It's just whimsical to say that a guy that has now since the start of the war said how Ukraine is collapsing and how victorious the Russians are would be something other than a shill. — ssu

On the other end of that argument you would be disqualifying the entire western media. :lol:

At some point you'll have to accept that when people have a different opinion it doesn't automatically makes them a shill for the other side - that's called growing up.

At the end of the day you're just unable to cope with the fact that various Europeans and Americans are criticizing their own system for all its faults.

You apparently have no lens to view self-criticism by the system you are a part of as anything other than shilling for the other side.

You are clearly stuck in a tribal mindset.

Is anyone else slightly alarmed by the way the legacy media is now trying to white-wash the image of the leader of the Syrian rebels - formerly Al-Qaeda and IS, and having ruled his little slice of Syria with an iron fist since he came to power?

Unlike you portray it, both politicians and the media are extremely heedful as what comes of the HTS. One is what you say, other what you do. HTS have to show their real colors by the actions they take. This is totally obvious. Didn't take long for the Taleban to show their real colours. But still, they aren't attacking the US (as they didn't attack the US on 9/11 anyway).

Alse we also shouldn't forget that the genocidal regime that was the Assad regime, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, justified it's genocide by saying it was "fighting against the islamists". The Assad regime captured the Alawites and other minorities by similar narrative. Also Ghaddafi portrayed every opponent of his to be part of the Al Qaeda. And seems you are promoting this view. Well, we will see what happens in the future. Yes, everything can indeed can go to hell in a handbasket.

Yet I see no reason to promote dictators like Ghaddafi and Assad to save us (or the US) from the ghost of Osama bin Laden.

* * *

This whole thing btw will be a real pain in the ass for Tulsi Gabbard, the former democrat now turned a Trumpist, as she faces congressional hearings. The problem is that she just loved, or so much understood, president Bashar al-Assad as a so-called "realist".





The thinking of Tulsi Gabbard is the reason why the US loses wars and why this thinking leads to self defeat. And thus every Putinist will promote Gabbard. Now I don't think she is taking money from the Russians (even if that might be a possibility). Likely it's just the fact that when you are against your own country (meaning that you are overtly critical about anything your country does), then you will talk the same narrative as the enemies of your country. When everything happens because of the evil doing of the US, you will repeat the narrative of Russia, North Korea and Iran. And actually of Assad's former Syria.

When listening to Tulsi, she is the best thing ever that could happen to Putin, especially if she will lead the US intelligence community.

The obvious question to ask is how a regime that withstood years of heavy western pressure suddenly crumbles like a crouton, because that already fails the common sense test.

It relied heavily on Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and other Iranian proxies to survive. Iran and Hezbollah just lost a lopsided war against Israel. Israel, holding all the cards, also forced Hezbollah to sign a cease fire forcing them to withdrawal behind the Litani in Lebanon while still giving Israel carte blanche to bomb them with impunity in Syria if they moved assets there. Iran meanwhile, had ample time to realize their Russian licensed air defense systems are worthless.

Russia meanwhile has lost the better part of a million men in Ukraine and is down to carrying out assaults in passenger cars. Neither could help the Assad regime, who had also demobilized large numbers of troops because they were bankrupt and weren't paying their current troops, who also resented a corrupt, authoritarian, brutal, regime of minority rule.

No conspiracy required really. Assad held on due to a heavy commitment of Russian and Iranian resources and because IS jumped on the scene and took a serious chunk out of the rebels, gobbling up a good deal of their territory and assets, while at the same time drawing the ire of the world and sparking a huge continous air offensive on them by the US and most of the Arab world.

This isn't any more surprising that IS taking Mosul because the Iraqi military routed and driving into the Baghdad suburbs within a week, or the ANA routing in the face of the Taliban. Poorly paid and trained conscripts facing a motivated opposition who don't have much faith in their state tend to rout eventually. A lesson Putin might eventually learn as Tsar Nicholas did.

When listening to Tulsi, she is the best thing ever that could happen to Putin, especially if she will lead the US intelligence community. — ssu

Her confirmation hearings will be wild. She should go on a double ticket with Kash Patel. ‘The enemy within’ will be more than Trumpian hyperbole, although of course, he will be responsible for it.

The Syrian army was a formidable fighting force, even without the Russians or the Iranians.

