A Fossilized Blood-Engorged Mosquito Is Found For the First Time Ever

 

Testing shows that a 46 million-year-old fossilized mosquito, found by amateur fossil hunters in Montana, contains the blood of an unknown ancient creature

Joseph Stromberg

October 14, 2013

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Testing shows that a 46 million-year-old fossilized mosquito, found in Montana, contains the blood of an unknown ancient creature. Image via Dale Greenwalt

In the 20 years since the movie Jurassic Park fantasized about how dinosaurs could be cloned from blood found in ancient amber-trapped mosquitoes, fossil collectors have been on the hunt for a similar specimen. Over the years, a few different groups of scientists have claimed to find a fossilized mosquito with ancient blood trapped in its abdomen, but each of these teams’ discoveries, in turn, turned out to be the result of error or contamination.

Today, it was announced that we finally have such a specimen, a blood-engorged mosquito that’s been preserved in shale rock for around 46 million years in northwestern Montana. The most astounding thing about the discovery? It was made three decades ago by an amateur fossil hunter—a geology graduate student named Kurt Constenius—then left to sit in a basement, and only recognized recently by a retired biochemist named Dale Greenwalt who’s been working to collect fossils in the Western U.S. for the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

The specimen, described in a paper Greenwalt published with museum researchers and entomologist Ralph Harbach today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is trapped in stone, not amber, and (unfortunately for Jurassic Park enthusiasts) it’s not old enough to be filled with dinosaur blood. But it is the first time we’ve found a fossilized mosquito with blood in its belly.

The Kishenehn Formation, in northwestern Montana near Glacier National Park, where the specimen was found. Photo by Dale Greenwalt

The rock-encased specimen was originally excavated sometime during the early 80s, when Constenius, then pursuing a master’s degree in geology from the University of Arizona, found hundreds of fossilized insects during weekend fossil-hunting trips with his parents at the Kishenehn Formation in northwestern Montana, near Glacier National Park. In the years since, they’d simply left the fossils sitting in boxes in their basement in Whitefish, Montana and largely forgotten about them.

Enter Greenwalt, who began volunteering at the museum in 2006, cataloging specimens for the paleobiology department. In 2008, he embarked on his own project of collecting fossils from the Kishenehn every summer, in part because he’d read in an insect evolution textbook an offhand mention of Constenius’ discoveries, which had never been rigorously described in the scientific literature.

In the years since, Greenwalt has collected thousands of specimens from 14 different orders of insects. The collection site is remote—he has to raft the Flathead River that runs along the border of the park to a place where the river has cut down through layers of rock of the Kishenehn Formation, which includes shale that formed the bottom of a lake during the Eocene epoch, some 46 million years ago.

“It is a fantastic fossil insect site, arguably one of the best in the world,” he says, noting that a rare combination of circumstances—thin layers of fine-grained sediment and a lack of oxygen—led to a “mind-boggling degree of preservation.” Working there, he’s made a number of significant finds, collecting specimens that led to the description of two new insect species (pdf).

After Greenwalt met the Constenius family in Whitefish and described his work, they decided to donate their fossil collection to the museum. When he began cataloging the boxes the fossils and came across this particular specimen, “I immediately noticed it—it was obvious that it was different,” he says. He suspected that the mosquito’s darkly opaque abdomen, trapped in a thin piece of shale, might contain 46-million-year old blood.

Staff from the museum’s mineral sciences lab used a number of techniques to scan the specimen up close, including energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. “The first thing we found is that the abdomen is just chock full of iron, which is what you’d expect from blood,” Greenwalt says. Additionally, analysis using a secondary ion mass spectrometer revealed the presence of heme, the compound that give red blood cells their distinctive color and allows them to carry oxygen throughout the body. Other tests that showed an absence of these compounds elsewhere in the fossil.

The findings serve as definitive evidence that blood was preserved inside the insect. But at this point, scientists have no way of knowing what creature’s fossilized blood fills the mosquito’s abdomen. That’s because DNA degrades way too quickly to possibly survive 46 million years of being trapped in stone (or in amber, for that matter). Recent research had found it has a half-life of roughly 521 years, even under ideal conditions.

This means that even if we miraculously had some DNA of the ancient creature, there are currently a ton of technical problems that prevent the cloning similar to that in Jurassic Park from becoming a reality. Assembling a full genome from DNA fragments requires us to have an understanding of what the whole genome looks like (which we don’t have in this case), and turning that into a living, breathing animal would necessitate putting that DNA into an ovum of a living species very closely related to the mystery creature that we don’t know in the first place.

So, alas, no resurrected ancient creatures will roam free thanks to this new find. Still, the find is scientifically significant, helping scientists better understand the evolution of blood-feeding insects. Previously, the closest thing to a blood-engorged mosquito that scientists had found was a mosquito with remnants of the malaria parasite inside its abdomen (pdf). Though that provides indirect evidence that mosquitoes fed on blood 15-20 million years ago, this new discovery represents the oldest direct evidence of blood-sucking behavior. It also shows for the first time that biological molecules such as heme can survive as part of the fossil record.

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Joseph Stromberg | | Read More

Joseph Stromberg was previously a digital reporter for Smithsonian.

Thomas Sowell: Tragic Optimist

 

In his 2000 memoir A Personal Odyssey, Sowell recounts a parable that was read to him as a young boy and which he never forgot.

Samuel Kronen

27 Mar 2021 · 29 min read

History is not destiny.
~Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture

Somewhere out of the mysterious interplay between nature and nurture, internal and external factors, cultures and structures, and bottom-up and top-down forces there emerge the individual and group outcomes that we care about and which ultimately make the difference between human flourishing and its absence. What distinguishes various political ideologies, in effect, is how the line of causation is drawn, or, more specifically, from which direction. What gets left unexamined in the rush for compelling narratives and ideological certainty, however, is the territory between different causes and how they combine to shape reality. Few have gone further to map that territory than the American economist, political philosopher, and public intellectual Thomas Sowell.

At 90 years of age, Sowell remains among the most prolific, influential, and penetrating minds of the past century. He understands the world in terms of trade-offs, incentives, constraints, systemic processes, feedback mechanisms, and human capital, an understanding developed by scrutinizing available data, considering human experience, and applying robust common sense. Sowell has written over 50 books according to his late friend Walter E. Williams, in which he has applied a humanist economic lens to issues as far-ranging as racial inequality, cultural history, intellectuals, Marxism, charter schools, late-talking children, and affirmative action policies around the world. His nationally syndicated column was published for decades in over 150 different newspapers, including National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post. His ability to write with authority on a wide range of issues stems from a genuine curiosity about the world as it is and human beings as they are, not how things ought to be.

In his 2000 memoir A Personal Odyssey, Sowell recounts a parable that was read to him as a young boy and which he never forgot. “One story I found sad at the time, but remembered the rest of my life, was about a dog with a bone who saw his reflection in a stream and thought that the dog he saw had a bigger bone than he did. He opened his mouth to try to get the other dog’s bone—and of course lost his own when it dropped in the water. There would be many occasions in life to remember that story.”¹ This set the tone for a life and career committed to closing the gap between image and reality. This is why Sowell’s contributions extend beyond partisan politics. His basic concern is with the dynamism, diversity, and development of living human beings, not inter-temporal sociological abstractions or racial archetypes that can be leveraged for political or moral power. Likewise, his basic orientation is that of a culturalist, with a belief in the effectiveness of evolved ideas, skills, attitudes, interests, and norms to change the course of human history, and the autonomy of individuals to adopt better cultural imperatives to improve their prospects and, crucially, those of their children.

“Cultures are not bumper stickers,” he once said during a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. “They are living, changing ways of doing all the things that have to be done in life… Their legacies belong to all people and all people need to claim that legacy, not seal themselves off in a dead-end of tribalism or an emotional orgy of cultural vanity.” His work tells a story of human progress and cultural evolution amid the challenges of living in a multi-ethnic democracy and against the historical determinism and cultural relativism that prevent us from meeting our deepest potential as individuals and societies.

“With all that I went through,” Sowell says of his own rise to prominence, “it now seems in retrospect almost as if someone had decided that there should be a man with all the outward indications of disadvantage, who nevertheless had the key inner advantages needed to advance.”²

Sowell’s journey began on June 30th, 1930, in Gastonia, North Carolina, where he was born into poverty and segregation. Both of his biological parents died within the first few years of his life and Sowell was sent to live with his great-aunt and her adult daughters, not learning the truth of his origins until much later. There was no electricity or running water in the house and light and heat required the use of kerosene. Sowell was baffled to discover two running faucets in the kitchen of a white family his elder sister worked for, remarking at the time: “They must sure drink a lot of water around here.”³ He had almost no contact with white people and couldn’t understand why some of the characters in the comics he was reading had yellow hair.⁴ Of his schooling in the south, he wrote, “My only memories are of fights, being spanked by the teacher, having crushes on a couple of girls and the long walk to and from school.”⁵ With the attention and care of multiple adult family members, Sowell had already learned to read by the time he entered grade school and quickly excelled, managing all the course material for the semester in a couple of weeks. He speaks happily of his childhood. They were poor, but they had more.

On Mother’s Day 1939, when Sowell was eight years old, his family moved to Harlem as part of the Great Migration of southern blacks to northern cities. The experience was a major culture shock. Nobody in his family had made it beyond the seventh grade and the move was intended to expand his prospects. Sowell was encouraged to acculturate to city life and develop middle class norms, and discouraged from playing with the kids on his block. His family members introduced him to a neighborhood boy of West Indian heritage named Eddie Mapp, a good student who could play classical music on the piano. It was Mapp who brought the nine-year-old Sowell to his first public library. “Unknown to me at the time, it was a turning point in my life, for then I developed the habit of reading books.”⁶ As Sowell recounts in the recent documentary Common Sense in a Senseless World, narrated by the Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley (author of a forthcoming biography on Sowell), “Really, had I not encountered [Mapp], the entire rest of the story could not have been the way it was.” Cultural exposure was crucial to his development.

