Pepe Escobar, Zulfiqar Ali: 25 Years of War on Terror; Both OIL Chokepoints Are Gone; 9/11 WAR Ends in IRAN

by Transition Protocol(opens in new tab) [9-12-2026] Pepe Escobar(bio)(opens in new tab).

Twenty-five years to the day after 9/11, both of the world’s great oil chokepoints are outside Western control — and one of them fell this week.

Pepe Escobar joins Transition Protocol from Moscow to trace the whole arc: what the world looked like in 2001, what was already planned before the attacks, and how a quarter century of war ended with the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandeb in the hands of the powers that war was aimed at.

Escobar conducted the last interview with Ahmad Shah Massoud in the Panjshir Valley in August 2001, three weeks before Massoud was assassinated. On 31 August 2001 he reported the American plan to send a commando into Kandahar to seize Osama bin Laden, and Pervez Musharraf’s refusal to allow it. In December 2001 he was on the ridgeline at Tora Bora when Afghan commanders told him the Americans were bombing the wrong mountains.

In this episode he connects that first-hand record to the present: the Cheney energy maps of early 2001, the seven-country plan, the Shanghai Five founded three months before the attacks, Yevgeny Primakov and the real origins of BRICS, Camp Bucca and the incubation of ISIS, Kabul 2021, and the war against Iran.

In the final section, host Zulfiqar Ali reports what Transition Protocol was told today about a meeting in Oman — a proposed safe-passage corridor running from the Strait of Hormuz to the Arabian Sea, Monday’s GCC session, and what Iran has done to monitoring at its nuclear facilities.

Note on sourcing: this episode contains a mix of established fact, first-person reporting, source-based claims that have not been independently confirmed, and analysis. Each is identified on screen where it appears. Where we are relying on a single source, we say so.