Intercepted: The Civil and Proxy War Reignites in Syria

About this episode

Joe Biden has just weeks left in his presidency. Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza is continuing at full force. In Lebanon, the so-called ceasefire was one-sided by U.S. design, meant to require only Hezbollah to cease its fire. A U.N. peacekeeping force official told CNN Tuesday that Israel had committed roughly 100 violations of the ceasefire, including gradually intensifying military strikes in southern Lebanon. After several days of Israeli attacks, Hezbollah fired back what it said was a warning to Israel. And now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is saying he is going to escalate even further. In the midst of all of this, in Syria, armed opposition forces seeking to topple the government of Bashar al-Assad stunned the region when they marched into Syria’s second largest city, Aleppo, and encountered almost no resistance from the Syrian armed forces or their allies. That operation was led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, which the U.S. government has classified as a terror organization. HTS has its origins in ISIS and Al Qaeda, though the group’s leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani has spent years seeking to rebrand