Peace from pieces: Syria after Assad

The Economist. Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Australia's teenagers are about to have one more reason for angst. In a year, under-16s will be banned from using social media—for their own good, of course. It's a bold bit of legislation, but it's not easy to see how it can be enforced. And the role-playing game Dungeons Dragons is turning 50. We ask how it made the jump along the way from nerd culture to popular culture. But first— There's this idea in physics called an unstable equilibrium. Forces are balanced, but only a slight nudge can change the situation entirely. That's how to view Syria. For 24 years, Bashar al-Assad ruled it, 13 of them during a brutal war of his own devising. From Russian firepower backing Mr. Assad to American-backed Kurds in the north, rebels in the south, Islamists, the regime's Alawites, all these various forces were balanced. Then, 10 days ago, the nudge. A rebel group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, took Aleppo. Then Hama, then Homs. And over the weekend, the capital Damascus fell. Mr. Assad had fled, his army deserted, leaving roads lined with their discarded uniforms. It's hard to put words to what a change this is. The House of Assad has run Syria for half a century. The country's people along the way have been immiserated, tortured, imprisoned, gassed. So the fall of the regime has felt like a liberation. How will the forces be rebalanced? All those same sectarian factions, they still exist and will want representation. It may end up being another unstable equilibrium. But for the moment anyway, most of Syria has reason to celebrate.

My first reaction, I suspect most people's first reaction, was a feeling of great satisfaction to learn that Bashar al-Assad, a vile dictator, had fled the country and that his regime had come to an end.

Christopher Lockwood is a senior editor at The Economist.

But then almost immediately the questions come into one's mind. What happens next? How do you put back together a country that's been smashed into a million pieces, a devastated place with many different groups and many different agendas vying for control? How do you put that back together and make sure that the suffering of the Syrian people doesn't just give way to a new chapter of suffering in the future?

And so one of the most striking things about this is how fast it happened in the end. We've been chasing this story all weekend. What was the actual fall of the regime like?

It happened with astonishing speed. This uprising began only on the 27th of November, 12 days ago, and 2 days after it began, Aleppo, the second city in Syria, had fallen. A week after that, the rebels had reached Homs, which is the next big city as you go from Aleppo south to Damascus. And at that point, things unfolded incredibly fast. Bashar Assad contacted the Russians for help, the Iranians for help, of course tried to rally his own army, but it was clear that the army were taking off their uniforms and melting away. The Russians were evacuating their people, the Iranians likewise. He looked around and found he had no support anywhere and turned tail and fled, almost certainly to Moscow. That's what's being said by Russian state media. We don't have actual confirmation of it, but that does seem most likely.

Now, Chris, I know that this is an enormous question to ask at this stage, but what happens next?

Well, of course, no one knows what happens next, but we can take some guesses. The most powerful group involved is HTS, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. This is an Islamicist army. They were at one point part of al-Qaeda. They were the people that did this uprising. They took Aleppo, they swept south. It's true that they weren't necessarily the first to reach Damascus itself because other groups were moving up from the south. But their leader made a big appearance at the main mosque in Damascus at the weekend. His name is Abu Muhammad al-Jolani. He is on his own website calling himself president of Syria, and he is clearly, for the moment, the man in pole position to rule Syria. He's a very doughty fighter, but so far proving himself to be quite a wise man, calling on his followers to show restraint, to protect minorities, not to engage in looting. But of course, there are many other groups that will want to share in this. So putting together a government that will last will be a very tricky thing.

As you say, plenty of players here who will want to have a part in the new Syria. Who are they and how do you think they will or won't come together?

Well, there are many different groups. There is the largest of them, HTS, led by Mr. Jalani, the Islamist group, but there are plenty of other fighters that don't share his objectives. For a start, we have the American-backed Kurds up in the north and the east of the country. They will certainly want to be represented. We have other non-Islamic militant groups based in the south that formed an army of resistance and have been fighting in that direction. But then above all, we have the remnants of the regime. The regime is an Alawite regime, Alawites being a form of Shia Islam, whereas most of the other groups are Sunni Islam. The Alawites, who have been used over the last decades to ruling the country, will now be very fearful They are predominantly located in the coastal strip. That's, of course, the most prosperous part of Syria. They will want to hold on to what they have, and they will be very fearful indeed of an HTS-led government.

But the unity of the response so far, the seemingly nationwide glee that Assad is gone, might suggest that the idea of unity might get all of these sectarian groups together to rebuild Syria, at least in the near term.

