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.
Gotta give myself and @MarmiteLover123@hexbear.net a big pat on the back for correctly dooming from the start, we were the only megaheads that got the Afghanistan-scenario prediction correctly.
By the time Aleppo completely fell, which had never happened before, and the SAA abandoned/donated half their equipment to HTS on the withdrawal to Hama, the writing was on the wall.
The biggest surprise was Hama holding out for a few days, and it appears that only happend to buy time for Russia, Iran, and Assad government elites to negotiate their withdrawal. Then we got the worst "counter-offensive" in history by the SAA, when everyone was wondering if HTS was overstretched, it was actually the SAA overstretching themselves and having the other half of their equipment captured by HTS. Made the infamous Ukrainian "counter-offensive" look like a 10/10 military operation by comparison.
Then there was the cope about paratroopers going to save Hama and Homs in an attack that never materialised, then cope that Iran would intervene somehow, then the Syrian minister of defence turning into Baghdad Bob with his ridiculous speeches and statements.
Then we had the rebels take all the provincial capitals, and the evacuation flights started taking place. Damascus finally falls, the last plane out of Damascus disappears from radar (wonder what happened to it, Assad wasn't on it most likely, but did it crash, did it jam it's transponder, was it shot down, who knows), the US starts watching all of this with their spy planes, Iran flies every evacuation flight to Latakia over Al Tanf airspace, in what appears to be some kind of negotiated withdrawal and safety for these flights.
Then Israel invades the Golan (I know I'm a broken record at this point, but Jolani giving the Jolan to Israel is just something out of a Sacha Baron Cohen film), Israel bombs all the leftover equipment from the SAA, Netanyahu makes another unhinged speech, and now we learn Assad's family have asylum in Moscow. Not even the UAE would take him.
It's been a long week...
It was over when Muqtada Al Sadr got the Iraqi shia to back down. If his party doesn't come into power soon, Iraq will also flip.
Bittersweet, but I'm glad that you two were at least doing the sort of material analysis that a lot of people who were calling you "doomers" seemed to forget that we are supposed to be doing, and get to be acquitted from that charge. I screenshotted a lot of people who were taking victory laps against the "doomers" a little over 24 hours ago.
Screenshotting your posting enemies is cringe, even if you were right
Screenshotting your enemies is cringe but screenshotting your wins is chad
deleted by creator
Calling people "doomers" and doing victory laps on them 24 hours before Assad falls, especially when you are doing zero material analysis yourself, is what's cringe.
Two wrongs
All the cool takes get deleted by the leadership so might as well win the argument in your head.
You know I kind of agree this is petty, but I respect this and support you to some extent only because I understand it.
Day one of that piece of shit garbage communist meets Hitler one month after Oct 7th and all I had for my bad reaction is a bunch of China hardliners with no rethoric but "trust the plan" and "its just diplomacy". Not only China did it again almost exactly 1 year later but as I feared from the start without the prospect of a real conflict and pressure on the US from the top we're all worse off. The whole China-Saudi Arabia cozying up shit is just chefs kiss.
You know whats funny? All those earlier analysis that the US just wanted to isolate Russia and China(and failed) I'm just scared to think of the consequences of Russia accepting an Ukraine peace deal now for whatever dumb reason. If Russia chose DPRK and not China as their ally(military ally not we do business shit "ally"), yikes.
IMO its all interconnected, China doesn't want to take the fight abroad, minimal interference and they could have kept the US fighting Iran/Russia for years to come.
I always said I don't think China will fight for Taiwan right now(this war is a meme imo) but I'm it does happen it will only prove all this US cooperation shit definitely did not "buy" any time at all, instead its pretty obvious the intellectual and ideological brain rot of dengism dropping the mask. God I hope that wont be the case, but I'm not going to pretend to be surprised.
I realy realy don't want this site to be reduced to a bunch of "told you so!" petty battles, but god if the entire BRICS grifting on western social media since 2022 transformed support to China to uncritical support to literaly anything China does even as Chinese self-centered nationalism starts showing its double face towards the global south.
I don't think many people have a problem with the material analysis, especially not from from LargePenis. The dooming I had been bitching about was more towards the people coming in and posting 1-2 sentences about how it's so over, the resistance is dead, etc.
I will say that I've probably been overly optimistic in response. It just sucks when the dooming is true
I wanna see if I'm part of mkultrawide cringe list or mkultrawide based list.
Honestly, I don't really want to do it or specifically call anyone out. I was emotional myself when I took them. It was wild to me, given the news that was coming out of Syria, that members of this community were doing their best Baghdad Bob impressions on Friday night/Saturday morning. I was also upset that people like LargePenis and Marmite were being called doomers or even "Islamists/HTS supporters" for actually trying to gather and analyze news by people who had no actual support to base their opinions on.
I'm not going to lie, I've been kind of upset with how this community has dealt with negative news about the Resistance, and I have meant it when I said that it's felt like some people here have forgotten what the "critical" part of "critical support" is supposed to mean. It would be one thing if it was just HTS/NATO-sources that were posting bad news, and Resistance and third-party sources were posting good evidence countering that, but that isn't what happened. We had a lot of different camps, including sources this mega has deemed reliable earlier in the week, reporting similarly about the collapse of the SAA, and it felt like this mega was sitting around waiting for the the Syrian government to come out with an official statement saying "we give up, our military is trash" before it would even weigh the possibility that things were trending in a bad direction for the Resistance.
