Image is of Azerbaijan's President, Aliyev (left) and Armenia's President, Pashinyan (right) in a meeting a month or two after Azerbaijan took Nagorno-Karabakh.
- Never go to a second location.
- Always get the interior ministry post.
- Never get in a helicopter or any small aircraft.
- If someone with a gun enters your car, they’re gonna kill you.
- If someone tells you they’re not going to kill you, they’re calming you down to kill you later.
- Never give up your nukes.
- Never release the opposition's political prisoners.
- Never let the opposition delay elections.
- If someone starts to get into German runes, drop them.
- Never trust a South American with a German name.
- Never move anywhere for a religion.
- Never go into the sewers unless you’re a sewer guy.
- If someone’s trying to get you to commit a crime, they're FBI (sometimes CIA or military intelligence).
- Never become an FBI informant.
- If you do become an FBI informant, record everything.
- Never relinquish your arms.
- Always get it in writing.
- If you keep gambling, you’ll eventually win.
- Never talk to cops without a lawyer.
- Always pay your mercenaries.
- Don’t let anyone take your passport.
To add an addendum to rule 3, never put your President and Foreign Minister in the same helicopter or small aircraft. Especially if doing so in bad weather conditions. Especially if you're already under threat from a hostile nuclear power in the region with a proclivity for terrorism (though this probably isn't Israel's doing, in this particular case).
Anyway, Azerbaijan. Not a great country, I think. Did some genocides. They're a petrostate that is hosting Cop29, which I suppose is a way for the bourgeoisie to implicitly convey their contempt for the green movement. They got weapons from Israel, too.
Just for the record, there's an Iranian province called East Azerbaijan, which is not the same as Azerbaijan.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Azerbaijan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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 daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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 am still waking up but did Raisi really fucking die? God looks like another year this week
Not to disrespect him but he was just a guy. The entire Iranian leadership is committed to their path and a couple of people dropping out of the sky or getting assassinated hasn't previously, and won't now, change their course.
Yeah but if there is a hint of conspiracy then this becomes a huge escalation. No way some Iranian officials won't be assuming it was a hit, bot after the provocations. It is less a matter of Iran changing course tho, but if Israel thinks Iran is weaker more disjointed.
Also I love that we are a place on the internet that genuinely will say "no disrespect" when talking about an Iranian official. Nations will probably give a thoughts and prayers, but I can only imagine what reddit or even MSNBC are like right now
I know reddit is celebrating, including the fans of the CIA podcaster Robert Fedvans.
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The West (probably) assassinated Raisi and thinks his replacement won't be even more ruthless towards the West lol
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Ken Klippenstein is making crass jokes and calling Raisi "authoritarian". pathetic
unsure if they've found the body (I imagine they must have by now but I'm not keeping up with it)edit: 100% confirmed dead, body found - and they've found the helicopter wreckage and it is not something that you look at and go "yep, a person could have feasibly survived that" he is most certainly dead, alongside the Foreign Minister who was on the same helicopter for some very stupid reason. as Staines says though, I don't think Iran is terribly vulnerable to high-up politicians being killed. Soleimani getting assassinated was tragic for example but it didn't seem to terribly affect the Resistance given everything that's happened since October 7th. there's clearly institutional stability that is independent of who is running a particular part of the government, which is necessary to develop when your opponent happily uses terrorism and assassinationsas a side note, I am genuinely curious about where the term "hard landing" came from in the timeline of events. I guess it might be elucidated in the coming days and weeks but I do wonder precisely what happened. did the president's helicopter pilot say that they were going for an emergency landing and fail? did the other two helicopters lose contact and just assume that the pilot was going for a landing? was it euphemism from the very beginning and the two helicopters knew that it crashed but the government was buying time to do whatever needs to happen when a leader suddenly dies? I'm curious whether the higher-ups in the Iranian government were pretty sure he was dead but didn't want to say it just on the off-chance that somehow he was only very injured, or if instead they genuinely had no idea if it was a "hard landing" or a crash.
Hard landing is helicopter terminology it seems.
So likely more of a descriptor than anything. Maybe to immediately make clear it wasn't blown up midair or anything but was forced to land and did so in a way that proved fatal
From the wreckage photos it looks like a controlled flight into terrain - same shit that got Kobe, in the same weather circumstances to boot. I suspect the pilot did attempt an emergency landing in the rough weather and while trying to set it down collided with the mountain, hence the hard landing bit
In my opinion, obviously. The Iranian leadership was telling the population to pray for the president and foreign minister. To me, that reads that the Iranian leadership knew that they were dead, and were preparing the people for the news of his death, instead of dropping such a bombshell out of nowhere.
AP report says "found dead".
thanks, editted