This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting from the start
Syria - long celebrated for its breathtaking beauty.
For centuries, people of different faiths lived here side by side.
Then, in 2011, Syrians took to these streets to protest
against decades of repressive rule.
And Syria spiralled into one of the worst human disasters of our time.
You could call it the smell of death but it's the smell of everything bad,
it's the smell of weapons and explosions.
I was shocked. A lot of foam's coming out from their mouth.
Their eyeballs are getting smaller, and then they die.
This is the story of Syria's war told by people who lived through it.
Many times, they forced me to listen to his voice while they were torturing him.
Twice, they forced me to watch.
Syria was under attack, and we have to defend ourselves.
The war drew in so many foreign powers, it stopped being just Syria's war.
It was chaotic, horrendous, catastrophic...
..an insult to the humanity of this planet.
I've never met a single person in the West who would answer my question -
what happens next if Mr Assad resigns?
I've been reporting from Syria throughout this most brutal war.
What happened here?
How did peaceful protest for change spiral into such unspeakable savagery?
Half a million people killed, millions of lives shattered,
and so much of Syria in utter ruin.
I didn't tell any person that I'm going there,
even my family.
Before I left home, I had looked to the faces of my mother and my father.
I felt like it's the moment I'm saying goodbye.
I was not sure even I will be killed or arrested.
Noura al-Jizawi, a 23-year-old university student.
Everything she knew was about to change.
She joined thousands who took to the streets of her city, Homs, calling for political freedom.
It was an amazing day, a special day.
We felt like it's a miracle, it's not real.
Seldom had Syria witnessed scenes like this.
Reports from the town of Daraa of teenagers tortured for spraying graffiti
on a wall had lit a fuse.
We started shouting, "Praise Syria, dignity, freedom!
"Syria is for us, not for Assad."
For years, Noura wrote a secret blog.
Now like others, she shouted in public.
It was my first time that I had a voice, so I exist.
But some Syrians felt threatened.
Hayat Awad worked for a newspaper then in Homs.
She started making notes on the protests.
Protests flared in other places...
..and bloodshed too
as security forces moved to quell the uprising.
The fervour of the Arab Spring of 2011 had now reached Syria.
I had visited Damascus and I had discussed with Assad, and he said that there
would not be trouble in Syria and was quite passionate about it, so
he, I believe, was very surprised by what started to happen.
Two weeks into the protests, President Assad went to Syria's Parliament,
cheered on by his supporters -
his most anticipated speech after 11 years in power.
He'd made some concessions.
Now his advisors hinted he'd announce major reform.
The President blamed the protest on foreign plots and offered no reform.
It only provoked more protests on the streets.
And in some capitals, growing concern.
Bashar al-Assad went before Parliament
and gave a very hard-line speech
that, rather than calming things down, ended up inflaming them more.
I view the whole journey of Syria as just one of tragic
missed opportunity, miscalculation,
none larger, of course, than Assad's own decisions when a peaceful series
of protests about jobs and future was turned into the beginning of a civil war.
In Homs now, the streets were packed.
Activists crowned this city the capital of the revolution.
People started to join from all cities.
I remember some of my friends joined us from Aleppo.
Others joined us from Damascus.
Protesters occupied this area around Homs' clocktower, inspired by Egypt's Tahir Square.
Security forces were standing by. As night fell,
they closed in and organisers urged some to go home.
Between 11 and 12, they asked women and children to leave.
Two hours later, security forces moved in.
Protesters called it the Clocktower Massacre.
Many died - the exact number disputed to this day.
But it was a defining moment.
Actually, I was so afraid.
It was a hard moment.
But I felt like, for me at least, I cannot live as a normal person in this life.
From this moment, I'm the daughter of the revolution.
Two days before, in Homs, a Syrian general was murdered with his two sons
and a nephew. Hayat blamed the opposition.
Hayat went to the funeral.