Yes, that's certainly what we can hope for, and there is some reason to suppose it. So far, everything has been pretty peaceful, but it's terribly early days. We saw after the fall of Gaddafi in Libya, or after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, that attempts to unify the state very quickly ran into difficulties. This may very well not happen. Syria has always been in the past one of the richest, best educated among Arab states, a highly civilized place, and it's entirely possible that people will want to put it together in a way that is durable and will actually succeed in that. There is an awful lot of goodwill. The big thing that's happening from all over the world, Syrian exiles flooding back, you know, particularly of course from Lebanon and Jordan, which are closest. But people will want to come back and help stand up the new state. You know, the problem will be that the person who seems in pole position to lead it is quite an Islamist figure. You can't get away from that. And not everyone in Syria will want the future Syrian Republic to be an Islamist republic.

And how will that dynamic play into the international response here? Syria needs some serious help in rebuilding.

Yes, it's a very interesting, almost a chicken and egg situation. You know, the foreign lenders, donors, and supporters will probably want to see how things play out, but unless they support the new government, there's a greater risk that things will play out badly. The first reaction of Donald Trump was to say, this is not our fight, let it play out. Well, that's an incredibly dangerous attitude to have.

But what about other countries that already have a presence, a stake in Syria? Turkey, Russia.

This is a terrible development for Vladimir Putin. Syria and his support of Bashar al-Assad was one of the things that gave Vladimir Putin a claim to great power status. He had a powerful ally in a very sensitive part of the world who he stood by. And of course, Russia gets from this the huge advantage of a Mediterranean port, its only Mediterranean naval base, at a place called Tartus on the coast, and also a big air base at the town of Latakia. He's in danger of losing both of those. So I think Russian influence will wither away very fast, and I think that has incalculable consequences for the wider struggle to contain this resurgent Russia. And then of course the other big power player in all of this is Turkey. Turkey was the main backer of the HTS, but of course they have their own axe to grind. They are fearful of expansion by Kurds in Syria, because of course those Kurds in Syria are part of groups that work with Kurds in Turkey who they're very fearful of.

As you say, it's going to be extremely difficult to stitch Syria back together. But for the moment, at least, it seems like the entire country is in a celebratory mood, at least in this interim period.

Yes, it's really important not to lose sight of that. This is a very joyful moment for many people. And the ones I think of most are political prisoners, in many cases there for years in the terrible jails that Assad ran across much of the country, and the rebels have been liberating people. It's a wonderful, almost sort of biblical moment. You see people coming out of these terrible dark places where they have been kept for a long time and being reunited with families who for many years perhaps haven't even known whether they were alive or not. That is really something to celebrate.

Chris, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. In one year's time, Australians under the age of 16 will be banned from using social media.

Tonight, Australia taking an unprecedented step, becoming the first country in the world to ban the use of social media apps for anyone under the age of 16.

The country's parliament has just passed a law under which tech companies could be fined $50 million Australian dollars, $32 million American ones, if they don't comply. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says the ban is to protect young people from the dangers of social media.

Social media is doing harm to our children. And today parents can have a different discussion with their young ones.

For Aziza Green, a parent in Melbourne, the ban is a relief.

I feel really positive about it. I'm very nervous about the social media world that we're all a part of, and I think about how my kids are going to be on the internet and in the real world.

For teenagers, it's a mixed bag. I, like, don't like it.

Like, not one bit.

That's 13-year-old Angela, who doesn't agree with her friend Sarah.

I know this is, like, conflicting with Angela. When you're consuming, like, so, so, so much content, you're just, like, always comparing your life to, like, those that you see online.

There is one area of agreement, though.

Most kids just think of the social media being stupid and they're gonna go around it.

They're getting at something here: uncertainty on how to implement the ban or whether it can be implemented at all.

Social media has always been a bit of a wild west for children. Notionally, most of these apps are only for those aged 13 and over, but on the whole, people haven't been too concerned about that.

Tom Wainwright is our tech and media editor.

Things are changing though at the moment because there's more concern than ever before that some of these networks are not great for children's mental health. And so we've seen governments around the world just taking small steps to do things like, in some cases, make sure that parents have to give permission for children to use networks. Australia, though, has gone further than this. It's the first place that has enacted a real blanket ban on social media for teenagers. And so everybody's very interested to see how it's going to go over the next year when they begin to implement it.

There's a lot to ask here about enforceability, but let's start with definitions. I mean, what is a social media platform in the eyes of Australian law?

