 Good afternoon. So with a great deal of pleasure that I introduced Black Barfi, a friend and a colleague here at New America who's a research fellow specializing in Arab and Islamist affairs. He was previously a visiting fellow with the Brookings Doha Center. Before that he was a producer with ABC News affiliates in the Middle East where he reported from countries such as Iraq and Lebanon. His articles have appeared in many publications including The Washington Post and Foreign Policy and the New Republic, all frequent collaborators with the New America Foundation. He's recently visited Egypt and Syria where he visited the province of Aleppo and met with rebel leaders. And Barack spent six months in Libya during the 2011 revolution so he's going to speak for about 15 minutes. I'm going to engage him in a little Q&A and then throw it open to you. Thank you Barack. Taking the time out to moderate this. I also want to take a moment to remember a friend, Munzer Ali Abrad. Him and his family welcomed me when I was in the province of Aleppo. And recently he was killed in fighting in the city of Aleppo so I just want to say I want to start today by talking about Libya. The biggest dilemma in Libya is the militia problem but to understand that you really need to understand the country's history. Libya has been characterized by weak state institutions. It began in the monarchy that rules from 1951 to 1969. Small coterie around the king controlled the country. Qaddafi continued this. He was frustrated with the bureaucracy so he created people's power with individual power to the municipalities. He dismantled ministries and he wanted to distribute oil revenues directly to the people to spend rather than have central government planning. This theme was emphasized in 1988 Green Charter of Human Rights where it was written, quote, the people who exercised this power directly without intermediary or representative unquote. This led to formal versus informal authority that weakened state institutions. In 1977 Qaddafi created the revolutionary communities which had arrest powers. Then he created revolutionary courts that had powers of prosecution and execution and so he shifted power from legitimate state institutions to revolutionary ones. All these policies make the state virtually nonexistent beyond the coercive powers of the intelligence services and the extraction and sale of oil. The 2011 revolution continued this. Within days of the revolution outbreak of the revolution the National Transitional Council the NTC was an opposition group that was established to be the opposition government. The people there didn't have a lot of governing experience. Early on the Libyans were very happy but over time we realized there was no transparency and there was no move to dismantle the militias. The militias are the country's real power brokers. They are regional and ideological militias. These militias engage in retribution against Qaddafi loyalists. There's also intramilitia fighting between militias from the cities of Zintan and Mashrata. There's also these militias are engaged in theft, a lot of car theft, a lot of vandalism and whatnot. So today's dilemmas are that there's no state institutions, there's weak national security forces and there's strong militias and that translates into a weak central government. On the political level we have major regional and ideological troubles. The National Forces Alliance, the NFA, led by former Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril. They came out on top in the recent elections. But Jibril has a lot of enemies. Chief Amal and the city of Mashrata and the most powerful militias from Libya come from the city of Mashrata. There's historical animosity between Jibril's Warfalla tribe and the city of Mashrata. Jibril is using Qaddafi loyalists from the Warfalla tribe. So his enemies really blocked him from becoming Prime Minister. Into the vacuum stepped an organ, a party called the National Front. It's descended from the the Libyan National Salvation Front. It's the major opposition group that was created in 1981. They were able to get the positions of President and Prime Minister. Because they were the opposition party they were able to stock the cabinet with exiled dissidents and this angered the local parliamentarians. We also have the regional parties such as Mastrakhtins and Tom. These are the cities where the strong militias came from. They were not happy with the cabinet representation. They got easier. So what happened? And also there were a number of Qaddafi loyalists that were given posts. So a lot of people they said, hey, we don't know these people because they came from abroad. Be their Qaddafi loyalists and see we don't have regional representations. And that basically undermined and torpedoed the Prime Minister Mustafa Abhisarghur's government. And now the country has no Prime Minister when it's dealing with the biggest crisis since the revolution with the Benghazi consulate attack. I want to now talk about Syria. Since history was written in the third century BCE, Syria has been historically unstable. We had waves of nomads and nomadic invaders. We had the mountains offering refuge to persecuted minorities. In the independence era, we never had a cohesive state. There were coups and counter-coups every few years. This basically led to what the journalist Patrick Steele called a struggle for Syria. This really changed with Hafiz al-Assad when he came to 1970. He created strong central government that provided people stability and security in exchange for them giving up freedoms. And he built a coalition of minorities that was buffeted by the rural Sunni poor. But when the revolution began, many of the members of this coalition began to unravel. When we saw protests in Sunni urban cities such as Hama and Holmes, there was no surprise because these areas rose up in the Islamic insurrection in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Sunnis there were very upset because the regime brought in Alawis from the northwest areas of Jabal al-Alawi where the Alawis predominate and they sell them in these areas. So you're surping a lot of their privileges. But now when we see protests in rural Sunni areas that were pillars of the regime support, that means that there's a lot of trouble for the regime. But we shouldn't estimate the staying power of the regime. Many people still support it. People don't want instability. A lot of people don't understand what the revolution is about. When I was in the province of Aleppo, there were certain areas that my Syrian friends didn't want to take us because they said they were either pro-regime or they sat on the fence. And these were Sunni villages. We're not talking about Alawi villages, minority villages or Shi'i villages. From time to time, we hear that the regime is on the brink of collapse, but no cities have fallen to the rebels. The regime can still use its air power. The core pillars of support for the regime are still there. The rebels are very good. They know how to fight. They know how to have sustained assaults. There's coordination between different brigades. They know how to gather intelligence. They know how to have sophisticated attacks using different types of weapons. I didn't see this during my six months of Libya The rebels would move forward during the day and they'd fall back at night. They didn't hold positions. You see a lot of difference with the rebels in Syria. Jihadists have been spotted on the front lines in considerable numbers. There are some westerners there. We know of jihadist camps that are being run. A lot of attention has fallen on an organization called Jabhat al-Nusra. It's drawing in young Syrians, the Free Syrian Army, as it's called, but doesn't really exist, is not happy about it. We hear of disputes between national Syrians and more ideological, national Syrian units and more ideological ones. