English transcript

And so by the time we were leaving Iraq in 2011,

it was evident that we had basically handed

over Baghdad to the Iranians. Um, and so the,

the Israeli lobby said, hey, this is, this is

a major problem because now we basically have

a Iranian superhighway, a land bridge that goes

from, uh, Iran all the way into Syria through,

through Iraq. This, this directly supports,

uh, Hezbollah's efforts against Israel, so it

was a major problem. And so we had basically

tipped the, the balance of power in the region

over to the Shiites. So then the dirty war in

Syria was launched because Hafez al-Assad and

Bashar al-Assad had always been longtime, uh,

friends with the Iranians, supported the Iranians,

helped support Hezbollah and Hamas from Syria.

And so who, who did we rely on as our proxies

inside of Syria?

Well, it was by and large the Sunnis and the

most radical elements of the Sunnis. There was

the Free Syrian Army and there were some so-called

moderates, but the guys who were out there and

really aggressive against the Assad regime were

members of Al-Qaeda and then eventually members

of ISIS. ISIS got so out of control that we

eventually had to go back into Iraq, back into

Syria, largely re-empower a lot of the same,

uh, Shiite militias that we were trying to take

power away from in order to, to take out the

ISIS caliphate. That's where I lost my late

wife, was fighting the ISIS caliphate in, in

2019.