The Harlem schools were more rigorous than those in the south and adjusting to the higher academic standards was a difficult process. He began at the bottom of the class but refused to be held back a grade and even went to the principal to argue his case. Sowell consistently had trouble dealing with authority—or perhaps authority had trouble dealing with him. He resented the arbitrary rules and regulations of the school system and had physical altercations with his male teachers on more than one occasion. Nevertheless, he was already beginning to grasp the true diversity and complexity of American life. His junior high school was in a lower-middle-class white neighborhood comprised of over 40 different ethnic groups, “proud of its diversity and maybe a little too self-congratulatory.”⁷ It was here that he noticed one of his first racial disparities: “I do not recall ever losing a fight to a white kid my own size.”⁸

Sowell began to develop a distaste for the paternalism of low expectations and impoverished standards to which minorities tended to be held. In middle school, his class was discouraged from taking the qualifying tests for the better high schools in Harlem to avoid embarrassing the school if few (or none) of them got in. “Everyone from our class passed every high school exam we took… The teacher’s gross misjudgements of our ability… was a powerful example of what unspoken feelings can do.” Still, many of his teachers served him well, and, sadly, Sowell believes the Harlem schools of the 1930s and ’40s were much better than they are today.

Sowell entered the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Downtown Manhattan on the advice of Mapp. The workload was much higher and it began to create a rift with his family, who couldn’t wrap their minds around why he was at the library so much. His aunt, in particular, grew bitter about Sowell’s academic success. “She became, and remained over the years, ambivalent about my progress—proud of my advancement and yet resentful of being left behind, inconsistent in word and deed, tenaciously determined to assert her authority, however arbitrarily, and yet with a premonition that our relationship—never the strongest—was completely unraveling.”⁹

With the stress of life at home, Sowell fell behind in school and eventually dropped out at 17 after a bout with illness further disrupted his education. He took up a job as a Western Union messenger, and here first encountered poor and semi-literate white people, some of whom were of immigrant backgrounds and needed to have their telegrams read to them. “It was my first realization that life is tough all over.”¹⁰ Naturally creative, he tried his hand at illustrating and writing short stories for a time. When he was lent an old camera by a work colleague, he developed a lifelong passion for photography. Meanwhile, his relationship with his aunt finally deteriorated beyond repair—after an extended legal dispute over his living situation, he left her apartment to stay in a homeless boys’ shelter for a brief time where he kept a knife under his pillow in case he needed to defend himself.

Sowell was scrambling for a path forward, applying for jobs around the city and trying to figure things out. It was a rough patch. After he was laid off by a machine shop in the garment district, he recalls “wondering what the future held, as I looked out the factory window, down into the canyons of midtown Manhattan, where the Christmas decorations were still out and the snow was softly falling.”¹¹ He would soon visit Washington, DC to apply for a job as a clerk, and became increasingly preoccupied by the issue of race. Segregation was still in place in the nation’s capital and his first published piece of writing was a letter to the Washington Star urging the desegregation of the city’s public schools. Grabbing a burger in the city meant standing to eat while whites sat at the counter. He had arguments with his brother about the issue, who kept reminding him of the strides blacks were making. “Great, William,” Sowell would reply. “Why don’t we go drink to that—at a bar downtown?”¹²

On one occasion, he bought a secondhand set of encyclopedias for $1.17 and discovered Karl Marx, a thinker whose ideas would enthral him for the next decade. “The ideas seemed to explain so much, and explain it in a way to which my grim experience made me very receptive.”¹³ Sowell simply could not understand the yawning chasm between the Harlem tenements and the extravagant wealth of lower Manhattan. “I wondered, ‘Why is this?’ It’s so different.” he recounts in Riley’s documentary. “And nothing in the schools or the books seemed to deal with that. Marx dealt with that.” His disappointments were channeled into radicalism. “I was appalled at this discrepancy between the ideal and the actual, which is how I judged, as a young radical—not according to what the limited alternatives might have been.”¹⁴

In 1951, Sowell was drafted for the Korean War. He was recruited as a marine and went through bootcamp before working as a photographer at a naval air station in Pensacola, Florida. His description of military life reads like an endless series of shenanigans to avoid work and stymie authority. “As elsewhere throughout my life, I made enough enemies to get me in trouble and enough friends to get me out of it.”¹⁵ Upon returning to New York after his time in the military, Sowell began working in the stockroom of a camera store while taking classes at night to earn his general equivalency diploma. Leaving work one evening, he mentioned to the elevator man that he was too tired to go to school that night. The man “became distressed, alarmed, and urged me to go to school anyway. With surprising emotion, he told me how he had thrown away opportunities when he was young and regretted it ever afterwards.”¹⁶ The exchange stood out to him, emblematic of a different era of greater social trust in the country when adults were more willing to steward and forewarn the young.

Soon, Sowell began taking classes at the all-black Howard University in Washington, DC. One night, his sociology professor announced that the Supreme Court had overruled the “separate but equal” doctrine upon which Jim Crow laws were based. The class was asked to reflect on the decision. “All of us were, of course, in favor of it, but many of my classmates seemed to have the most Utopian expectations that this was going to lead to some magical solution to problems of race and poverty.”¹⁷ His skepticism, unfortunately, was prescient.

At Howard, Sowell met the renowned poet Sterling Brown. It was during professor Brown’s creative writing class that Sowell “acquired an appreciation of the beauty and power of plain writing, which helped me the rest of my life when writing nonfiction.” But Sowell found other elements of the institution wanting. “Most students—and faculty members—were just not serious about intellectual work. They might sometimes be somber about it, or unctuous about it, or even pompous about it, but they were not serious about it.” Sowell was eventually able to secure a place at Harvard by virtue of his high standardized test scores and teacher recommendations, including that of Brown. “Although a bitterly eloquent critic of racism in his writings,” Sowell writes of his former teacher, “he also understood the pitfalls of a victim mentality.” When he left Howard, he recalls Brown telling him, “Don’t come back here and tell me you didn’t make it ’cause the white folks were mean.”¹⁸

Sowell would go on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard in 1958 with a bachelor’s in economics. Moreover, his upbringing had made him resilient to Harvard’s elitist social norms. “What I most disliked about Harvard was that smug assumptions were too often treated as substitutes for evidence or logic.” Sowell developed a technique to deal with his classmates’ racial condescension. “My strategy was to ask innocent-sounding leading questions, until [my opponent] had gotten himself way out on a limb—and then begin sawing off the limb.”¹⁹ Sowell would later receive his master’s from Columbia before moving on to the Chicago School of Economics, where he studied under Milton Friedman and George Stigler. The ideological differences between Sowell and his advisors were overshadowed by the intellectual rigor of the Chicago School, which was “quite unlike the question-begging smugness of Harvard.” Sowell received his PhD in economics in 1968 and wrote his dissertation on Say’s Law, a foundational concept of classical economics, even though he remained a committed Marxist for most of that period.

The following decade, however, would bring disillusion. Sowell had held onto his leftist convictions throughout school, but direct experience exposed the knowledge gap between practical wisdom and bureaucratic expertise and disabused him of his belief that government intervention could resolve social issues. While he was working as an economist for the Department of Labor one summer, Sowell was tasked with studying the sugar cane industry in Puerto Rico and its minimum wage laws. To determine whether the law itself was creating unemployment or if there were other environmental factors at play, he decided to look at how much sugar cane there was before and after a recent hurricane. His colleagues were stunned. Minimum wage laws made up a significant chunk of the Department of Labor’s budget, and the experience showed him how the decisions of those charged with serving the public good were guided by their own set of incentives and interests. Against the wishes of the Department, he sent a request for the necessary information up the chain of command. “That was 1960. I have yet to receive a reply to my request.”²⁰

Sowell was also beginning to harbor doubts about the direction of black activism after the legislative and cultural victories of the civil rights movement. Even with segregation abolished, there was clearly much work to be done. But Sowell was unable to identify with the obsessive fixation on racism at the expense of more practical, developmental concerns. “Given all the urgent needs for more and better education, for example, and for all the things that can be obtained with the fruits of work skills and business experience, how much time and effort could be spared for endless campaigns to get into every hamburger stand operated by a redneck?” he remembers thinking at the time. “Not only did this seem like an investment that ought to be put somewhere else, it annoyed me that we seemed to be constantly seeking acceptance and validation by white people—any white people at all, anywhere.”²¹

Symbolic of the turn toward black power in the 1960s, the tone of the moral leadership had likewise shifted. One day, Sowell turned on the television to find James Baldwin telling an audience, “I’ve just come back from seeing a dead boy—and you killed him.” Sowell’s immediate response was, “Not me, Jim. I’ve been here in the apartment all day.” The dead boy to whom Baldwin referred was actually a man in his 20s who had died of an overdose. “Apparently, ‘society’ was to blame, or more specifically whites in the society. However, Baldwin was a master of images, not logic. Psychological warfare was the stock in trade of the new charismatic leaders, and the tactic of putting others on the moral defensive was sometimes used against blacks as well as against whites.”²² Curiously, Baldwin and Sowell grew up mere blocks from each other and only a few years apart, but came away with completely different ideas about the world.

Thomas Sowell’s Harlem Years

Sydney. London. Toronto.

QuilletteJason L. Riley

Compounding these misgivings, Sowell taught at a number of universities in the 1960s and ’70s—Howard, Amherst, Cornell, UCLA—and was disturbed by the going academic trends, particularly regarding race. He enjoyed teaching but was discouraged at every turn by the university system. His teaching style emphasized the principles of tough love, neutrality, and critical thinking. He refused to grade on a curve or reveal his own opinions as he encouraged students to develop their own analytical powers. He was constantly hassled to go easier on his students and scorned by his fellow faculty when he failed to do so. At a staff meeting held to determine Sowell’s future at Cornell, “the worst term of opprobrium used against me in the meeting, I was told, was that I was ‘uncompromising.’”²³

But beyond the widespread resistance to his teaching methods and the apparent indifference of the administration to student development, something much worse was happening within the black cohort on campus. Affirmative Action policies were taking off, and Sowell began noticing growing angst among the black students funneled into activism. He saw desperate and alienated young people who recoiled from being treated as disposable tokens used to exonerate the university of racism, no matter how many of the students failed to graduate in the process. He saw the students’ endless demands for racial concessions—black studies departments, separate dorms and graduation ceremonies—as arising from the same foundational insecurity: The fear of being seen as inferior in an environment that constantly seemed to confirm it.

