The Kremlin is burning?

[mandeb48]

NATO members celebrating an al-Qaeda victory in a 3rd world country. Democratic and free civilization is getting better and better.

[Stefan Kotsch]

NATO members celebrating? Truly?

[Roman Alymov]

9 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

What knowledge is that? How to conduct human wave assaults, how to die gloriously under Western cluster bombs? Valuable skills indeed!  

 

First and foremost, the knowlege of how not to live in the world of Western media bubble full of stories of human wave assaults and Western wunderwaffe.

[Roman Alymov]

2 hours ago, ink said:

I think it must be clear I was referring to the Russians.

As it should be! Beyond carefully coordinated peacekeeping (preferably under the auspices of the UN), sending troops abroad should be one of the most controversial things a country can do.

     Russians were operating alongside local soldiers and obviously inder invitation of official local Gov, so it was quite legitimate. Another queestion is if it was in interests of Russia - see this from Strelkov's friend, first commander of Saur-Mogila hill defence https://t.me/donbass_skripnik/15446

2 hours ago, ink said:

As it should be! Beyond carefully coordinated peacekeeping (preferably under the auspices of the UN), sending troops abroad should be one of the most controversial things a country can do.

It got nothing to do with UN as it is deeply rooted in Russian culture: lands overseas were never considered as something valuable worth fighting for longterm. From time to time Russians were getting some peaces of faraway lands - from Greek islands to California - but never were bothered to keep them. Some scepticism about wars in foreign land remained even in the age of colonial empires, as Russian society was always aware of the cost of this wars - see Vereschagin's diptych "After failure" and "After success" dated 1868

Re UN mandate - as far as i remember Korean war was fought inder UN mandate....

[Mighty_Zuk]

2 hours ago, mandeb48 said:

NATO members celebrating an al-Qaeda victory in a 3rd world country. Democratic and free civilization is getting better and better.

What's better? Having Al Qaeda at home or an Al Qaeda abroad?

I'd rather have it stay abroad. 

[Yama]

3 hours ago, Mighty_Zuk said:

What's better? Having Al Qaeda at home or an Al Qaeda abroad?

I'd rather have it stay abroad. 

More successful AQ and IS are abroad, more likely they are going to spread to (your) home too.

[bojan]

"This movie is dedicated to brave mujahedeen of Afghanistan"... Oh wait...  

Edited July 29, 2024 by bojan

[mandeb48]

21 minutes ago, bojan said:

"This movie is dedicated to brave mujahedeen of Afghanistan"... Oh wait...  

I'm still waiting for Rambo V where John returns to Afghanistan to kill Hamid and maybe his family (You know, there is collateral damage when fighting in the Third World.)

[mandeb48]

4 hours ago, Mighty_Zuk said:

What's better? Having Al Qaeda at home or an Al Qaeda abroad?

I'd rather have it stay abroad. 

The only good Al Qaeda member is a dead Al Qaeda member. I find it strange that an Israeli thinks differently.

[seahawk]

When it comes to Russians, everybody is preferred by the West. This is why it is a matter of national survival for Russia to defeat the West.

[Mighty_Zuk]

8 hours ago, Yama said:

More successful AQ and IS are abroad, more likely they are going to spread to (your) home too.

6 hours ago, mandeb48 said:

The only good Al Qaeda member is a dead Al Qaeda member. I find it strange that an Israeli thinks differently.

It amazes me how simple reading comprehension skills are so elusive to so many people.

[Stuart Galbraith]

12 hours ago, Roman Alymov said:

First and foremost, the knowlege of how not to live in the world of Western media bubble full of stories of human wave assaults and Western wunderwaffe.

Ah, im probably imagining it when Russian soldiers talk of meatgrinder tactics. Thats obviously much more sophisticated then Human Wave.

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-meat-grinder-campaign/32328051.html

[sunday]

7 hours ago, mandeb48 said:

The only good Al Qaeda member is a dead Al Qaeda member. I find it strange that an Israeli thinks differently.

Indeed! After so many energetic Israeli operations against ISIS and the like in Syria...