This time, crowds supporting the government filled the streets.
Just as the clocktower killings defined Noura, these deaths marked Hayat.
From the very start of the uprising,
there was a battle over what really happened.
From the first day of demonstrations,
we were a nonviolent movement and the regime was killing civilians.
They started immediately with violent demonstrations.
But you saw what was happening in Homs, that the government started firing
at protesters? Everything was prepared for a confrontation.
The weapons were stored...
..people had instructions from their...
..operators, handlers.
The government says that there were armed protesters and that's why they
used force. Were there people among you who were armed, either with
weapons or rocks? Definitely no persons who were holding weapons.
This is the propaganda of the regime.
As protests grew, the Army was sent in to Daraa,
where the uprising started.
Within a couple of weeks, Syria was on a roller-coaster.
The government was simply shooting,
trying to repress rather than...
..implement any kind of reforms.
There were arrest sweeps, where hundreds of people were detained.
That triggers even larger protests.
By summer, we were in places like Hama and places like Homs.
We were getting tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands.
Reporting from Damascus that year, we saw how the conflict escalated.
Soldiers. Where? Soldiers to the left. Here we go.
Oh, my goodness!
The crackdown intensified.
This teacher was stopped at a checkpoint in Homs, accused of inciting protests.
His family later found his lifeless body, scarred by torture.
Damascus, the seat of power, had seen few protests.
The eyes of the secret police, the Mukhabarat, were everywhere in the capital.
I was just living a normal life as a young man in the middle of the capital of Damascus...
..having my friends, going to parties.
Mohammed Abdullah, known as Artino, worked at a computer store in the city.
He decided to join the protests growing on the outskirts of Damascus.
I was really scared because your adrenaline is like super high but,
at the same time, you feel like you're not alone in this.
We can see the police are waiting for us...
..waiting for the order to attack us,
to capture some of us.
The consequences of dissent could be terrible.
They put me in a cell, blindfolded me,
and then a guy started to come and beat me, and then they moved me from
one room to another room, like that.
It was between interrogation and torture.
It was just like, lay on the floor and beat you.
While you are sitting handcuffed to the chair, they could just beat you.
In the face, kick you, spit on you, like that.
They were insulting me to tell me, like, you are an Alawi, you are...
..from us and you are..
..like betrayed us.
Artino is Alawite -
from the same Muslim minority sect as the President and many in power.
He had a way out.
His father had worked in military intelligence.
He told me, "I paid a lot to get you out. Next time, I can't promise you."
My brother was in the military, so he sent me an SMS, telling me, like,
I'd rather kill you with my own hands than let you destroy the family name.
This officer played a leading role in military operations around Damascus
and later became one of the most important generals in this war -
General Mohamed Khaddour.
We've heard from so many young Syrian protesters who
said that they were just calling for peaceful political change in Syria.
You were put on the Western sanctions list in which they talked about the
suppression of peaceful protest.
What was your reaction to being put on that list?
By the summer of 2011,
people were taking up arms to fight back against the Army.
When security personnel went into neighbourhoods,
they were met with gunfire, people on rooftops were shooting at the Army,
shooting at the police coming this way to slow them down while they tell
the people, run that way.
The resistance became more organised.
And then, the first armed opposition group was formed.
A small group of Syrian officers had defected
and launched what they called the Free Syrian Army.
By now, the Syrian military's response was escalating.
Tanks rolled into Homs and opened fire.
In Western capitals,
growing pressure to do something and indecision over what to do.
Six months after protests began,
Western leaders decided to ratchet up the rhetoric.
This morning, President Obama called on Assad to step aside.
The transition to democracy in Syria has begun, and it's time for Assad
to get out of the way.
They've led you to believe that the US would become involved in a significant way?
Of course.
Because, as one of President Obama's security advisors said,
superpowers don't bluff.
You have to say what you mean and you have to mean what you say.
I do think it was a mistake to call on him to resign.
