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Syrian conflict.


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5 hours ago, Lostwingman said:

Question, I know the source of this is Ezra Klein (many keks) but how accurate is the narrative?

 

I understand there's a narrative at play with this but what are the issues with them as presented here? I'm a bit weak with my knowledge of the origins of the Syria civil war.

https://www.facebook.com/ezraklein/videos/10153737513773410/

 

 

Look, I'm a patriotic American, and this sort of video makes me happy.  You see, as a patriotic American, I have long believed that my country makes the best propaganda.  Tremendous.  Huge.  The best, believe me.  Bigly.

This video is an excellent example of how to do propaganda.  Good propaganda consists mostly of statements that are true.  You don't make up your own facts, you make up your own interpretations of those facts.

 

So, while most of what Klein says is basically true (and the things that he says that are wrong might be honest mistakes; in 2015 less of the truth had leaked out), the overall story is slanted.  And not even obviously slanted; a lot of his big-picture stuff is also essentially correct.  His breakdown of the factions and their foreign backers is pretty accurate, for instance.

For instance, he describes US aid to the rebels as starting in 2013.  While it is true that the US was not providing the rebels weapons prior to this date (at least not in large amounts), they were providing food and medical supplies since 2011.  So it isn't like the Obama Administration was responding to outrages by the Assad regime; they had been materially supporting the rebellion almost since the start.  Maybe from the very start, if you believe that the CIA was involved with the earliest stages of the revolt back when it was still part of the greater Arab Spring movement (I think that this is a reasonable, but unproven guess).

 

The bit about how Assad released prisoners to "tinge the opposition with extremism" is a clever bit of spin.  I paused when I heard that, because it sounds like retarded comic book villain logic.  "Hahahahahaha," said Assad, "I will increase the rebels manpower by releasing extremist prisoners even though I am near Qatar and Saudi Arabia, two countries well-known for supporting extremists!  The prisoners I release will definitely not call their jihadi friends from those two countries!  I am so smart!  Mwuhahahaha!"

 

...Yeah, I couldn't see that happening either.  Here's my take on what was actually going on:

Prior to 2011 Syria was actually helping the USA in the Global War on Terror.  Mostly, Syria was used as a CIA black site where people that the US intelligence apparatus scooped up disappeared into.  So Assad generally releasing prisoners in 2011 sounds to me like Assad realizing that the honeymoon was over, and shutting down the CIA's black site because he didn't need that in his country anymore.  Also, I strongly suspect that a lot of the stories about torture and extrajudicial executions happening in Syrian prisons prior to the revolution were aided and abetted by the CIA.

 

So now Assad is getting criticism from the US government for torturing and killing people, which he was doing because the US government asked him to.  Lovely.  If you want to get ahead in international politics, I have three words for you.  Don't.  Trust.  Jonathan.

 

Anyway, in 2013 there was a sarin gas attack that was allegedly by the Syrian government.  I say "allegedly" because aside from the perpetrators of the attack, nobody is still quite sure who did it.  Either this attack was the result of ongoing incompetence by Assad's military (who, let's face it, are generally incompetent with the exception of individual formations) because there were all sorts of things that needed gassing way more than civilians, or a false-flag intended to build support in the USA for the war (Seymour Hersh alleges that this is the case), or even a simple mistake (it's possible that pesticide storage got hit, and some pesticides are chemically very similar to sarin and in large amounts produce almost identical poisoning).

Anyway, the usual story that gets spun is that Obama backed down from a US military intervention in Syria because the US public was tired of war and because Obama is a pussy.  This is partially true, mostly the part about him being a pussy.  Truth is though, the US has been engaged in a massive air campaign over Syria since 2014.  They just haven't been hitting the Syrian government.  On top of that, since at least 2013 the US has been supplying Syrian rebels with weapons, so the usual media line that gets peddled in the West that the US is aloof or relatively uninvolved in the conflict is bullshit.

 

Klein's video's account of the origins of DAESH aka ISIL aka ISIS aka Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad is really the low point of the video.  He's way, way, obviously factually off.

 

ISIS didn't form in 2014 in Syria.  It formed in 1999 in Iraq, although it didn't come to the attention of US intelligence until the mid 2000s, and was only able to make a serious nuisance of itself by about 2012.  The idea that ISIS didn't engage the Syrian government is also laughably wrong; look at the siege of Deir ez Zor, but that was something that was commonly repeated in Western media as late as 2015.

 

He also repeats the claim that Russia didn't bomb ISIS in 2015.  This isn't really true; about 10% of the initial Russian air campaign was directed at ISIS, memorably some of the early kaliber cruise missile strikes.  Again, this was a narrative that the media has quietly withdrawn, since Russian air support was instrumental in defeating ISIS in Palmyra and holding the line in Deir ez Zor.