Sowell recognized that preferential racial policies in college admissions were mismatching black students with schools above their academic level. This, in turn, often caused them to fall behind or drop out when they could have done much better in less demanding environments. The problem was not so much the content of the classes than the pace at which those classes moved. But rather than acknowledging the issue, it was easier to rail against racial oppression, sparing them the shame and embarrassment that might otherwise have motivated them to work harder. Worse, it was in the interests of the predominantly white faculty to encourage the students’ paranoid delusions—either to alleviate feelings of guilt or, more likely, to cover for themselves. Sowell was appalled, realizing that he wouldn’t have done as well in school had he been told that his unpreparedness was actually a consequence of racism rather than simply not being good enough at math or English. It was an easy excuse for failure that precluded the difficult effort of development.

Many of his fellow black faculty understood what was happening but were terrified to say so. Any black academic who openly challenged the efficacy of Affirmative Action policies or other Great Society programs meant to benefit blacks was certain to be stigmatized as a race traitor. And, of course, no white academic could protest. Sowell was reluctant to write about race because the subject lay outside his specialty. “Let the professionals handle it,” he thought. Then, he actually read what the so-called professionals had to say and decided that “if these are the professionals then maybe it’s time to give an amateur a try!”

And so, even though he knew his views would be greeted with hostility, Sowell began writing about race out of a sense of moral obligation. He set out his basic concerns about the course of post-civil rights liberalism in a 1970 New York Times article, excoriating the institutional practice of passing over highly qualified blacks who didn’t fit a certain sociological or ideological profile. Consequently, Sowell gained infamy as one of the first “black conservative” figures on the American scene, despite never wholly accepting the label. Attacks from the media and from former colleagues came thick and fast and would continue for years to come. He would go on to publish two books about race in the 1970s—Black Education: Myths and Tragedies and Race and Economics—setting a new career trajectory that would earn him a National Humanities Medal among other accolades. After some time spent in and out of the business world, his career in academia was drawing to a close. Sowell ended the decade by publishing his crowning achievement, Knowledge and Decisions, a book that earned him a fellowship at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute.

Published in 1980, Knowledge and Decisions crystallized Sowell’s work in economics and life experience to that point, setting the stage for his later writings. Inspired by Friedrich Hayek’s essay “The Uses of Knowledge in Society,” the book emerged from the observation that the knowledge necessary for complex technological societies to function was increasingly uncoupled from the ability of everyday citizens to make decisions that impact the quality of their lives. In the same way that the objects we see in the world are mostly made up of empty space with dispersed specks of matter keeping them together, in modern societies “specks of knowledge are scattered through a vast emptiness of ignorance, and everything depends on how solid the individual specks of knowledge are, and on how powerfully linked and coordinated they are with one another.”²⁴ Each of us is ensconced in a wide spectrum of overlapping and interlocking institutions—families, friend groups, churches, schools, companies—that mobilize and coordinate the knowledge and experience of previous generations. These form the basis of individual decisions in the present—what to teach our children, what food to eat, how to help the less fortunate, and so on. But the dispersion and specialization of knowledge leads to a contraction and centralization of decision-making power, while the hard knowledge and practical wisdom passed down through the ages is overtaken by intellectual or technical expertise wielded by the few over the many.

The knowledge required to make decisions for an entire society can’t be harnessed by any human being because most of us have no sense of the complex economic processes involved in producing a cup of coffee or a box of tissues. Given our lack of omniscience and the economic principle of scarcity, there can be no unequivocal solution to any major social issue, only trade-offs, which create their own undesirable outcomes. We can’t merely choose to construct a better reality. Improving the conditions of society means setting certain systemic processes in motion that correspond to objective realities and abide by certain principles—representative democracy, the rule of law, universal humanism, due process—with inbuilt feedback mechanisms that constrain decision-making powers and mitigate bad incentives.

No matter how appealing a policy proposal may sound—the Green New Deal, the push to “Defund The Police,” prison abolition, the War on Drugs—we should always ask what process we are setting in motion and who gains power to make decisions by it. “The most fundamental question is not what decision to make but who is to make it—through what processes and under what incentives and constraints, and with what feedback mechanisms to correct the decision if it proves to be wrong.”²⁵ There is an essential difference, Sowell argues, between market forces and government policy—the former result from the cumulative decisions of millions of people with immediate feedback through the price system, while the latter stems from the immediate decisions of politicians with cumulative feedback, if any, and practically no responsibility for the outcome.

The vision of humanity that informs Knowledge and Decisions is a tragic one. There are, Sowell argued, inherent limitations and constraints to the human condition and it is dangerous to ignore them. In his 1987 book A Conflict of Visions, which he cites as his favorite, Sowell shows just how deep ideological disagreements go. If you show up at a pro-life meeting, it’s quite likely there will be much agreement to be found among attendees on many other unrelated political issues. Why is this? Because, at bottom, when we argue about politics or culture it is not about the details of this-or-that issue or policy, it is about our implicit understanding—or vision—of how reality works. Visions are what we feel before we think, an intuition about what causes things to happen in the world. Visions, according to Sowell, “fill in the necessarily large gaps in individual knowledge.”²⁶ We need them. But our respective visions conflict on a fundamental level, fashioning the psychological terrain upon which political and cultural debates take place.

The opposite of what Sowell calls the tragic or the constrained vision is the unconstrained vision. From the halls of Yale to the boardrooms of the New York Times, the unconstrained view is the prevailing vision in modern American culture. If the tragic vision works to check the darker elements of human nature, the unconstrained vision works to free our better angels from the chains of the past. While the constrained vision finds prosperity, peace, and public order unusual in an inherently chaotic and brutal universe, the unconstrained vision finds poverty, war, and criminality unusual and unnecessary in a world where things could be otherwise.

At bottom, the visions conflict over the meaning of history: Is our collective past a wellspring of knowledge and wisdom from which to draw, or a hornet’s nest of injustice and oppression that we need to discard in the name of progress? A person’s preferred vision also informs his attitude toward life itself. The constrained vision accepts tragedy as an unavoidable part of being human and seeks to make the best of things. The unconstrained vision takes human tragedy as evidence that something has gone wrong and someone is to blame—once we fix the problem and remove the blameworthy people we will return to our natural state of goodness. “We will do almost anything for our visions,” Sowell writes in the preface, “except think about them. The purpose of this book is to think about them.”²⁷

Sowell spent over a decade traveling the world in search of an answer to one of the central questions of contemporary political debate: Why are there such massive disparities in wealth and income between different racial and ethnic groups and among different nations and civilizations? The upshot of these investigations was his comprehensive trilogy on the impact of culture across the world and throughout history in the development of modern society—Race and Culture, Migrations and Cultures, and Conquests and Cultures. Prevailing wisdom holds that unequal outcomes are a consequence of unequal treatment and power differentials, and that group disparities will dissipate in their absence. However, as Sowell summarizes in Race and Culture, there are countless examples of minority groups around the world beginning in poverty and going on to achieve remarkable success, dominating entire industries in the face of majoritarian hostility and in the absence of political representation or power.

For example, in the late-19th century, the German minority in Czarist Russia made up about one percent of the population and yet constituted 40 percent of Russia’s high ranking military generals²⁸—diplomatic correspondences were even written in German. And those were mainly Baltic Germans, who made up a smaller proportion of that one percent than either Black Sea Germans or Volga Germans. Indeed, it is difficult to find any sector of society, anywhere in the history of the world, without such disparities. The list of minority groups who went on to out-earn the ethnic majorities around them could be extended almost indefinitely—the Parsis in India, the Japanese in the Americas, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Italians in South America, the Lebanese in West Africa, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Jews in Europe, the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. The question is not why there are disparities between different groups of people, but why we would ever expect different groups with completely different histories and cultures to excel at the same pace in the same endeavors.

We all began in poverty; what matters is how we got out. The determining factor in a group’s advancement is the evolved set of skills, work habits, attitudes, norms, interests, and values inherited from their cultural past—a group’s human capital—which evolved from contact with other cultures in other times and places through migration and conquest amid the expansion and contraction of different civilizations. Moreover, the range of a group’s cultural contacts is heavily influenced by geographical factors like navigable waterways and the contours of the land. For instance, Europe has a longer coastline than Africa despite being nowhere near its size, historically providing it with more channels through which to exchange with and learn from other societies.

When the British came to North America, for example, they did so on a ship with rudders invented in China, and they navigated with trigonometry from Egypt, letters invented by the Romans, and numbers from India brought west by Arabs. Millennia earlier, there were no buildings in Britain until the Romans built them, nor was there anything resembling London before the Romans built that, too. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the standard of living in Western Europe deteriorated, opening the continent to invasion by the Mongols, the Ottomans, and the Moors, before emerging centuries later as a world power. “A history which spans thousands of years,” Sowell writes, “encompassing the rise and fall of empires and of peoples, makes it difficult—if not impossible—to believe in the permanent superiority of any race or culture.”²⁹

Sowell is telling a story of human history, in which economic development and cultural diffusion are more important than zero-sum political power struggles. Shattering the false binary of heredity versus environment, he argues that “peoples whose skills and values have been shaped by different external factors in the past tend today to have different internal cultural patterns with which to confront the opportunities and challenges presented by external conditions in the present.”³⁰ Culture is inherited, at least in the sense that we acquire it from our parents, and yet it remains highly malleable across time.

Moreover, culture goes deeper than race. Different ethnic groups of the same race live side by side but yield vastly different outcomes and succeed in different areas, whether it be the Italian and Jewish immigrants to America in the late-19th and early-20th century, or West Indian and native-born blacks more recently. As Sowell bluntly puts it, “Jews are not Italians and Italians are not Jews.” Of course they’re not. Every ethnic group trails its own unique set of cultural features, some of which are better equipped to flourish in a complex knowledge-based economy than others. Individual blame, moreover, has nothing to do with the cultural patterns we happen to acquire from our ancestors, which develop beyond anyone’s choosing through a complex tangle of historical, geographic, and demographic forces. Still, by recognizing how our cultural past affects us today, some degree of freedom is opened within those constraints—we can adopt different values if we want to. This is, after all, how we got here. Every group goes through this.