It did create expectations, and I think that I should have objected when I
was called the night before.
Noura was now a leading figure in the opposition.
She started an underground newspaper, working with other activists in Syria
and abroad, knowing the risks they faced.
I keep asking myself how I was still alive.
We know all of us, as protesters,
we know that this way of revolution will take us even to jails or to death.
We were losing our friends and our colleagues.
Me, myself, I was in danger of detention or kidnapping.
I had my coffee with my mother and I said goodbye.
I went to the bus station.
Four guys, two of them were holding weapons.
They said, come with us.
They covered my eyes and they took me to a place - I don't know where
this place is.
I felt like I'm just...
..swimming in nothing...
..and in the endless darkness.
So you were kept alone in a room, blindfolded?
Yes. For days? Yes.
They were questioning me and, after that, forced me to keep awake for four days.
In that moment, I had...
..eight friends who were detained by the regime.
And the regime tried to force me to speak against them.
The guards singled out her friend, Nawar.
Many times, they forced me to listen to his voice while they were torturing him.
They used many tools against detainees at that time.
So you heard the screams of your friend, Nawar?
Yeah.
And twice, they forced me to watch.
Doctors, teachers, students ended up in prisons.
Why was it necessary to arrest so many civilians?
We detain terrorists, we detain potential...
..violators of law, as is the case in every country, but we don't
detain civilians at large.
But tens of thousands went into prison,
went into a black hole, and nobody knows if they're dead or alive.
We receive a lot of...
..lists from the International...
..Red Cross, but I really found out a lot of allegations where the government
has no information about such people.
Noura was held in military prisons,
including the infamous 215.
Photos smuggled from this jail and others show victims numbered and
recorded by a military police photographer.
This is an official government archive.
This is a person from the military who was asked to document, archive,
index the numbers and names and take pictures of dead bodies.
These are not isolated cases.
This is a state systematic campaign of torturing and abusing and killing people.
Calls to end this war echoed around the world.
The UN came up with a plan for peace talks.
It went nowhere.
The West insisted any solution had to include President Assad's exit.
But Syria's long-standing ally, Russia, resisted any suggestion of regime change.
The American approach towards Syria, they say, this guy...
..is bad and has to go away.
While we do not take any position on that.
We have never said that Mr Assad is good and should stay.
But in order to combat terror in a country, you need to have a functionable state.
I have never met a single person in the West who would answer my
question - what happens next if Mr Assad resigns?
By the summer of 2012, the rebel Free Syrian Army was growing in numbers.
Syrians from many walks of life were setting up local brigades to fight
under the FSA banner...
..alongside the Syrian officers who decided to defect.
The rebels now set their sights on Aleppo.
An ancient city, Syria's industrial heartland...
..a bastion still of government support.
Colonel al-Okaidi led FSA fighters along with militia formed just the
day before they launched a sudden attack.
I remember very well, in 2012, bets inside the State Department
about how long Assad would last, and the betting was
it was either going to be by Thanksgiving 2012 or Christmas.
That's how sure we were that the Free Syrian Army, which we were supporting...
..was going to get the upper hand and win.
But in Aleppo, the Army mobilised.
The rebels' stunning assault stalled.
The fighters managed to hold on to about half of Aleppo, but their
weaknesses were exposed.
What's so-called today Free Syrian Army is not an army.
I was officer in an army and I know what is an army. It is not an army.
There's no discipline,
no military training, no experience.
When we get some progress on the ground...
..we didn't get after that any ammunition for more than one month.
The US was weighing up how much support to give the rebels.
The CIA was already on the ground, mainly in Turkey,
monitoring the arms and cash entering Syria from supporters in Arab states.
Now the CIA came up with a plan to vet, train
and arm the rebels themselves.
There was a government that was really under siege, including
in the capital city itself.
There were never any guarantees, and I think the debates of that time...
..all reflected that.
