Episodes
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UNLOCKED: Bonus Episode 17 - The Christians of Syria
This episode was originally recorded in 2024, shortly after the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime, and released on our Patreon that Christmas. https://www.patreon.com/c/whathappenedtosyria?vanity=user Apologies for the terrible audio quality on my end, I'm having a lot of issues with my computer…
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UNLOCKED: BONUS EPISODE 16 - Christmas in Syria
Milad majid! Did you know that Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas on January 7th? This episode examines the millennia-long history of Christianity in Syria, the ways that Christians have participated in both the Syrian Revolution and Syrian Civil War, and ending with an overview of the...
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2023 Christmas Special (aka “Don’t Cut Aid to Syria! And other countries!”)
Merry Christmas! Sadly, the World Food Program has had their funding cut by 60 percent. Also, we are currently listed among the Top Five Syria-related podcasts on Feedspot.com (https://podcasts.feedspot.com/syria_podcasts/). Check us out there and help us get up to the #1 spot. Sources / Quotes:...
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Episode 15 (Full) - Crimes Against Humanity (June 24 to July 31, 2011)
The Assad regime starts to crack under the pressure of increasingly large, passionate, cross-sectarian protests. Millions of people are taking to the streets and voicing dissent for the first time in their lives, putting the regime's legitimacy in doubt for the first time in decades. This prompts...
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Episode 15D - Seven Million Protestors
We're breaking up Episode 15 - Crimes Against Humanity (June 24 to July 31, 2011) into four smaller episodes before putting out the full thing. The Assad regime starts to crack under the pressure of increasingly large, passionate, cross-sectarian protests. Millions of people are taking to the...
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Episode 15C - Crimes Against Humanity
We're breaking up Episode 15 - Crimes Against Humanity (June 24 to July 31, 2011) into four smaller episodes before putting out the full thing. The Assad regime starts to crack under the pressure of increasingly large, passionate, cross-sectarian protests. Millions of people are taking to the...
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Episode 15B - Ibrahim Qashoush’s Revolutionary Song
We're breaking up Episode 15 - Crimes Against Humanity (June 24 to July 31, 2011) into four smaller episodes before putting out the full thing. The Assad regime starts to crack under the pressure of increasingly large, passionate, cross-sectarian protests. Millions of people are taking to the...
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Episode 15A - Lost Legitimacy
We're breaking up Episode 15 - Crimes Against Humanity (June 24 to July 31, 2011) into four smaller episodes before putting out the full thing. The Assad regime starts to crack under the pressure of increasingly large, passionate, cross-sectarian protests. Millions of people are taking to the...
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2022 Christmas Special (This Podcast is Still Alive)
Explaining the absence and examining the Syrian refugee crisis, as well as the situation for refugees across the world in 2022. Sources / Quotes: “Boat carrying Syrian refugees lands in Southern Italy,” Reuters https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-italy-boat-idUSBRE8780L720120809…
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UNLOCKED - BONUS EPISODE 15 - Calluses on the Soul: Bernd Debusmann reflects on war reporting in Lebanon and Syria
Bernd Debusmann was a young Reuters bureau chief when Lebanon imploded into civil war and anarchy in the 1970s, during which Syria and Hafez al-Assad became intimately involved the conflict. This talented and daring journalist took to war-torn Beirut like a duck to water, risking his life to...
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2021 Christmas Special - The First Refugees
We're starting a new holiday tradition, an episode focused on refugees and other humanitarian issues in Syria. As early as 2011, tens of thousands of people were forced to flee the country. Today, more than six million displaced Syrians are demonized by hateful individuals and political movements...
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Episode 14 - Community Revolution
How do you organize a leaderless movement? The Syrian Revolution was a decentralized movement of localized cells, but enterprising activists still managed to coordinate with each other and reach out to the outside world. We examine how the Local Coordination Committees attempted to create a...
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Episode 13 - Alienation (June 13 to June 24, 2011)
Supporters and opponents of the Assad regime are becoming irrevocably alienated from one another, sowing the seeds for a future war between Assad's Syria versus Free Syria. Sources A Woman in the Crossfire by Samar Yazbek Assad or We Burn the Country by Sam Dagher The Impossible Revolution by...