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are fundering units that tow their line. They may be getting better weapons. The regime is not going to collapse and wither away as we saw in Iraq and Libya. Its core is based on sex that live in compact regions. They have legitimate interests and concerns the international community needs to address. If Damascus falls, the Alawis are going to move to the northern regions of Latakia and Tartus, where the Alawis predominate. This will give them a coastal area and a border with Lebanon where his brother will be able to fund them and provide them with services. This is why the regime moved chemical weapons there because they could not allow for those areas to fall and be slaughtered and massacred. I finally want to finish by talking about Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood. There's internal struggles within the organization between a core group that wants to stay true to the group's ideals and another one that knows that governing necessitates changes. The group can't decide what it wants to focus on and as a result its messaging is muddled. The Islamists really stumbled out of the gate when I talk about this. I'm not talking so much about the Muslim Brotherhood as I am about the Salafi party on the north. The Muslim Brotherhood had years of political experience in organization and they had representation in the parliament but the Salafists didn't. They're new to politics and too many Salafists and really Muslim Brother candidates won and they just don't know how to be good politicians. So what we need to do in this situation is look back at other countries where religious parties came to power in very large numbers to understand what happened. Give a precedent paradigm. A great example of this is Israel, the Shas party led by an Orientalist Jew party that's led by rabbis. When this party started winning seats in large numbers in the late 1980s and 1990s it had to move people into the Knesset or parliament that didn't have political experience. They were second tiered political hacks and what happened is a number of these people, when they came into the Knesset and they saw all the powers that they could have, they took advantage of them and a number of members of Shas party went to prison on charges, corruption charges including its leader Arya Dairy. We're already seeing the beginnings of our disenchantment and the problems with the Salafists on newer party. One of the MPs was caught in a car with a woman in a late hour in a deserted area. Another one came to parliament with bandages on his nose. He said he was beat up and turned out he had plastic surgery. These people are supposed to be pious Muslims that set an example for the society, but what we're seeing is they are being attempted and corrupted by the same temptations that undermined the secular politicians during the Mubarak regime. Egypt's dilemma is that you can't govern a society that's ungovernable. No political party can fix Egypt's political woes. There's too many people, not enough jobs and not enough agricultural resources. Egypt is falling into the nile. The people are frustrated. It's not only the slow pace of political change that is frustrating them. This summer there were widespread electrical shortages. People want responsive government and that is just not going to happen in a country like Egypt. We hear a lot about the lack of security. The police are on the street after the revolution. People are being robbed. One of the big things that when I was in Egypt this summer in the papers, the people were getting beat up at hospitals. They were just coming in and just beating people up. That's another thing that's frustrating people. Shifting back to politics, Egypt makes the man. President Mohammed Morsi has been criticized as an uncharismatic leader in a consolation prize that the brotherhood put forward when his chief strategist, Hyrat al-Shatra, was disqualified from running for president. Morsi was described as, quote, a spare tire, unquote. These sound much like the criticisms against Anwal Siddharth when he succeeded Gamal Abdel Masr in 1970. But Siddharth quickly made his mark on society and chartered a policy course known, I will forget, first by the, by the, by the, by his participation in 1973 war with Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal and really brought pride back to Egypt after the disaster, the catastrophe of 1967 war. And secondly, the Camp David Accords. The question worrying Washington is whether the revolution will lead to Egypt shifting out of America's orbit. To answer this, we need to look at Egypt's history. Nasser wanted to be unaligned when he came to power. He was very close with Tito from Yugoslavia and Nehru from India. But by the time he died in 1970, Russian fighter pilots were skirmishing with Israelis over Sinai. And Russian was virtually a second language in Alexandria because the city was staffed with so many Russian advisors. In Egypt, economic policy drives foreign policy. First it was the Russians and now it's the Americans. If Morsi shakes Ahmadinejad's hands at a, at a conference in Iran, it doesn't matter because when President Obama calls them and gives them a dressing down, Morsi does what the president tells him to do. Because economic policy drives foreign policy, Egypt's not going to find new friends like China to help them out. Morsi had a big trip to China recently. China can't provide Egypt the billions of dollars in aid that it needs. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar have a lot of the money that Egypt needs, but they're just been slowed to door it out. The only America, only America has the experience and resources to provide Egypt with the aid that it needs. Finally, I want to talk briefly about Sinai Peninsula. Foreign jihadists are moving in there. Recently had 16 soldiers die in attacks. There have been cross-border raids into Israel. This is a dilemma that's not going to go away for a long time. The Egyptian army just is not prepared to deal with this threat, doesn't have experience and counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations. During the Islamist insurrection of the 1990s, the Egyptian, the government relied on the police forces and the intelligence services to put down the rebellion, not the military. Also, one of the problems it relies on an organization called the Central Security Forces. These are the people, according to this Camp David Accords, Egypt had to demilitarize the Sinai. So on the border in what's called Area C, there are no soldiers. There are only people from this organization called the Central Security Forces or the CSF. These people are rejects that couldn't get into army but still need to serve their mandatory military conscription. These are the people that are basically on the front lines. Because the military does not have experience dealing with the jihadists, what happened? It needed to respond to society's anger after the soldiers were killed, so it just bombed a base. Anybody that has experience with counterterrorism and counterinsurgency knows that the first thing you want is to capture someone because they can give you information and intelligence about an organization. When you drop bombs on people, you're not going to get anything. Now what we're hearing is that when they dropped the bombs, there was nobody even there because if people died, they said that there were deaths on the side of the jihadists. When there's deaths on the side of the jihadists, they usually have funerals that follow and locals there said there were no funerals. So the jihadist problem is not going to go away and basically the army doesn't have an answer for it. Thank you. What's your understanding of what happened at Benghazi at the American consulate? What happened in Benghazi had nothing to do with the protests. We know, based on discussions with people that were there that night, it was a highly sophisticated attack, the coordination, the weapons that the people used. Blame is falling on an organization called Anstral Sharia, and this was a very small brigade that is not as strong as the regional brigades, such as Mastratans and Tan. It's also not as strong as more illogically-based ones like February 17th and Deer Libya, Libya Shield, which are the strong ones. And for an organization to put the blame on an organization like Anstral Sharia that can't fight on the level of those other organizations is just missing the point. As more and more information comes out, we're going to learn that about the organizations and movements that were involved that have a lot more to do than just being in Libya. Meaning what? Meaning that it's very likely there was a foreign component that was driving what happened on the ground that night. In your view, having spent six months in Libya after the Gaddafi's fall, I mean, do you think the attack on the consulate is sort of an outlier or sort of represents the future of Libya? That's an excellent question. The problem in Libya is that there's just no security, and we saw this in the regional security report that came out in the congressional testimony recently, and the security situation is much worse than we first imagined based on some of these documents. The security services can't provide any level of security. There's a retribution against Gaddafi loyalists. There's all types of attacks against people that you don't like. You just clip them like soprano style. So what's going to happen, and also what we need to look at is historically what happened in Libya. Historically, and I'm talking really since foreigners came in, the Phoenicians and the Romans, they've always controlled the coastal areas, and the hinterlands have always been controlled by tribes or groups or movements that were opposed to the government. Only really with the Gaddafi, when Gaddafi took power and he established a real regime, was he able to extend power into the hinterlands, authority into the hinterlands. And now since the revolution, we've seen a recession of that power. The government society has receded, and it's only