Gamal Mansour is a Syrian-Palestinian who was forced to move to Canada in 2012, as the Syrian uprising was turning into a civil war.

Mansour is also a political scientist who is currently researching strategies that the business sector under the Assad regime employed so that they could remain autonomous from the state.

In this marathon three-hour conversation, Gamal Mansour and the host Ashfaaq Carim discuss the genesis of the Syrian uprising amidst the Arab Spring and how it turned into a civil war; what the impact and scale of the war was both in terms of human devastation and in terms of ideological impact it had in the West and the Arab world, as Europe and North America moved to the right and Islamic State was born; and how brutal and devastating Assad's tactics in the war were.

They try to make sense of all the conflicting voices that are clashing over what the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham liberation of Damascus means, and are critical of the reluctance amongst the anti-US-imperial left to embrace the new reality in Damascus as most Syrians are.