not like we were not in the
upper of the tier. We couldn't import from, let's
say from Germany, but we used to buy from the market and resell
it in the market. And we used to work in a German
business. And what happened is basically
people come to our shop and say to my tell my father that we
want to buy from you because you're Armenian, because you're
Christian, because we know you don't lie and you don't cheat
and we trust you. And when you say this is
Chinese, this is Chinese, this is German, this is German.
So Muslims used to come and buy from us all the time.
And we made our money, we made our fortune thanks to them.
We had no problem with them. And on Fridays they used to go
to their prayer, they pray for 1/1 and 1/2 hour, etcetera.
All the countries stops from operating.
It's OK, it's 1 1/2 hour per week, no problem.
But the moment when you start forcing it on the people, so
it's Friday, they're going to pray.
So we used to close our shop and sit inside until they finish
their prayer out of respect. But then when the war erupted,
the Islamists came. They will force you to close
your shop, so they would come to your shop.
If you don't close your shop, we will kill you or we will lynch
you in the streets. That's the difference between
what Muslim and what an Islamist is.
So nowadays, unfortunately speaking, the people governing
the country are these radical Islamists and the Christians
have lost just completely in this government and they know
that this government doesn't sees them as equals in the
country. And the evidence for it is, is
this latest terrorist attack in the church in San Elias Church
in Damascus, which killed over 30 civilians.
I will give you, I will tell you why two people between two to
three people conducted this terrorist attack.
And one of them, the people outside the church, they have
seen him crossing a checkpoint of the Jolani regime and they
have seen this person before in their neighbourhood. 2 weeks
ago, he came with loud speakers on a back of a pickup track
calling the Christians to convert to Islam and the people
of the district kicked him out of the neighbourhood. 2 weeks
later they saw him coming and passing through the checkpoint
and walking to the church and people tried to stop him and he
had the suicide vest and he went into the church and he blew
himself up after he opened fire on on on the people.
Now this person who two weeks ago came and called the people
to convert to Islam, people noticed his face.
They started asking questions with this person, what is he
doing in our neighbourhood? And they brought his full name,
and they found out that he is an official security personnel in
the Jolani regime, which means he's a registered security agent
in the Jolani regime. And this person came back to the
church and blew himself up among people, killing them.
And 15 minutes later, the Jolani regime issued a statement
blaming ISIS for the attack. But this was not carried out by
ISIS. This was carried out by a man
and his colleague. Both of them were part of the
Jolani regime. But because they cannot say
that, so they blamed ISIS for it.
Quickly. This is a huge sin that they
have done against the Christians because now the Christians
cannot trust the judgement of the government if you are not
going to hold yourself accountable for what your guy
did to us. Secondly, after the bombing,
only one Syrian official in the Jolani regime visited the church
to deliver the condolences and this person is Christian herself
because there is one Christian woman in the Jolani cabinet that
her handlers told her she used to live in Canada.
You need to come to Damascus. She used to work with them, with
the regime change operatives, let's say for a long time,
because we need a woman, we need a woman who who is not covered
not there is no hijab and we need a Christian woman in the
government. So we give the impression, the
false impression that this is a multiculti and diversity
friendly regime. Theatre, theatre.
She went to the church to deliver her condolences.
Right? Jolani called on the phone.
The patriarch and said he's sorry to what happened to to the
church and to the people. And then he issued a written
statement. In the statement, he says he's
expressing solidarity and sympathy with the victims of the
criminal explosion. Now when we said you need to be
Syrian to understand the, the mentality and the meanings
behind the words that these, all these pandas do not know.
If you're a president of a country and you call the this
terrorist attack a criminal explosion, you don't call it a
terrorist attack and you don't call the victims martyrs in our
language, then you are putting them below the martyrs status.
And in Syria when somebody is praying to God in a church and
gets killed, he's a martyr. Same thing happens to people who
worshipping in the mosque and somebody kills them, he's a
martyr. But Jolani not calling them a
martyr means he doesn't he, he considers them below the Muslims
who could be martyrs but the Christians not.