In contrast to the multicultural ethos that seeks to “preserve cultures in their purity, almost like butterflies in amber,” Sowell argues that “cultural features do not merely exist as badges of identity to which we have some emotional attachment. They exist to meet the necessities and forward the purposes of human life.” And just because a certain culture served a purpose in a past environment, that doesn’t mean it serves any useful purpose in the present. Some cultural features are clearly better than others, just as books are better than scrolls and Arabic numerals are better than Roman numerals. “Cultural competition is not a zero-sum game. It is what advances the human race… No culture has grown great in isolation, but a number of cultures have made great and astonishing advances when their isolation was ended. Those who use the term cultural diversity to create a multiplicity of segregated ethnic enclaves are doing an enormous harm to the people in those enclaves.” In short, cultural exposure, criticism, appropriation, and competition are how we progress as human beings, while relativism is a path backwards.

In his 2005 book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Sowell applies his culture concept to race issues in America. Why is it that, more than a half-century after the civil rights movement, the condition of lower-class black Americans has remained practically the same or even worsened? The progressive response to this question points to the compounding historical effects of racism and white supremacy, but Sowell offers an alternative thesis. Blacks, he argues, who lived predominantly in the south until the Great Migration, adopted the cultural heritage of white southerners, who originally descended from the northern borderlands of England, the Scottish Highlands, and Ulster County in Ireland. The inability of this culture to adapt to modern life helps explain the vicious cycle of urban crime and poverty among blacks.

The same cultural patterns found in the worst urban black ghettos today were, for centuries, recorded in those parts of the British Isles from which white southerners immigrated—styles of speech, religious oratory, touchy pridefulness, resistance to education, promiscuity, money habits, even particular card games—before dying out in Britain and the south. In the debauched and marauding regions of the British Isles, what Sowell calls the redneck or cracker culture was necessary for survival, but it outlived its original use.

Sowell contends that it is no longer white racism but a particular set of cultural elements that inhibit the development of poor blacks in America’s inner-cities. Many of the racial barriers erected in the 20th century were overreactions among northern whites to the black redneck culture of the south during the Great Migration—barriers that would take on a life of their own. The same barriers were upheld, to an even greater extent in some cases, against white southerners moving north. Meanwhile, the northern population of blacks lived side by side with whites and attended integrated schools for generations before such barriers were erected.

In the decades preceding the civil rights movement—a period of virulent racism and institutional segregation—black Americans were rapidly advancing on whites along a number of socio-economic metrics, from labor participation rates to household wealth and employment.³¹ Sowell attributes these advancements, in large part, to the acculturation efforts of New England teachers who established black schools in the south. In this telling, civil rights were more of an effect than a cause of black development. But after the 1960s, many of these patterns stalled or even reversed.

In Sowell’s view, this development was the result of two factors. First, the unintended consequences of various War on Poverty and Great Society programs such as the expansion of welfare rolls and various federal housing initiatives—framed as reparational at the time—that effectively discharged black responsibility, discouraged entrepreneurship, and broke apart the black family. Second, the overarching moral and cultural shift in American society that came to view black redneck culture as somehow authentic, concomitant with a white liberal guilt complex that shielded it from criticism and suppressed the need for cultural assimilation and development. In other words, the acknowledgement of historical racism on the part of the larger society gave black Americans a perpetual excuse for failure that simply did not exist before.

The import of Sowell’s thesis is manifold: Culture can be transmitted across racial lines, while destructive cultural features among a racialized group can interact with the larger society in ways that reproduce racial stigmas. In other words, racial inequality can arise from both top-down and bottom-up forces, and any honest conversation about white racism, privilege, or systemic bias must include a conversation about black American culture. It is not justice to withhold judgement from a group of people regarding behavior we would never tolerate from our own family out of the fear of being thought racist. Ultimately, this is not a racial problem but a human problem.

To modern progressives, the notion that black suffering isn’t necessarily tied to historical racism is a hard pill to swallow. It seems to blame the victim and alleviate white responsibility. But this whole way of looking at things in terms of intergenerational guilt and victimization is fundamentally flawed: Morality is not causation. In retrospect, we can all agree that slavery and Jim Crow were terrible, but that doesn’t mean they explain what’s happening in our own time. Further, the notion of historical justice itself implies that we could somehow correct for past injustices. We can’t. If we go far back enough, we will all find slaves and enslavers, conquerors and conquered among our ancestors at one point or another. It’s an insult to our forebears to suppose we could somehow account for their suffering in the present by selectively parsing the sins of some groups and not others to satisfy contemporary moral sensibilities. What’s historically unique is the idea that everyone should have freedom and rights, which was by no means obvious for most of world history.

In the same way that we can’t blame someone for inheriting a problematic culture, we can’t blame someone for the sins their ancestors may or may not have committed. The impulse to resuscitate the historical grievances of long-dead and symbolic victims creates new injustices between flesh-and-blood human beings in the present. History becomes a cudgel for prevailing political visions instead of a record of what actually happened. “What can any society hope to gain,” Sowell asks, “by having some babies in that society born into the world with a priori grievances against other babies born into that same society on the same day?”³² We can learn from our mistakes, but we can’t change the past.

The Quest For Cosmic Justice, Sowell describes this impulse as “an attempt to mitigate and make more just the undeserved misfortunes arising from the cosmos” in ways that transform “the tragedy of the human condition into the specific sins of specific societies.” While traditional justice applies the same rules equally across the board, regardless of whether everyone ends up with the same things, cosmic justice applies different rules to different groups of people until all unearned advantages or disadvantages disappear. This conflict is why what believers in cosmic justice mean by anti-racism or equality or justice looks a lot to believers in traditional justice like racism, inequality, and injustice. One of the many problems with cosmic justice is that most of people’s advantages and disadvantages in life are undeserved anyway, and on a long enough time scale, many advantages become disadvantages and many disadvantages become advantages. The idea that anyone could possibly weigh out the privileges and deficits of a given life, let alone an entire group of people throughout history, as if looking down upon Earth through the eyes of God, conveys a startling degree of moral arrogance.

One ‘Maverick’ Documents Another—Jason Riley’s Biography of Thomas Sowell

Sydney. London. Toronto.

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Similarly misguided is the belief that “society” is an anthropomorphic entity capable of making conscious decisions and taking responsibility for them, instead of a complex system of moving parts over which no one has full control. Of course, it is unjust, in a cosmic sense, that some people suffer more than others by no fault of their own while others enjoy benefits through no merit of their own, but the reflexive tendency to draw a straight line from one of those things to the other inevitably stirs up the ancient tribal impulse for revenge. The flip-side of cosmic justice is cosmic vengeance.

For many on the Left, Sowell strikes too harsh of a tone. The emphasis on our limitations rather than our possibilities can, in a modern context, feel like an excuse for complacency or a way of justifying current inequalities. But this view mistakes smug repose for hard-earned wisdom. It is only by recognizing the inherent constraints of human life and, indeed, the tragedy of it all, that we can set about gradually improving our lot without falling into bitterness. If we don’t know how far we’ve come, it’s hard to know where we are going.

“Heedless of the past,” Sowell warns, “we are flying blind into the future.”³³ On the other hand, denying human tragedy sets in motion a perpetual spiral of activism in which the feeling of moral participation becomes an end in itself and life is made more tragic at the altar of good intentions. Sowell’s blend of tragic optimism and conservative humanism is an antidote to the moral zealotry of our political and cultural moment. We are trying to socially engineer away statistical gaps between groups to reach some cosmic notion of equality that has never existed in order to absolve ourselves of selectively plucked historical sins. Instead, we should start closing the reality gap between prevailing visions and the facts of history to make things better for all in the only time in which we live—the present.

 

References

¹ Thomas Sowell, A Personal Odyssey, p 3
² Ibid, p 306
³ Ibid, p 5
⁴ Ibid, p 6
⁵ Ibid, p 9
⁶ Ibid, p 16
⁷ Ibid, p 26
⁸ Ibid, p 27
⁹ Ibid, p 17
¹⁰ Ibid, p 47
¹¹ Ibid, p 58
¹² Ibid, p 66
¹³ Ibid, p 60
¹⁴ Ibid, p 65
¹⁵ Ibid, p 86
¹⁶ Ibid, p 106
¹⁷ Ibid, p 111
¹⁸ Ibid, p 117
¹⁹ Ibid, p 121
²⁰ Ibid, p 131
²¹ Ibid, p 141
²² Ibid, p 153
²³ Ibid, p 181
²⁴ Knowledge and Decisions, p 4
²⁵ Ibid, p xxii
²⁶ A Conflict of Visions, p 7
²⁷ Ibid, p xiv
²⁸ Race and Culture, p 3
²⁹ Ibid. p 225
³⁰ Ibid, p 229
³¹ US Bureau of the Census, Changing Characteristics of the Negro Population by Daniel A. Price, pp 117, 118, 133
³² Race and Culture, p 251
³³ Black Rednecks and White Liberals, p 291

THOMAS SOWELL Black Rednecks & White Liberals

It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some Europeans slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States.

Syria After Assad

 

Transcript

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SYRIAN WOMAN:

[Speaking Arabic] I haven’t slept at all since yesterday. I came early in the morning to see the people, to express joy on behalf of all the mothers of missing, imprisoned or killed. May peace and security prevail in Syria.

YOUNG SYRIAN WOMAN:

[Speaking Arabic] Syria is free!

MALE NEWSREADER:

We’ve been seeing these amazing images all day coming out of Syria, right, of tens of thousands of people out on the streets celebrating. Celebrating a new Syria and also tasting freedom after decades of repression.

SYRIAN MAN:

[Speaking Kurdish] For 54 years we have suffered. The oppression, the injustice. They used to say, "Hafez al-Assad forever." Now we say, "Freedom forever!"

MALE NEWSREADER:

Quite simply, no one saw this coming.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Bashar al-Assad has clung on to power through years of civil war. But now a new rebel movement has managed to topple his regime in less than two weeks.

