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.
I disagree on one point. I don't think Turkey has territorial ambitions towards Syria. If anything they come across as one of the few actors that don't. To them the game is economic and political, but they don't need to annex territory to project power.
Yes, Turkey is a foreign instigator of the second civil war. But against whom? Assad and the SDF. Turkish troops haven't crossed the border and Turkey hasn't annexed territory. Even though Turkey has been bombing SDF positions, just by comparison to Israel the Turks come across as restrained.
Wether one sees Turkey's actions as legitimate or not is down to wether they see the new government as legitimate or not. So what happens should the new government objectively improve people's material conditions? The real hard part there is re-founding the Syrian state. If that is done, then there goes the sanctions and in comes the oil field revenues. That by itself goes a long way and who will have made that possible? Not Russia, not Iran, not the US but Turkey. Erdogan will be the one who rolled the dice, triggered Assad's ouster, and the pressed the US backed SDF into negotiations.
There are Turkish Nationalists online talking about annexing Aleppo or whatever. They don't matter. The Turkish State only cares about two things. The immediate survival of its current government by tackling the refugee crisis, and that the SDF does not remain/become a platform for kurdish nationalism. Turkey will be happy as long as Damascus recovers the northeast or, even better, the SDF withdraws from the arab majority areas and transitions into a sort of syrian version of the KRG. Turkey doesn't have to annex a single mile of territory to create a Syria that is very lucrative as a dependency for economic, military and diplomatic reasons. A cursory look into how things trucked onwards in Idlib and Afrin show that turkish companies were the ones supplying the populace there. A stable Syria would be that, just economically viable and much bigger.
The two objectives sort of feed into each other. Turkey wants a stable client in Damascus to feed its industry and so that the refugees have a place to return to. Those who do will end up being supporters of the new government if for no other reasons than they've consumed Turkish and European media for a decade + they were probably Assad detractors in the first place. The Israeli invasion and American support for the SDF makes Turkey look better by comparison.
Didn't they move in a couple years ago when Trump pulled out US troops in the north?
I think Turkey would be quite happy to carve off the north east of Syria to get rid of the Kurds and take over the oil infrastructure, probably less about oil revenue than denying the oil to anyone else.
The actual Turkish Army did move into Afrin years ago, yes. But there's only so much you can get away with now that Assad has fallen and the Syrians have a modicum of hope for the future. Israel gets to do a full invasion of Syria, the US gets to maintain their occupation of the oil fields and the Russians are trying to negotiate their way back in. But nobody wants to see the turkish army cross the border again.
Moving into northeastern Syria, occupying not only the Kurdish cities at the border - like Qamshli - but going deep into arab majority areas like Raqaa and Deir Ezzor would not only be a strategic disaster on Turkey's part, it would go against Erdogan's survival as a politician.
Turkey has faced a massive ethnic struggle due to the sheer number of syrian refugees that moved into the country, which 'masks' in some ways the also huge number of afghans that spilled over through Iran and towards Turkey as well. Half of the reason why the HTS offensive even happened is because Erdogan needed to have fewer arabs in his country, where the secular opposition adopted nationalist and straight up racist rethoric last election.
The economic incentives aren't there either. An occupation of these arab majority areas would be costly. The SDF is currently failing to build an amicable governance with the local tribes, Turkey would only have have greater difficulty than they do. It is much better for Turkey to sit back and let the SNA pressure the SDF into the negotiating table. That way the Turks get a more stable client in Damascus, don't worsen their image before the arab majority of the country, accomplish their objective of KRGifying the SDF, and still make a lot of profit from supplying Syria's reconstruction, its grocery markets, and from benefitting from future oil and gas pipelines.
Simply put, Turkey has no reason to go deep into Syria themselves when they can just support their allies.