And the second thing is, how would Jolani even call them
martyrs if he himself sent car bombs to the Christian and Xi'an
neighbourhoods and killed many people in the past?
This means he's also a terrorist.
He's calling himself a terrorist.
And that's why the patriarch Yaji, when he gave the speech,
and I could send you the speech now.
So you could probably, if you want to show it later to your
audience. He dared to criticise Jolani and
he said you called us on a phone.
That's not enough. You didn't even declare 3 day
days of mourning for our martyrs.
You didn't call them martyrs. So he said if there is anyone
who should declare 3 days of mourning, you should declare A
mourning over the government, which means the government is
dead. And he challenged him in the
church and this LED into a huge backlash against him.
And all the minions and mouthpieces of Jolani waged a
brutal campaign against him, against Patriarch Yaji.
And I fear and I believe that they will kill him eventually.
They will kill him, but they will not kill him themselves.
Just like they did with the church.
They will send a lone wolf. It's not going to be someone
this time from the government and they will say this criminal
person killed the Patriot. They will capture him and they
will make a theatre. They will make a video of him
being captured. We brought justice.
But the real issue is they will eliminate him because they will
bring someone else in his position.
And I hear those are my sources. I could be wrong, that they're
preparing someone in the United States who is a Christian
Zionist to bring him to Damascus to replace him.
So this could be a record for the people to to see if this
happens in the future. OK Kevork, I just want to make
sure I'm following. OK.
So 1946 more or less would be the the start of independence.
It was the end of the French mandate and the defeat of the
Ottomans. And around 1970, Assad senior
took control. He became the president and
around 2000, Assad junior became president during the Assad
presidency. Because the West likes to say
regime. We always say regime when it
when it's a government they don't like the the mainstream
narrative is that Syria was very unstable and it was oppressive
and it was authoritarian and it was a horrible place to live.
You're saying the opposite, that it was stable and it was a good
safe place to live. With that in mind, the rise of
is Islamism is that, is that a word?
Islamism? I don't know if it's a word, but
let's use it. Is that related then to US
foreign interests and of course by extension Israeli foreign
interests to to destabilise the region?
So people may say Kevork is biassed.
He's not objective. Google him.
He, he's, Wikipedia says he's an Assadist, right?
OK, let's ask 7 million tourists who visited Syria in 2010 if
Syria was unstable and Syria was a chaotic place where people are
being beaten up in the streets, being sent to dungeons for
having an opinion. Or how can, how can 7 million
people risk themselves and come to Syria as visitors from all
around the world? This is 2010 Syria.
According to the Western pollings, was one of the safest
places in the world. It was the safest place in the
Middle East for people to come and visit.
And it was the richest place for culturally, historically, for
the people to come and visit the country.
I, I, I studied in Paris in 2010.
And with me, I brought a friend from France to visit Syria.
And she said, I believe you. I have never been to Syria.
In the press they would say don't go, but I will go with
you. And she came to Syria and
visited it for 15 days. And she was fascinated.
Now the rise of the Islamists, Islamism, right?
This is something that goes back to the to the Brits, not to the
Americans. The Brits, they're the ones who
created this Muslim Brotherhood movement in the region or helped
in the creation of the Muslim. Brotherhood.
Because in the 1920s, in the mid 1920s, when the Brits used to be
in the occupation in in Egypt, the people who fought against
the British occupation were the nationalists and the socialists.
So how do you find an A domestic rift and domestic enemy to the
nationalists and socialists? Who is the natural enemy of
nationalism and socialism in the region?
They are the Islamists. So they have they have helped
the creation of the Muslim bordered in Egypt by I will
remember his name now. And they have started this
movement from Egypt to divide and conquer the region.
Now the Americans are the successor of the British Empire,
and they have learned a lot from them.
And they have. They have just taken the script
and they applied it in different places, one of which is in
Afghanistan. And Afghanistan was the test for
this formula, and it worked. Hillary Clinton says this was an
amazing plan. We defeated the Soviet Union.