MALE NEWSREADER:

What we’ve been seeing from the rebel leadership is a clear attempt to signal that they want an inclusive Syria and that they want to avoid more conflict. The leader, al-Jolani, has even interestingly dropped his jihadi nom de guerre. He now calls himself by his original birth name, Ahmad al-Sharaa. Even that is a signal that he is not trying to impose his jihadist position.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] This victory, my brothers, is a new history for the entire Islamic nation. This victory, my brothers, is a new history for the region.

SYRIAN MAN:

[Speaking Arabic] Now, I feel victory. Freedom! I feel freedom.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

We are tracking one of the most extraordinary events in Middle East history. This will have a profound impact on the region and beyond.

MALE NEWSREADER:

There is real joy here. But there's also real concern. No one knows what’s going to happen next.

Four Years Earlier

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] This type of trip has its risks—could be ISIS, could be regime, could be Russian agents.

I was close by when this place got hit.

MALE TRANSLATOR:

He was right here when—

MARTIN SMITH, Correspondent:

I met Ahmad al-Sharaa in 2021 in Syria’s Idlib province.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] This is the center of Idlib. It’s not New York’s Times Square.

MALE TRANSLATOR:

It’s not Times Square.

MARTIN SMITH:

My cameraman and I were the first Western journalists to meet him. At the time, he went by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. He was also then a wanted man with a $10 million bounty on his head. And he had a long history as a jihadist. At age 21, al-Jolani joined Al Qaeda in Iraq to fight and kill Americans. Captured by U.S. forces, he spent five years in Iraqi prisons, including Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] God the Almighty is the one who grants us victory, and if God wants victory, we will achieve it.

MARTIN SMITH:

Soon after he was released, he came back to Syria and formed an Al Qaeda branch to fight Assad.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] —with bombs and booby traps, with rifles, raids, with suicide bombers, with all the strength and energy we have.

MARTIN SMITH:

By the time we met, al-Jolani had broken ties with Al Qaeda and was trying to moderate his image to get the world to reconsider him.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] We go to camps that NGOs have missed or ones they have not reached yet.

MARTIN SMITH:

He took us to a camp of internally displaced Syrians where he assured the residents that he was planning to defeat Assad and send them home.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] God willing, all this is temporary. We hope that you can go back home after we kick the occupiers from this land. Some journalists are here with us today to try and convey the picture to the outside world.

MARTIN SMITH:

Al-Jolani’s key ally in the region was Turkey. It was Turkish intelligence that had taken us into Idlib so al-Jolani could be heard. But at the time, Jolani’s odds of victory were very long. Assad controlled most of the country.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] You are key to the military might of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

MARTIN SMITH:

However, with his army, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, al-Jolani was determined to strike at the heart of the Assad regime and march straight to the capital.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] We ask God the Almighty that we enter Damascus soon.

MARTIN SMITH:

Altogether I spent seven days in Idlib. Al-Jolani struck me as remarkably open. At one point, we were taken to his military command headquarters.

HTS OFFICER:

[Speaking Arabic] The front line extends from the north toward Aleppo ...

MARTIN SMITH:

Al-Jolani had come to review the current situation on their front lines.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] Iranians in this area ...

MARTIN SMITH:

They were facing pressure from Assad’s principal allies, Iran and Russia.

HTS OFFICER:

[Speaking Arabic] There’s an Iranian presence in Saraqib, to the north toward Kafr Aleppo.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] There are Iraqi Shiite militias and Hezbollah fighters.

HTS OFFICER:

[Speaking Arabic] Here, the Russian forces have constant reconnaissance and surveillance, so this area has always seen intensive Russian bombardment.

MARTIN SMITH:

So, are the Russians flying drones over this area?

HTS OFFICER:

[Speaking Arabic] Yes. There are two types of Russian planes. There are warplanes, fighter jets, and surveillance drones, which never leave the airspace.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] Russian planes.

HTS OFFICER:

[Speaking Arabic] Russian warplanes are flying overhead right now.

MARTIN SMITH:

I hear it. I hear it.

HTS OFFICER:

[Speaking Arabic] Yeah, these are the Russian planes. We hear them almost every day.

MARTIN SMITH:

The day after showing me his maps, al-Jolani sat down for an interview.

You are in a box, it seems to me, with the Russians, with the Iranians, with the regime. What is your strategy?

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] We are in a popular revolution and a war to liberate a people from a tyrant. We’re aware of the many risks surrounding the Syrian revolution. We make up for this with the faith that we hold. We'll keep sacrificing until the last drop of our blood.

MARTIN SMITH:

After I left Idlib I posted a picture of al-Jolani and me on Twitter. The post went viral. Al-Jolani was ridiculed for wearing a suit. I was criticized for talking to a terrorist.

So how did an obscure, besieged rebel leader manage to topple a dictator?

The Road to Damascus

MARTIN SMITH:

It began three years after I met al-Jolani, in November 2024, when his forces launched an assault on Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city.

HTS SOLDIER:

[Speaking Arabic] Straight into the tunnel, let’s go!

MARTIN SMITH:

They entered from above and below ground, a coordinated ambush utilizing a vast network of tunnels.

HTS SOLDIER:

[Speaking Arabic] Say the prayer, guys. Say the prayer.

HTS SOLDIER:

[Speaking Arabic] Oh God, oh God.

MARTIN SMITH:

The attack blindsided everyone.

JON FINER, Dep. National Security Adviser, 2021-25:

I don't know of anyone who accurately predicted that Jolani was likely to pose a real threat to the Assad regime. I was the deputy national security advisor, had access to all the intelligence information, analytic information the U.S. government has. I first heard that we should be watching Aleppo from somebody outside of the U.S. government, who said, "You might want to pay attention to what is happening here. It is different from what we've seen before."

MARTIN SMITH:

The city fell to al-Jolani in three days.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] Brothers, I bring you the good news that we have entered Aleppo. I ask all brothers to not enter peoples’ homes and to keep them safe.

We will enter Aleppo as liberators. We will lift the injustice from our people there.

AARON ZELIN, Washington Institute for Near East Policy:

I truly think that they only thought that they were going to take over Aleppo and then hold there and see how that went, and then try to build themselves up strong enough to then move on elsewhere, and that it might take some time. But in fact, because there was no true counteroffensive, the military people were like, "All right, nobody's going after us, let's keep on going."

MALE NEWSREADER:

Syrian rebel fighters are advancing southward after seizing control of Aleppo. That’s one of Syria’s largest cities.

MARTIN SMITH:

As al-Jolani’s forces headed south toward Damascus, the assumption was still that Iran and Russia would come to Assad’s rescue.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Those rebels have just blitzed through the countryside and made enormous gains in the east, in the south.

HTS SOLDIER:

[Speaking Arabic] We entered Hama celebrating, chanting, "God is great." We entered with God’s support and with these guns and the determination of these men. We took it against their will.

MALE NEWSREADER:

More celebrations today in the city of Hama. The rebels’ advance across the country has been lightning-fast. But where’s the Syrian army in all of this? Because they mostly seem to be surrendering or defecting.

JOSHUA LANDIS:

The Syrian regime completely gave up. Assad’s officers on the front line were getting paid $30 a month, enlisted men about $10 a month.

MARTIN SMITH:

Joshua Landis is a professor at the University of Oklahoma, director of their Center for Middle East Studies.

JOSHUA LANDIS:

American sanctions had really hollowed out that regime, and when we saw the rebel soldiers come down—and many of them had night vision goggles on there, and these fantastic uniforms, much better than anything Assad's soldiers had—it was clear that Turkey had been really building up these militias. And also Assad lost all of his allies. Hezbollah had been decapitated by Israel. They were major supporters of the Assad regime.

MALE NEWSREADER:

This morning Israel and Hezbollah are exchanging missile and drone attacks across the border.

MARTIN SMITH:

Hezbollah and its patron, Iran, became increasingly engaged with Israel. They had shifted their focus away from Syria.

And Assad’s other ally was also distracted.

JOSHUA LANDIS:

And Russia, of course, was completely preoccupied in Ukraine and had not been resupplying him, so Assad was cut off.

MALE NEWSREADER:

And after decades in the country, Russia is pulling back. This video shows military vehicles with Russian flags leaving the Damascus region.

AMB. JAMES JEFFREY, U.S. Special Rep. for Syria, 2018-20:

According to my contacts, the Russians were ready to go back to the bombing campaign that had been so effective in beating down the Syrian opposition. However, they immediately saw (A) that there was no real effective infantry, because there was almost no Iranian proxy forces from Hezbollah. And once Aleppo fell, it was obvious that whether the Russians dropped bombs or not, it wasn't going to stop this massive offensive.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Last week it was Aleppo. Yesterday, the city of Homs. Last night, the outskirts of Damascus.

MALE NEWSREADER:

At this point it appears that the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad is crumbling.

IBRAHIM AL-ASSIL, Middle East Institute:

Nobody read what was happening on the ground correctly. Not the outsiders, not Assad and his backers.

MARTIN SMITH:

So Jolani finds himself pushing on an open door.

IBRAHIM AL-ASSIL:

Exactly.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] Today we have an opportunity, because our enemy is in its weakest state.

MARTIN SMITH:

Everyone misread the situation except al-Jolani. In this meeting with followers nearly five years earlier, he predicted precisely how he would achieve victory.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] This criminal regime had one of the largest armies among Arab countries. But today, nine years later, it has been shattered. It’s no longer the army it used to be. If it is abandoned by Russia or Iran, we would be inside of Damascus within a week.

MALE NEWSREADER:

[Speaking Arabic] Breaking news. I alert you to this urgent news: Bashar al-Assad has fled Damascus to an unknown location ...

MARTIN SMITH:

So al-Jolani in less than two weeks conquered Syria, just as he had promised.

Why should Americans care about what happens in Syria? Why should Americans care about the fall of Assad or the rise of al-Sharaa?

JAMES JEFFREY:

It's not that Syria per se is important. It's that what happens in Syria impacts all of the Middle East. Syria can generate massive refugee flows, and it has terrorism that does not stay in the region, as we saw all over Europe in 2015-16 with the Islamic State. These are issues at the center of the Middle East.

MARTIN SMITH:

And Syria sits squarely in the center of the Middle East, sharing borders with five U.S. strategic partners in the region: Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel and Lebanon.

