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.
Like, what else can Sri Lanka do? If you do reform, you get punished, then people hate you even more and elect right wingers next time exactly like what happened in Argentina.
The crux of the problem is that there is no alternative. The fall of the USSR has meant the total capitulation to neoliberalism. If China doesn’t take up that role and start creating an alternative economic and financial system (and from the recent turn of events, military alliance), then the only choice left for most countries is to yield to US hegemony.
But why should China do that? They’ve been benefiting greatly from the US concentrating the world’s industrial capacity into China, which is a deliberate strategy that has enabled the US to exploit the rest of the world by denying economic sovereignty to those countries and rendering them vulnerable to neo-colonial exploitation.
We’re now hearing that China is seemingly moving towards devaluing its yuan in response to Trump’s tariffs. If this happens, it can only mean that they have decided to keep the charade going. China’s economy is strong enough that it is going to be fine for a while and the US and China will both benefit from the status quo for as long as it can last.
Sorry for the rant but my last remaining bit of copium is about to run out.
I'm sure you've seen the current CN state media pushing out the more consumption stimulus for 2025 narrative.
If there is an argument to be made they doesn't even understand why Dengism worked so well we may start to make that argument soon lol.
It will be both weird and funny to watch China continue growing more than 2x the US while the western financial media tells the CPC China is crashing while at the same time the CPC completely agrees with it and starts repeating much of the same rethoric as the worst western neoliberal mainstream economists but still not managing to actualy crash.
Anyway I'm nobody ever said "in times of trouble just boost consumption! Wow nobody tried that before, surely its a sign it works so well!"
No need for the US media to tell them, they already think that way. Chinese financial presses already follow the IMF logic: we need more foreign investment (because clearly it is against market principle for the central bank to print new money without earning foreign reserves first), issue special long-term bonds, devalue currency to adjust for Trump’s tariffs etc.
Yea China has no ambitions to change the status quo, so any posibility of positive change is going to come from the global south in the form of the non reformists factions unless China experiences some big change in vision
I feel like any major enemy of empire's strategy is to play a game of chicken. They want to stave off the full force of their enemy's might as long as possible in order to build up their productive forces, military, intelligence apparatus, soft power, and so on, so that they can be in the best position to survive the inevitable confrontation. Meanwhile, while these larger nations focus on these primarily domestic strategies, the empire is going all on in their strategy of picking off all the B-listers who by and large want to side with the anti-West bloc but without immense support for a long period they wouldn't be able to feasibly get to a point where they can really defend themselves from the empire, which they will have to do as soon as they stray away from the empire's desires for their nation.
It is a really challenging situation to be in of course because if you initiate a confrontation before you are ready, the empire could easily destroy your entire nation and turn it into a proxy. It makes sense to play the long game and stave off the US as long as you can, because while they are distracted with continuing the pillaging of the world, China is rapidly advancing technologically. I imagine in about 10 years when China's military is objectively unstoppable, they have fusion breakthrough to throw on top of their already entirely green energy nation, they have a robot workforce eliminating a lot of menial labor and redirecting humans into being better educated and doing more specialized work (creating even faster scientific and social progress), and whatever other breakthroughs that could drastically shift the balance of power, China will be in a position to do more without the US being able to stop them or hurt anyone more than they already do. Of course during the next 10 years the empire will also be waning and China will be expanding into that vacuum piece by piece, it is a slow process that takes place at the speed of humanity's material circumstances unfolding; China can't accelerate that process of change any more than they are.