Yeah, good question. I mean, nobody knows. Australia has yet to say exactly who's going to be included and who isn't. But social media is a very, very blurred definition. It could include anything from a video platform like TikTok to a messaging platform like WhatsApp. And some people say video gaming increasingly is almost a social media experience because people do so much socializing within games like Roblox. Australia has said so far that TikTok, for example, probably will be included, but it said that YouTube won't because YouTube supposedly includes lots of educational content. And it's kind of uncomfortable when you've got a situation like that where two direct rivals, TikTok and YouTube, are falling on different sides of this particular ban. So I think the question of exactly who is included and who isn't is going to be a really controversial one in the year ahead as they figure this thing out.

And once those battle lines are drawn though, I mean, what about enforcement? How do you think that will play out?

I mean, traditionally, if you're checking for someone's age, you might ask them for a government ID, you know, driving license or something like that. But there are two problems here. One is that Australia has said that people won't be compelled to show ID. And the other problem, of course, is that if you're dealing with teenagers, especially young teenagers, they're often not going to have these things— credit cards, driving licenses, and so on. And so I think what a lot of companies are probably going to do is use age estimation technology using artificial intelligence. And this is something that a few years ago didn't work all that well. These days, though, like with many things powered by AI, it's taken leaps and bounds. And AI-based estimation tools now can guess people's age within about a year on average. One thing to watch there, I think, is that as with lots Lots of AI-based tools, there are some racial disparities because the training data that these models are trained on is reflected in their abilities. And so if they're trained predominantly on faces of white people, they're going to be much better at guessing the ages of white people than non-white people. And that is indeed what we see with these models. I was speaking to one company that does these checks, and they told me that they can guess the age of a white teenager to within about a year. But a darker-skinned teenager, they get it to within about a year and a half. So not so different, but at the margins, obviously, that's going to make a difference. So I think that's going to be a possible controversy to keep an eye on.

And you're talking about this in the context of third-party companies that are doing it. I mean, who is directing them? Ultimately, who has the responsibility then to do this kind of checking? Is it the government that implements the law? Is it the tech companies themselves?

Well, there's a big argument about that going on. And in Australia, they've taken the view that it's really up to the social media platforms to do it. They take the view they're the ones creating this risk, so they're the ones should have to manage it. But the social platforms take a different view, obviously. They say that actually it would be better if these checks were done at the level of the operating system or the App Store, which of course would make it Google or Apple's problem. And the case they make for that is that if you do it in that way, then it means that a person's phone knows their date of birth, for example. And so from then on, every time they visit a social network or a gambling site or a porn site or any kind of age-gated site or app, the phone can in effect vouch for their age anonymously. But it It seems governments so far are not keen on the idea of giving Apple and Google the right or the responsibility to run a sort of massive global register of IDs of the billions of customers that they have. So for now, it seems as if it's the social media platforms that are going to be in charge of doing this themselves, but they would much rather offload responsibility onto somebody else.

Well, that kind of gets to another question about whether from the perspective of the tech companies, the issue is the hassle of compliance or whether any of this is going to eat into their bottom lines.

I think the immediate impact on the bottom line is not going to be that big. I mean, if we're talking about people under 16, I mean, obviously it's just Australia at the moment, which is not a giant market, but let's say this goes worldwide, which in theory that's possible. Children under 16 are not a huge share of the ad market. I spoke to one analyst who said he thought they probably make up a low single-digit percentage of total ad spending. So I think the immediate impact revenue-wise is not going to be very big, but there other questions that are interesting to think about. One is nobody really knows quite what the impact is if you don't have social media in your teens. What effect does that have on your social media use as an adult? And we don't really know the answer to that question. So that's one concern that I think these tech companies will have. And another concern that many of them have is that bans like this could be enforced in an uneven way. I mentioned TikTok is likely to fall under this ban in Australia. YouTube is likely to be exempt. And you can just imagine that as far as TikTok is concerned, that's potentially quite a big disadvantage if it's not allowed to have any users up to the age of 16. Meanwhile, those same users are allowed to grow up with YouTube from birth, literally. It presents TikTok with a big competitive disadvantage. So I think that this is not going to cause catastrophe immediately to anybody's ad business, but I think that the competitive dynamics of social media could be upset somewhat if these bans are enacted more broadly, and particularly if they apply to some apps and not others.

And along the way there, you mentioned the prospect that this might go worldwide, that Australia might be a pioneer in solving this thorny question. Do you see that happening?