We sent thousands of banless jihadists from all around the
world, trained them, gave them the money.
We have a good ally like Saudi Arabia financing all this and
then we tasked Saudi Arabia to build what is called madrassas.
Madrassa in Arabic means schools.
School and madrassas are the plural of schools.
And Saudi Arabia built religious schools in Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Central Asia, Middle East, thousands of them.
What is the purpose of this? Religious schools is to
indoctrinate and radicalise the youth.
So this was not something like a misjudgement.
This was a deliberate policy to radicalise this the Muslim youth
through indoctrination, through petrodollar, which Saudi Arabia
played a major role after the Arab Spring.
It was Qatar who played the major role in the radicalization
of the people. So this is not something like
the Americans made a mistake in Afghanistan.
This was a deliberate policy, because if this was a mistake
and you consider it a mistake, you will not copy this script
again in Syria or in Afghanistan or in Chechnya or in Bosnia and
in different places around the world.
This is a useful strategy against the enemies of the
United States, turning this brainless, radicalised, young,
aggressive, angry at life people into ticking bombs against the
enemies of the United States. And this has been the case also
in Syria. We had 10s of thousands of
multinational terrorists coming to Syria to fight against who
they say the infidel Assad regime.
OK, what about Palestine, my friend?
Why don't they go also to Palestine if that is the case?
If Jerusalem is the fourth most important holy site in Islam,
why don't they go and liberate Jerusalem?
Why is it that Al Qaeda has never attacked Israel?
Why is it that ISIS never attacked Israel?
Why is it most of the victims are the people of the Levant and
not the Americans or the Israelis per SE?
And I'm not calling for attacks against them because if at any
historical juncture I find myself between only two powers,
ISIS and America, I will definitely find myself on the
side of America. I'm not going to be with with
ISIS. But what I'm saying is they are
moving ISIS on the chess board. And I, this reminds me of what
Professor Mikhail Hudson said in this case, he said Al Qaeda is
basically a contract army for the United States.
They founded it in Afghanistan and they moved it in into
different places to break status quo.
When there is a status quo that you don't like, you have to
break it. You need these chaotic and
terroristic elements to break the status quo so you can reform
a new reality or a new status quo which is more in favourable
to you. And this is the problem.
This is a huge problem. This problem is not like people
believe in Islam. The the problem is the Islamism
that you said, which is imposing your way of life and your
understanding of what Islam is on the rest of the people.
And this is where you will find me pushing against it.
And that's why they say I'm an, I'm an Islamophobe, I'm a
fascist. It's like, am I saying anything
wrong in this? If if Christians come, if the
Roman Empire comes to Syria and tells to the 70% of the people,
I will wipe, I will I will basically send you into
concentration camp, put you inside cages.
I will burn you woman. I will rape you woman.
I will take them as sex slaves. If you don't convert to
Christianity. Do you think we're going to do
this podcast and say that's amazing or we're going to push
against it? So today, when we speak today,
my friend, even the mainstream press say that 10's and 10s of
Alawite women are kidnapped by the Jolani thugs.
They are daily kidnappings of women in Syria for sex, slave
for slavery. This is worse than a jungle,
right? Like do you do?
Do do people understand the gravity of the issue?
Like a woman takes a taxi or a van and going to her school and
then take the woman and they call her parents and they mock
her, mock the her parents saying your woman is with us and you
will never see her again. And they rape her over and over
again. This jihadist come seven people,
eight people, nine people. This is the situation now in the
country. Is this really the freedom we
were promised? It is not.
And, and under both Assads was Syria the secular country.
So the definition of secularism in Europe and in the West is
different from what secularism means in Syria.
And nowadays secularism in the West is also, some people would
say, an indication that it is anti religion.
Like they're trying to destroy the church and they're trying to
destroy the church. They're trying to destroy
Christianity in the West. I can see it with my objective
eyes. Like I have nothing against the
people who are gays or lesbians at all.
Zero. I don't even care what people
believe in their sexual aspirations right?
Or what they want to do. As long as don't come to the
kids, I'm fine. You do it in private.