The question was again, how serious was the President when he said
Bashar al-Assad must go?
But the President's team was divided.
He and some key advisors weren't convinced the CIA plan would work.
President Obama would always ask, how is that actually going to fix
the problem that we're talking about here?
And then everyone sort of looked at their shoes and said,
well, they won't stop.
And he said, well, then, why the hell are we talking about it if this
is not going to solve the actual problem?
We're not doing this just to make ourselves feel good.
The Obama administration was very,
very reluctant to provide weapons to the opposition and, meanwhile, people
were being slaughtered without the ability to defend themselves.
So this is when you decided that you had to get involved by financing,
providing arms for the opposition?
We finally came to the point where we and a number of countries said,
we would rather do it with you. If not, we will do it alone.
President Obama was reluctant to be drawn into another war in the Middle East.
But he did lay down a red line on chemical weapons.
I have...
..at this point, not ordered military...
..engagement, but a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of
chemical weapons moving around or being utilised.
That would change my calculus.
She was the voice of every oppressed human being fighting for their freedom.
For the sake of a better future for all of us.
We will not be silenced!
We demand the immediate release of the human rights activist Noura al-Jizawi.
An international campaign was launched
to free the activist Noura.
She was moved from a military prison to a civilian one.
It was easier because there, at least, my family knew where I am and
they succeeded to...
..to use corruption and to pay for it.
So you think your family paid money? Absolutely, they paid money.
In September 2012, the Syria Noura
stepped back into after seven months had changed.
I felt like...
..I missed a huge gap.
I couldn't understand.
They had armed groups with the black flags, and how we had less demonstrations and
tens of activists, who I started working with in the beginning...
..they had been arrested or disappeared.
More radical Islamists were entering the fray.
Conservative Muslim groups were already fighting under the FSA banner.
Now hard-line fighters like this were forming their own alliances.
Some would later be linked to Al-Qaeda.
Some new groups were led by Islamists freed from prison in a presidential
pardon just after protests began.
Some saw it as a concession, others a cynical step by the government.
Their argument to the world is, we are the protectors of secularism in
Syria, and here you go.
They released these prisoners during the revolution,
knowing fully that these extremists, when allowed to flourish, will fill in the vacuum.
In secret, supply chains were smuggling weapons and money into Syria.
By this time, the biggest financial backer of the opposition was the
wealthy Gulf state of Qatar.
And some of its money was ending up in the hands of hard-line Islamists.
We wanted to empower the Free Syrian Army, but also we wanted to support groups
from Islamic backgrounds.
You cannot exclude them since they are Syrian and they are defending
the same cause.
So this was groups, for example, Jabhat al-Nusra, which is linked to Al-Qaeda.
Qatar is known to have backed them in the early stages.
Did you realise at some point it was not a good idea?
When they formed themselves, they were
an Islamic Syrian group as the other Islamic Syrian groups.
But linked very early on to Al-Qaeda.
Not when they formed themselves as Jabhat al-Nusra and pledged their allegiance for Al-Qaeda.
Everybody would hold their support from that.
Syria's uprising was now a fully fledged war.
The city of Homs, which saw some of the first and biggest protests, had
by now suffered some of the worst fighting.
Such a chilling feeling. Homs was a vibrant third city of Syria.
Parts were in rebel hands. The battles left neighbourhoods in ruin.
Tens of thousands forced to flee.
In other areas, some chose to stay.
You have to imagine a background of smoke and then the sound.
Hear the take-off...
..then you hear...
..the landing of the mortars.
Boof! Boof!
As if some kind of big, ugly giant stepping on...
..the city.
Marwa al-Sabouni, an architect and author, lived with her young family close to the front line.
My son was traumatised by the noises.
He couldn't control his fear - just, you know,
he'd get really scared
and he would block his ears and couldn't bear it.
Everybody's technique was to create this safe bubble...
..where you just play them songs...
..read for them, keep them occupied and loved.
