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Dec. 22, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
22:32
Pepe Escobar : Russia Stays in Syria.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, December 23rd, 2024, Christmas week.
Pepe Escobar will be with us in just a moment on Russia is staying in Syria.
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Pepe Escobar, welcome here, my dear friend, and an early Merry Christmas to you.
Merry Christmas, Judd.
Thank you with deep gratitude for all of our work together in 2024.
Is Russia staying in Syria?
Yes, for the moment, yes.
This is a very complex negotiation at the highest levels, and it will include a direct negotiation between Putin and Erdogan.
It's fascinating to see the movement of foreign ministries at the moment.
The Turkish Foreign Minister every day is out with a bombshell.
And Lavrov is very circumspect about the Russian presence in Syria.
This is fascinating, in fact.
Lavrov is usually very outspoken.
So this is a very complex negotiation.
The Russians know who they are dealing with in Damascus.
They are not in a hurry.
The bases, for the moment, they stay.
They are protected.
The Russian embassy in Damascus is protected, just like the Iranian embassy in Damascus.
So this is a midterm negotiation.
And don't forget, Erdogan is going to Damascus soon, maybe within the next three weeks maximum.
The Guardian of London had reported last week that...
The Kremlin was moving its air defense systems from Syria to Libya.
Was that an accurate report?
Not everything, Judge.
Yes, they are moving some of their assets to Libya.
Some other assets are staying in Khmer Min.
Some were moved back to Russia.
So, obviously...
Fog of war, of course.
And our MI6 friends in London, of course, they're like cockroaches that we are trying to figure that all out.
Here's a clip I want to play for you.
I'm not going to tell you who it is because you might not recognize the person, but you'll probably know.
Cut number one.
There are many differences between Syria and the Taliban.
The way we govern is different.
That man has a $10 million bounty on his head.
That's Al Jelani, looking very much like a Western diplomat stationed in the Middle East.
Well, and he was Che Guevara-fied, and now he's being Giorgio Armani-fied.
Nicely put.
Nicely put, my friend.
What is he the head of government of?
If Putin has to negotiate with Erdogan to keep his bases in Syria, what does Al Jolani and his crew, what do they run?
Basically a fiction.
Essentially, Hakan Fidan, which, by the way, was the head of Turkish Intel before he became foreign minister, and he has sights on the presidency later on.
They are prime asset in Greater Idlibistan, Jolani, former Al-Qaeda, former ISIS, founder of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, weapons from Qatar, all the logistics from Turkey,
support leading from behind by the Pentagon.
Now everybody knows the full story.
And by the way, this clip that you just played, Judge, what he said is completely stupid.
Syria is a tribal, clannish society, even more complex than Afghanistan.
So he doesn't even know what he's talking about.
And by the way, he's not Syrian.
He's Saudi.
He was born in Riyadh.
This is a Saudi national.
Here's what our friend Norman Finkelstein, as only he could, say about this.
Here's what he said.
If you ever feel useless, remember it took 20 years, trillions of dollars, and four U.S. presidents to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
With the Taliban.
I mean, is that where we are in Syria today?
Possibly, possibly.
Well, I followed Afghanistan in detail before, during, and after.
This was one of my...
My biggest long-running story is as a foreign correspondent.
And I'm an old-school foreign correspondent, so I actually go everywhere.
And I went to Taliban, Afghanistan, many times.
And even before 9-11, I was there less than three weeks before 9-11.
And that's how I learned Afghanistan from the inside, starting with the tribal areas, and then inside Afghanistan, so I knew.
As best as I could as a foreigner, of course, without speaking Pashto or Dari, but with very good local connections, a tribal clannish society and how Afghanistan is a jigsaw puzzle of tribal clannish societies.
Syria is even more complex because it's also tribal and clannish and basically irreconcilable.
In fact, Druze and Alawites and Shiites, minorities compared to Sunni Islam, and those tribes that are in the desert, in the northern part of Syria, in the northeast, these are basically Arab tribes,
and they oppose everybody who is not part of the tribe or the clan.
Basically, you cannot rule that part of Syria.
And Erdogan, in his mind, he thinks that he can establish a sort of buffer zone in there.
It's going to be extremely difficult.
They're going to have to kill a lot of Arab tribals.
And this is something that bypasses Jolani completely.