in some coastal areas, not even that. And because there's no national security services, they can't provide any type of security and stability. At this point in time, if the United States gave the Libyans the names and the places of where these people were, it's highly, of the perpetrators of the attack, it's highly unlikely that they could apprehend them without really good training from the Americans, even possibly having American special forces on the ground helping them. Do you have a sense of how chaotic Libya is? I mean, if Iraq 2007 is sort of like a 10, or Iraq 2006 is a 10, and where would you score this present situation in Libya? Well, I spent a lot of time in Iraq during the war there, and I saw this security situation progressively deteriorate in the slippery slope. I think that we're really at the beginning right after the American occupation in 2003, towards right before April 2004, when you had the incidents in Fallujah and the attacks against Muqtar al-Sadr. So we're seeing a progressive deterioration of the situation in Libya. And if the government doesn't step up and really establish authority soon, we could see what happens in Iraq really after April 2004. But what are the differences? I mean, is there a Shia Sunni component in Libya that my impression was not much compared to Iraq, right? Well, our population is homogeneous. It's about, I think, 90 percent Arab and about 10 percent Sunni Arab, and the rest are Berbers and Touaregs and Taboud minorities. So you're not going to see that minority split. The loyalists are weak. The Qaddafi loyalists, they are engaged in some type of attacks, but they're not as strong as what we saw at the insurgency at the beginning of Iraq. But what we're going to see is we're going to see this weak central government doesn't have control over the entire country, and that invites foreign jihadists into established camps that you can't really take on. But I mean, do you have a sense of the scale of that? Is that a marginal problem? Is that a growing problem? Is that an exaggerated problem? I mean, what? Well, the thing is, we thought there were small numbers of foreigners early on, and that they were just a nuisance until the attack. And then we were shocked by the level of sophistication. Well, that goes back to the question. So you're saying then that the attack was not an outlier, but it's perhaps a harbinger? It's possible that there could be more attacks like this in the future. And when you say foreigners, I mean, where are these, where are they from? Well, that's the thing. We don't know exactly where they're from. But the people who were involved in the attack, they don't appear based on discussions with the people who were there that night just don't fit in with being Libyans. Let's turn to Aleppo for a minute. I mean, tell me, tell us, tell you, we, C-Span is also on recording this. Tell the audience kind of what you did in Aleppo, what you saw, what kind of risks you took, the kind of dangers that independent researchers, journalists, like yourself face, trying to report on the conflict. Well, this was the first conflict that I was in where the side I was on didn't have air supremacy. So you're exposed at 24 hours a day to these type of attacks, and you basically can't run away from a fighter jet. So that's a problem. I mean, when we were in places like Iraq, on an American basis, such as al-Assad, you were shelled every night, every day and every night with mortars. And you came to expect that. And when you go out, you might face an ID at any moment. But you just didn't have this constant fear that the other side could come out with such strong firepower and get to you anyway. Basically what would happen is shelling, that we'd be shelled between 11 p.m. and 3 or 4 a.m. Then there would be a lull until about 11, 12 p.m. And then the helicopters and fighter jets would come out and attack us. And you'd get shelled with long-range cannons and some tank shells and missiles and whatnot. How did you get into Aleppo without getting into anything that would be something that you wouldn't want to say publicly? I mean, what was the, and when did you go exactly? I was there at the beginning of September. And basically at this point in time, the rebels have taken over the checkpoint, the border crossings. So you're able to cross over from Turkey and go in and move around in those areas. But still, there are some roads that are very dangerous because some of these roads are near air bases that the regime controls and they shell randomly at vehicles that drive on the road. And what would you say, what is the strategy of the Assad regime other than survival? I mean, what are the tactics and strategies that they are using to remain in power? Well, basically, when they use the air force like this, they're just trying to scare people because it's just, it's random bombing with no overall strategy. Many of these bombs fall in fields. When I was in Ta'rafat, Al-39 bombed us and the bomb landed in an agricultural field, a farm, which was far from the built-up urban areas. So you wonder, why do they do that? Many of these bombings don't lead to any casualties because they're just trying to scare them. They're trying to wear down the morale of the rebels and the citizens that support them, and they want them to know that we're here and we're not going away. And is that proving to be successful? At this point in time, no, it's not being successful. You're not seeing people. What it's doing is the regime is turning more and more people away, especially as I said in the rural areas. One of the villages that I was in was a very prosperous village. It was a lot of new building, a lot of building that was stopped. And you'd think, wow, they benefited from the regime policies. It's not a poor village. But what we're seeing is that the regime is turning these civilians who were either on the fence or didn't like the idea of instability that was caused by the revolution and the rebels, it's shifting them towards seeing that the regime is barbaric, so to speak, because of what it's doing. That's the way some of these people feel, they don't trust the regime anymore. And they're very angry that it would go out and target civilians on this level. That said, the regime still has support. And you're not going to exceed this a lot in the media because you're not going to be able to talk to a lot of these people. And even the journalists that go in on regular visas into Syria, they think that people are saying these things because they're scared. I was able to spend some time with some Syrians when I was in the region from Damascus. And they really supported the regime. They did not like the rebels. They did not like what they were doing. They were very upset. And what sort of ethnic or class were these people from? These were Sunnis. These were urban Sunnis, middle class Sunnis. And they were just not supportive of the revolution. And you still have that, like I said, in these villages, some of these villages, Sunni villages in Aleppo, still supported the regime. And what is your prognosis for the regime? Eventually the regime is going to fall. They can't sustain over the long term. They can't win the war. The rebels haven't taken any of the cities, but the regime is just focused on putting out brush fires in too many places and they can't do it. And it's gradually losing more and more. Once we get past this election, whether it's a Romney administration or an Obama administration, what could that administration do to actually change the facts on the ground? The next administration need to really understand that this regime has interests, that it has legitimate security concerns, and we have to address them. And we have to give them a soft landing and a graceful exit and allow them to move into these aloe areas and be secure there and have some type of autonomy like the Kurds have in Kurdistan. So you can imagine then a sort of, and how would that operate? It would be a sort of UN-guaranteed safe havens? Exactly. You could probably maybe put a buffer of international troops there. The aloes would still be able to hold on to their weapons. They're not going to give up those weapons or the chemical weapons that they move there exactly for that reason. And the international community gives them guaranteed assurances. And over a generation or two that we can then move to integrating that area back into Syria. Otherwise, this problem is not going to go away. You say they've moved the chemical weapons into the alawite areas. What's the evidence for that? Well, we know that the weapons were moved. And some people thought, oh, because they were going to use them against the civilian population. But they were most likely moved because to guarantee if the mascus falls that the alawites could move back into their home areas and provinces and they would be secure. Because you can't go up against chemical weapons. You can go up against tanks. You can go up against long-range shelling or whatnot. But