I'm trying to give everyone some grace here, I realize that no one is happy about what has happened and it's an emotional time. I'm certainly not happy about what happened, and I don't have any expectations of HTS being anything but NATO dogs. But I am hoping that this community can take a step back and look at how we are digesting the news and maybe stop calling anyone who is, through good faith, coming to conclusions we don't want to see happen, a doomer.
This mega has a very annoying bloomer-doomer dynamic going on right now. And a big part of the reason why is that shithead Boredom/Halloweenbean pushing people's buttons and poisoning the well of people with more pessimistic analysis. And they got banned from a comment in some different comm so it's not even a case of them getting banned here for being a doomer. They just suck.
I think both doomers and bloomers need to follow more fronts and not hyperfocus on a particular front no matter how significant it is from a geopolitical point of view. Every front will sooner or later face setbacks, and your entire worldview shouldn't just shatter based on a setback or even a defeat, or for that matter, you shouldn't parade about the inevitable defeat of imperialism just because a particular front has a string of W's. It's becomes larp if you, for example, follow the Russian campaign so closely that you start to have strongly held opinions on what armored division should do what and malding that the Russian MoD hasn't telepathically received your 200+ IQ marching orders. That's why I pretty much ignored comments on the Russian invasion. It's literally just people discussing random villages that they can't even pronounce and having strongly held opinions about this or that armored division. It gives off the exact energy as those weirdos who memorize entire Soviet armored divisions during WWII right down to the name of the tank commander for each armored division. It is enough of me to know that Ukraine is not going to accomplish its political objectives of getting Crimea back and getting its other oblasts back.
Not hyperfocusing on a particular front also makes your analysis stronger by taking different fronts on their own terms and not trying to lazily shove the analysis of your pet front into different fronts that have nothing in common with it. I've read so many garbage takes here and elsewhere trying to compare Russia and Ukraine to the Mainland and Taiwan. You have some libs trying to compare Taiwan to Crimea while most people, both pro- and anti-Russia, try to fit the Ukraine peg into the Taiwan hole. They literally have nothing in common with one another, and I would go so far as to say that if you memory wipe someone's brain so that anything tangentially related to Russia and Ukraine is deleted from their head, it wouldn't affect their analysis of Taiwan an iota. It probably would make their analysis stronger if anything since they would finally take the geopolitical situation on its own terms.
...He was right though. This is why I just lurk and only post during cool zone events, he was right which made the people who believed in the tank bowl super mad. Every time I hear "believe in the resistance", I think of a basketball team losing on purpose because they think they are inevitably going to win a title 8 years from now.
Uh huh. Very curious that you would know their choice of pronouns when both of their accounts just had none/use name flair, the default pronoun flair. Do you happen to know Boredom/Halloweenbean on a personal level or something?
Removed by mod
Awfully touchy about a total stranger you've never met before, are we?
deleted by creator
Respect your analysis and always have. I am curious to see how this affects the chud-cuck rankings though now that the lion has been tamed.
Mostly, I hope that you and yours are safe.
Chud-cuck ranking is being written right now, it's a full breakdown of all 14 years of the war. Thank you for the well wishes my friend.
I always try to keep a 'wait and see'-approach but you were right about the assassination of Nasrallah and you were right about Syria.
It makes sense, unlike most of us, you actually know the region intimately. There's good reason to take seriously your insights, particularly when it comes to the region in question. Your contributions to the news mega are invaluable if you ask me.
Alright, enough with the glazing. Like kittin said, hope you and yours are safe.
“No investigation, no right to speak” fans stay winning.
I didn't think they'd fully take Aleppo in a month, let alone the whole country in an afternoon
Removed by mod
Honestly kiss my ass, we all know that HTS is fucking trash, but one can still be moderately happy about Assad and his murderous government eating shit.
Removed by mod
Lmao okay
This attitude you have here (and below when you say they Kurds are gonna get what they deserve for being anti-Assad) is such an American attitude. You get to righteously watch from the sidelines while others suffer, secure that you (safe online and unaffected) were on the right side of things and they were not so they deserve their suffering. It's nearly indistinguishable from Democrats talking to racialized minorities after they lost the election.
Your editorializing doesn't do your argument any favors. I stated what they did and what happened because of it. You bring your moralizing about deserving and not deserving, I'm not interested in this sort of analysis. Everyone deserves to be liberated, everyone deserves to be safe and secure, but none of that matters. Everyone also knows the saying about being friends with the US is worse than being their enemy.
What everyone in any similar situation is going through is terrible, and just like I don't want to cheer salafists on because Assad wasn't good, I don't want to cheer the Turks against Kurdish people because the US is bad and the SDF is their proxy. It isn't about deserving anything, but what is happening is certainly the results of a lot of actions that those same people have taken, or not taken.
Of course it is easier to consider and comment on from the sidelines, you're on the news thread of hexbear.net, what else do to think is going on here
deleted by creator