Sects and balances: a violent flare-up in Syria

单集文稿 ...

• 00:03

  THE Economist hello and welcome to the Intelligence from THE Economist.

• 00:13

  I'm Jason Palmer.

• 00:14

  And I'm Rosie Blore.

• 00:15

  Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the event shaping your world.

• 00:25

  For a long while,

• 00:26

  interest rates were so low that paying

• 00:28

  off a mortgage wasn't the smartest way to make your money work.

• 00:32

  But borrowing costs are rising and stock market yields are slowing.

• 00:36

  We go through the calculation homeowners should now be making.

• 00:41

  And businesses have long been jealous of the kinds of super sharp images that spy

• 00:45

  and military satellites take of Earth.

• 00:48

  Now some commercial operators are starting to take photos that are just as good and a lot cheaper.

• 01:01

  First up, though, since the fall of Bashar Al Assad's regime in December,

• 01:13

  a key question has been how the Alawites would figure into Syria's sectarian patchwork.

• 01:19

  It's an ethnic group that practices an offshoot of Shia Islam,

• 01:23

  a group that the Assads and their loyalists came from,

• 01:26

  one that held sway over Syria for more than half a century.

• 01:31

  Would the rest of the country now led by Ahmed Al Shara and his Sunni Islamist government,

• 01:36

  seek revenge on the Alawites for the crimes of a brutal civil war?

• 01:40

  Would the Alawites simply accept that their time in power, their self determination was over?

• 全部文稿