nobody wants to go up against chemical weapons. And so how long was this most recent trip? When was it exactly? It was in September. For how long? About 10 days. And how did you travel around? Well, I was lucky. Like I said, Munzer's family and friends helped us out. They opened their villages to us and they opened their homes to us. And they took us in and they took us around. We were with fighters from their units. Those families were each in different units and they took care of us. What do you think our colleague Leila Hillao here at New America said that there are believed to be about 800 militias. Are the militias that are particularly viable or particularly successful or is it just a thicket of small groups that are just each handling their own little region? No, there are battalions and brigades that are trying to move. I've spent time in Laplace. That's the only place I can talk about. These organizations are, there's an Aleppo Military Council and it's got about five, I can't remember five or six people on there. And then you have the brigades there, leaders of the brigades and then you have units underneath them. So we have a hierarchical structure. I don't know if an order that goes from the top is going to be executed at the bottom. But I do know that there's coordination, there's horizontal coordination between these individual units because when they get together, when they decide they want to carry an operation, the individual unit can't do it alone, a couple hundred fighters. It needs to rely on other units to come together. So you said an interesting thing about comparing, because obviously you spent a lot of time observing the same activities in Libya, that the Syrian rebels have a more sophisticated military strategy and tactics than the Libyans. The Libyans would get together at night in a strata amongst themselves and talk about what they were going to do the next day of fighting. The way an operation is planned and carried out on the Syrian side shows a high level of sophistication that people are learning, civilians are learning the intricacies of war and how to scope out a place, how to initially come up with the plan, how to scope out the place, how to decide how many fighters are needed, then what the operation will look like. From the top to the bottom, these guys are getting very good. How would a no-fly zone, an enforced no-fly zone affect the war in Syria? Basically what the no-fly zone would do initially is the regime has bases that are islands in the Sea of Rebels and they would have to give up these areas because they're using these bases in a level pattern to think there's about three or four air bases. It has an air corridor so it can shovel supplies there and whatnot and then it's using that as the base to bomb the region. It would have to fall back, it would have to fall back from those areas into predetermined areas that would be of strategic interest for the regime and all that would happen at the beginning. The regime would still have long range, the same problem we saw in Libya, the regime would still have long range cans and missiles that the rebels don't have. We were attacked with grad missiles and a shot on the front lines. The regime was using grads to push people back. In Libya? Yeah. What happened in Libya was a very unique situation because the rebels were stomped on the road between Ben-Ghazi and between Sarenika and Tripoli, Ben-Ghazi and Surton and Tripoli and basically in Libya the last army, the last conqueror that was able to move from east to west and take the country where the Arabs in the 7th century. It hasn't happened since then. So these guys got stalemated on the desert and then what you had is a unique situation that Mishrata rose up which was the third largest city and the regime couldn't stamp it out and the city of Zintan which was an Arab city in the Jabal Nafruch which was a Berber area so there's a lot of cohesiveness amongst these people and they had an air strip there so the factories could bring supplies there. These are the things that eventually won the war. When we thought it when the West thought of a no-fly zone early on it thought okay no-fly zone the guys would move from east to west but then the war was stalemated very quickly and then what you had we saw was a gradual escalation. You went from fixed wings planes to helicopters the French brought in helicopters a couple months later because you needed more precision and be able to to bomb those regime targets and then you brought spotters on the ground and you brought special forces, western special forces to work with the rebels. There was a gradual escalation. And do you think that should happen in Syria or what's your view? I think that the problem in Syria is if we go to the no-fly zone there's no guarantee that will lead to a rebel victory. What we need to do is work, try to work and find a negotiated settlement with the regime that gives them a soft laying at this point in time. Do you think the regime I mean the regime has had plenty of time to to think about sort of a negotiated settlement. Do you think to have any appetite for one? I think that what the regime has made many bad decisions along the way. I think there were many points along the way that it could have reduced tensions and even maybe ended the war and it hasn't done that. It hasn't shown the strategic sagacity and insights that a man like Hafiz al-Assad would have. The new generation just doesn't have that. Well it's an interesting form of sagacity his Hafiz al-Assad in terms of his approach to dealing with internal dissent. Well he did the rule for 30 years in a country where no leader ruled for five years since independence in 19, well I think 1946. His son seems to have adopted the same approach pretty much wholesale right which is repression if it's at a sufficiently high level seems to seems to work. Well see the thing is he didn't move, well that goes back to the Powell doctrine. If you're going to use force you've got to come out strong with it early on and he didn't do that. There was a slow escalation. All right so there should have been hammer rules as Friedman says. I don't advocate violence but maybe Hafiz gets a raw deal. He wasn't this ruthless sadistic man like Saddam was that was just wanted violence every day. He wanted stability and he did allow pockets of stability. He allowed professional syndicates to exist. Some level of civil society in a country like Libya where Saddam didn't. He's somewhere between Saddam and the authoritarian leaders of the republican regime such as Mubarak in Egypt and Ben Ali and Tunisia and in Salah and in Yemen or whatnot. So he has that middle ground and he really gets a bum rap of me. If you read the conversations like the Clinton tapes he's expressing concerns and fears to Clinton and Clinton is very sympathetic with these things. So what Hafiz needed was a much better PR organization to help him out. Okay by the way is that Patrick Seale? Is that Patrick Seale or is that well? Patrick Patrick focused too much on the conspiracy theories of why certain things happened in the region. Turning to Egypt you've interviewed a lot of people in the jihadi movement in Egypt relatively recently. What's the and you mentioned the 1990s obviously where the you know basically the Egyptians put down and it sort of Islamist many Islamist insurgency and also these jihadi groups last all their popular. I mean I think the Luxor massacre in 97 where 56 tourists were hunted down and stabbed to death kind of was the end of the jihadi movement. Which by the way the leadership was against? Of the Islamic group. In prison. Yeah yeah well they were much more. So the question is you know is there any likelihood of let's say Iman al-Zawari the head of al-Qaeda being able to sort of resuscitate an al-Qaeda-like group in Egypt or is there other jihadi groups or have Egyptians sort of gone through that in the 90s and seen that that was sort of a dead end. How do you see the sort of militant movement in Egypt playing out? Well here's the thing first of all all of Iman's friends have entered the political process. They renounced violence right okay. So what you have is both in the Islamic jihad and the gamma islamic group they the leaders and then the mid-level guys all embraced the political process. First they started with the ceasefire in 1997 they renounced violence and gradually over the next decade a lot of these people were released like just Karam Zuhdi which was the analog of the of the gamma and Najih Ibrahim. And then after the revolution on the Islamic jihad side the Zuma brother and cousin. So these people then moved straight into politics. And Muhammad al-Zawari Iman's brother is out of jail now. Yeah Muhammad is a different he's cut from a different cloth. What cloth is that? Well he wasn't in the prison with those people at the time. These people there was a transformation in the 1888-1980s-1990s. I spoke to one of them he said we were young we didn't understand things. We