[seahawk]

Against ISIS? If you bomb the Assad regime, which is fighting the IS and Al Qaeda, you are actually supporting those head choppers.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Yes, but so were they, thats the neat thing!

[old_goat]

14 hours ago, mandeb48 said:

The only good Al Qaeda member is a dead Al Qaeda member. I find it strange that an Israeli thinks differently.

I think israeli government once even stated that they have zero problems with ISIS. It is a confirmed fact that some wounded jihadists (leaders?) were treated in israeli hospitals. Also IDF actively aided ISIS operations against SAA, both with recon data and airstrikes.

Edited July 29, 2024 by old_goat

[ink]

7 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Yes, but so were they, thats the neat thing!

I don't think supporting and not-attacking-quite-as-much-as-everyone-would-like are the same thing really. It made sense for Assad and the Russo-Iranians to attack their foes one by one given that the Western-backed head choppers were knocking on the gates of Damascus.

[Yama]

In a super-complicated conflict such as Syrian Civil War, temporary truces and 'agreements' are made by everyone and are simply sensible.

It was rumoured that during zenith of ISIS caliphate, USA was considering temporary alliance with Al-Qaida.

[Roman Alymov]

From Zakhar Prilepin 

"The opening of the French Olympiad impressed everyone, of course. Satanists, transvestites (banned in the territory of the Russian Federation), all that.

Anger is righteous, and disgust at the sight of all this is natural, inevitable for any normal person.

I see the problem (intuitively, I don't know anything about it) in another way.

So far, we are not waiting for a Eurasian turnaround and the construction of a new anti-colonial civilization of saved humanity.

We are more likely to have painful negotiations and then, with a creak, a return to the world of good old Europe, sanctions lifted one after another, our economic, cultural and political elites, who have reached their dusty dachas in Nice in a small (but gaining strength) stream and wherever else they have dachas — in Spain or in England; well, everything else accompanying this process.

New agreements (the economy is above all, are we idiots to refuse money), new negotiations with the new American president ("reset relations", although I have already heard it somewhere), new, so to speak, prospects, much more promising than the previous ones.

And Satanism... well, Satanism. "Don't exaggerate!" they will say. "Europe is different!" they will say. They will say: "All this was arranged by Marxists and Leftists, but we are not like that, we return to our dachas in old Europe, praying, overshadowed by a broad cross and deeply sovereign."

Well, it will start from the same place: ours in Cannes, ours at the next Olympiad, ours in the world chess tournaments. Will they allow our flags to be taken out? Well.

So we'll carry the flags.

Do you know why our flag was not next to this unprecedented rampage?

Well, you know.

Well, let's say it out loud, since everyone knows it.

Only. Because. As for us. They didn't let us in.

It's not because we're so proud and disgusted. No.

Only because they wouldn't let us in. 

Until next time. 

...in the meantime, you can make some noise, of course. "Babylon must be destroyed!" "Thank God, we are not like that!" "Goodbye, Europe!"

Yeah. Goodbye. See you next year. Well, or in a couple of years. Much faster than we think today. 

Just wave your finger at us. With just one finger. We will throw everything and run back to the European embrace. To their bare-assed party. The wrong door, as they say. 

...Am I wrong, right?

Well, I'll be the first to selebrate if I'm wrong." ( https://t.me/oper_goblin/30828 )

[Roman Alymov]

This person is Thomas Jolly, "artistic director" who have created Paris Olimpic opening ceremony

What is this guy got to do with Russia? Well, one of his first works as performance in Moscow's liberal "Gogol-center". The center created and run on Russian state money. It was in 2018, when Donbass was already soaked with Russian blood....

https://start-std.ru/ru/blog/104/

[Stuart Galbraith]

15 hours ago, ink said:

I don't think supporting and not-attacking-quite-as-much-as-everyone-would-like are the same thing really. It made sense for Assad and the Russo-Iranians to attack their foes one by one given that the Western-backed head choppers were knocking on the gates of Damascus.

https://www.newsweek.com/how-syrias-assad-helped-forge-isis-255631

Mohammed Al-Saud is under no illusions. "In 2011, the majority of the current ISIS leadership was released from jail by Bashar Al Assad," he said. "No one in the regime has ever admitted this, or explained why." Al-Saud, a Syrian dissident with the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, left Syria under threat of arrest in 2011.

