For well over a decade, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad managed to hold onto power during a complicated civil war involving a number of anti-regime rebel groups. That conflict has also been marked by the intervention of an array of external actors. Some of these actors—like Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah—bolstered Assad’s forces. Others worked to support the rebel groups. The battlefield of the Syrian civil war was a complex landscape, but one Assad managed to navigate just well enough to stay in power.
And then, after a lightning offensive that saw a series of Syrian cities—including, ultimately, the capital Damascus—fall to the rebels, Assad was gone and more than a half-century of rule by his family came to an end.
To explore how that happened—and examine what comes next—John Amble is joined on this episode by Natasha Hall, a senior fellow with the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies with deep expertise on Syria.
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