went and we read books. This was a guy who was friends with Khalid Islambouli the man who assassinated Sadat. I mean talking about the most senior people saying we were wrong and this process started in 1997. So what happened is you have these organizations enter the political process. You have fringe elements from these groups that were not leaders. They were not political leaders. They were not military leaders. They were not administrative leaders. They decided we're not going to play that game. We want to clean to our jihadi roots. They don't have the experience now to really create new organizations. It's going to take them a lot of time when they want to do that. And we have signs of some of these people on the ground trying to move trying to shift and operate. You know all these people who were at least in March 2011 is when the prisons were opened. With signs meaning what? Certain people have come up on radars. The people that follow these things and there's a cause for concern that these people are establishing camps. They're going out. They're trying to radicalize the population. Establishing camps where? Some in Libya and some in Egypt. And Egyptians? Yes. And do they call themselves al-Qaeda or what are they? I mean how do they self-identify? I don't think that they call themselves al-Qaeda from what I understand. They want to be al-Qaeda. Any sense of size? I can't give you an estimate on the size. Have they done anything in Egypt? Have any note? Well you know we see the jihadists in Sinai have already carried out several attacks. But that was true before the regime fell. I mean there were all those attacks on the Israeli hotels in Sinai. But they thought they stomped it out. They killed all the ring leaders of those attacks. Great. Let's throw it open to the audience. Can you wait for the microphones and identify yourself and answer your question rather than making a statement? Jennifer, this gentleman here. I'm Tom Getman, former NGO executive and OCHA board member in the Middle East. Thanks for the extraordinary detail. We're wondering more about what's happening in the northern part of Syria in regard to Turkey. Now you mentioned that it's an open border. Now you can come and go again like early on. And I'm wondering with the Russian confiscated plane and the shelling, what your assessment is of Turkey's future in the conflict? And just on a personal note, how badly damaged is historic Aleppo? Yeah, Turkey's got a big dilemma on its hands. First of all, you've seen the influx of refugees. They don't have the infrastructure to host them. The condition of the camp, some of these camps is very bad. You have to walk very far to get to the bathroom, to sanitary areas. They don't really have access outside the refugee camps. Another problem that Turkey has is in the region of Hatay. There's a large Alevi community. I think it's about $500,000. I have to look at my notes again. These people don't want to have anything to do with the Syrians. We had protests every day. I mean, every day they would protest by the left-wing groups in Hatay, in Antakya, excuse me, against the Syrians. There were marchers, I think, once we got tear-gassed by the riot police. Syrians have been told, Syrian refugees have been told by Turkish authorities they shouldn't be in certain areas. I mean, for their own good, because the locals might beat them up. So Turkey has that problem. And it's trying to push, it's trying to pull the West into this, especially with what happened this week. Turkey is a NATO member of NATO, so any attack against Turkey is an attack against every NATO member. But the NATO members haven't stepped up to the plate. I wonder why that is. Because they don't want to be involved in this right now. The United States rules the alliance, and it doesn't want to get involved in these things right now. So Turkey, with Turkey's strong response, it's really trying to then draw, lay the trap for the Syrians, and then hire civilian casualties on the Turkish side, and then you come and say, look what's going on to the Western powers. Turkey's in a very bad dilemma right now. I would not want to be in Ankara at this point in time. Historical up, just what we've, I don't know, I have not seen those areas. What I've read, the old cities have been burned. There could be some damage to set it out. Seyfandallah set it out, which is horrible. It's a beautiful place when I visited there. And everybody that loves Syria, loves the Middle East, loves Islamic monuments and whatever. We just, you know, we cry every day about what have we grieved. This gentleman in the front. Thank you. Mark Katz from Georgia Mason University. Barack, I want to thank you for a truly fascinating presentation. I'm intrigued by your suggestion that a solution might be to allow the regime to retreat to the al-Await heartland on the coast. And I'd just like to press you on how we could incentivize them to do this. It strikes me that, you know, what you're offering them is a carrot, but that in a situation like this, a stick has to be applied as well. In other words, that, I think Peter referred to it, that, you know, what are we going, what can, what can get them to actually accept this as a solution? Also, what do we know about the ethnic composition of this coastal region? How al-Await is that region? In other words, is there another population there that's going to be pretty unhappy about this? And also just sort of the whole regional reaction to essentially what will be a de facto secession. How is this going to be responded to? Thank you. This is what I always like to talk to my old friend Mark Katz. He gives me these great ideas to think about. Basically, what we need to do is, you're going to give them an incentive, and hopefully at some point in time that they'll find out that everything is lost, and they have to go in. Or you could threaten the use of force that you're going to escalate. The west is going to escalate and get involved. And then they realize that it's going to be all over for them at that point in time. And then they have to move into those areas that they realize, you know, somebody comes in, you know, the very Goldwater movement with Nixon and says, it's all over here. The problem is we don't know how the regime functions. We don't know who's making the decisions. And the regime times is delusional in what it says and what it does. So the option works on a rational actor basis. And if the leader isn't rational, then it's not going to get done. I mean, is there any evidence that he's a non-rational actor? Yes. There is a lot of evidence that Bashar is not a non-rational actor. What would you say the main piece of evidence are? Based on discussions of people who have met him and talked to him, he says different things to different people. He's very moody. There have been discussions of some issues with him on that level. Like bipolar, I mean, be more explicit. I would think that that would hit the nail on the head. Interesting. That's not really been much addressed in any of the coverage. Well, people don't really talk about things like that. I mean, you can't say those things with any certainty. And then you're bringing in what gives you the right to say things like that. But he doesn't have the stability that we see with others. Right. But it seems that, I mean, if you look at the exit strategies of the guys that have gone, that only in Yemen has there really been a successful negotiated exit of the former president. And I think there are differences between Yemen and Syria that perhaps you can comment on. But I mean, Yemen was a somewhat democratic state by regional standards. I mean, there were political parties that had some degree of freedom. There was a more, it was an authoritarian democracy for one of a better term. It was a pluralized authoritarian state. Right. So Syria seems to be a slightly different animal. I mean, in Yemen, there was enough space to kind of come up with this compromise. Sure. There's nobody you can negotiate. The regime can't negotiate with the opposition. No opposition exists. Even worse in Egypt. What happened is, in Egypt, the ruler is a pharaoh. He rules without anybody. The last man that could have ever challenged Mubarak was Abu Hazal, the defense minister, who was moved aside in the mid-1980s. He wanted to become vice president, and he wasn't. And he had a fiefdom as a minister of defense. The regime never had any dealings with the opposition groups, such as Tagammu, the social, the labor party and whatnot. They were just fig leaves. They had no power. And they didn't have that relationship. But whereas in Yemen, Salah, because the state is so weak, he always had contacts with these other parties. But does that exist in Syria at all? No. There are no political parties there. You're not going to get anything there. Right. So that would suggest that it's going to be pretty hard to do the deal. No. It's going to be a negotiation between the regime and the West. It's not going to be a regime. The