Don't come to the kids, leave the kids alone.
But when you see in the church, for example in Germany, the
priest is carrying the LGBT flag and walking with his people.
I would say this is not Christian right?
This is anti Christian anyways. In Syria, secularism meant that
every religious and sectarian group would have its rights to
practise its rituals without the state intervention into their
religious affairs. And this is the secularism which
existed under both Assad the father and Assad the son until
the last day. And it also meant one more
thing, which is the suppression of any group in Syria which
comes and tries to impose its religious views on the rest.
So this is something important. If you have, say, 2% or 3% or 5%
of Syrians believe that they have to convert all other people
into their own religion, then this is when the state used to
intervene to put them in their place.
That you practise yours, they practise theirs.
So this is the secular levelism which existed in Syria, which no
longer exists nowadays. Syria is now the opposite of
what it used to be in the past. And it's going to get worse.
Yeah, it is going to get worse because once you empty the
society, so you had like a 1520% Christians, you emptied them
from the country and now you're coming after the Alawites and
they're leaving the country en masse, going to Lebanon, they're
going to Europe. So you're emptying your country
anyways from it's the the real multiculturalism, not the
engineered multiculturalism, not the imposed multiculturalism on
the people. You are destroying that and
creating one state and one coloured state, something that
ironically the West says that we have to accept multiculturalism.
And even if you don't like multiculturalism, you must owe
you a fascist. And then in Syria they come.
They establish A1 coloured country.
Like the, the, the, the contradiction is, it angers me
because then you see someone like Annalina Beibok shake
trying to shake hands with Jolani, and Jolani doesn't even
give her his hand. Do you understand how absurd it
is for a minister to call herself a feminist and says, or
we used to say, because she's now out of government?
The same thing goes for Kayakalas and the rest of this,
sorry to say, clowns who say we're a feminist foreign policy.
We're there for feminism, we're there for women.
And then they go to Damascus, they give their hand to Jolani
and Jolan doesn't even shake hands with them and they say
everything is OK in Syria. We lift the sanctions, we give
them €200 million aid to govern themselves.
What is this? I mean, you, you tell me, what
is this? This is the beyond absurdity,
something that even I don't have a words in my dictionary to
describe. It's horrendous.
You, you, you kind of sideline this.
But what is the involvement of Israel or shall we say Zionism
in Syria? Actually, one of the main
considerations, one of the main reasons why the United States
initiated the regime change operation in Syria was for
Israel. the United States is how many thousand kilo, 10,000
kilometres away. How many thousand kilometres
away from Syria? There is no Syrian Army didn't
pose any threat to the United States.
In the contrary, Syria cooperated with the United
States in the war against terrorism, against Al Qaeda,
against this radicalism in the region.
But it was Israel, because Israel wanted for Syria to sign
the normalisation deal. And Syria, after Egypt was the
only Arab country in the region capable of keeping the Arabic
people in a position that they reject normalisation, they
reject the political entity of Israel.
So under both Hafiz and Bashar, they always called Israel a
Zionist entity, which means they don't recognise the legitimacy
of Israel as a as a political entity.
And they after Egypt left the Arab Israeli conflict, they
signed the accords, the Camp David accords.
Syria stayed alone in the Arabic country against Israel.
So Syria with limited resources, they cannot fight against Israel
which receives full backing of the United States.
So they coordinated with Iran to support and aid and train and
equip non state actors in the region to open small front lines
against Israel, to keep Israel in in in its borders.
Because Israel always had these expansionist aspirations in the
region to the extent that in 1982, Israeli soldiers were
drinking beer in Beirut, they were in Beirut.
So if you are in Beirut, 1 and half hour away, you're in
Damascus. How does that make you feel when
there is a country expanding in the region this way?
So you have they created these conflict zones against Israel to
kept keep them busy fighting against these non state actors.
And those non state actors they had also legitimate grievances
because their territories in Lebanon were occupied, entire
southern Lebanon to Beirut was occupied by Israel.