MARTIN SMITH:

Should it be considered an intelligence failure that we didn't see either that Jolani, at that time, was a potent force to be dealt with, or that Assad, the regime, was rotting from within?

AMB. BARBARA LEAF, Asst. Sec., Near Eastern Affairs, 2022-25:

Look, I think anyone you might have asked, either in the policy side, the intel side, whether in State, NSC, DOD, our folks in the field, people would've been easily able to reckon, yes, the regime is stagnant. You know things are brittle, but you don't know how brittle they are, and you don't know what kind of punch knocks the whole thing to pieces.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

More than two weeks after Assad fled Syria, Syrian families are still searching for answers about so many of their loved ones taken by Assad’s secret police over the years.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

At least 200,000 people are missing after—

MURHAF JOUEJATI, Syrian academic and diplomat:

I have trouble thinking of the collapse of the Assad regime. It's 54 years. Fifty-four years that the Syrians have been repressed. And so when in 11 days a regime like this collapses, it takes you time to understand it, to believe it.

MALE NEWSREADER:

And what we’re identifying is multiple mass graves, all these places where hundreds of thousands of bodies, men, women, children and elderly, had been not just shot in the head, but mostly tortured to death. Really a sadistic regime.

MURHAF JOUEJATI:

Anything was better than the Assad regime. We saw the videos, how prisoners were treated.

SYRIAN MAN:

[Speaking Arabic] Congratulations! Come out!

MURHAF JOUEJATI:

The brutality of the regime.

SYRIAN MAN:

[Speaking Arabic] It’s over! Bashar fell. Come out, come out.

MURHAF JOUEJATI:

Children born from raped mothers in prisons, that were born in prisons.

SYRIAN MAN:

[Speaking Arabic] This boy, oh God. Poor boy.

MURHAF JOUEJATI:

Anything other than Assad is good, even if it's the devil.

The Honeymoon

MARTIN SMITH:

During his first weeks in power, al-Sharaa walked the streets of Damascus, talking to people, reassuring everyone what his plans were.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] We must give Syria its due by restoring people’s dignity and pride and by rebuilding it properly.

CHARLES LISTER, Middle East Institute:

From day one, when Ahmad al-Sharaa took Damascus, he talked about peace and reconciliation, reunifying the country.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] There is no greater duty than working to reunite the Syrian people.

CHARLES LISTER:

He talked about disarmament, demobilization and reintegration. He used all of the phrases that you would read in a textbook about a political transition.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] This is an invitation to all Syrians to participate in building a new homeland ...

MARTIN SMITH:

The world’s press soon arrived to meet and talk with the new leader.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] God willing, we are Syrians, we can live together without problems.

MARTIN SMITH:

As did a parade of foreign diplomats.

CHARLES LISTER:

The world rushed to Damascus. Foreign ministers, emirs, prime ministers, presidents are seeking to shake Ahmad al-Sharaa's hand, amazed by this historic opportunity, first time in more than 50 years, to reshape the heart of the Middle East for the better.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN:

As we all turn to the question of what comes next in Syria—

MARTIN SMITH:

In Washington, the Biden administration was weighing what it should do.

JOE BIDEN:

We’ve taken note of statements by the leaders of these rebel groups in recent days. And they’re saying the right things now.

JON FINER:

We were struck by the interviews that Jolani gave in the early days after assuming power, in which, yes, he quote-unquote "said the right things," but said them with a degree of sophistication and conviction and detail.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] An interim parliament will then be formed, and the interim parliament will then form a constitutional committee ...

JON FINER:

He gave us some reason to believe that this might be a different sort of leader. So we decided that at a certain point we would need to engage.

MARTIN SMITH:

Less than two weeks after al-Sharaa’s victory, a U.S. State Department delegation headed by Barbara Leaf set out from neighboring Jordan to meet with him.

BARBARA LEAF:

We took off down the highway at speed and we drove through a very dilapidated countryside, I will say, really looked beaten down.

As we got into Damascus, it was difficult to measure what security would be like. Were there militias roaming at will? Was there any security? Had all the remnants of the regime fled for good?

MARTIN SMITH:

They arrived at the presidential palace 12 days after Assad had fled to Moscow.

BARBARA LEAF:

So we were walked into this big cavernous palace and taken upstairs, and all of a sudden there they were.

MARTIN SMITH:

Talk about how he struck you.

ROGER CARSTENS, Special Pres. Envoy, Hostage Affairs, 2020-25:

Having worked for many four-star generals in the American military, I felt like I was talking to a very senior general, not that different than an American commander, who had a very deep understanding of warfare, economics, policy, what he wanted to achieve, how he might want to achieve it. I walked away impressed.

BARBARA LEAF:

He just had this air of calm, quiet authority and a whiff of charisma, frankly. I mean, I had to almost close my eyes and remind myself I was talking to a Syrian official, with the very easy way he talked about Israel. No diatribes, no recitation of 40 years of history, the way Hafez al-Assad would “Let me tell you about 1948” sort of start of the conversation. And of course at that time, the Israelis had moved in up on the Golan Heights on Syrian soil—

MARTIN SMITH:

And they were bombing.

BARBARA LEAF:

And they were bombing.

MALE VOICE:

[Speaking Arabic] May God curse you, Israel.

MARTIN SMITH:

Israel, long in a state of war with Syria, immediately started bombing and dismantling Syria’s remaining military capabilities.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Israel has been bombarding every part of Syria’s military—fighter jets, naval assets, surface-to-surface missiles. They have taken out everything.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Israelis say they told the Biden administration what they were planning to do. Al-Sharaa asked Barbara Leaf to get Israel to stop.

BARBARA LEAF:

He was very matter-of-fact in his request. He said, "Could you get the Israelis to stop bombing? They're scaring my people.” And he was at pains to say repeatedly, "We have no argument with Israel."

MICHAEL HERZOG:

I don't doubt that al-Sharaa has no interest in going to war with Israel.

MARTIN SMITH:

Michael Herzog was Israeli ambassador to the U.S. at the time. He told me that Israel was particularly worried about Assad’s weapons and chemical stockpiles falling into the wrong hands.

MICHAEL HERZOG:

We all know the background of al-Sharaa and the people around him. They all come from the schools of Al Qaeda and ISIS. They all have jihadi background, and that was, and remains, a source of concern in Israel.

MARTIN SMITH:

How does continuing to strike militarily with bombs encourage al-Sharaa's moderation? It would seem to me the opposite’s true, that that encourages the jihadists.

MICHAEL HERZOG:

Well, Israel is not going to strike military capabilities forever. There’s—The more we do it, the less there is left to destroy. And again, we're talking about specific military capabilities that we do not want to be there because they could be used against us, either by this new regime or by others.

MARTIN SMITH:

Initially, Israel did say the bombing campaign would be brief.

GIDEON SAAR, Israeli Foreign Minister:

I emphasize it is a very limited and temporary step.

MARTIN SMITH:

But Israel has continued striking targets for months, killing an estimated two dozen civilians in the process. Israel has also seized land in southern Syria, expanding what it calls its "security zone."

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] This ongoing Israeli aggression, along with the military attacks ...

MARTIN SMITH:

At an Arab summit in March, al-Sharaa asked for help.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] We also urge the international community to fulfill its legal and moral obligations in supporting Syria's rights and pressuring Israel to immediately withdraw from southern Syria.

MURHAF JOUEJATI, Prof., U.S. Naval Academy:

I think behind Israel is an agenda, is an intention to weaken Syria, to break it up and to expand Israeli boundaries, without any accountability by the international community. And that is really the recipe for future violence, not for peace.

MARTIN SMITH:

They don't see it that way.

MURHAF JOUEJATI:

The French and the British, when they carved up the Middle East, didn't see it that way either.

MALE DRIVER:

[Speaking Arabic] Is this the right road?

FEMALE PRODUCER:

[Speaking Arabic] Correct. We’ll make a right soon.

MALE DRIVER:

[Speaking Arabic] OK.

MARTIN SMITH:

By mid-January 2025, when I returned to Syria, I was planning on seeing al-Sharaa again, but it seemed he was distracted—his honeymoon was coming to an end. Resistance to his government was emerging around the country.

Defiance

MARTIN SMITH:

A large pocket was here in the south, in the city of Sweida, the heartland of Syria’s Druze. The Druze are a minority religious group, an ancient offshoot of Shia Islam. And since al-Sharaa came to power they have been reluctant to support him or trust his jihadist followers.

SHAKIB AZAAM:

[Speaking Arabic] We do not trust them because we do not recognize their legitimacy. They can’t overnight decide to become a government.

MARTIN SMITH:

Shakib Azaam is commander of a large Druze militia called the Mountain Brigade. His people, he said, felt excluded. He complained that the new government was stacked with al-Sharaa’s own people.

SHAKIB AZAAM:

[Speaking Arabic] The people surrounding al-Sharaa, he appointed them as judges, as ministers, officials all over the country. He directed everything, the forces that were with him, this entourage to manage this country. It’s unacceptable. We’re moving from one authoritarian regime to another. This is not acceptable.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] Syria’s priorities today are, first, filling the power vacuum in a legitimate and lawful manner.

MARTIN SMITH:

The complaint that I heard is that Sharaa was stocking his cabinet with friends from his government in Idlib, and they were all fellow Islamists. Was it inevitable that al-Sharaa did that?

JOSHUA LANDIS, Prof., University of Oklahoma:

I should think it is. He's been fighting a war since he's 20 years old. He's been a warrior. He's been leading a militia that is deeply Islamist. When he first got to Idlib, he said, "This is going to be an entity for Sunnis." And so there's this deep Sunni supremacist attitude that comes along with him.

MARTIN SMITH:

Under scrutiny was one of al-Sharaa’s initial cabinet members. His justice minister was filmed in 2015 overseeing the execution of two women in Idlib accused of corruption and prostitution.

SHADI AL-WAISI:

[Speaking Arabic] The Council of Scholars, which approved this ruling, decided to carry out this punishment.

MARTIN SMITH:

How do you explain his appointment of a justice minister who is, in video, executing two women?