rebels stand behind the West, and they say, OK, yeah, we'll do that. But when we look at the Arab revolts, the Arab Spring, only outside of Syria, only in Libya did we see violence. Tunisia fell fairly quickly. The security forces wouldn't use violence against the protesters. Only a few hundred died in Egypt. And that was before the tanks were rolled out. Yemen, he used violence as a tool to extract the concessions that Salah wanted. I mean, he knew he was down. He knew he couldn't continue, but he wanted to get those assurances that he needed. Only in Libya, when half the country was lost in a few days, where we see any level of violence that approximated what happened in Syria. That's because Gaddafi was very upset, and he wanted to get his country back. And the level of violence also was very low compared to what we saw in Syria. Everybody talked about that Benghazi would be massacred and whatnot. Now that we know what happened in these areas under the loyalist regime's control, the level of violence used against Libyans was very low vis-à-vis what we see in Syria, what the people do in Syria, which is just the most horrible atrocities. This gentleman over here. Can you wait for the light? I'm William Breed from Dinecorp International, and that gives me the segue to the discussion about the political opposition. The U.S. government has been trying to talk to the SNC with the Turks. My understanding, and I hope you know more about this than I do, is that the SNC really isn't an effective organization, which leads to the fact that there isn't anybody for the U.S. or Syria or the U.N. or anybody else really to talk to about cutting a deal or finding some way out other than continuing bloodshed. I was wondering if you talk a little bit about the political opposition. That's a great question. I didn't address that in my talk. Basically, the SNC is a great debating society. What is it, Stamford? The Syrian National Converses, the opposition group created in the aftermath of the revolution. These guys have no support on the ground. People don't even know them. Their names or their faces inside the country, and they really frankly don't care. They're not in the country. I mean, some of them have come in, they distribute some aid in the northern areas that have been liberated and are very quiet, but they're not anywhere close to the front lines. They're not creating the legitimacy that they need. There's a lot of fighting. A lot of them, I know, have resigned. They're frustrated that these llamas are taking over and certain factions are being supported. Qatar and the French are trying to really mold them into some type of cohesive organization. It's just not working. It's not going anywhere. I don't think that you're going to see anything out of the SNC come out. That said, there are certain people on the SNC that I think would be good leaders, the people that I've met. They have some good ideas. They're upright individuals, and they don't have an agenda. They just have Syria's interests, but they just don't have the legitimacy on the ground to do anything serious at this time. Given all the problems you describe in Syria and Libya and to some degree Egypt, was the Arab awakening worth it? Well, that's a very tough question, Peter. It depends on where you stand, and also depends what point in time you look at it. These birth payings of a new middle east, as someone once said in 2006, it's going to take a lot of time to transition. You need to really build institutions. You can't just impose democracy. It would have been much better had it been a transitional stage. I remember when the Clinton administration came in office in 1992, they sent Robert Pellishor, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, to go talk to Mubarak. They wanted him to liberalize the regime, and he said, well, if I'm going to do that, the Islamists will take over, and that was the end of that. And then the Americans focused on peace process instead. We've made mistakes in the Middle East, and we should have pushed for some type of opening, so we could have had a process, and not just something that just comes out of nowhere. And that is a problem, and people are very frustrated in these societies, and they're not going to understand that the democracy takes time, that the governments aren't strong in stability. You're already hearing a lot of backlash against democracy in countries like Egypt and Libya. They want strong leadership. They want stability. It's sort of like the nostalgia for Stalin and Russia and certain parts of Russian society. Exactly. But that didn't happen with a year and a half after he was gone. But that did happen in Egypt when Ahmed Shafiq almost beat Mohamed Morsi, because he was seeing as a standard bearer of the former regime, because he was the former transportation, he was a general, he was the former transportation minister, and then Mubarak named him as Prime Minister of his last cabinet. You know, I guess Egypt could, is it, you know, there are certain models of societies which are sort of somewhat democratic, but also have a strong military. A successful model would be Turkey, and a less successful model would be Pakistan right now. Is Egypt perhaps even a less successful version of that? Well, the military is always going to be very strong in Egyptian society, because first of all, they talk about the threat of Israel. They need to have a strong military. The military also controls, I think, between 10 and 15 percent of the economy based on its factories. The military gets a good portion of the budget for defense spending. So you're always going to have a strong military in Egypt, and it's also the strongest state institution. When all else fails, you look at the military. You didn't have that in Libya. The Libya, the military was just torn apart after the loss in the war against Chad 1987, Qaddafi dismantled it. So you're going to always have that in Egypt. What I was surprised was the swiftness with which the military leadership, the SCAF, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, who took over power after Mubarak fell, collapsed with such swiftness when Morsi came into power, and he just fired everybody. So that was very interesting. And perhaps haunting? Yes, that's also true that they had forward to move forward to democracy, if you're going to have that type of, would you have the civilian leaders really assert their powers so forcefully in early on? In Pakistan in 2002, the pro-Taliban religious parties controlled two out of four of Pakistan's provinces. In 2008, they got 2 percent of the vote, and they lost control. And they lost control, basically, as they hadn't delivered. So how would you sort of, how would you see the fortunes of the Salafists? You sort of address that to some degree in your opening remarks, but how are they doing, or is it too large a movement to make any large sort of general prediction about them? They got, obviously, 25 percent of the vote. That implies that they're, you know, doing well in lots of parts of Egypt. How would you assess their political prospects, or is it too early to tell? Well, it is too early to tell. We don't know what's happening with the parliament right now. They can say, well, we didn't get ministries. They didn't give us any power. But that said, what can they deliver? I mean, they're not going to be able to reform Egyptian society. The things that they want, they want, the things that they want to put in the constitution are just shocking that you can't have any type of insulting to anything that has to do with religion in the country or whatnot. The structures that they want to impose in society, the people aren't really going to go for that. And they're not going to be able to, so that's on the religious side. People want, they want economic progress. People want jobs. They want an end to corruption. They want, they want a more responsive government to the needs of society. And that's not going to happen because you don't get that with democracy. You need to change a complete change in the way people think. You need to move from traditionalism to modernity. It's what called, what the Georgetown scholar, Shamsher Abbey, called neo-patriarchy. You put a thin layer of modernity over traditionalism, and you create a neo-patriarchal society which doesn't result in any change. And that is the biggest problem. You know, on Monday Mitt Romney gave what was billed as a major foreign policy address, and I thought one of the interesting ideas he had in there was that the United States should condition its $1.5 billion of aid to Egypt, A, on, you know, that it maintains the peace treaty with Israel and B, you know, that the democratic institutions are sort of built up. You didn't get into specifics, but I mean, how would that go over in Egypt? Horribly. And that's a horrible idea. You're now going to stipulate the conditions for Egyptian aid, for American aid. You're going to humiliate the Egyptians. You're going to spur national sentiment