 

His main thesis, that the war is a mess with no obvious end in sight, was a reasonable one in late 2015.  His characterization of the players is pretty skewed, however.

As of now, the Assad government is slowly but definitively winning.  Russian air support, re-training and re-equipment of large portions of the SAA, and several key victories (notably Aleppo) have given them the initiative.

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America has been involved with funding Syrian opposition groups since 2005

 

The 2011 prisoner release was Assad going along with a rebel demand, which the rebels called "too little, too late" and most of the core of the ISIS and Tahrir al-Sham are not Syrians, but you have a lot of Saudis though. 

 

 

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5 hours ago, Collimatrix said:

 

Snippitey Snoopitey

 

Thanks, I knew there were some issues with the rhetoric being used in the video to "gloss over" things but since I'm not that well versed on the Syrian conflict I can't definitively deny it.

 

Interesting about the CIA black sites. Wasn't that our first big agreement with Libya too? That we would use them to host secret prisons and run torture programs? Boy, seems anyone who works with us in that regard needs to watch their back.

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12 hours ago, Lostwingman said:

 

Thanks, I knew there were some issues with the rhetoric being used in the video to "gloss over" things but since I'm not that well versed on the Syrian conflict I can't definitively deny it.

 

Interesting about the CIA black sites. Wasn't that our first big agreement with Libya too? That we would use them to host secret prisons and run torture programs? Boy, seems anyone who works with us in that regard needs to watch their back.

 

I'm not sure about the timeline with Libya, but I think something roughly similar happened.  There have been reports of black sites in Libya.  Libya was much more jarring because the US went from rapprochement to banging the war drum seemingly overnight:
 

 

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Yuri Lyamin about Shayrat base attack.

 

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   In principle, SyrianMilitaryCap figures of losses of the Syrian Air Force of 5 Su-22M3, 1 Su-22M4 and 3 MiG-23ML, a total of 9 aircraft are in good agreement with the figure reported by the military reporter Yevgeni Poddubny of the "Rossiya" television channel,  shortly after arriving on affected base - "Not all planes were destroyed, 9 of them burned down in the hangars".

   As you can see on the satellite images of the shelters for the aircraft there are located into three groups. Moreover, the MiG-23s were based in the eastern group of eight doubled shelters, and the Su-22 in two western groups, each of seven shelters of five "doubled" and two "solitary". This arrangement and the number of places for aircraft in the shelters is in good agreement with the data that three squadrons were based there, one on the MiG-23ML / MLD fighters, and two others on the Su-22M3 / M4 fighter-bombers. As I mentioned earlier, it seems that part of the MiG-23s were transferred to the Hama airbase during the war, and there were not so many of them left on the base at Shayrat. In turn, the Su-22 squadron suffered losses, both because of the actions of militants, and for technical reasons. Thus, some of the shelters were empty and used as warehouses, and in some there a damaged or broken aircrafts were sationed, which they hoped to restore/repair.

    Among the group of northwestern shelters, a helipad was also located, which from time to time was used by Russian military helicopters.
   Judging by the satellite images that appeared over the past time, the video from the UAV of Russian MoD, photos of the Sputnik agency and the reports of the crew of the Russiya channed and Anna-news TV channel, as a result of the "Tomahawks" strikes, the eastern group of shelters with the MiG-23 and the south-western Group of shelters with part of Su-22 took hits. The air defense positions with the Kvadrat air defense system, warehouses and storage facilities in the eastern and northern parts of the base also were attacked.

   At the same time, the northwestern group of shelters seems not to have suffered at all. Thus, it can be assumed that one of the Su-22 squadrons was not affected at all and probably it was them who began to fly back from the base now.

 

   Three groups of shelters on the base of Ash Shayrat, red identified the affected groups of shelters and the blue that group of shelters that remained unaffected as a result of American missile strikes.

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MiG-23s

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0_15858b_21f72300_orig

 

3 Su-22s

0_158581_61775ab8_orig

 

0_158580_900b2987_orig

 

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10th April of 2017. As a result of a clear airstrike near city Jisr ash-Shugur (Idlib province), 22 terrorist’s leaders of Jabhat al-Nusra were exterminated due to information obtained from Ahrar al-Sham representatives.

 

I am interested how those guys are getting those videos taking into account MoD didn't published those.

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Conflicting reports on SAA capture of Khirbet Anadan, intense clashes reported at Tell Shuwayhaneh + shelling on west Aleppo countryside

 

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Big push by SAA south of Tadmor/Palmyra, reports that they have reached Sawanah crossroad & are advancing towards Khunayfis mines

 

 

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