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THE TERROR - Bonus Episode 1 - Navy SEAL, CIA, Firefighter: Jeff Butler Reflects on 9/11 and the War on Terror
Jeff Butler's multifaceted career made him the perfect guest for THE TERROR. A warfighter, a CIA counterterrorism specialist, and now a first responder. His perspective is truly one-of-a-kind. You can find Mr. Butler on Twitter at @SOFFru1 "Deliverance" by Aliaksei Yukhenevich...
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Episode 12 - The Revolutionaries (Part 2)
There are too many amazing heroes among the Syrians who protested in 2011 to fit into a single episode. This is our second attempt at an ongoing effort to commemorate the heroes of the Syrian Revolution. Ghiath Matar, Fadwa Soleiman, Bassel Shehadeh, a certain iconic goalkeeper-turned-singer from...
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Episode 11 - The Last Straw (May 25 to June 12, 2011)
DISTURBING CONTENT WARNING There is no turning back for Syria after this episode. The Syrian Opposition is nearing its breaking point after months of being massacred, mass-arrested, and mass-tortured by the Assad regime. But all hell breaks loose when the public discovers the torture and murder…
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Minisode 1 - Daraa‘s Devastation
Episode 11 - The Last Straw is taking longer than expected to edit. Here's an excerpt to tide everyone over until the full episode is done. Sources Cited: "We've Never Seen Such Horror" by Human Rights Watch Music Licensing Genocide by Silent Carrion Creative Commons -...
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Episode 10 - Syrian Kurds and the Revolution
This might be our most controversial episode, yet. What is the relationship between the Assad regime and Syrian Kurds? How did Kurds react to the Syrian revolution? Why is it that a majority of Syrian Kurds came to prefer the YPG over the Free Syrian Army? A lot of it has to do with societal...
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UNLOCKED - Bonus Episode 11 - The Northern Revolution
Yusuf was born in Manbij and gave up his job in Latakia to organize protests during the Syrian Revolution. The events of 2011 changed his life forever, resulting in the loss of his freedom (detained twice by the regime, plus once by ISIS) and eventually forcing him to leave Syria in 2015. Music...
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THE TERROR - Episode 1 - When Everything Changed (September 11, 2001)
Twenty years ago, the world changed. The Terror is a 12-episode miniseries about 9/11, what led up to it, and it's aftermath. It's the story about how the Cold War led to 9/11 and the War on Terror. Aram Shabanian (@ShabanianAram on Twitter) has extensively researched the events of September 11,...
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Message to Listeners (Upcoming Hiatus)
Hey y'all, we're going to put out one or two more episodes before we take a month off. In the meantime, keep an eye out for The Terror, a 12-part miniseries about al-Qaeda, 9/11, and its aftermath due for release on September 11, 2021.
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Episode 9 - A Thousand Deaths (April 22 to May 24, 2011)
This week, the Syrian Revolution takes a bloody and tragic turn when the Assad regime begins to put restive towns and cities under military siege. Starvation, indiscriminate bombings, and other horrors associated with the Syrian Civil War (a label that many Syrians see as a misnomer) begin to be...
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Episode 8 - The Assad Family and Regime (Part 1, 1930 to 1970)
How did the Assad family seize power in Syria? The answer lies in a man named Hafez al-Assad (basically, imagine an alternate version of Bashar al-Assad with confidence and a modicum of masculinity). Hafez rises from a poor country boy from the Alawite heartland, the bottom rung of the Syrian...
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Episode 7 - The Great Friday (April 1 to April 22, 2011)
The regime and its opponents both dig in their heels while each tries to convince the other to give up. Appeasement, brutality, and other mix-messaging dominate the regime's approach to increasing unrest while protestors continue to put their lives on the line to voice their grievances. This...
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Episode 6 - Inside Daraa’s Uprising feat. Fadil al-Mhameed
Fadil al-Mhameed lived right next to the Omari mosque in 2011, when Daraa became the epicenter of the Syrian Revolution. He witnessed, participated, and documented the uprising and crackdown by the regime, at grave personal cost. Fadil sustained a gunshot wound to the hand in 2011 before he was...