and feelings that the Americans want to keep you under their foot, and they have no respect for you as an equal and a partner. Egypt was our greatest ally, and the last ever since, the aftermath of the 1973 war when Henry Kissinger went to see Sadat, and Sadat rolled the map on the table, and he said, the Americans, the Israelis will move their forces here, and we will be able to move our forces here. That was the beginning of an American-Egyptian relationship. Well, you know, in a sense, the aid was a quid pro quo for that defense treaty. Yeah, it was a quid pro quo for Camp David, and you can't start stipulating democratic conditions for that. Do we really want to alienate when there's such instability in the region? We have so many problems. Do we really want to alienate the country that had been a pillar of American stability and support in the region? We need to work with the new leadership in a country like Egypt and find common goals and move towards them together hand in hand. Morsi seems to have said, I mean, it seems the Muslim brother of a position is that the peace treaty with Israel will sort of stand for the moment. Is that, I mean, what is their basic position? Oh, that's not going to, there's going to be no movement on the treaty. What they might want is some type of amendment, amending a modification, which will allow the military to move more forces in. That's what you hear on the street, but the problem and the funny thing with that is, every time the Israelis have allowed them to move more forces, they didn't do that. I think the Israeli, I forgot the statistics, the Israelis allowed them to move, I think seven battalions in, I think it was in May. Into the Sinai? Into the Sinai, into Zone C, excuse me, into Zone C, which borders Israel. They allowed, and I think 20 tanks, but the Egyptians never did that. Historically, historically, since the Egyptians took over the Sinai, they've only stationed about 75 percent of the forces they were allowed to under camp David Accord. So in your view, there's almost, it's extremely unlikely that the peace treaty with Israel, between Israel and Egypt, would in any way be significantly changed, amended? No, the change is amended. They may want to get more forces in there now because of the situation, but they're working on it. They're bilateral working on it. Now, when we talk about if there's going to be a problem between Israel and Egypt, my greatest fear is they're both moving forces into these regions. Israel, because it has to show up against jihadist incursions, and the Egyptians, because they have this jihadist problem. When the, what happened, I think in August 2011, when the, when there's a jihadist incursion into Israel, when the Israelis respond in hot pursuit and they killed the Egyptian guards, it created a real big conflagration in Egypt, which led to the storming of the Israeli embassy. Tensions are very, very high. The both sides need to work to reduce that, so there's not this type of isolated incident or event that could lead to a real, real big problem. There's that lady here and then the two gentlemen there. Thanks. Hi, Josanne Plainer with Public International Law and Policy Group. What role and prospects do you see for U.S. influence in the region, especially given the security problems in the recent embassy attacks and the challenges of weak governance and weak institutions? I think a great book to read on that is the Not Too Much Promised Land by Aaron David Miller. He has a great section in there on how strong we think we are in the region and what we can get done and what we really, what the people on the ground think we can get done and we cannot get much done. We need to work with our allies. We need to talk to local intelligence services, and that's been the big problem now. We've lost the contacts in these, intelligence services that really provided us information about the bad guys. Well, but at a huge cost to, I mean, it's not like there's any great nostalgia for the Libyan Mukhabarat or the Egyptian Mukhabarat, right? Well, the thing is we had a great relationship with Musa Kusa. He was giving us all, and at the end of his life, Qadhafi was really a tolerated nuisance. When Kandilisa Rice visited, I think it was in 2006, 2007, it was the highest ranking American to visit Libya since I think Nixon's visit, Vice President Nixon's visit in 1957 and 1958. There was a really a big about face, and that was the big policy, middle east foreign policy achievement that the Bush administration put forward that they had, that they brought Libya back in from the cold, and that was what we had there. Yes, there were a lot of human, there were human rights violations, and yes, there were a lot of problems, but that didn't change the fact that our intelligence services really benefited from the coordination that they had. Well, but I mean, in a sense, the whole jihadi al-Qaeda problem was really, in some ways, a fruit of these intelligence services as much as anything else. I mean, it's not an accident that Sa'i Qatub wrote his critical text milestones while he was in- Of course. They played a very large role. And it's not an accident that Aiman Al-Zawari became more radicalized after his three years in prison. And I mean, we can give you, as many other examples, Abu Masab al-Zakawi became radicalized in a Jordanian prison. I'm familiar with all those examples and you're 100 percent right. But so it raises the big, really the big question for all this is, if you accept the idea, and I think it's uncontroversial, that Al-Qaeda and groups like it really came a result of these authoritarian regimes. Many of these regimes are going, which suggests more political space for Islamists, which may, we hope, not turn violent. That's a hope, but I think it's a reasonable one. Would it have been better to have none of these democratic openings and these regimes still in place, who also brutally repressed these groups, but also in a way created them? Or is there some other sort of? Sure. Like I said earlier, it depends where you're looking at it and what time frame you're looking at. We're looking at the right short-term immediate right after these revolutions. And we see the September 11 tax. Let me say, you see, this is the problem. This is what happens. This is why these things were not good. In 10, 20 years in the next generation, the societies will transition to more strong democratic states with strong state institutions with more security stability, and then everybody's going to be happy with the flowers that were happy enough that bloomed. But going back to one of your points about the political Islamists that you've given them space, the problem is that a lot of people are going to be disgruntled with what the political Islamists were able to accomplish, the real hardcore people at the pious. And they'll say, well, they're just as bad. They didn't get for us what we wanted. So they'll become disenchantment and disillusioned. And then the al-Qaeda ideas, or the Salafist ideas that said democracy is an idol. Abu Yahya Libya, I think it was a 2009 speech, Democracy the Contemporary, or the Modern Idol, where you have people like Abu Muhammad al-Maktas, I can't remember the name of his lecture. These guys all talked about democracy as being a new form of idol worship. They'll be able to say, you see, we told you about this decade. Well, in Iraq, for all the, I mean, in Iraq, there's been a sort of experiment about a lot of these same issues. I mean, where do you see the jihadists in Iraq right now? The problem with the jihadists in Iraq was Abu Musab al-Jarkali overplayed his hand. Right. Have they come back? Do they have any sort of validity now? Have they changed their ways? It's too soon for society to forgive them for what they did in the bloodline. And I think that that lesson is also, you know, I think if you look at, I think one of the turning points in al-Qaeda's fortunes was the attack on the three American-owned hotels in Amman, Jordan in 2005, which killed mostly, almost entirely Jordanians attending a wedding. That got widespread coverage in the Arab world. So I think there were, it's not just in Iraq, where people saw what an al-Qaeda-like regime would impose on the population. I think that was, I mean, around the Muslim world. I think there was quite a lot of understanding of this. Sure. I was in Amman, I think about a month after that, and people were very upset. I mean, the Abu Musab al-Jarkali's tribe disowned him. They took out page ads in the papers, full page ads in the papers, denouncing the attacks. There was a real backlash against that. But you see that, you see a lot of that in the country where an attack is carried out. People usually support attacks outside their countries. Well, they talk about Benghazi, what happened in Benghazi after the attack on the consulate. Well, Benghazi is very different. Libya is very different because they're very supportive of the West for what they did in overthrowing Qaddafi, as opposed