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.
Gotta wonder if they used some super illegal NSA type shit to ID him and then just waited for him to go somewhere public. Like for all we know the elderly customer who called in the tip could’ve been a fed or even totally fictional, just a reason for a bunch of cops to show up to McDonalds and arrest the guy.
I think people underestimate how powerful facial recognition technology has become.
In 2019, Chinese authorities caught Lao Rongzhi, the most notorious female serial killer in China who had been on the run for 20 years, based on a grainy security camera footage and her much younger photographs from the 1980s alone, with a confidence of 97% similarity. That’s China with more than one billion people. It wouldn’t be hard at all with the technologies these days.
But how many false positives did that same system throw up? Just because they did eventually catch one person doesn’t mean the tech really made much difference if they still had to interview a thousand suspects in the process.
It was part of Operation Cloud Sword, the Chinese government’s initiative to leverage Big Data to catch criminal elements.
According to Chinese media (Xiamen police), she showed up at a mall on November 27, they caught her on November 28. Less than 24 hours. The facial recognition algorithm spat out a 97.33% similarity:
But yes there are false positives, it was the matching DNA samples that convicted her. But Chinese authorities have claimed that to date, they have already prosecuted hundreds of thousands of criminals through the assistance of Operation Cloud Sword.
So, up to how much you want to take them at their word.
Yeah, agencies will point to facial recognition even though it’s absolutely shocking for the use case of “compare every face on every camera to every database entry”, to hide the real mechanism used
That’s the first time I have ever read those three words together.
They’re certainly a lot less common, but they pop up from time to time. There was that British nurse, and there was one Norwegian-American woman who killed a bunch of dudes in Indiana around from the 1880s through the early 1900s.
One of Colombia’s worst serial killers was a woman, too.
i just watched the movie deja vu, in which the govt has developed technology that allows them to look back in time 4 days 6 hours. thompson was killed about 5 days ago…
at first when i read about how much evidence he had on him when they picked him up i figured it had to be a total stitch-up but after learning about the guy it does seem like it’s probably him. i have to imagine he just didn’t want to be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life. otherwise i don’t know why he wouldn’t have just disappeared to some non-extradition country and worked at a hostel or whatever forever, especially knowing that he seems to have come from enough money for that to be a possibility.
knowing what we know about him makes all those takes about how it had to be a hitman or at least some ex special forces guy even funnier. turns out it’s actually not that hard to kill someone with a gun
This is my take on it, I think they were using every trick in the book to find this guy. The other theory that this is not the guy is probable too though…
Nah, the super nsa shit mostly doesn’t work. A tip is a lot more plausible.
Some folks are speculating he got dinged using a fake id or a stolen credit card and it was just dumb luck for the cops to get him.