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.
i'm trying to build a feed in an RSS app for myself including hexbear's summary news, but idk how. what happened to bulletins.hexbear.net it hasn't been updated since last 4/20 :(
That's a side project of 72t who had to basically aggregate everything that was good and relevant news from the mega and the comm, then sort and editorialize them before publishing them for public consumption. A big project indeed on top of maintaining this mega and personal life matters, it's fallen to the wayside to free up his bandwidth for more urgent matters.
Though it would be much quicker to ask him plus asking how he's been doing now that he's freed from the ball and chain that is being a forum mod.
I think 72 trillion has been purposely avoiding hexbear because one or more admins have gone fucking insane and are banning tons of long time users for made up issues. Banning people who refuse to "toe the line" when the line is being decided in a back room and refusing open debate is wrecker bullshit and other admins just going along with it are cowards.This comment will get removed too because "disagreeing with Moderation decisions is a capital offense these days.edit from another department: Posting heterodox (or moderodox) opinions on bureaucrat is cool and good, but friend if you're gonna bring up personal grievances a bunch, then it's time to either post from a throwaway or your personal account. I understand if Bureaucrat is the first time you're posting on your own, it is for me, but the bureaucracy has no room for personal stances on strugglesessions. Don't get us banned from c/news. But I do agree with your critique of mods, they're all cops and liberals. But that's fine because hexbear is a site full of feds trying to honeypot eachother, liberals and me, the one true communist.
To whoever posted this, I haven't been purposefully avoiding Hexbear lately because of the admins, I've been purposefully avoiding Hexbear lately because the comments have generally been unnecessarily pessimistic and unproductive. I'm not gonna spend much times in places where the vibe is merely documenting the thousand myriad ways in which the world is screwed and it's all hopeless; I prefer spending time analyzing those thousand myriad ways and how they could be overcome and what the likely course of action will be based on historical comparisons. Informed despair is still just despair.
The admins are one thing, but it's the Bluesky migration that's really going to fuck things up. As far as politics are concerned, I have almost zero faith in these people. It's one thing if they came from somewhere like Mastodon or even a different Lemmy instance, but Bluesky is lib central where all the obnoxious blue check Twitter accounts went after Musk bought it. Imagine if the Bluesky migration happened in August. We would've probably have multiple shitty Project 2025 struggle sessions between the newcomers and the rest of us. The politics of general Hexbear is going to diverge even more heavily from the news mega. The news mega always had better politics compared with general Hexbear, and the gap is just going to widen even further.
At the end of the day, the admins will favor general Hexbear over the news mega because you obviously can't elevate a megathread over an entire website. Best case scenario is the news mega becomes a walled-off section of the site that doesn't culturally or politically fit in with the rest of Hexbear whatsoever (this is already happening). Worst case scenario is enough news mega regulars get banned for various reasons that everyone just moves to a different instance so they don't get banned, most likely lemmygrad.ml due to compatibility in politics and crossover in users, which will also completely kill traffic.
Oh but dunking on libs is what I'm here for. After all Hexbear is the site for liberals
Or the month long struggle session and wave of bans were done in preparation for the migration of a bunch ofliberals and bedtime hating users"apolitical progressive to some flavor of anarchism" users.edit from another department: Posting heterodox (or moderodox) opinions on bureaucrat is cool and good, but friend if you're gonna bring up personal grievances a bunch, then it's time to either post from a throwaway or your personal account. I understand if Bureaucrat is the first time you're posting on your own, it is for me, but the bureaucracy has no room for personal stances on strugglesessions. Don't get us banned from c/news
Hey Bureaucrat, I don't have any opinion on your actual comment, but similar to our ban from the meta comm, you might want to limit comments like this to whatever your main account is. I can see it being very easy to accuse us of being a way for banned users to circumvent mod actions and then the fun is all over. Just a suggestion though, if we get got, I'll just keep posting.
@alaskaball rn
