Image is of Assad and his family.
After less than two weeks of retreating with few shots fired and little resistance, the SAA has retreated into, well, a state of non-existence. This thereby ends a conflict that has been simmering for over a decade. With the end of this conflict, another begins: the carving up of what used to be Syria between Israel and Turkey, with perhaps the odd Syrian faction getting a rump state here and there. Both Israel and Turkey have begun military operations, with Israel working on expanding their territory in Syria and bombing military bases to ensure as little resistance as possible.
Israeli success in Syria is interesting to contrast against their failures in Gaza and Lebanon. A short time ago, Israel failed to make significant territorial progress in Lebanon due to Hezbollah's resistance despite the heavy hits they had recently taken, and was forced into a ceasefire with little to show for the manpower and equipment lost and the settlers displaced. The war with Lebanon was fast, but still slow enough to allow a degree of analysis and prediction. In contrast, the sheer speed of Syria's collapse has made analysis near-impossible beyond obvious statements like "this is bad" and "Assad is fucking up"; by the time a major Syrian city had fallen, you barely had time to digest the implications before the next one was under threat.
There is still too much that we don't know about the potential responses (and non-responses) of other countries in the region - Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Russia, for example. I think that this week and the next will see a lot of statements made by various parties and an elucidation of how the conflict will progress. The only thing that seems clear is that we are in the next stage of the conflict, and perhaps have been, in retrospect, since Nasrallah's assassination. This stage has been and will be far more chaotic as the damage to Israel compounds and they are willing to take greater and greater risks to stay in power. It will also involve Israel causing destruction all throughout the region, rather than mostly localizing it in Gaza and southern Lebanon. Successful gambles like with Syria may or may not outweigh the unsuccessful ones like with Lebanon. This is a similar road to the one apartheid South Africa took, but there are also too many differences to say if the destination will be the same.
What is certain is that Assad's time in power can be summarized as a failure, both to be an effective leader and to create positive economic conditions. His policies were actively harmful to internal stability for no real payoff and by the end, all goodwill had been fully depleted. By the end, the SAA did not fight back; not because of some wunderwaffen on the side of HST, but because there was nothing to fight for, and internal cohesion rapidly disintegrated.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
There's a psychological operation going on on TikTok and probably other social media where people are portraying Syria as some time of heaven now
I haven't seen anything this coordinated since the attempted color revolution on China via HK
The HTS rebranding from Al-Qaeda 2.0 to "moderate rebels" has been wild to watch. Even when they started their offensive on Aleppo, they were doing the usual fire burning/worshiping propaganda and the usual Salafist nonsense. I'm guessing that their backers told them stop stop that quickly.
Unrelated, but the other psy op convincing Americans that cargo/passenger planes and helicopters are actually UFOs or Iranian drones is also going wild. Americans have started pointing lasers at FedEx courier aircraft and C-17 military transport aircraft. Pilots are having to make public social media posts begging some fool in New Jersey not to blind them with lasers.
Smartphones were a mistake.
I think one of the craziest things about this is that it was like... maybe a year ago when the US was firing multiple missiles at every fucking hobbyist balloon in its airspace because of a made-up "Chinese spy balloon" angle. The US military would have shot these down in an instant if they were from Iran or whatever. They could have a child operating them, and the US government would have blown them up without a second thought if they were Russian/Chinese/Iranian. They are passing the defense budget right now, and it is pretty fucking obvious this is just to gin up fear and/or invite a closed "investigation" in congress to try and get congress to fund (and inside-trade investment) in some kind of boondoggle defense project
The chickens coming home to roost but in the stupidest way possible.