And just, you know, the smell of...
..you could call it the smell of death, but it's the smell of everything bad,
it's the smell of weapons and explosions...
..and this kind of image, which was the worst.
By the end of 2012 in Homs, the Syrian Army controlled most of the city.
A few significant pockets were still in rebel hands.
Homs had become a city of snipers.
Hayat Awad lived in a neighbourhood staunchly supporting the government.
Her husband was in the military and two of her three sons,
often out filming with the Army, often in the sights of rebel snipers.
Months later, she came across the corpse of a rebel sniper.
What she did next came as a shock, even to herself.
Did it surprise you that you did that?
Syrian warplanes ruled the skies,
shelling rebel areas, including Homs' old city.
The ancient quarter became a byword for a tactic used time and again in this war -
siege and starvation.
Mohammed Jinniyat left his military service to join the rebels.
Several thousand civilians were also trapped inside the besieged quarter.
In the West, the clamour to intervene was growing ever stronger.
General David Richards headed the British Armed Forces.
The Western liberal response, a sort of Pavlovian reaction of these
things is to go and support them.
It was bad man, good people, didn't really count how many,
we've got to go and help.
We started looking at options which ranged from Iraq-style full
intervention through a training commitment,
through to what we ended up doing, which was minimalist.
Syria's savage war soon spread far beyond the battlefield.
By early 2013,
not a month went by without a massacre of civilians somewhere.
We heard terrible reports coming from Haswiya, a village just outside Homs.
We travelled there and convinced the Army to take us in.
And what we found was shocking.
There's blood on the cement and...
..a body is straddling the doorway and one sprawled in the yard...
..in positions which suggest they were trying to flee.
The family who live here were shot and burned alive.
The bottle of fuel still here.
Oh!
Inside this compound, a trail of blood.
Bodies were dragged away.
And round the back, more bodies.
A woman, completely charred...
..in her bed.
More than 100 men, women and children were slaughtered.
Soldiers blamed it on Islamist rebels.
The villagers were too afraid to speak.
Only now do survivors who've left feel able to talk.
She speaks of a feared militia known as Shabiha -
armed gangs fiercely loyal to the regime, mainly from the Alawite sect.
Another man searched desperately for his uncle.
A massacre like this, on a Sunni Muslim village, was seen as sectarian.
What Assad did very well from the beginning,
painting what's happening
as a Sunni threat to the Alawis, and telling the Alawis,
you have to defend yourselves.
And to do that, you have to get brutal, and we're going to use these groups,
and these groups were let alone and acted on their own.
These atrocities happened from both sides, but you'll find people who will justify these acts.
Syria's Army was under mounting strain.
Deaths, desertions, defections were taking their toll.
In this loyal heartland in the western mountains,
villagers were burying their dead every day.
Soldiers killed on front lines.
Hayat's 21-year-old son, Mahmoud, was also in the Army.
During a fierce battle at a hospital,
his unit was encircled by fighters linked to Al-Qaeda.
After her son's death,
Hayat decided to work for the Ministry of Information.
By the beginning of 2013, warring sides were locked in a bloody stalemate.
The Syrian Army was now stretched across many fronts.
And the US saw a chance to force President Assad to the negotiating table.
I came in, in 2013, and we found a fairly weak Assad, and that's when I
sort of sensed we had to...
..create the leverage in order to be able to get to the discussion.
But the President remained defiant,
denouncing rebels as Western puppets.
His powerful allies, Russia and Iran, stood firmly behind him.
We have always supported efforts made by the United Nations.
What we have always been concerned about was this double game played by
our Western partners because they would support certain moves in terms of
the political settlement in Syria but, on the other hand, they would always
support weapons, armed opposition, fighting against Mr Assad.
And now Iran has stepped up its game.
Its advisors had been in Syria from the start.
Now Lebanon's Hezbollah militia, backed by Tehran, joined the battle
on a key front line.
