Syria

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
a lot to say but the worst thing is erdogan granted a victory to assad and that they were always on the same side. noone believed this from me though, not on the left, much less on the right.

the SDF is now being dismantled and the PYD is being absorbed into the russian controlled SAA 5th army core, so they'll be fighting alongside iraqi, Iranian and ba'athists. there is no revolution anymore, it's fully over as the only avenue that syrians can fight under now is hts, an al-qaeda spin off. The syrian people are fed up of the syrian national army which has totally mutated from being the expression of an armed uprising (the original free syrian army 2011-14) to being nothing but canon fodder for the turkish military state. turkey is likely to abandon them soon which is going to give obama-trump their dreams come true, ultra-balkanisation, and also create a new brand of salafi takfirism as groups war for scraps of 10km land strips. Afghanistan mk2, warlords amenable to the distabilisation everyone requires. This naturally means that the strategic pipeline from Kerkuk to Seyhan is going to be useful for trump-putin. neocolonialism in action, folks. Idlib, naturally, will fall.

Worse still, Erdogan is still trying to play russia off against the states, not realising that this is going to create an analogous situation in turkey where tr becomes ultra-nationalised and a new type of ultranationalist and islamic synthesis takes place.

unfortunately, some pro-syrian personalities have sided with Tayyip in this, something structural racism islamophobia something, ignoring of course that the majority of the turkish armed forces are conscripted kurds from poor areas who are registered on the censuses as Turkish. such nuance I fear eludes many western imperial nostalgics.

Firefinga's point is just out of a cold war textbook and not even disagreeable, so inaccurate that it's funny and i can't be arsed with it. there is no multipolar world when everyone is on the side of Bashir.
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
Just saw some footage of yesterday's pro-Rojava demo on a Novara twitter account. Good, I'm glad but my God where have this people been for the last 8 years? Why the fetish for Rojava and the ignorance of the rest of the war and revolution? Why could they never find it in themselves to support anti-Assad Syrian arabs? These are all rhetorical questions btw.

It really does my head in. I can't believe the selective outrage. There must be some cognitive dissonance surely?
 
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yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
i think it's because somehow, the kurds have been turned into the "good" muslims. there certainly is something strange about it.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I think part of it is due to their separation from the rest of Syria - you don't have to engage with the same history and complexity. Not that I have much of a clue about this but all the different factors like clans, secular history, class composition, Sunni/Shite etc etc. Plus also they tickled the bellies of Western progressive fantasies with women soldiers and the like.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
i think it's because somehow, the kurds have been turned into the "good" muslims. there certainly is something strange about it.

Any discussion of this sort kind of has to be prefaced with a disclaimer that there is probably no major single faction in this war that hasn't committed some atrocities, but that said, I think it's probably fair to class the SDF/YPG as preferable to Assad's torturers, the Hezbollah death squads or the infinitude of Salafist groups active in Syria, never mind ISIS itself.

And the PKK itself is pretty secular, if not actively anti-religious, so I don't know how many of those Kurds - at least those involved in the fighting - are actually Muslims any more than you and I are "Christians".
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
For anyone curious it's a film dedicated to the filmakers daughter. They're now both safe in London. It's 5 years of footage she shot of the revolution and the aftermath. With distressing film, I sometimes distance myself by reminding myself that what I'm watching isn't real - can't do that here. You're up close and personal with someone's life.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
There are oilfields in Syria but the idea that the US is there for that reason is mistaken. Who knows what Trump is free associating about this time? Idk if you've encountered the whole "pipelines" theory but that's similarly batshit.
 

luka

Well-known member
There are oilfields in Syria but the idea that the US is there for that reason is mistaken. Who knows what Trump is free associating about this time? Idk if you've encountered the whole "pipelines" theory but that's similarly batshit.

It may be over specific but one reason the US is unable to stay away from the Middle East is oil. Energy security is crucial.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
But there's a lot of analyses out there that start and stop with "oil" and ignore the complex social realities of the countries they're talking about. That's really inane.

If you want to talk about any country, you need to understand it with a degree of depth. You need an analysis that focused on specific conditions, grounded in the experience of those who live there. A lot of analysis that focuses on "oil" lacks that. There's a lot of stuff that treats Syria as Iraq Mk 2 that'd be funny if it wasn't racist af.

Starting to see some of this kneejerk anti-imperialism in circulation with regard to Bolivia. Now, I have no idea what's happening there. But lots of people are trotting out the "it's a US coup" line while at the same time being no more informed than I am.
 

luka

Well-known member
Complex social realities are all well and good but have no bearing on American actions in the region.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
But lots of commentators ignore said realities while blaming largely imaginary US interests. An event too complex too understand? Don't worry, just blame the USA, shout oil a lot and you'll get a bazillion social media likes.
 

luka

Well-known member
As far as Bolivia goes some people have probably noticed a trend concerning what happens when markets are closed to capital, from the opium wars onward, and feel confident in extrapolating.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Complex social realities are all well and good but have no bearing on American actions in the region.

This is a bizarre thing to say. Trump is a moron but there are people involved in making decisions about American involvement in Syria other than him, some of whom are presumably fairly smart.

I know you like to live in a morally simple universe of absolute goodies and baddies in which the USA is an unqualified baddy which routinely invades other countries for no reason other than resource piracy. But as I said, that doesn't even make sense since Syria is not an oil-rich country. It has the same reserves as Uganda and I don't see the USA invading Uganda, which would be a damn sight easier than invading Syria.
 
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