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.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
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.
Israel couldn’t help it. All they had to do was play ball with a NATO backed goverment. HTS had been going out of its way to say they had no problems with Israel and were anti Hezbollah/Iran. But no, the Israelis just had to do a shameless landgrab and bomb the shit out of Syria instead.
No future government of Syria can exist without military infrastructure. And now Russia is back into play as the only actor that can make that a reality. I’m sure nobody in Washington will blame Israel for this though.
Jimmy Carter Has Outlived United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson - r/JimmyCarterAliveCheck
Some pretty wild footage. The prison Luigi is being held at has the inmates in uproar, and they basically do a live television interview about Luigi’s prison conditions. The news anchor is able to interview inmates live because they’re just shouting across the fence; lots of chants of “Free Luigi.” Luigi is probably already 50% of the way there to leading a prison riot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCml-w9MQ7Y
ToI journalist hypothesizing
A pretty hopeless post by Yves on NakedCapitalism
One detail of the CEO killing I haven’t seen discussed much: he was walking to the hotel where the company event was being hosted… from the different hotel he was staying in across the street.
If he just stayed in the same hotel as the event, this wouldn’t have happened. What’s the point in using two different hotels in the first place?
I wonder if companies will start making sure their executives stay in the same building as the events they’re attending.
International Torture Watchdog: Danish Immigration Detention Facility “Resembles A Prison”
Denmark’s infamous Ellebæk Immigration Detention Facility has come under fire from the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) for maintaining “prison-like conditions.”
The center features barred windows, locked sections, and officers equipped with handcuffs and pepper spray. However, the residents are not criminals.
“Such conditions are unacceptable, as the foreign nationals detained at Ellebæk are neither suspected of crimes nor serving sentences,” states a new CPT report.
Independent human rights organization Dignity agrees with the criticism.
“These are several points of concern that we believe Denmark should take seriously,” said senior advisor Elna Søndergaard, urging Denmark’s anti-refugee regime to change course.
Ellebæk houses refugees who have been denied asylum by the Nordic hermit kingdom’s notoriously restrictive and racist asylum system and who the regime is unable to deport by force. The regime claims the refugees “refuse to return home” but many of them fear for their lives if they go back.
The Danish asylum system uses punitive measures such as so-called “detention to encourage compliance”, prison-like confinement intended to make life so unbearable for refugees that they would rather return home to an uncertain fate than stay.
- Source: DR (state media), December 12th 2024
So some psycho on Al Jazeera called for mass beheadings and asked “why don’t Shia go to the coast”
The Council of the European Union approved the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to Schengen from January 1. Both countries joined the EU 18 years ago.
gukesh wins, ding loses https://www.chess.com/news/view/fide-world-chess-championship-2024-game-14
Lula undergoes procedure to prevent new bleeding in the head and is now awake, says doctor
Lula underwent emergency surgery on Tuesday to drain a hematoma on his head and has now undergone embolization. According to the doctors, he will not suffer any sequelae. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva underwent a medical procedure on Thursday morning (12) to prevent further bleeding in his head.
“The procedure has just finished, it was successful, [we] managed to embolize that artery. (…) The president is awake and talking,” said doctor Roberto Kalil after the procedure, which began at around 7:10 am and lasted less than an hour. At 10am, the medical team will give an interview to the press.
The technique is not considered a surgery, but an “endovascular procedure (embolization of the middle meningeal artery)” and will not influence his expected discharge from the ICU, which should be this Thursday. The intervention is part of the post-surgical protocol. The 79-year-old PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores - Workers’ Party) leader underwent emergency surgery in the early hours of Tuesday to drain a hematoma on his head - still as a result of the fall he suffered in his bathroom in October.
Trump invites China’s Xi Jinping to inauguration
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-invites-china-xi-jinping-inauguration/
cursed lathe
Xi attends. The MAGA communism shit head gets invited and has a meeting with the two.
HTS fighter gives ‘brotherly advice’, asking me to wear headscarf - BBC
spoiler
On our way to Damascus’ main Umayyad Square, I meet Abul Hammam, a Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) fighter, and his cousin Mohammad.
They hug each other tightly, meeting after 15 years apart.
Abul Hammam, 30, originally from Damascus, says he was fighting in Aleppo for years at the beginning of the Syrian revolution where he joined HTS. He has been in Azerbaijan for some years.
I speak to him in Azeri a little.
“Your name is Arabic but you are not Arab. Where are you from?” he asks me.
I cautiously tell him that I am originally from Iran’s West Azerbaijan.
He smiles, saying: “Many of our ancestors are from Balkan and old Soviet Union countries near Iran. I like Iranian people but not the regime. We fought with them.”
He goes on to ask me whether I am a Christian – I smile, trying to avoid talking about religion. He continues: “May I give you a brotherly nice advice? Do you have headscarf?”
I say yes I have it with me.
“I think you will be nicer if you wear it as a Muslim woman,” he says.
Out of respect and for security reasons I take my headscarf and cover a part of my hair similar to how I would wear it in Iran.
“If you bring it further and cover all, it will [be] much better,” Hammam adds.
A little news and combat footage from the Donbass and Kursk oblast.
This news article discusses Russian forces’ recent advances and includes a big collection of combat footage videos (some are 18+): https://southfront.press/ukraine-faces-the-loss-of-five-cities-russias-offensive-gains-momentum/
Racist, British imperialist disinformation about “North Korean soldiers in Kursk” was exposed as laughable fake news: https://odysee.com/@RT:fd/DMNK:3
Some Syria news for today.
The big news of the day is that former officers and soldiers of the Syrian Arab Army’s 25th Special Mission Forces Division (Tiger Forces) are organizing in the coastal, mountainous areas near Lebanon and have vowed to continue fighting against the Western-backed terrorists. The announcement is very reminiscent of how Green resistance forces continued fighting against Western-backed terrorists in Libya for many years after NATO destroyed the Jamahiriya: https://x.com/Megatron_ron/status/1866927900886467014
Iranian Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei stated, “The more they fight the resistance, the wider its front will be, and it will be stronger and include the entire region … America is trying to establish a foothold in the region, but it will not achieve its goals, and the resistance front will expel the Americans from the region”: https://thecradle.co/articles/fall-of-syria-planned-in-us-israeli-war-rooms-khamenei
Turkish-backed “SNA” and al-Queda “HTS” forces captured the eastern Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor from Washington’s “SDF” proxies: https://sputnikglobe.com/20241211/what-is-the-strategic-importance-of-deir-ez-zor-and-could-it-cause-new-kurdish-syrian-conflict-1121150295.html
Traitorous elements controlling Syria’s Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party announced the suspension of the party’s activities: https://tass.com/world/1886169
The Western-backed terrorist onslaught has now displaced over one million Syrians: https://tass.com/world/1886137
