This is a podcast interview I did the week after the fall of the Asad regime in Syria, speculating on how the new government might develop.

It has to deal with multiple problems: uniting the disparate ethnic and religious groups within the country, keeping predatory groups and neighboring countries at bay, bringing the former torturers and executioners in the previous regime to justice, creating the infrastructure for policing and internal security, and designing a long-term plan for a future polity that combines democratic participation, free speech, and sufficient centralized authority to hold the whole thing together. That’s a lot.

The question is whether a relatively small group of militants are capable of the task. In their favor is the experience of al Shara (formerly al Julani) and his colleagues in running the Idlib region.

Idlib was reasonably prosperous and well run, though there was a wave of protest against al Shara/ Julani’s authoritarian rule and his habit of imprisoning his critics. He backed down a bit, and perhaps learned from that.

More troubling is his association with an extreme jihadi ideology in the past when he and the other leading members of the rebels were part of al Nusra, an al Qaeda affiliate. It shared this standing with the Islamic State in Syria. But the two groups quarreled with each other and since then al Shara and his former al Nusra colleagues claim to have renounced their extremism and embraced a more moderate pro-nationalist posture.

We’ll see how all this works out.