The war in Sudan has so far been marked by a lot of incompetency and mismanagement by government forces (the SAF). After months of bitter fighting, in late 2023, the opposing Rapid Support Forces suddenly expanded their control towards the southeast of Khartoum after not a lot of resistance, most notably taking the city of Wad Madani. This led the SAF supporters and officials to panic and point fingers at each other about what the hell the army is even doing, while RSF soldiers looted the city.
These victories led to a short period in late December and early January where diplomacy and peace talks were considered, but such attempts fell apart. The leader of the RSF visited various African countries, including meeting Paul Kagame in Rwanda, to boost his legitimacy. Then, the RSF attacked into South Kordofan and consolidated their hold on other areas.
The Sudanese capital of Khartoum sits on a river which divides it from the city to its west, Omdurman (see the post image). The SAF and RSF have been fighting over this grand urban area for the whole war, with the RSF holding most of Khartoum (with an entirely cut-off SAF force holding on in the center), with a similarly cut-off SAF force also in eastern Omdurman, up against the river. For 10 months, this force has been under siege - but no longer. In perhaps the first actual W of the war for the SAF, they finally managed to break the siege a week ago, pouring supplies in. This leaves a section of the RSF now cut off, though Omdurman is still not under full SAF control (and, who knows, the whole situation could once again go badly for the SAF).
Meanwhile, the Sudanese socioeconomic situation has completely collapsed, with potentially a 20% fall in GDP and 8 million people displaced, with 2 million from Khartoum alone. 18 million Sudanese, or about a third of the population, is in acute hunger, and 20 million children are out in school. The refugees streaming out of the country are causing knock-on effects in neighorboring countries like Chad. Nobody is even really counting the dead anymore.
Red is the government forces, the SAF. Blue is the RSF opposition. Other colours are various factions.
The Country of the Week is Sudan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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 daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
will the US have mandatory conscription soon? it just feels like tensions are ratcheting up globally and US leaders are realizing they cant fight all these wars with a volunteer army
Nah we will use proxies and auxiliaries first. Ukrainians, Taiwanese, Sunni extremists, Poles, Baltic states, Albanians, Israelis, mercenary groups, compradors and criminals, etc.
America wants to be the backbone structure, the weapons and ammo provider & the intel support for their axis. They don’t want to be the frontline meat shields, that’s proxy work.
I still think we’re in the era of the US forcing the people of other countries to die on its behalf. Idk I feel like the only thing that would change that might be a hot war with China tbh
As zed said, the US is out sourcing military service to the periphery and to proxies. Conscription would be too destabilizing inside the core. Better to just make money off of failure to win wars.
I wonder if any large empire that collapsed in history also outsourced its military might to auxiliaries from allied states? :thonk-rome:
I honestly doubt it because I don't think the US (or most Western countries for that matter) even really have the capacity anymore to send enough troops abroad with all associated equipment and supply lines to make conscription something that could be supported versus the cost of having an increasingly unhappy population. Even with a hot war with China - what, are we doing amphibious assaults on the shores of Shanghai? Where's the angle of approach there? Feels like you're either talking about Southeast Asia (Vietnam 2.0? Myanmar?) or getting right in the middle of the Russia-Iran-China region and going through Tajikistan or something, through mountains and deserts. If you try the amphibious approach, at some point you run out of boats because the US can't industrialize fast enough and then you're just cooked.
Fundamentally I just don't know how conscription can really function in deeply neoliberalized, financialized economies, when you start getting into the logistics of it all. It would necessitate a dramatic shift towards reindustrialization and non-neoclassical economics that we saw in WW1, but I don't know if it can happen again. Israel is famously a country where many civilians enter military service, and what has it gotten them? Their army fucking sucks. They're still quaking too hard in their little booties to take on Hezbollah, and China and Russia are orders of magnitude stronger than Hezbollah, obviously.
So I think we're just gonna have terrorist groups and mercenaries doing the ground combat while the West tries to use their aircraft to support them, with mostly unimpressive results. Some countries might be couped and their populations thrown into battle against the US's enemies in the hopes that the Russians and Chinese run out bullets before those countries run out of bodies to throw at them, as Ukraine is going and likely how Taiwan would go, but the US itself? Probably not.
Adding on to what others said, PMC
Karensmercenaries are also an option. Have your tacticool spec ops guys join up to advise and oversee the death squads around the world. They'll try to be like Wagner group but be worse in multiple definitions of that word.IMO there'd be serious rebellion. Even those who cheer on the empire's foreign escapades from their armchairs have had a lifetime (plus) to get used to the condition of not being forced themselves to go die for it. If the U.S. were going to bring back the draft, they would've had to do it in the sweet spot between when the anger over Vietnam died down and when people grew to expect that there's no real such thing as a draft anymore, plus just after a manufactured war outrage. So IDK maybe just after 9/11 they would've gotten away with it.