Yes. Thank you.
Look, I think Assad for a very long time was interested in keeping control of Damascus, Aleppo, and the Latakia coast. That's his heartland. If we look at the map of what ISIS controls....
You know, I'm almost skeptical about using the words “ISIS”, “IS”, or “Islamic State”, because it's not a state. They control two or three cities and lots of roads that connect them. They don't particularly control a big, vast amount of arable, livable territory. Much of it is desert. It's not to say that the millions who are under its unfortunate tutelage don't matter; by no means is that the point. But if you look at the map of Syria and Iraq, they've taken the void. They've taken the amount of territory that is mostly uninhabited, mostly desert and not necessarily the most resource rich, although they do have access to a few oil refineries. Most of it is desert, uninhabited desert, and the people who inhabit those areas tend to be more rural, tend to be more conservative. That's why that ideology first took hold.
Initially, at least, they were able to come into that territory because the people on the ground were able to see that there was at least an attempt to govern them, to provide services, to provide electricity. We hear, for example, that in Mosul and parts of Syria, much of the reason for the initial welcoming of ISIS was that they came in and picked up garbage. They provided things like electricity and water. They freed political prisoners from jail. So they were able to initially—again, very initially—get public support. That's why they made such a vast spread so quickly.
I digress a little bit, but the point is that these are really not cities in the classic sense, not populated cities—with the exception of Mosul, which is not easy to ignore. My point is that much of Syria is barren.
Going back to your question about Assad, Assad did not fight ISIS. Some on the ground would be skeptical and argue that Assad and ISIS were aligned. I think that's a bit extreme. More importantly, Assad turned a blind eye and said, look, I don't have enough forces to fight two fronts; let me focus on the secular front, which clearly the international regimes globally are more sympathetic to, such as the FSA, the Free Syrian Army. ISIS eventually, if it does get hold of much of eastern Syria, as it did, is easier to at least garner the international support to counter it.
I think he played it quite well. He was right on that front. But his key goal was to hold on to the centre of the country and the coast, the highly populated areas: Aleppo, the most populated city; the second, Damascus; and then Latakia, because of access to the sea and also its Alawite heartland. Those were all the reasons why he focused on that. That was a tactical and I think a political choice.
So he didn't fight ISIS, and ISIS was able to pretty much spread in Syria very quickly and easily with initially popular support on the ground. That has obviously changed. People have started to see that ISIS is not a saviour against the Assad regime, it's a medieval interpretation of Islam that's even worse than Assad. But that's taken time to get to, and I think that explains why in Syria, at least, we have seen a lot more of this kind of uprising against ISIS than we have in other areas.
I'll stop there.