A few thousand Hezbollah fighters, well-armed, well-trained,
reinforced the Syrian Army.
The mission - to retake Qusayr,
a strategic border town on key supply routes.
They surrounded and pounded the rebel forces controlling the town.
FSA commander Colonel Okaidi set off with just 300 fighters to
relieve his beleaguered comrades.
Colonel Okaidi's men battled their way into Qusayr and found scenes of utter devastation.
In the end, the Colonel and his exhausted men pulled out on foot,
carrying as many wounded as they could.
Once a symbol of rebel resistance, Qusayr was now a symbol of retreat.
We drove into the town just hours after the Syrian Army claimed victory.
The city lies in ruin, the troops are everywhere.
They've retaken Qusayr.
Hezbollah fighters didn't hide their role in the victory.
The arrival of Hezbollah -
that was the turning point, and I remember General Idris saying,
"Everything has changed, we could beat the Syrian Army."
Their hearts are not in this, they're not well prepared.
It has all changed because the commanders now are Hezbollah.
The war entered a new phase.
Iran's growing sway in Syria alarmed its rivals in the region.
The Iranians mobilised militias out of Iraq,
Shia militias, and out of Pakistan and Afghanistan,
and so this ended up intensifying the war there.
Would you say that your main concern in Syria evolved not into worrying
about President Assad, but worrying about Iran's growing influence?
Well, Iran's growing influence in Syria is a function of Bashar al-Assad.
He's the one who opened the country to them.
Syria's war grew ever more tangled,
the human cost ever worse.
By the summer of 2013, 2 million Syrians had fled their country,
4 million more displaced inside.
It was the worst of all worlds.
We were doing just enough to keep the thing alive as a conflict.
Hundreds of thousands were dying,
millions beginning to be displaced, and we seemed to think that was OK.
And I'm reluctant to call it a strategy, but I'll grace it with that term.
This strategy we were applying, in a way, was quite clearly not working, and
our judgment was it wasn't going to work, and it was at that point
I said, in exasperation, look, if it goes on like this, I mean, people are dying
in the tens of thousands,
you know, it might be better, just better to think about it,
to let Assad win and put an end to all this.
And, of course, that was a complete no-no.
The centre of the capital, Damascus, was still in government hands.
But rebel groups were advancing from the outskirts.
And some of the heaviest fighting in this city since the uprising began.
By now, Artino was a photographer in the rebel enclave of Ghouta on
the edge of the capital.
One summer's night, he heard reports of a major attack.
It was crazy, because everyone's running, and people just keep coming.
At that time, we didn't know what's going on.
People are just, like, a lot of foams coming up from their mouths -
their eyeballs are going smaller and then they die.
CLAMOURING
And then I moved to the hospital.
I saw a lot of bodies. Most of them are children.
I still remember it, laying on the floor.
Artino filmed the unfolding tragedy.
I see them as children who's sleeping.
Their eyes are closed and they were wearing their pyjamas.
When I realised that they were not sleeping, it was a big shock for me.
I...I...I...
My camera fell out of my hand, and I start crying and shaking, because I couldn't handle the situation.
And I start to take pictures, and I felt like I'm going dizzy and my eyes were really going small.
And then I went down.
So you were also affected by the gas? I was affected by the gas.
But I was lucky enough that I was next to the doctor, so he gave me atropine.
I just, like, woke up.
I couldn't breathe. My cuts, you know, inside my throat and my eyes
were really hurting. I barely, could, like, really open my eyes.
The doctor told me that this is all evidence of
a sarin attack or a sarin gas.
Hundreds of people died.
Thousands were affected by the nerve agent sarin.
The finger of blame pointed at Syria's government.
They and their allies accused the rebels.
Some would say it wouldn't make sense for the rebels to use poison gases
in their own areas, where people, their families, where they live.
These are criminals.
They use them against their own people to say,
"Look, the government is using them."