Getting back to Syria, Colonel McGregor reports of the existence of an open-air slave.
I haven't followed that, Judge, really.
It's quite possible.
First of all, because most of the connections that we had in Damascus, many of them were Christians.
They left.
They are not there.
And many Shiite connections as well, they also left to Lebanon.
So Damascus nowadays is a little bit of a no-man's land, and nobody really knows what's happening in the back streets at 2, 3 in the morning.
For instance, the equivalent would be during the American surge in Iraq.
The Americans didn't know what was going on in Southern City at 2 or 3 in the morning.
It's more or less the same thing in Damascus.
But now that concerns people who actually used to live in Damascus.
Christians who used to live in the old city of Damascus, for instance.
Shiites who used to live around Sayida Zainab Temple, which is in the outskirts of Damascus, which is one of the most important sanctuaries in Shiite Islam.
And there are pogroms going on.
There are purges.
And I'm sure there may be a slave market of sorts because many of these groups allied with HTS, they're basically criminal gangs.
It's not that they are Salafi jihadis ideologically per se.
They are criminal gangs and whatever happens, whatever they can make money with, they will do it.
What happens if Erdogan and Netanyahu Have their eyes set on the same piece of real estate?
Apparently, for the moment, it's not the same.
The Israelis are south all the way to the southern countryside, south of Damascus, essentially.
Tel Aviv has its eyes on Damascus.
It's not going to cut it.
And it's not going to cut it with anybody in Syria and with Syrian patriots, whatever their ideological bent.
And Turkey, for Erdogan, it's very, very important.
He wants the industrial heartland of Syria.
This means everything from Aleppo in the north, cutting through the M5 highway, all the way to Damascus near the south.
This is what Erdogan and Of course, the people who back him in Ankara won't.
But he also wants this buffer zone all across the Turkish-Syrian border in the north and northeast and obviously get rid of as many Kurds as possible.
Literally.
This is to put it diplomatically.
The second option is more feasible compared to the first one.
Because the Americans, the Israelis, and other powers who also want to have a say throughout Western Syria, the part of Syria that works, essentially.
And never discount what Russia and Iran could do.
Because this is something immensely important that people in the West are not paying attention.
It's not that Russia and Iran are out of Syria.
They are momentarily out of Syria.
And we should never forget that what was decided at the last moment in that fateful Doha meeting, the round table of the Astana process, where we had Russia, Turkey, and Iran at the same table, there was a mutual agreement between those three partners.
Nobody knows what they agreed on.
Nobody.
The crowds were chanting to Erdogan over the weekend, on to Jerusalem.
What does that mean?
Excellent point.
What does that mean?
It used to be on to Aleppo, then on to Damascus, and now on to Jerusalem.
And many of these outfits linked to HTS, these past few days, they started to yell the same thing.
We're going all the way to Jerusalem.
So I can imagine our friends in Tel Aviv now that we're biting more than we can chew, in fact.
There will be blowback, of course.
And the blowback against Israel is going to be long-running.
It's not now.
It's going to take a while.
Same thing, the Syrian blowback against Turkey.
This is going to take quite a while.
Assuming we have a functioning government within the next few months.
Not a done deal.
For the moment, they put a guy who used to run Idlib to run Damascus.
This is completely absurd.
And they are getting all ultra-hardcore HTS criminals, in fact, for very important positions in the interim government all the way to March.
But Pepe, what is it a government of?
How much real estate?
Besides the city of Damascus is left after the Israelis took what they wanted and the Turks took what they wanted and the Kurds occupied what they wanted.
Exactly.
Because, Judge, we don't know who's actually running Hama and Homs.
Nobody knows who's actually running Hama and Homs.
In Aleppo, the situation in Aleppo is very, very fuzzy.
At the moment.
For the moment, what we have is these key Hayat Tariq Al-Sham executives, let's put it this way, working as, I would say, some sort of mayors, as we have it here in Europe or in France,
for instance.
Mayors of Aleppo, Homs, Hamlet, but this is unsustainable.
We don't know about the degree of popular support that they have.
We don't know about the previous We already know that there is a resistance in the mountains of Latakia by the most able special forces of the previous Syrian Arab army.
So this is just the beginning of a resistance movement.
Let's try...
To define them as Russian patriots.
Oh, Syrian patriots.
I'm sorry.
Okay.
So everything is moving.