Others were not so lucky. In 2006, Syrian Tarek Alghorani was sentenced to seven years in jail for the contents of his blog. Since his amnesty in 2011, he has been an active opponent of the Damascus regime. "There were around 1,500 people in there," he recalls, outside a sleepy midtown café in Tunis. "There were about ten of us bloggers, around one hundred Kurds and the rest were just normal people. I'd say that, when they went in, around 90 percent were simply normal Muslims."

"The situation in there was like the middle ages. There were too many people and not enough space. There wasn't enough water to drink. There wasn't enough food to eat and what there was would have been ignored by dogs in the street. Torture was an everyday reality. After years in there, all of those people became Salafists and in a bad, bad way."

His fellow prisoners were members of ISIS. "Abu Muhammad al-Joulani, (founder of the Jihadist group, Jabhat al-Jabhat al-Nusra) was rumored to be there. Mohammed Haydar Zammar, (one of the organisers of the 9/11 attacks) was there. This is where the Syrian part of ISIS was born," he said.

Alghorani is convinced that members of ISIS were released strategically by Assad. "From the first days of the revolution (in March 2011), Assad denounced the organisation as being the work of radical Salafists, so he released the Salafists he had created in his prisons to justify the claim ... If you do not have an enemy, you create an enemy."

Fellow Syrians agree. "The regime did not just open the door to the prisons and let these extremists out, it facilitated them in their work, in their creation of armed brigades," a former member of the Syrian Security Services told the Abu Dhabi newspaper, the National, on condition of anonymity in January this year.

"The regime knew what these people were. It knew what they wanted and the extent of their networks. Then it released them. These are the same people who are now in Iraq," Al-Saud added.

[ink]

Perhaps that's true but usually one would require a slightly higher grade of evidence than dissident X says so (in Newsweek of all places!).

Anyway, I'm not going to spend too much time defending the Assad regime - I think they are plenty brutal - but I still think "supporting ISIS" is a bit too strong.

[Stuart Galbraith]

1 hour ago, ink said:

Perhaps that's true but usually one would require a slightly higher grade of evidence than dissident X says so (in Newsweek of all places!).

Anyway, I'm not going to spend too much time defending the Assad regime - I think they are plenty brutal - but I still think "supporting ISIS" is a bit too strong.

How many do you want?

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/assad-regimes-business-model-supporting-islamic-state

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration_with_the_Islamic_State

 

[ink]

56 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

How many do you want?

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/assad-regimes-business-model-supporting-islamic-state

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration_with_the_Islamic_State

 

Not sure. Even from that Wiki article, Syrian support for ISIS looks more "alleged" than Turkish support for ISIS.

What seems to be the case is that lots of the players in the region (or all of them? Including the US and Israel?) used ISIS for their own purposes and against their enemies.

Given that the Syrians, Iraqis, and the USians actually fought ISIS and invaded/liberated ISIS-held territories, perhaps the focus should be on those players who didn't do that?

Edited July 30, 2024 by ink

[Stuart Galbraith]

6 minutes ago, ink said:

Not sure. Even from that Wiki article, Syrian support for ISIS looks more "alleged" than Turkish support for ISIS.

What seems to be the case is that lots of the players in the region (or all of them? Including the US and Israel?) used ISIS for their own purposes and against their enemies.

Given that the Syrians, Iraqis, and the USians actually fought ISIS and invaded/liberated ISIS-held territories, perhaps the focus should be on those players who didn't do that?

Its offering two perspectives, one that shows there is considerable evidence for it happening, a counterfactual saying ther eis no evidence for it happening. What was clear, even when it happened, is the Assad regime was not attacking ISIS nearly as much as the other opposition, and was buying oil off ISIS. At that point, Im not really sure what other evidence is needed.