We have never used chemical weapons even against terrorists.
I'm absolutely sure that they
do not have any motivation,
do not have any interest of using chemical weapons against opposition.
Intelligence indicated the Syrian government
had crossed President Obama's red line.
This kind of attack is a challenge to the world.
We cannot accept a world where women and children and innocent civilians
are gassed on a terrible scale.
Prime Minister David Cameron was one of the first to call for a military response.
He rushed to seek Parliamentary approval.
We were blindsided.
We did not know that the Prime Minister
was going to go to the Parliament.
He was surprised when I told him that we were going to do that,
but that is, in effect, the British constitution,
so this shouldn't have been a surprise for the United States,
given they have a large embassy here that knows how British politics work.
The ayes to the right, 272, the noes to the left, 285.
ALL: Yay!
But we certainly were surprised that once the Prime Minister
had made the decision to go, that he lost the vote.
Have you lost control, Prime Minister?
Well, that had a profound impact -
a profound impact, and the questions began to come at us -
"Oh, aren't you going to come to Congress?"
The world waited to see how President Obama would react
to this most brutal chemical attack in decades.
We bought fuel, we borrow a generator, we bought a TV.
I think it was more than 20 to 30 people sitting in one room.
My fellow Americans, tonight I want to talk to you about Syria.
We were hoping that action could stop and make a point,
and make a big statement to the regime, like, enough is enough.
We know the Assad regime was responsible.
However, over the last few days, we've seen some encouraging signs.
I have therefore asked the leaders of Congress to postpone a vote to
authorise the use of force while we pursue this diplomatic path.
We were like, "No way". We were like, "That's not possible".
Did he just said that he's not going to do anything?
We felt hopeless and we felt left behind.
Do you remember the moment? I slept peacefully.
They expected President Obama to bombard Syria.
I went to bed and slept until late in the day.
And why? Because I knew that he would not dare do such a thing.
I was in Washington.
We were stunned, because everything was in place.
We were talking to them about providing support and I think everybody was
surprised that the President did not respect the red line that he drew a
year earlier.
It was an opportunity for everybody to stand united
and to protect the civilians in Syria.
I think it was a turning point for everything.
But Washington was already talking to Moscow about a different way forward.
When I was asked, "Is there anything that Assad could do to avoid being bombed?"
I answered, "Yes, he could remove the chemical weapons from Syria."
And within hours,
Foreign Minister Lavrov of Russia and I were engaged in a discussion.
A deal was struck.
UN inspectors oversaw the destruction of Syria's declared chemical arsenal.
We removed 1,300 tonnes of chemical weapons,
all the declared weapons,
and President Obama accomplished the goal that he had set out to do,
and I think it's incredible that people say, "Oh, he should have bombed them anyway,"
and maybe gotten a lot less.
I mean, frankly, that's just plain stupid.
The policy was a failure. When the red line
incident came and went, I think we hoped for a moment
that maybe Assad would respect the norms,
respect the deal, but we got - within just a month or two, we got reports
that he was using chlorine gas again, so we hadn't gone very far at all.
CLAMOURING
I thought a line had been crossed where we had to take action.
After that point, we had almost no influence over the Syrian crisis.
It was as if we had walked away from it and slammed the door,
and said, "You can do what you want.
"You can kill as many people as you like with any weapons you like.
"There's nothing you can do to provoke us."
Gulf States and Turkey lost patience with the West.
Now, more than ever, they were ready to back whichever militias seemed to stand
the best chance of ousting the Syrian leader.
It was self-help. People decided,
"OK, we're going to take this into our own hands,"
and they began to make choices about who was getting support and how,
that was not helpful, and it had huge consequence, no question about it.
It was a war against Syria created by the intelligence circles in the West against the Syrian people.
They did not care for Syrian lives - they will pay for that.
Next time, the rise of extremism...
..and the human cost of this war.
I started to say some prayers - "God, please protect us."