MURHAF JOUEJATI:

He's gotten a lot of protests over this. There are still extremist elements, and this is the source of concern to many secular Syrians. Mr. al-Sharaa is walking a tightrope.

MARTIN SMITH:

Al-Sharaa has since replaced his Justice minister, and by the end of March he formed a new cabinet that was much more inclusive.

It's very interesting. Do you speak English?

But these Druze leaders may not be assuaged. They cite too much bad history.

NAJIB ABU FAKHR, Druze leader:

You can't say for us, "Oh, today I am angel and forget my history." You know? It's not enough to say, "OK, yesterday, I was Al Qaeda. Yesterday, my leader is Osama bin Laden. But today, my leader is the Syrian free man."

MARTIN SMITH:

Ten years earlier, members of al-Sharaa’s group executed 20 Druze in an Idlib village, accusing them of heresy. Al-Sharaa's group later said the attack went against his orders.

MARTIN SMITH:

There is a very important struggle going on right now—

Today in Sweida, the Druze are refusing to give up their guns.

How many men do you have in arms?

SHAKIB AZAAM:

[Speaking Arabic] All of Sweida's citizens are fighters. We’re holding onto our weapons. We believe our weapons are our protection.

MARTIN SMITH:

The day after my meeting with the Mountain Brigade we got a tip from a local journalist.

MALE DRIVER:

[Speaking Arabic] It’s a security convoy.

MARTIN SMITH:

There was a large convoy of al-Sharaa’s soldiers patrolling in the nearby countryside.

MARTIN SMITH:

That’s a big convoy.

SCOTT ANGER, Co-producer:

It is a big convoy. Let’s try to follow them.

MARTIN SMITH:

They were going from town to town in a show of force, assuring Syrians that al-Sharaa was restoring order in the country.

SOLDIER FROM SECURITY CONVOY:

[Speaking Arabic] We need your help. We have a list of names, including drug dealers, thieves, [Assad] regime loyalists ...

MARTIN SMITH:

But the soldiers were also here demanding loyalty, warning everyone in no uncertain terms to cooperate in the fight against any armed resistance to al-Sharaa’s government.

SOLDIER FROM SECURITY CONVOY:

[Speaking Arabic] Anyone who’s being manipulated by the former regime to spread chaos in this country, we’ll be on the lookout for them. We will show no mercy. We’ll use an iron fist. You will lead, and we’ll be behind you.

MARTIN SMITH:

At the end of the day, these soldiers paused to pray, a common Muslim ritual. But al-Sharaa’s forces are staunchly conservative Sunnis. As seen by the Druze from nearby Sweida or by defeated Assad loyalists, rule by a band of Islamists is deeply troubling. Under Assad, religion was downplayed. Assad was an Alawite, a minority sect of Islam, but he promoted a largely secular vision for Syria.

The Massacre

MARTIN SMITH:

Assad’s base was here along Syria's Mediterranean coast, in communities with a concentration of Alawites. After Assad’s defeat, some coastal residents feared for their safety, and there were reports that some were being targeted.

Then, in early March, some Assad loyalists attacked one of al-Sharaa’s government patrols.

SYRIAN MAN:

[Speaking Arabic] All our friends, all our friends.

MARTIN SMITH:

Sixteen men lay dead. And more lethal attacks followed.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] With your heinous act of killing those who protect and serve Syria, you have attacked all Syrians. So hand over your weapons and turn yourselves in before it’s too late.

MALE NEWSREADER:

And today what we’re seeing is a huge security operation targeting forces loyal to the Assad regime.

JOSHUA LANDIS:

And so there was a general mobilization of the military. And then the mosques began to call for jihad.

SYRIAN IMAM:

[Speaking Arabic] No sect should ever disrupt our peace. By God, we long for martyrdom and for killing. Do your souls call you to jihad, or not?

CONGREGATION:

[Speaking Arabic] God is great!

MARTIN SMITH:

Tensions had been building for weeks with provocative online threats, like these against the Alawites—

MILITIA MEMBER:

[Speaking Arabic] The Alawite pigs will get what they deserve.

MARTIN SMITH:

—some linked to suspicious foreign accounts.

MILITIA MEMBER:

[Speaking Arabic] I swear, if I come across an Alawite whether they were involved or not ...

MILITIA MEMBER:

[Speaking Arabic] No one from the Alawite sect should be left alive.

JOSHUA LANDIS:

You know, put hate in your hearts, go to that coast, smash the Alawites.

MARTIN SMITH:

Thousands of militiamen joined al-Sharaa’s government forces and descended on the coast.

MILITIA MEMBER:

[Speaking Arabic] Louder! Hurry up, boy!

JOSHUA LANDIS:

And then just a flood of videos begin to come out. And some of the soldiers, and these militiamen, making Alawites, long strings of them, walk on their hands and knees, bark like a dog.

MILITIA MEMBER:

[Speaking Arabic] Louder!

JOSHUA LANDIS:

And then they started carrying out these massacres. Just shooting people up and down. It was a free-for-all. And they were having a good time!

MILITIA MEMBER:

[Speaking Arabic] Dead animals, dead animals. Alawites.

MILITIA MEMBER:

[Speaking Arabic] Now we have cleansed the coast.

MILITIA MEMBER:

[Speaking Arabic] Honestly, this happiness feels better for us than the happiness we felt at liberation.

MALE WITNESS:

[Speaking Arabic] They would round up the men, sometimes on the roof. And they would shoot them in the head. Men, women, even children who were a year old were killed. My neighbor, who was seven months pregnant, was killed.

MARTIN SMITH:

This eyewitness says three of his family members were executed. We’re blurring his face to protect his identity.

MALE WITNESS:

[Speaking Arabic] Are you Sunni or Alawite? That was the only question. I was able to hide inside a house under construction. That’s how I survived.

I brought my family to a graveyard. There were already about 100 bodies there. And every 15 minutes the Red Crescent ambulance would bring new bodies. There are still hundreds missing, and no one knows anything about them.

MILITIA MEMBER:

[Speaking Arabic] Victory over remnants of the fallen regime. Thanks be to God.

MILITIA MEMBER:

[Speaking Arabic] We killed them.

MARTIN SMITH:

So you wake up to these images that are then online, and you and your wife are together.

JOSHUA LANDIS:

Yeah.

MARTIN SMITH:

She’s Alawite.

JOSHUA LANDIS:

She’s Alawite.

MARTIN SMITH:

You have relatives, in-laws, living there.

JOSHUA LANDIS:

Yeah. Three of my wife's cousins wrote us the next day. People came to their door, bang, bang, bang. You open it up, "Who are you? Sunni or Alawite?" It was the first thing that each one of them said they were asked. One cousin, who grew up with my son, we knew well, was shot at his doorstep. He was 19, 20 years old.

MARTIN SMITH:

Over the course of several days, an estimated 1,200 people were killed, mostly Alawites.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] There is no one above the law, and anyone with Syrian blood on their hands will face justice very soon. We want to assure the Syrian people ...

MARTIN SMITH:

Al-Sharaa called for a thorough investigation.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] We announced the formation of a fact-finding committee to review and investigate the events on the coast, to bring those involved to justice and reveal the facts to the Syrian people.

IBRAHIM AL-ASSIL:

This investigation committee, will they actually provide reports with names? Will those people be held accountable? Those are real tests, to look at them and ask al-Sharaa, "If you do that, we trust you. If you don't, no, we don't trust you."

MALE NEWSREADER:

Damascus says it has successfully contained the offensive on the coast. But while Ahmad al-Sharaa may be in control of some of the men in uniforms, he is not in control of all of the men with guns.

A Broken Promise

MARTIN SMITH:

It is in Syria’s far northeastern corner where al-Sharaa faces perhaps his biggest challenge. This is the homeland of Syria’s Kurds, the largest non-Arab minority in Syria.

Kurds have long been subject to systematic discrimination, including the arbitrary denial of citizenship to around 150,000 Syria-born Kurds, who are not allowed to have passports, who can’t own property, get a marriage license or find work. Whose children are also considered noncitizens.

Kurds have not fared well elsewhere, either. They form the largest stateless ethnic group in the world, with 30 million people concentrated in an area straddling Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria.

After Syria’s civil war began in 2012, Kurds here in the northeast broke free of Assad and established a semi-autonomous region they call Rojava.

How did Syria ever lose control of the northeast?

JAMES JEFFREY:

When Assad's forces faced massive armed opposition during the Arab Spring, they pulled troops out of the northeast to hold off against the opposition, the resistance in the rest of the country. So the Kurds split off, and they’re currently a state within a state.

MALE NEWSREADER:

[Speaking Kurdish] Today is a day that all Kurdish people have been waiting for, holding the Kurdish Unity Conference in Rojava ...

MARTIN SMITH:

I went to Rojava in April 2025 to see and hear the Kurds’ powerful and immensely popular rebel leader, Gen. Mazloum Abdi Kobane.

GEN. MAZLOUM ABDI KOBANE, Syrian Democratic Forces:

[Speaking Kurdish] Since the founding of the Syrian state, we have been marginalized. This message is directed to all Syrians and to the government in Damascus. We advocate for a Syria where all communities are equally represented in the constitution. We call for a democratic Syria, one that embraces all of its people, including us.

MARTIN SMITH:

After the conference, I met with Gen. Mazloum at his headquarters.

I want to begin by talking about this unity conference that took place yesterday. I was there. What is the significance of the declaration that came out of that conference?

MAZLOUM ABDI KOBANE:

[Speaking Kurdish] It was an historic day for the Syrian Kurds. The Kurdish people have been denied their rights throughout Syria's history. The Kurdish people want their rights spelled out in the constitution.

MARTIN SMITH:

Do the people trust a former Al Qaeda commander to rule Syria or to preserve or to give you autonomy?

MAZLOUM ABDI KOBANE:

[Speaking Kurdish] We had a situation with [al-Sharaa’s] Syrian opposition back in 2012-13. There was intense fighting between our forces. Our people are indeed concerned and hesitant.

[Street mural] "Woman, life, freedom!"

MARTIN SMITH:

From al-Sharaa’s perspective, integrating the Kurds back into Syria is essential. He needed to make a deal.

And why is northeast Syria important to al-Sharaa?