West Asia, everything is moving all the time.
And backstabbing is an art.
Switching gears to Ukraine.
In the past week, of course, the Ukrainians claim credit for assassinating a high-ranking Russian general who was also a senior scientist.
In Russia.
And numerous drones have attacked high-rise apartment buildings.
Here are photographs of the drones.
In Kazan.
Kazan, 500 miles east of Moscow, using American drones.
What will Putin's response to all of this be?
Enormous provocation, of course.
And once again, Putin is demonstrating Taoist patience, which, of course...
A lot of people between Moscow and St. Petersburg, they are fed up with that.
It's the same old story.
Cut off the head of the snake.
But no, especially not now.
And not now when we are a little over three weeks before the start of a new administration in Washington.
So the Russians will, of course, the reprisals will happen.
The responses will happen.
Not too spectacular.
Probably not even Orishniks.
But this attack on residential buildings in Kazan, which is very far from the front line.
But why Kazan?
Kazan is a symbol.
Kazan is the symbol of the BRICS.
The BRICS summit was in Kazan.
So I have been saying this for weeks now.
This is a war against BRICS.
There's no question about that.
This is something we could spend hours getting into the details.
But this is a provocation.
You have BRICS, so you can attack your BRICS capital anytime we want.
It's a huge provocation, not only against Russia, but against the other BRICS members.
Which, by the way, today, the Kremlin revealed already nine nations that...
We'll become official BRICS partners on January 1st, 2025.
They're expecting answers from other four, among them Turkey.
So BRICS continues to expand.
BRICS is the big, big thing all across the global majority.
And this crazy and absolutely senseless attack on civilian targets and civilian buildings in Kazan, there's only one meaning for all that.
A provocation and...
A direct provocation against BRICS as a whole.
But what do the Ukrainians hope to gain?
Do they think that somehow Putin will be driven from office because he can't protect civilians?
No, they want a rash response so they can sell this to their Western sponsors, Judge, essentially.
They are dying for a very, very rash Russian response with lots of Ukrainian civilian...
Which is not going to happen.
This is what they dream of at Bankova in Kiev.
It's not going to happen because the Russians know about it.
Their military sources and their intel sources tell them this is exactly what they're thinking.
When they go out, these people of the SBU especially, when they go out and they talk about it, it's very provocatory.
They know that they have only less than four weeks.
Before the end of the worst administration in the history of the modern United States.
So that's it.
That's why we have to come back always to the same point.
These next four weeks are the most dangerous in quite a while.
Anything can happen, including a false flag, because they are desperate.
They know that the game is going to change after January 20. They still don't know how, but it's not going to be a free-for-all like they had until today.
The Financial Times reports this morning that the Trump transition team has informed Kiev and NATO leaders that he will continue to supply, at least early on, arms and cash to Ukraine.
Can that be true?
Yes, it is, because the deep state wants it.
Trump cannot go head-on against the deep state, at least in the beginning.
The first few days of the new Trump administration.
How Trump is going to format the beginning of the negotiations between him and Putin.
My suggestion, and a suggestion of many other analysts, there's got to be a completely sealed, foolproof, leak-proof channel between Trump and Putin.
Otherwise, anybody from Washington, from the Beltway, from New York, or from Moscow, or the Brits, can interfere and derail the whole process from the start.
I'm sure the Trump people are aware of that.
The Russians are aware of that.
Money and material.
He must be talking about that which has already been authorized and in the pipeline.
I can't imagine Donald Trump going to a Republican Congress saying give me a few more billion dollars to ship over there.
He won't get it.
He won't get it.
Exactly.
This is what is already in the pipeline.
Absolutely.
And of course, Trump will pressure NATO.
This means Trump pressuring the European Union, essentially, and the big European capitals.
Shell out more for Ukraine.
I am not going to.
We already know that.
This is already on the record, right?
Right, right.
Pepe Escobar, thank you, my dear friend.
Thank you for all the work we've done together in 2024.
I wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season, and I hope we can continue to do this work together in 2025.
We will, Judge.
Thank you.
Merry Christmas to you.
To the whole team, to our audience.
And in January, I'll have Italy, Turkey, and Russia.
Wow, wonderful.
Safe travels, my dear friend.
All the best.
All the best.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Coming up later today at 3 this afternoon, Max Blumenthal, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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