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.
There is some twitter speculation pisrael will strike iran nuclear sites. Will
irgc wake up? who knows
Well all the air defences over Syria are down, the Israeli Air Force can just cruise up to Iran with fuel tanker planes, drones and all. Israel dropped 1800 munitions in 500 strikes over a period of 72 hours, almost no air defence systems are left. The S-200s are destroyed, and Russia would've pulled back their S-300s that they allowed the SAA to use to Latakia. Iranian S-300s, along with their early warning radars, got hit by Israel's last two attacks. The highway to Iran is open and freshly paved, so to speak, such a situation may never happen again, it's the best opportunity Israel has ever had to conduct such an attack. If they actually do it, who knows at this point, the world is upside down and inside out right now.
An ex Israeli Air Force pilot spells it all out here, unfortunately he's right
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There is iraq still. And hypothetically, sam depletion via drones for iran is perfectly valid tactic. But they be libbing around. I do wonder what they expect to happen, when they don't do anything visible, and lib opposition can legitimately ask what are we doing this (army, support for militias etc) for?
Does Iraq even control their own airspace, or is it controlled by the USA occupation?
In the realm of asking nicely i think, but diplomatically it's very vassal looking to not protest. Not that that would stop entity, but might make iraq slightly mad.
The biggest fear i have is that pezeshkian will announce on jan 21th that "we were talking to our partners in europe, and what do you know, they got our nose again, we need to mobilize".
Golden Horizon air launched ballistic missile booster stages have been found in the Iraqi countryside after being jettisoned by the missiles, so I don't think Israel really cares what Iraq thinks. They've already used their airspace in the past, even if the missiles were launched from Jordan or eastern Israel, they still flew over Iraq.
I think Israel certainly has the capability to hit Iran and hit very hard, but I also think what gets left out is just how much firepower Iran and Hezbollah have to hit back. Hezbollah never even used their absolute best stuff over the last year. And Iran showed they can get past Israel’s defensive systems. Based on simple geography (Israel is small and everything is concentrated in certain areas) as well as psychology, I doubt Israel has an ability to “take a punch” as well as Iran can.
hezbollah didn't use that firepower when beirut was bombed cause they are so considerate?
seems at least very debatable. Iran maybe can, but, again, seems either under delusion of talks or they can't actually.
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There is satellite imagery of the early warning radars damaged from the October attack, and satellite imagery of an S-300 radar being taken out in April. There were geolocated photographs showing fires/explosions at suspected S-300 and HAWK air defence sites in Tehran. I have posted all of this before on another account, I'll dig it up tomorrow if you want the evidence. The were also Iranian military casualties from the October attack. You are not going to get more evidence than that, what are you expecting, Iran to hold a press conference and saying: "yes our radars and air defence systems got hit". Such a thing will never happen, no one is going to publicly confirm losses like that.
First i get accused of posting NATO propaganda for a whole week for making the correct assesment that the SAA and Assad's government were in a very bad position, now I get told I'm from a government agency? I mean what must I do, I'm posting based on the information that is publicly available, and giving opinions from there. Must I ignore information that is considered bad for the side we support and not report on it? That would lead to misinformed opinions.
Ghadir early warning radars hit on October
Twitter source
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And no, it's not because of shadows.
S-300 radar vehicle hit during April
HAWK air defence site in Tehran location on fire during October
Kahrizak air defense base on fire/explosion in Tehran during October, likely S-300 site
The whole point of what i said is that the imagery is tied up to NATO osints who leaked them on tt and lots of flaws have been cited in them and signs of manipulation.
With regards to the Ghadir images, mainly consisting of false arguments about shadows that were easily disproven.
Twitter source 1
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Twitter source 2
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With the April hit, there's no serious dispute, the radar vehicle is destroyed. The images from October are images of explosions/fire that were geolocated to publicly known air defence sites and bases that can be viewed on google maps even.
You know what, I'm tired of all the sub posting, and constant accusations so I'm just going to address it below:
And the NATO propaganda attack, again as predicted. Anyone saying anything that be seen as negative is a posting NATO propaganda, or only using NATO sources. Of course, that's it. That's the only response anyone on here has when confronted with "negative" evidence contrary to their opinion. I got told the whole week, all I was doing was posting NATO propaganda, when I warned about how precarious the situation in Syria was, how the SAA had lost cities they never had before, how the SAA were abandoning defensive positions and equipment on masse. Come on this is getting old now. We have to acknowledge what is currently, actually happening instead of burying our heads in the sand, if you want to throw around accusations about being irresponsible, I'd argue that kind of denial is far more irresponsible. As we've seen over the last week when people were doing "victory laps over the doomers" literally less than 24 hours before Assad fell and Syria got taken over by HTS. While that was going on, I was warning about the incoming Israeli air campaign in Syria as the first bombs dropped, and warning people who may be there to stay away from any SAA military sites as Israel was going to blow it all up.
Again, I have no desire to influence anyone's opinions and how they react to current events, you can interpret my posts however you want, but I'm tired of the baseless accusations.
just fyi your xcancel mirror for source 1 is missing the .com.
as far as the arguments about information discipline: i think the problem is it's very hard to tell what is true or not for most people. I dont have the expertise to zoom in and study photos released to see if they've been manipulated or not. the problem is how do I trust nato intel? they have every incentive to lie as much as possible to spread panic among their enemies, so what am I supposed to do? I mean, if we were to always take osint at their word Russia would have had to re-institute a draft by now no? Should I take you, another anonymous poster, at your word that I have no real way of knowing if you're credible or not (other than that you've been accurate with your predictions very recently)? seems better to me to wait and see and let the smoke clear like 72T does. fwiw I am not against posting things using nato intel with the caveat of making it clear where you got it from
i appreciate the work you put in your posts comrade.
thank for your labour, is it you and @LargePenis@hexbear.net that i have semi coherent understanding of syria
i have also forwarded your work to my palestine group which i am a senior ranking member on the council to inform on the current situation ongoing
Cmon dude. Like, if you're going to insult @MarmiteLover123@hexbear.net, at least say they're too reliant on OSINT. Don't fedjacket them lmao