The next 9/11 being caused by some dipshit in NJ with a laser pointer wasn't on my bingo card but now I'm just thinking what a great episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force this would make
I saw one video yesterday that was like “UFO over New Jersey evades F-15 at extreme speeds!” And it was literally a video of a plane high in the sky and then the drone, much closer to the ground, just moving, unrelated
the us shooting down an american plane flying in american airspace would be extremely funny, not the tragic loss of life of the immediate citizens and more of commentary on how deeply gungho, paranoid, and willing the american government is willing to kill anything that may hint towards being OPFOR
Careful with the lathe or they might just use it as a new Tonkin incident and start WW3
Did you miss the Ukraine propaganda from 2022?
that is probably the thing that fucking catapulted me firmly into no longer believe the western media uncritically forever, when zelensky said all the dudes on snake island were dead, and the RU navy said they were alive - and then they showed up alive a couple months later.
fuck reddit, it's front page is an complete ecosystem and space to uncritically circulate western propaganda to advance their interest around the globe
Got a source or example for what you've been seeing?
I've seen a lot of surprising discussions/takes on social media, and the vibe has been strange. For me, the news about Syria has been really hard to follow and understand, and even when I think I have an OK handle on things, I still see a lot of posts on IG or elsewhere that really throw me off. Like, I've seen a few consistently pro-Resistance accounts I follow on IG start calling people out for "abandoning Palestine" or being "Assadists" for being weary or critical about the dissolution of Syrian gov't by HTS and co. That stuff feels weird and wrong, but when I'm unsure of my own understanding of the news, I don't know if it really is super weird or wrong.
Obviously, now is a great time for the empire to be doing psyops. They want to write the story about what's happening in Syria. And with new fractures in the Resistance Axis, they want to create deeper fractures in international support for the Resistance.
TRT World propaganda: man says that everyone is free and that the current regime no longer exists. Camera pans to women of various ages crying and running out of a room. Camera is extremely shaky.
Various TikTok propaganda: young men and women either showing off how cool and great it is in Syria right now or alleged Syrians living abroad saying that now they can go back to Syria. Commenters, usually supporting the regime change, often have a Palestinian flag in their username.
i don't think it's **all **a psych operation, but there are absolutely ~~very likely there very much~~ agents with malice intent tipping the scale to chaos, but it is taking advantage of the fact that the pro pal factions are composed of people with different material upbringings, ideologies and etc
it may not even be just individual agents, they may have primed the contradictory pro pal influencers via institutions like legacy news outlets over many years to be receptive to cues expressed ongoing right now. the analogy i am thinking of is that we are playing a card game and, our opponent is the house - there are probably some subtle ways they have tweeked our surrounding institutions to be aligned with their interests.
i think and this is speculative, that people will default to material conditions, imo the arabs and general people of these regions are no different than the north americans in the sense that they will resort to what they perceived will grant them better living conditions or aligning themselves to their respective religious denominations/ ideologies in some sort of dynamic similar to a gang.
there is this book maus which i will paraphrase to this situation, that you don't always necessarily "level up" and learn something from suffering, the only sure thing is that you suffer. that said the pro pal accounts are not homogeneous, and they all have different material conditions and many strains of thought.
Think about how the communist and anarchist combat each other and then within those ideologies there are many different strains within those ideologies, probably something similar with the people of these region.
probably feels weird because it suppose to be thought terminating word, like when people use the word terrorists. sometime the word actually means what it means, but more often the case it is just suppose to make you side with the speaker and shutdown all conversation
but all speculation at the end of the day, gotta get out there and do something
syria under the governance of HTS right?
they govern idlib under a iron fist according to a CSIS press debrief, some prisoners died under custody which caused protests against their authority.
Sednaya prison, the one the west and hts alligned syrian hailed as the catalyst for rebellion, will most likely not stay empty for long. maybe the slightly less over crowded than before but it is early into their governance of these new areas.
Yup, it was fed to me on TikTok
Shocking that TRT World is supporting the narrative. I always thought it was Russia-controlled media due to their coverage on Palestine but apparently it's controlled opposition
Edit: I did one second of research, they're Turkish state media
Can’t trust anything mainstream out of Turkey, Qatar, UAE or Saudis on Syria or any Middle East politics aside from Palestine reporting
And even then, a lot of their Palestine reporting is just atrocity porn and hyping up a ceasefire that will never happen.
Trt, Middle East eye, many such cases