Well, it's possible. I mean, certainly Australia wants to portray itself as a leader in tech regulation. And we've seen this already. Australia recently passed a different law, again, taking aim at tech companies. This was the so-called News Media Bargaining Law, which in effect is trying to get get big tech platforms to pay money to news publishers in return for hosting their stories on their platforms. And it was taken up by Canada, among other places. So far, it's not been a huge success, I think it's fair to say. But Australia does seem to see itself as a country that wants to go first and try these things out. And that seems to be what it's doing here with social media as well. So I think it's certainly possible that it will be copied elsewhere. Certainly, every country is interested in this subject. It's interesting though, quite a lot of the expert commentary has been a bit skeptical, and I heard one interesting comment from the NSPCC, which is a big child protection charity here in the UK, and they said that rather than accept that social media are dangerous and ban children from it, what we really should be doing is trying to make it safer, to give children a good online experience. So I think that could be an alternative approach. You could see some countries going down the banning route and other countries going down the route of trying to regulate social media to make it a more child-friendly place. Either way, I think everybody is currently watching Australia to see what happens.

Tom, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you.

He leans and he grabs your two hands and he pulls them together and he says, "You must have forgotten who you are. You are my slave.

You belong to no one but me." I recently found myself in a room with a barbarian faerie, a water genasi, a bard, and this ragtag group of adventurers. Who had just returned from saving the world.

Johnny Williams writes about culture for The Economist.

So I was sitting in a game of Dungeons and Dragons, also known as D&D, and the people gathered there were actually just a contractor, a librarian, a university professor. For 3 to 4 hours, they just transformed into these characters and went on an epic adventure that that ended up with them fighting for their lives.

And then you wake up. I'm like, do I have resistance to fire damage? But I don't think I have resistance to that fire damage.

Since its invention 50 years ago, D&D has been a pastime of geeks. Geeks, but in recent years it's kind of made a jump to the mainstream. Consider the hit show Stranger Things. An army of troglodytes charged into the chamber.

Told you.

If you've ever heard of the Demogorgon or Vecna or the Mind Flayer, a lot of people are familiar with those names. What they may not realize is that they're actually from Dungeons Dragons. Last year also there was a movie called Dungeons Dungeons Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and a video game, Baldur's Gate 3.

What in the sweet hells were you thinking, activating that lance?

I was right there! Dungeons Dragons emerged from war games. These were miniature battle simulations that were used mainly to train military officers, but over time they became a hobby Now, as the story goes, there were two wargamers, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and the two of them saw a lot more potential in war games that could be used for telling fantastical stories and adventures. So one of the things that they did was they started creating their own rules. D&D has a lot of elements that are kind of hard to describe. It is a game where you form an adventuring party You first have to make a character. There's also the Dungeon Master. He or she is the one who really kind of guides and tells the story. And Dungeon Masters could use a pre-written book, but many of them like to build their own worlds, create their own characters, tell their own stories. D&D honestly offers so much freedom that a game session could involve raiding a dragon's hoard, or it could involve going into the market and just trying to find a rare item where a charisma roll may bag you a really good bargain. Now, D&D has become more than just a game. Consider Critical Role, which is a group of voice actors who about 10 years ago, they started streaming their game sessions. Now, these game sessions are 3 to 4 hours long, but millions of people watch them. They have about 850 million views on YouTube.

D&D came into my life very beginning of high school. Like, I'd heard about it, and my mom had gotten me a book, a Monster's Manual of the second edition, when I was kind of late middle school. I read it cover to cover but didn't have anyone to play with, didn't really know how to find a community like that. And it wasn't until high school that I was invited by some elder classmen to join their group kind of unlocked something in me, enabled all the players, but especially the DM, to expand their imagination in ways they normally are challenged to feel empowered to do so. So yeah, my name is Matthew Mercer. I am a voice actor who more or less just kind of came up as a nerdy, quiet kid in most of my early life. I loved fantasy and novels and kind of worldbuilding in general. Through theater and through roleplaying games, kind of opened up a little bit, learned to enjoy a performing arts craft and started getting involved in theater, and then eventually began to craft a career as a voice actor. One of the other great legacies of D&D is continuously creating a new generation of game designers and storytellers. We will see people that come out of playing D&D, like modern D&D for the first time, kids, teenagers that 15 years from now will be the next showrunners and scriptwriters and game designers. And they will take the things they love about playing these games growing up. And that kind of proliferation, that sort of inspiration is, is magical.

There are several reasons for Dungeons Dragons growing popularity. One is the 5th edition book rule from 2014. Designers made it specifically to onboard new players. The pandemic also played a big role with people being cooped inside and turning to board games. You know, for me, Dungeons Dragons is really about community. The game puts you in all these sorts of situations where you're fighting for your life, you're having to make difficult ethical decisions, and before you know it, you're creating a bond with this party of adventurers who, for a few hours, sure, pretend to be something else, but in reality, you end up creating some deep and wonderful friendships.

It's an 8. Your character's gonna struggle. Okay, this is a brutal one. Um, you're gonna have disadvantage on all charisma-based rolls.

Oh boy.

Okay, that's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.