So Syria and Iran gave them weapons to fight against them
and they managed and succeeded to kick the Israeli occupation
forces out of Lebanon in the year 2000.
And the same goes to Palestine and many of the weapons that
nowadays the, the pro Palestine camp are proud of, they came
either from Syria or passed through Syria, right.
So this, this is the, this was the situation that Israel saw
that they have to solve it because they will create one
state only for the Israelis. There is no two state solution.
And they want to have the freedom of action in the region,
which is Syria is a major obstacle and the supporter of
these resistance groups. That's why they wanted to knock
out Assad and not for its authoritarianism or democracy of
human or BS. You know it my friend.
So they came after him. They removed him from power.
And what's the result now? Palestine is gone.
Anyone who thinks there is going to be Palestine under such
circumstances is delusional. Greater Israel.
Israel now exists also in southern Lebanon and Hezbollah
doesn't push them back because they don't have supply chains
with Syria and they're cut off from the Iran and Iraq.
So they lost the strategic depth.
They're isolated. The same goes for for
Palestinian armed factions. And now Israel can fly its
fighter jets all the way to the borders on the on the Syrian
airspace, something that was unimaginable under Assad since
2018. Last time Israel tried to
penetrate the Syrian airspace, the civilian army shut it down
an F16. And since then, Israel never
penetrated the civilian airspace.
Now the civilian airspace is like it's open for Israel.
They fly every day. They go all the way to the
borders with Iraq. They go from Syria to northern
Iraq to the Kurdistan Region, and they bomb inside Iran.
They have won this war. Israel won this war. the United
States won this strategic conflict in the region.
In the future, there could be a pushback, there could be a
resistance. It's always possible and it will
be. But now I'm saying as we speak
now they have emerged victorious, we have to accept
this reality. Otherwise, if you say no, we
emerged victorious and they lost, means you don't have to do
anything about it if you don't accept the defeat, right?
Because if you don't accept the defeat, you don't work for
victory in the future. So the Syrians have lost, the
Lebanese have lost, the Palestinians have lost.
In this. Iranians, they have preserved
their territorial integrity, their sovereignty, their nuclear
enrichment, but they have lost their allies big time.
So there is no longer axis of resistance in the region.
There is Iran, there is Yemen. Those are very far away,
separate powers. They coordinate with each other,
but there is no longer strategic depth represented by Syria.
There is no longer Hezbollah as a regional power, basically
posing a serious threat against Israel because they don't have
an access now to weapon markets. And the same goes for the
Palestinians. You're watching the footage
coming from Gaza. They're killing Palestinians now
as a sport, for fun. There is no need to kill
malnutrition, the the the the poor and hungry kids going to
collect food. But they can do it because they
can, because they can and nobody cares and nobody will bring them
to justice. But before you had you had an
axis trying to counter this. They made huge mistakes.
I don't want to get into so much details and I criticised them
enough in the past weeks for really adopting this, what they
call the strategic patients, sorry, strategic patients LED
into the crumbling of the axis of resistance or what used to be
called. I also noticed that it wasn't
really in axis because they didn't really act as a organic
one body, but rather they had differences among them.
Iran wanted to lead from the back and not from the front.
And many actors in this axis of resistance were upset by that.
If you're the leader of the axis, just like the United
States is the leader of that axis.
United States leads doesn't come in the background.
United States leads, but Iran didn't lead.
It wanted to lead from the back and wanted for the other actors
to carry out the hostilities. And this was a major, huge
mistake which I think. Killed.
Let's say this axis for now. How can I follow your work?
First of all, thank you so much my friend for having me on the
show. I'm posting daily live
streamings between Monday to Friday. 11 AM is an American
time, 5:00 PM Central European time on my YouTube channel and
Rumble Syriana Analysis. That's the only two places I
post and my personal X account is Kevo Calmasi and my personal
name by shorter video, shorter commentaries, etcetera.
And before I say goodbye, I'm going to insist that you come
and stay with me in South Africa in the near future.
I will definitely do that. I would be more than happy to do
that. All right, Kawalka Mohsen, thank
you for joining me in the trenches.