For those who are wondering your edge router (or border router) "advertises" that it can route to a particular subnet. That information propagates around and packets find there way there. So someone in Syria told all of their border routers to stop advertising routes to Syria's IP blocks. Now the fun thing you can do is since they aren't advertising those routes, if you are sitting in a data center somewhere and have peering access and a ASIN id you can advertise those routes and all of Syria's traffic will start heading your way :-) Of course if that monitoring tool is still running it will have all these lines suddenly running off the screen toward your data center.
The traffic that is actually in Syria can't get out. So its not like you could snoop on Syria or anything.