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

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

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.


  • Boise_Idaho [null/void, any]@hexbear.net
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    20 days ago

    Interesting commentary by a Vietnamese communist:
    https://xcancel.com/darrion_nguyen/status/1865962973455634668

    What happened in Syria vindicated Ho Chi Minh famous teaching “A nation who does not want to fight for its independence does not deserve it”. That’s why even though we got support from our allies (materials, technical), it was the Vietnamese to decide our struggle.

    We got “negotiated” by big nation (incl. so called allies like the USSR / China) during Geneva and we learned our lesson. Le Duan famously said if we want unification, we must not fear the US, and also not fear the USSR and China, which means if our allies don’t agree to our course of action (let’s say fully liberate the south), be prepared to get supply cut off and fought on our own term if we want unification.

    Reality shows that was correct decision, culminating in Paris 1972 where we negotiate directly with the US. In the last days of south Vietnam, the West called the USSR and China to talk to Hanoi to halt our operation, but it was all in vain.

    Reminds me how Iran didn’t want Ansarallah to seize Sanaa, but Ansarallah did it anyways.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    21 days ago

    Btw turns out that decades and weeks Lenin quote is actually George Galloway’s version of this paragraph of Lenin:

    In the space of a few days we destroyed one of the oldest, most powerful, barbarous and brutal of monarchies. In the space of a few months we passed through a number of stages of collaboration with the bourgeoisie and of shaking off petty-bourgeois illusions, for which other countries have required decades.

    The entire left has been quoting Galloway for years.

  • AOCapitulator [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    20 days ago

    I just can’t get over the difference between “killing ceo in well executed premeditated assasination and fleeing the scene successfully” and “got caught in a mcdonalds with the gun STILL ON YOU and also with a hasily written manifesto ON HIM”

    Like what? If it is the same guy, how the fuck did he pull the assassination off so effortlessly if he’s this incompetent. If he’s not incometent and he wanted to get caught, THIS is the way he wanted to do that? There were so many other ways!

    So… wtf?! Genuinely I cannot comprehend it lmao

  • LargePenis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    21 days ago

    cuck n chad ranking: 14 years of Syrian meltdown

    Note: temporary removal of the first RUS vs UKR row, this edition is fully dedicated to Syria and related conflicts

    Gigachad Chad Neutral Beta (Fe)Male Virgin Cuck
    Abu Mohammed Al Jolani (bro started last week with a little zone in Idlib and ended this week as conqueror of Damascus) SDF (what started as a little militia to control some Kurdish neighborhoods runs more than a third of Syria today) Bashar Al Assad (the lion himself, strong independent dictator who dazzled us for years, but one day the lion couldn’t do it anymore, so it was over) Iraqi Shia militia guys (spent years dying for Assad, went home to chill as the war calmed down, suddenly their life’s work is gone) Syrian statue quality (Saddam’s statues in Baghdad needed tanks and advanced rope to be pulled down, one guy that has gone to gym once can break a Hafez statue in two, very low quality work)
    Hezbollah (this collapse proved that were truly the backbone of all resistance in the region, everything is gone without them) Suheil Al Hassan (his Tiger forces leave the war as undefeated in actual combat, he deserves his gay harem) Iran and Russia (they deserve credit for somehow keeping a deeply unpopular regime alive for years, in the end they can’t force the SAA to fight if they don’t want to) Saudi Arabia (supported the rebels until they lost, then supported Assad until he lost, you’re fucked if the Saudis are on your side) ISIS and Baghdadi (if Jolani gets gigachad for his powerful end to the race, then ISIS get virgin cuck for going on a generational run for like two years before getting destroyed)
    The people of Syria (endured absolute hell for years, with millions leaving and hundreds of thousands dead) Erdogan (I hate that this watermelon seller gets so many Ws in life, but I can’t deny that he masterfully executed his role in this war) Iraq (suffered the worst ISIS spillover, the country almost collapsed because of it, but it came out as a mature leadership in the region) the World collectively (it never needed to be a massive war, everyone from the US to Russia to the Arab World are responsible for ruining a beautiful country) The people of Syria (14 years of pain, half of the population is gone, for what in the end, getting duped into accepting israeli control of the south and americans stealing oil in the east and jihadists in the capital)
  • thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    17 days ago

    Some pretty wild footage. The prison Luigi is being held at has the inmates in uproar, and they basically do a live television interview about Luigi’s prison conditions. The news anchor is able to interview inmates live because they’re just shouting across the fence; lots of chants of “Free Luigi.” Luigi is probably already 50% of the way there to leading a prison riot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCml-w9MQ7Y

  • MarmiteLover123 [comrade/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    20 days ago

    Israel is currently undertaking one of the largest offensive air operations in it’s entire history in Syria, bombing basically any piece of SAA/ex SAA military equipment, research facilities (both civilian and military), military bases and installations, weapons caches and ammunition caches, air defence systems, tanks, fighter jets, naval assets, ports, factories, etc. All that equipment that the HTS captured from the SAA is turning to ashes at this moment, all across the country. Israel is striking as far east as Hasaka, launching over 300 airstrikes in the past few hours. 150 airstrikes were reported yesterday. The United States is, as expected, providing assistance, flying MQ-4C ISR recon drones over the coast of Syria and Lebanon. Israeli ground forces are also in the Damascus countryside and 20km/12.5mi away from Damascus city itself. It’s a disastrous situation, one that’s was entirely predictable should the government of Syria fall.

    I made a comment a few months ago about how the SAAs air defence systems, including S-300 PMU-1’s supplied by Russia, S-200s, Tor and Pantsir point air defence systems, were the only things in Syria preventing a large scale air attacks from Israel, and the skies of Syria turning into the skies of Lebanon and Gaza. Yes Israel could conduct air strikes into Syria, but those required extensive effort and planning, and were only done on a small scale, nothing like what is happening now. Some were dismissive of my comment given that Israel could conduct these limited strikes. But it unfortunately seems that I was right, now that those air defence systems no longer exist or have operators, Israel has free reign over the skies of Syria and are conducting some of the largest air operations in their history… The Syrian state infrastructure is being completely dismantled.

  • Evilphd666 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    20 days ago

    The amount of gloating and rebranding ISIS and Al Quedea as “rebels” from even Arab media is making me sick watching the coverage of this. Do people not understsnd who these bastard are? Have they forgotten already every single Arab country the west stuck their corrupted fingers in? What the fuck is going on?

  • CthulhusIntern [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    21 days ago

    Man, imagine telling someone that this year, there’d be two attempted or successful assassinations in the United States, one against a president, but the OTHER one caused more of a ripple