I'm not saying that they may have stopped this eventual outcome, but rather I'm questioning why it crumbled like a crouton, which is ahistorical - armies don't just evaporate under normal wartime circumstances.

Even Reuters joined in the white-washing. :lol:

By running Aleppo, Syrian rebels seek to show they are alternative to Assad

And the BBC:

From Syrian jihadist leader to rebel politician: How Abu Mohammed al-Jolani reinvented himself

:rofl:

A few short years ago he was beheading people and setting them on fire for kicks, now he donates to children's hospitals. Who is this dark, tall and enigmatic man?

I'm not saying that they may have stopped this eventual outcome, but rather I'm questioning why it crumbled like a crouton, which is ahistorical - armies don't just evaporate under normal wartime circumstances. — Tzeentch

No. This is quite historical. When there is nobody willing to fight for something, then the whole thing simply comes down. Armies can simply unravel and the soldiers just walk away. It has happened many times in history.

It can happen to whole states even without a war. This happened with the Soviet Union. People simply didn't believe in it. It's people like Putin that have to see a culprit behind this.

And this is something that the so-called "realists" are so surprised to see when authoritarian tyrannical regimes falter. The regimes looked to be so in control just moments earlier.

Except of course the Syrian army has been willing to fight for years, and did so successfully in the face of much more pressure than the handful of rebels that now took over the country with barely a shot fired.

This is obviously not normal, nor a spontaneous 'uprising'.

For anyone who desires to look beyond surface level appearances:

which is ahistorical - armies don't just evaporate under normal wartime circumstances.

Except for:

Afghanistan 2021
South Vietnam 1975
Iraq 1991, 2003, and 2014, see below:



Nazi routs following the Western Allies landings in northern and Southern France, which stopped only when logistical concerns slowed the advance and continued following new offensives with a massively disproportionate casualty rate.



Korea following the Chinese intervention, where the US-led UN force had air, armor, and artillery superiority and had just routed a well-equipped North Korean force.



The extremely rapid fall of France in 1940


The collapse of Russian lines in 1917


The collapse of Russian defensive efforts and routs in 1941, where good order was only re-established outside Moscow and with St. Petersburg under siege.



Or there is the rapid defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War, etc. etc.

Mhm. A lovely history lesson, but none of those were defeated without a fight.

There was a fight in Syria, just not much of one. The rout wasn't particularly different in kind from that the ANA suffered without US support, and that was also in a context where a stalemate had held by agreement with lower levels of conflict for a long period.

Certainly HTS benefited from Turkish support, as other groups that helped depose Assad benefited from US and tacit Israeli support. But the collapse, it would seem, has far more to do with the regimes own issues.

Also, they initially held on a bit, halting the advance at Hama and Homs. Some foreign support began to come in but the US stopped Iranian aligned forces from transiting westwards while Israeli air strikes continued to hit Iranian positions around the country. This probably helped tip the scales towards total collapse, but only because it made it abundantly clear that foreign support wouldn't be forthcoming (and even if it was sent that it wouldn't reach its destination). But at any rate, the ground lines of communication between Syria and Iran were severed quickly by rebels anyhow.

The rout wasn't particularly different in kind from that the ANA suffered without US support, and that was also in a context where a stalemate had held by agreement with lower levels of conflict for a long period. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Exactly.

In many of these conflicts in countries that lack social cohesion and strong institutions, something like a collective "defending your country" won't happen. Why would put your life to danger for someone like Assad and his gangster family? Yet then there's the obvious question, do you think you can survive? Is your side capable of beating the opponent? Militaries are part of the society and they mirror the strengths and the weaknesses and also the structural problems of the society.

Above all, these armed forces don't embrace individual ability and soldiers and officers taking the initiative when it's needed, but simply total loyality and obedience to those in power. Promotions aren't based on merit, but on connections and loyalty. This all creates an atmosphere where people simply lie. The underlying reason for the crippling inefficiency that the armed forces itself pose a threat to power as totalitarian systems can easily be overthrown in a military coup or a palace coup. You can simply bribe officers commanding units or tribes to lay down their arms. Or as HTS did, simply tell that those who lay down their arms won't be killed.