CHARLES LISTER, Syria Weekly:

Northeastern Syria contains 80% of Syria's natural energy resources. So, oil and gas, hugely significant. The lifeblood of the Syrian economy. And then on top of that, it's the agricultural belt of the country. So if Syria is able to get anywhere close to feeding itself, it needs that region of Syria. Without that under Damascus's control, there really is no hope.

JOSHUA LANDIS:

And then there’s water. Rojava controls the Euphrates River, in part, and the dam. So that northeast, very important for the economy, oil, agriculture, water.

MARTIN SMITH:

Mazloum also leads a 100,000-man U.S.-backed army—the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, which is battle-hardened and well-supplied. The Americans trained and equipped the SDF to help them defeat ISIS after a large swath of Kurdish territory was seized by ISIS in 2014.

AARON ZELIN, Jihadology:

The SDF definitely has some power in the negotiation with Sharaa not only in terms of the resources, but also because they have a pretty robust military that's been trained by the United States and the global coalition, too. And some have said that it might even be a larger military than the one that's currently in Damascus.

MARTIN SMITH:

But the Kurds still have an ISIS problem. They have around 10,000 suspected ISIS fighters locked up in Kurdish prisons, along with two massive camps filled with 40,000 women and children, the families of these prisoners.

In the Kurdish city of Hasakah, I was allowed a look inside one of these prisons—

Can I look in some of these cells?

—this one filled with foreign fighters.

Do you speak English?

MALE PRISONER:

Yeah.

MARTIN SMITH:

Your brothers in this cell. Tell me, where are they from? What countries?

MALE PRISONER:

There’s people from all over the world with me.

MARTIN SMITH:

Just foreigners together. And how are you treated?

The Kurds need help repatriating these prisoners. No one wants to take them.

Kurds have something like 29 prisons full of ISIS prisoners. You’re trying to repatriate them.

MAZLOUM ABDI KOBANE:

[Speaking Kurdish] This is indeed a complicated matter. We ultimately want the countries where they come from to be willing to rehabilitate them. Solving this issue will take time.

MARTIN SMITH:

After weeks of negotiations, Mazloum set out for Damascus to meet al-Sharaa and hammer out an agreement on Kurdish rights, autonomy, on resources, the military and ISIS.

JOSHUA LANDIS:

The broad outlines were that Mazloum would put the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces, under the authority of the Ministry of Defense in Damascus. And they came up with an agreement on oil that was going to give the Kurds a big share of all oil revenues.

MARTIN SMITH:

And finally there were issues concerning Kurdish status in the new Syria. Al-Sharaa specifically agreed to recognize Kurds as fully Syrian and he guaranteed their constitutional rights.

JOSHUA LANDIS:

The Kurds want Syria to be called the Syrian Republic. So it'd be Syria for all Syrians. Traditionally, it's been the Syrian Arab Republic.

MARTIN SMITH:

Initially, Kurds celebrated the agreement.

KURDISH CROWD [chanting]:

[Speaking Kurdish] One, one, one! Syrian people are one!

MALE NEWSREADER:

Breaking news: Syria’s government has struck a deal—

MALE NEWSREADER:

—after weeks of negotiations between Damascus and the Kurds—

MALE NEWSREADER:

The Syrian state is recognizing the Kurdish community as an integral part of Syria. That is a major, major development ...

MARTIN SMITH:

Then, three days later, al-Sharaa issued a new Syrian Constitution. It was not what Mazloum envisioned.

JOSHUA LANDIS:

It said "Syrian Arab Republic," right at the top. And it didn't write the Kurds in. It didn't give them representation. It didn't outline the agreement.

MARTIN SMITH:

The constitution did promise to protect minority rights, but the Kurds said the language was too vague.

The document also contained Article 3, which deals with Islamic jurisprudence.

JOSHUA LANDIS:

It was changed from “Islamic law will be a source of law." That's what it was under Assad. Now it's "Islamic law will be the source of law." So this makes it very, potentially Sharia law will become the law of the land. This sent a shudder through many of the minority communities.

MALE PROTESTER:

[Speaking Kurdish] We don’t want this constitution.

MALE PROTESTER:

[Speaking Kurdish] Ahmad al-Sharaa and his new government in Damascus want to establish a religious Sunni state. We will never accept that.

MAZLOUM ABDI KOBANE:

[Speaking Kurdish] The interim constitution contradicts our initial agreement with Damascus.

MARTIN SMITH:

I would imagine you were tempted to pick up the phone and call al-Sharaa and say, "What's going on?"

MAZLOUM ABDI KOBANE:

[Speaking Kurdish] Sure, we did that. We expressed our discontent to them and criticized it.

MARTIN SMITH:

In an open letter, Kurdish authorities laid out their complete rejection of the new constitution and its attempt to re-create a dictatorship. Syria, they wrote, “is a homeland for all its people. We will not accept the reconstruction of an authoritarian regime.”

CROWD [chanting]:

[Speaking Kurdish] —fall of Jolani! The people demand the fall of Jolani!

MARTIN SMITH:

To date, al-Sharaa has decided not to revise the constitution.

MALE PROTESTER:

[Speaking Kurdish] Democracy for Syria!

MARTIN SMITH:

The question I have is how he could, three days after having this deal signed with Mazloum, come out with a constitutional declaration, at the very top it says "the Syrian Arab Republic."

BARBARA LEAF:

Yes. That is a glaring piece that has not been fixed. He’s making mistakes.

MARTIN SMITH:

I went back to speak via Zoom with Ambassador Barbara Leaf.

BARBARA LEAF:

If he wants a stable Syria, he's going to be compelled to take into account the changed landscape of Syria. Changed by 14 years of this brutal civil war. But he has to look at a longer scope of history where these communities were pitted against one another. So the high degree of mistrust is in multiple directions, but they all mistrust Damascus.

The Road Ahead

MARTIN SMITH:

I wanted to hear al-Sharaa’s response to all the turmoil around the country. I repeatedly pressed for an interview—to no avail.

We did visit this courthouse in the city of Homs, central Syria. We met this man, Chief Judge Hassan al-Aqraa, a staunch supporter of al-Sharaa. At the time, al-Aqraa was systematically going through all the files that were seized from the Assad regime. He said new laws were still being written.

HASSAN AL-AQRAA:

[Speaking Arabic] I have a degree in Sharia Law and, thank God, I have extensive judicial experience. But handling the judiciary requires some patience until new laws, decrees and regulations are introduced. We strive to build a Syria for all Syrians, a Syria where all sects coexist under the leadership of Mr. Ahmad al-Sharaa. So the world can rest assured that the next Syria is a better Syria.

AHMAD AL-SHARAA:

[Speaking Arabic] Today, Syria is creating a new history. You're building it with your own hands. We have what it takes to build on every level, in every area. We just need to work together, to agree rather than disagree.

MARTIN SMITH:

In May, President Trump made a trip to the Middle East. There was a jolt of good news for al-Sharaa.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:

After discussing the situation in Syria with the Crown Prince, your Crown Prince—

MARTIN SMITH:

In Saudi Arabia, Trump announced that economic sanctions imposed during the Assad regime would finally be lifted.

DONALD TRUMP:

I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness.

MARTIN SMITH:

Despite opposition from some hawks in D.C., Trump was widely praised for the move.

People in the administration were opposed to this. So what was behind all that?

BARBARA LEAF:

I think it's very clear what was behind that. He heard over the last several months consistently from the Saudis, from Erdoğan, from others, that this was an existential moment for Syria to get onto a path, a long one, albeit, but a path of recovery and successful political and economic and security transition. And that that would be good for regional interests, that would be good for U.S. interests.

MARTIN SMITH:

The following day, al-Sharaa and Trump met. The former Al Qaeda commander, who spent years in American prison camps in Iraq accused of making powerful roadside bombs, had come a long way.

DONALD TRUMP:

Young, attractive guy. Tough guy. You know. Strong past, very strong past. Fighter.

MURHAF JOUEJATI:

The situation is very fluid. We just have to wait and see what happens. We need to see this new administration be inclusive of all Syrians. We need to make sure that Syria will no longer be a center of terrorism.

JAMES JEFFREY:

If Syria can be united and stable and Iran can be kept out, then the temporary tactical defeat of Iran and proxies will become a permanent defeat. If not, if Syria becomes a failed state, if it goes back to active fighting and various outside forces intervening and split up, it will open the door for Iran again.

MARTIN SMITH:

As we were leaving Syria, events underscored just how fragile al-Sharaa’s rule is. Sectarian clashes erupted in several cities after a Druze religious leader was falsely accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad. Around 100 Druze militiamen and government security forces were killed.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU:

[Speaking Hebrew] We will not tolerate any threat to the Druze community in southern Syria.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Israelis, with a large Druze minority at home, have been issuing warnings to al-Sharaa not to harm the Druze.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Israel carried out airstrikes today in Damascus—

MARTIN SMITH:

To make their point, an Israeli missile landed right outside al-Sharaa’s palace gates.

MALE NEWSREADER:

—a direct message to stop threatening the Druze community.

MARTIN SMITH:

For now, al-Sharaa remains popular with the majority of Syrians. But he has been keeping a lower profile of late, avoiding most interviews.

I mean, he enjoyed a honeymoon. He talked to diplomats like yourself. He talked to journalists. He visited other regional states. But he's been relatively quiet. He's not in a honeymoon phase anymore.

BARBARA LEAF:

No. And governance is hard. The easy part is going on a foreign trip, but the hardest part is internally. It's governance. It's the daily slog of reconstructing an administrative apparatus, which is pretty worn and torn and riddled with corruption from the years of destruction of the Assad family rule. It's a hard, hard road ahead.

Al-Sharaa continues to call for unity and peace.

In June, a suspected ISIS suicide bomber killed more than 20 people inside a church in Damascus.

Sporadic violence against Syria’s Alawite community continues.

In April, the deadline for the government’s investigation was extended by three months.

Al-Sharaa has entered indirect talks with Israel over their ongoing bombing and incursions.

He has not publicly commented on the war between Israel and Iran.

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Syria After Assad

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54m

Syria After Assad

Syria’s uncertain future under jihadist-turned-statesman Ahmad al-Sharaa.

July 1, 2025