to the other countries where no one asked for American aid and nobody got military support. But my point is, I used to live in Yemen. In Yemen, people were very supportive of attacks against the Americans, military in Iraq, of attack against Americans, civilians. They were supportive of the 9-11 attacks. But the day that there was an attack in Yemen that AQA al-Qaeda sponsored, all the less bad we can't have. Same thing happened in Saudi Arabia in 2003. But let's have another question over here. This one? I'm Ray McGovern, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. I'd like to broaden the discussion to Russia. I used to know a lot about Russia and I think I remember they were very interested in Syria. How serious do you think the Russians consider what's happening there in Syria? What's the word on the street or in diplomatic circles as to how far the Russians will go to keep propping up al-Assad? I can't really talk about Russian foreign policy. That's not my specialty. I have a friend who's very good at it, but that's not something I can, I'm sorry. Okay. Did you have a question, sir? Yeah. I'm Mike Beard and I wonder what is the role that Iran is playing in the area? Excellent. Iran is playing a big role in supporting the Syrians. We know that they're training them. They're offering all types of aid. They really need, they can't allow Syria to fall because Syria is the country to send weapons to Hezbollah, which is Iran's really big ally in the region that it uses to exert influence and power against the threat to threaten the Israelis. So it's not, it doesn't, will do everything in its power to sustain the Syrian regime. However, it doesn't have the money they would want to have because of the sanctions regime against it. Its economy is really being bubbled. The Riyadh is falling by the day. It has a lot of internal instability problems, so they can't extend all the aid that it wants to, but it will give them the logistical support and the military training to help them. And we've heard rumors that they're training the Shebihah, the paramilitary units, the halloween units that go around and indiscriminately kill people. There's a lot of evidence of that, a lot of talk about that at this point in time. By the way, how are Alawites regarded by sort of mainstream Shia? They're not very, they're not very happy with them either. It sort of seems funny that a sort of ideologically Shia regime would be basically supporting a group that they really regard as heretics. See, it wasn't religious. It was more born of pragmatism and necessity when they started the relationship. The Iranians needed an ally when Iraq started the war with them, so they were able to reach out to them because all the whole region was against them. The Gulf countries, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and whatnot, they were very scared and they used Iraq, they fought, they supported Iraq as the shield, the protector of their interests against Iranians and that's what the Americans were brought in after the Gulf War. But when we look at the Shia-Alawi relationship, what happened is beginning at the end of the Ottoman era, the Ottomans tried to bring in the Alawis under the Islamic fold because they were scared that the French would claim that they were lost Christians. A French priest, Henri Lamont, who was a great Orientalist, claimed that these were lost Christians, so they were afraid that the French would claim them. Then what happened is the whole issue became politicized with when certain Islamic scholars gave Fatua as their legal, issued legal opinion saying that the Alawis were Muslims, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haas Husaini, issued a Fatua, I think in the 1940s saying that. And then Assad was able to get Musa al-Sadr, the vanished Imam, who was ready to move to al-Sadr to issue a Fatua in the mid-1970s saying that the Alawis were Twelvers, or Twelvers saying that they were Shia. And we also saw this, and I think in the 20s and 30s, maybe in the 30s and 40s, they started sending their youngsters to study in the seminaries. And I think in Najaf is where it was. So there was an integration of the Alawis into the Shia fold. They came back with books and whatnot, of Shia books. But the Alawis have never been considered Shias there. They are, what happened is, in the Shias, there's two groups. There's called Twelvers, which is the mainstream that predominates in Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. And then you have Seveners. They were extremists. And they based on 12 Imams and seven Imams, where you cut off on the Imam. These were extremists. And they preponder it now in some areas in Lebanon and Yemen and Syria and Agra Khan in India is a Sevener. They are an offshoot of these people, and they deify Alawi. I mean, if you read some of these Alawi texts, it's just, it's amazing what they say. So they are really outside the Islamic folder. They don't land within any type of normative Islam. I mean, the Shia are heterodox, but these people are just heretics. Any other questions? Gentleman here? Adam Giannola, Heritage Foundation. I was just wondering your thoughts on aid to Libya, and if we're giving enough, or should we give more? And what kind of aid? Yeah, it's a great question. The thing is with Libya, it doesn't need any aid, because it has all that oil wealth. It needs help in building institutions. It needs experts and trainers to build a good judiciary system, bring in judges. You need to bring in people to build up technical capacity that is non-existent. And Libya's oil money, it can support all that. Anything the Libyans need, they can get on their own. They just don't have the experience necessary, the government experience. Barack, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was once aligned with Al Qaeda, was really the first affiliate of Al Qaeda, which has ever really done a peace deal with the regime, with a regime. And that was, of course, they did a peace deal with Qaddafi. To what extent has that peace deal sort of held? Are the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, did they lay down their arms? Are they involved in jihadist activity? What is happening with that group? Oh, sure. They've pretty much, they've accepted to play by democratic rules. Everyone talked about Abdel Haqqeen Belhaj. He's part of a political party. You have, I think, Abu Yahya Liby's brother, a member of another party. I think Munzer, the ideologue, is also played by the political game. Everyone at the beginning of the revolution talked about a guy named Abdel Haqqeen Malhasadi in Darna. He is a security official in Darna. There have been some extremists such as Sufyan Ben-Gumu, excuse me, who was a Libyan LIFG. They say he was Al Qaeda bin Laden's driver. He was detained in Guantanamo Bay. He's clung to some elements of his extremism. We're not sure if he was involved in what happened on September 11th or not. I don't think so. But by and large, the LIFG has really, just like the Gamal Islami and the jihad in Egypt, they've renounced violence and they've moved into the mainstream society. There's somebody back over here with a question. Any other questions? So if I could get a second question. You look at the various transitions that have gone on in Libya and Syria, the leadership to me doesn't have any exit. They're going to get shot. Their followers are going to get shot and run out of town, where in Tunisia and Yemen certainly and also somewhat in Egypt, there was an exit strategy for them. Could you talk about the supporters of al-Assad and they see their backs to the wall and they have to fight to the death or they're going to be killed in other ways? Is there any way out of it? Yeah, it's a big problem. Basically, the regime is just feeding the Alawis the most horrible stories about the Sunnis and what they want to do to them. I've talked to Alawis inside, talked to Alawis, they got out. So these people really feel it's the back against the wall and they're going to be slaughtered and it's just a doomsday scenario for them. The Alawis, the other minorities, you know, you're talking about Christians, many Christian groups. What's the percentage of the Christian population? I think it's at the top of my head, I think it's between 10 and 12 percent. So significant. Yeah, you know, it's not a small population. It's pretty big and you're talking, it's not cohesive because, you know, you're talking about Greek Orthodox, you're talking about Syrian Christians, you're talking about small numbers of Protestant and what not, historians. So these groups and also the Druze in Jebel Druze, they've supported the regime, their members are part of the security services. So they are also scared at the same time. Brack, this has been a really deep, well reported and also you took a lot of risks to gather this information. So we're very grateful that you came and spoke to us about it. Well, the original person that took the risk was Peter. That was a long time ago.