What should also be noted is just how these issues can be changed. The performance of Hezbollah in the 2006 Lebanon war was telling: Hezbollah could act in small teams with the NCO-level using initiative. (That war didn't go so well for Israel, hence the IDF and Israeli Intelligence went back to think what went wrong and how to engage Hezbollah the next time.) Yet the best example of this is the Ukrainian armed forces or 2014 and the Ukrainian armed forces of 2022. In 2014 the admiral of the Ukrainian navy simply changed his job for a position in the Russian navy. That should tell all: not just surrender, but willing to join the ranks of the attacker. And this among other stuff then lead Putin to believe that the Ukrainian armed forces would be a house of cards as it had been in 2014, especially with the intel he was served was the ass-licking that dictators get when the want something. With the intel Putin had in 2022, a Blitzkrieg like taking Czechoslovakia was the benchmark for success of a "special military operation". Hence obviously armed forces, just like societies, can change.

It's beyond obvious that something went down between Turkey, Israel and the US, who are now starting to fight over the scraps.

Let's not fool ourselves here.

What happened was that after the Arab League had normalized ties with Syria, Erdogan wanted to normalize the ties with Assad. But Assad declined:

On several occasions, Erdoğan called for a meeting with Assad to discuss normalizing ties, which Ankara severed after the 2011 Syrian war. But, Assad has said such talks could only happen if the neighbors focus on core issues, including the withdrawal of Turkish forces from the north of Syria.

Finally Erdogan got enough of this and let HTS go on the offensive alongside the Turkish sponsored Syrian National Army. And then the house of cards that was the Syrian Arab Army collapsed, even if there was some actual fighting.

Now Israel has made about 500 strikes and the US 75 strikes in Syria. Idea is to destroy everything that is left from the equipment of the Syrian armed forces. It had for example about 3 000 tanks at the start of the war, and likely has lost well over half of that during the war.

Very likely the idea will to make Syria a state like Lebanon or simply keep it as a failed state. Israel has been far too successful now to pause here.

WASHINGTON, Dec 16 (Reuters) - The head of a U.S.-based Syrian advocacy organization on Monday said that a mass grave outside of Damascus contained the bodies of at least 100,000 people killed by the former government of ousted President Bashar al-Assad.
Mouaz Moustafa, speaking to Reuters in a telephone interview from Damascus, said the site at al Qutayfah, 25 miles (40 km) north of the Syrian capital, was one of five mass graves that he had identified over the years.

QUTAYFAH, Syria, Dec 17 (Reuters) - (This Dec. 17 story has been corrected to fix the number of missing in Syria, provided by the International Commission on Missing Persons, to more than 150,000, in paragraph 11)
An international war crimes prosecutor said on Tuesday that evidence emerging from mass grave sites in Syria has exposed a state-run "machinery of death" under toppled leader Bashar al-Assad in which he estimated more than 100,000 people were tortured and murdered since 2013.

It should be worth wile to examine critically at how the Assad regime got understanding from many people in the West as a bulwark against jihadism and basically a victim of the West. Yet it was Bashar al Assad that pushed volunteers into fighting the US in Iraq and then, in a move quite similar to Algeria, even let out jihadists to "tarnish the repution" of the opposition fighting against him.

It may seem contrary to conventional wisdom, but the regime of Bashar
al-Assad has consistently supported the Islamic State terrorist group (ISIS)
even as the regime struggles to retake control of Syrian territory from the
various rebel groups engaged in the Syria civil war, including ISIS. ISIS has
been fighting in Syria since its precursor organization sent operatives into
the country from Iraq in 2011. But the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad
took the strategic decision to enable and facilitate the continued survival
of the Islamic State in Syria in an effort to paint all of the Syrian opposition as “terrorists.”

See: The role of the Islamic State in the Assad regime’s Strategy for Regime Survival: How and Why the Assad regime Supported the Islamic State



Similar strategy was applied by the Algerian military junta to crush it's opposition in the Algerian civil war, where the regime successfully used the "jihadists" to fight it's opposition. Once the regime won, the "extremists" where nowhere to be found. Yet for some reason it seems that many fall for this and think that such murderous regimes are far better than anything else. Many critical of the US seem to defend these regimes with the idea that a) better them than anybody and b) these people simply need a "strong hand" to be guided. And of course that the only deep state exists in the US and usually everything is fault of the US.

And it seems that the US is going to put one such person to be put into an important intelligence service position, where her judgement, knowledge and discretion are of the utter importance. I cannot get over the sheer ignorance.