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.
Materialist posting time. Poke holes in my likely flawed analysis please:
Kurds - just want to grill, but it’s thanksgiving so that means grilling turkey
Turkey - protector and defender of the Turkmen, hates the Kurds
Iran - can’t do shit about it now, will focus on Iraq & seek some kind of detente with the caliphate.
Iraq - will drive closer to Iran in fear of the caliphate
The Caliphate - won big but learned from last time and will probably seek to consolidate. Will want to focus on northern Iraq but will be reactive for a time until they consolidate their big gains. They have a grudge against Russia here but the cia has a bounty against their leader while also supplying arms so let’s face it, these players are businessmen and will cut a deal with Russia.
Shias / Alawites / seculars / remnant Ba’athists - lost big and will just try to survive, goal one will be an autonomous Latakia. An autonomous Latakia is directly in the interests of everyone except the caliphate since the caliphate immediately becomes a threat to everyone else, and not directly against the interests of the caliphate so I expect an autonomous Latakia that is essentially a Russian protectorate.
Lebanon (excluding Hezbollah): can’t do shit even for itself right now, will ally with Latakia & Russia and balance-of-power Israel against Hezbollah.
Hezbollah: will have to bend the knee and accept the caliphate as a neighbor, will loosely ally with Lebanon and Latakia.
Russia: will cut any deal possible that preserves their naval base, likely taking the form of a Syrian confederation that preserves an autonomous Latakia and they’ll wash their hands of the rest of the place. Interestingly well placed to balance Turkey against Israel, and play a broker between the caliphate and Iran. Most interesting takeaway here is that Lebanon is pushed towards Russia, and Turkey and Russia need to align their interests (= Kurds get fucked, as is tradition.)
Russia well positioned to be the closest thing to a power broker in this game of thrones imo. Despite having clearly taken a side, their side clearly lost, and their interests are clear and directly understood so bygones will be bygones.
Israel: can’t conceivably occupy a major Syrian population center if they can’t pacify Gaza. The more land they seize, the more likely the caliphate targets them instead of Iraq. I expect a restrained land grab to create a buffer zone, nothing more.
USA: fucking wild card. It’s certainly possible the caliphate don’t deal with Russia, which is a key assumption that negates everything so that is probably want the USA wants.
EU: irrelevant
I largely agree with everything except for this, there is no fighting force in Syria that comes close to Hamas or Hezbollah in fighting capability or discipline
The Syrian rebels are to a man gangsters and mercenaries, the majority of them will either be bought off or simply flee to find easy pickings elsewhere, like a mangy half-starved hyena running from a mangy lion with rabies
Israel if it had a mind to could march straight into Damascus largely unopposed
Currently there is no organized armed force in Syria worthy of the title resistance
they might be able to walk in during the chaos, but they aren't going to hold it once a resistance is organized
A resistance may develop and become organized.......in ten years
with how few of the pro-assad forces were captured/destroyed there's a lot of nominally trained folks, plus rebel factions that'd be nonplussed by HTS handing over a city. how long did it take for irregular resistance to form against the US occupation of Baghdad?
Most of those folks are either making their way to Latakia or out of the country, you won't find many of them in the south plains
General resistance: 18 months
Effective resistance: two and half years
Those forces don't exist and didn't exist. They where soldiers for hire and the assads decided to horde the money instead of staying in power.
Israel could depopulate it though, the goal is genocide, not nation building.
Pushing back not to debate-lord but to test these ideas out. I am not sure either.
I certainly don’t think morality or norms constrain Israel here. But I’m doing my best to think in a materialist manner here so morality nor norms come into it anyway.
The more Israel pushes in, the closer they push into the caliphate, the more likely conflict is with the caliphate. So I see Israeli expansion as self-limiting.
The supply lines into Syria are shit and naturally choked via Golan. If they can’t push into Lebanon, they can’t push into a 2nd or 3rd tier city in Syria. If they can’t sustain operations in Gaza and 3km north of Israel, they can’t sustain operations 10s to 100 kms from Israel via Golan.
The “Greater Israel” faction is real and influential, but that’s a centuries long project not a mad dash into Kursk. Hopefully they try and incite the Caliphate into being another Hezbollah but I think they’re probably smarter than that.
I already suspect they want to take everything west of the M5 highway and position themselves to easily besiege Damascus should the need ever arise
They're already at Al Harah, it's just another 24km to the highway and Israel has a history of using roads as markers and borders
It would make sense they seek to get as close as possible to that goal without actually engaging the caliphate, that makes sense.
Alternatively, they puppet the caliphate against Iran which would imply something more limited in terms of actual occupation but evidenced by freedom of action beyond their declared boundaries while supplying arms. A giveaway would be any kind of joint operation that limits Hezbollah.
I don't think russia will stay there for long, they a thorn for usa and turkey in the region, and power brokerage requires power. putting that all aside, the coast is the side of commerce, even without anything else the current government will want it, if the price is war with latakia, they'll do it
Lebanon won't be a thing soon, you need to actually be looking at the fact that they are going to have a new president soon. The real wildcard here are the Lebanese Christians who aligned with hzbollah: do they abandoned the shia once rebels start pouring in or do they absorb the syrian christian refugees and risk alienating the sunnis?