ghostpinballer posted:

honest question, which minorities have they been suppressing? i remember the UN accused them of ethnic cleansing a while ago and then retracted when it came out they'd evacuated some villages, then helped the residents to return after a fight with ISIS. I've had a look around and can't find anything.
edit: i mean, I'm not about to die on this hill so if what you say is true then ofc it's bad.

https://gowans.wordpress.com/2017/07/11/the-myth-of-the-kurdish-ypgs-moral-excellence/
http://en.rnp-f.org/2015/03/24/pkk-and-imperialism/#

i haven't read these in a while but i think they cover different aspects of it

We invite the Syrian government forces to assert control over the areas our forces have withdrawn from, in particularly Manbij, and to protect these areas against a Turkish invasion.https://t.co/OAkymO8s9Q

— Rojava Defense Units | YPG (@DefenseUnits) December 28, 2018

Utter silence. That is the sound of Western corporate media days after a more than one-hour-long panel on the White Helmets at the United Nations on December 20...the silence is due to the irrefutable documentation presented on the faux-rescue group’s involvement in criminal activities, which include organ theft, working with terrorists — including as snipers — staging fake rescues, thieving from civilians, and other non-rescuer behaviour.

^with the important caveat that i'm quoting geopolitics.com so i honestly don't know how legit any of this is.

i don't have time to check all the names involved in the panel but despite beeley's involvement, they apparently interviewed over 300 syrians/mercenaries/assorted medical experts, including former WH members and civilians present in aleppo during the worst of the #holocaustaleppo #whitehelmets propaganda push. however i remember reading the same plausible-but-not-verified organ theft stuff about the kla. it's believable but also i'm reluctant to buy it wholesale without some solid, solid evidence, i feel we harm our case when we do so.

Edited by ghostpinballer (Dec. 29, 2018 10:35:43)

Petrol posted:

i dont follow her closely so forgive me asking, what's wrong with beeley?

im the same, so it's my own personal thing tbh. I've just never quite trusted her.

ghostpinballer posted:

The anti-Israel axis has never been stronger than it is today.

blessed be

The officials said the additional security forces may move around Syria to different locations as needed and may move in and out of the country at times. They would not indicate if any troop withdrawals have taken place or will happen in the immediate future, citing security concerns.

American military doctrine is very unique. Who else can withdraw by sending more soldiers? I would make a joke that soon American troops will withdraw from countries that they were never even in using this method, but that was the story all along with Syria anyway. Everyone just kind of forgot that there weren't any troops in Syria until suddenly there were, and they were very very important to keep there.

As for the regime’s victory there, it probably would not have taken place if Turkey had not withdrawn some of its rebel proxies to focus on fighting the Kurds. Aleppo may have helped the regime’s morale, but the war is likely to grind on for years, sustained and manipulated by outside powers. Assad needs them: His army has been decimated by war and desertions. That may help explain his use of chemical weapons in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in early April, which prompted the Trump administration’s slap-on-the-wrist missile strike. With his manpower running out, Assad cares more about reinforcing his rule — at any cost — than rehabilitating his reputation in the West, which might have provided loans to help rebuild his shattered country.

for real, dude could have had our loans if he'd just focused on his brand

Fisk (in the Independent) breaks up the monotony of the narrative, but only barely -- his somewhat more critical perspective comes qualified with the standard litany of denunciations of the "regime," and loaded with starry-eyed naiveté that proves no matter how senior a reporter you are, you can still remain a child at heart. "Western politicians, 'experts' and journalists are going to have to reboot their stories over the next few days now that Bashar al-Assad’s army has retaken control of eastern Aleppo," he begins, referencing some late-2016 hot topics ripe for correction, such as the number of civilians said to be trapped and fearfully awaiting extermination at the hands of the government. Later in the piece, he mentions "indiscriminate attacks" by rebels against the civilians in government-held areas. "I suspect we shall be hearing more of this in the coming days."

buddy, i have to specifically tell the biggest search engine to only show me results from the last year just to know Aleppo continued to exist after it "Fell" to some oriental-despot caricature

Edited by Constantignoble (Feb. 14, 2019 18:32:56)

In March, I met a lawyer named Anas Joudeh, who took part in some of the 2011 protests. Joudeh no longer considers himself a member of the opposition. I asked him why. “No one is 100 percent with the regime, but mostly these people are unified by their resistance to the opposition,” Joudeh told me. “They know what they don’t want, not what they want.” In December, he said, “Syrians abroad who believe in the revolution would call me and say, ‘We lost Aleppo.’ And I would say, ‘What do you mean?’ It was only a Turkish card guarded by jihadis.” For these exiled Syrians, he said, the specter of Assad’s crimes looms so large that they cannot see anything else. They refuse to acknowledge the realities of a rebellion that is corrupt, brutal and compromised by foreign sponsors. This is true. Eastern Aleppo may not have been Raqqa, where ISIS advertised its rigid Islamist dystopia and its mass beheadings. But as a symbol of Syria’s future, it was almost as bad: a chaotic wasteland full of feuding militias — some of them radical Islamists — who hoarded food and weapons while the people starved.

true, it ain't much, it's more than a little late, and the writer is hardly some anti-imperialist radical, but even those^ few lines invited a torrent of hysterical outrage from the usual suspects when the article first went up, so for me it did something right. there were also more than a few avowed socialists who were nevertheless satisfied that the final phase of the aleppo operation was definitely a massacre, a genocide, a holocaust 2.0, etc, who bought the "suicide rather than rape" rumours and believed bana was really tweeting all that shit in perfect english. they greeted that section of "...after the fall" with a kind of bewildered, cheated anger. it was easy to dismiss the al qaeda stuff when it was online journalists and the like making those claims, but when it was a middle class syrian, speaking to an american journalist, on the record, in the NYT, with enough "of course assad is a diabolical monster" qualifiers to sweeten the medicine, i think a lot of the more honest ones i know finally started doing some actual reading outside the acceptable places. this isn't to forgive 7 years of almost wall-to-wall bullshit, of course, but sometimes the MSM gets it kind of right and it can be useful.

for people who've taken the time to really learn about syria, i can see how the article is insufficient in all the ways you say. but i can also say i've pointed a couple of people to it when they expressed skepticism about the official narrative of the war but weren't (at that point) ready to fully dive into something really off the beaten path (war nerd, alternet, this thread, etc). it certainly helped water those seeds of doubt, and now they're fully on our side.

Edited by ghostpinballer (Feb. 17, 2019 02:35:26)

Neither Syrian rebels nor the White Helmets have access to air power. So unless you’re a complete idiot, you can only read this one way: the OPCW is corroborating allegations that the regime used chlorine in Douma. pic.twitter.com/pwukuD2EsB

— Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) March 2, 2019