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Episode 5 - An Infamous Speech (March 26 to March 31, 2011)
Protests have broken out across the country and the death toll from state violence against protestors has already broken the triple digits. Syria is in shock after the events of March 25, when more than a hundred people were murdered by soldiers and Shabiha in a single day. Things are going to go...
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Bonus Episode 7 - Revolution in Raqqa feat. Hasan al-Kassab
Hasan al-Kassab (@HasanAlKassab2 on Twitter) was a medical student from Raqqa in 2011, when the protests began. Today, he's a Syrian revolutionary activist living in Romania. Hasan joins us in this episode to talk about what the revolution was like in Raqqa and other parts of East Syria, located...
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Bonus Episode 6 - The Bride and Groom of the Revolution feat. Noura Ghazi
They fell in love while risking their lives to protest against a regime that routinely arrests, tortures, and executes dissidents. Noura Ghazi decided she wanted to be a lawyer at 13, when her father was a political prisoner. She met Bassel Khartabil in April of 2011, when activists in Damascus...
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Episode 4 - The Revolutionaries (Part 1)
This is our first "biographical" episode. This week, we're going to look at individuals who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives to engage in non-violent resistance to tyranny. Sources cited: The Impossible Revolution by Yassin al-Haj Saleh Assad or We Burn the Country by Sam Dagher Razan...
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Bonus Episode 5 - Damascus to DC (Part 3) feat. Mamoun
What is one to do after being exiled from your homeland? That's exactly the situation Mamoun found himself in eight years ago. Coming of age and finding a path for oneself is difficult enough without a war at home and being able to visit one's family. Mamoun will encounter the difficulties of…
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Bonus Episode 4 - Damascus to DC (Part 2) feat. Mamoun
Damascus to DC tells the story of Mamoun, a Syrian-Lebanese attorney whose life journey took him across the world from his hometown Damascus to Washington D.C. after he was forced leave Syria. Part 2 focuses on Mamoun's involvement in the 2011 protests, how he helped combat disinformation by...
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Episode 3 - Days That Changed Everything (March 15 to March 25, 2011)
How did the Syrian Revolution lead to the Syrian Civil War? Why didn't the regime make any real concessions? How quickly did the regime resort to massacring protestors? (Answer: very quickly). This episode looks at what happened in Syria between March 15 to March 25, 2011. Sources cited: The...
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Bonus Episode 3 - Damascus to DC (Part 1)
Today, we're reaching into the vault and pulling out a pilot episode from mid-2020, before we knew what exactly this podcast would look like. Damascus to DC tells the story of Mamoun, a Syrian-Lebanese attorney whose life journey took him across the world from his hometown Damascus to Washington...
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Bonus Episode 2 - The Syrian Revolution feat. Suhail al-Ghazi
What did protestors in Syria want? How does it feel to voice your opinion and show solidarity with your fellow citizens for the first time in a totalitarian state? How did protests in one part of the country differ from another? How quickly did the Assad regime resort to brutalizing and…
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Episode 2 - The Good, The Bad, and the Propaganda feat. Dr. Idrees Ahmad
This week, we look at a topic that has dominated the discourse surrounding Syria: media coverage and disinformation. Dr. Idrees Ahmad is lecturer in journalism at the University of Stirling with a doctorate in sociology and a focus on international conflicts. He is also the author of The Road to...
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UNLOCKED Bonus Episode 1 - What Comes Next
This is a prototype bonus episode. Future bonus episodes will feature interviews with Syrians or experts in the topics we discuss. Our first set of Bonus episodes will be released for free. In the future, they will be available only to our Patrons on Patreon. Music licensing Fragments by Nomyn...
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Episode 1 - The Calm and the Storm (March 15, 2011)
Here it begins! Our ten-year retrospective look at Syria. This first episode works its way to the 15 of March, 2011, the day most-commonly cited as the beginning of the Syrian Civil War. This is the start of Season 1, which will focus on 2011. Season 2 will focus on 2012, so on and so forth....
About this show
A look back at what’s happened in Syria since 2011.
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