Oh my fucking God they are building a fucking wall.
I mean, more is going on, but I didn’t want to bury the lede on this one.
So how did this come to pass? I mean, building a wall is a strange thing to do in a combat zone. I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense, I just mean that it’s hard to do and, like, really, really dangerous. People are often amused by Hobbes’s “nasty, brutish, and short,” line as representing life in the state of nature, but what he means is that without a stable political situation, life is too uncertain to do much of anything, least of all build shit that which some jerk will inevitably knock down when you’re not looking.
So, to reiterate: The hell? First, word came of a meeting.
Actually, no. First shit like this Tweet thread started.
which caused pretty much exactly the reaction you might expect.
WHO THE FUCK VAGUEBOOKS A WAR???
So anyway, it was announced that there was a big meeting between Gen. Alexander Chaiko of the Russian forces in Syria and Gen. Mazloum of the SDF.
Here’s the notice that went out.
Wait, if you’re reading this, you probably can’t read that. I can’t either. Let’s try again.
Whoops, no. You know what? They didn’t put the notice out in English, just Russian and Arabic.
That’s cold, yo. Anyway, we can get a translation.
Of course, everybody already knew what had been decided long before the announcement.
Still, was the VagueBooking really necessary?
Fine. Be like that.
Actually, it’s cool. He really does get the goods. Good follow.
So yeah, there was a big deal finalized whereby the Turkish backed militia withdraw a bit north from the M4 highway along that critical stretch between Tal Tamr and Ayn Issa, and Russian and SAA troops will take over patrolling that territory, in addition to a Russian base up north east in Amuda.
Chances of a possible Russian withdrawal from the Turkish border and the resumption of the Turkish military operation against Kurdish armed groups seem to be working like a charm.
Mazloum Abdi, a member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (designated a terrorist group in Turkey) and the commander-in-chief of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces now speaks Russian.
On December 1, Abdi announced that the SDF and the Russian side had reached a deal under which Russian Military Police units will be deployed in Tell Tamr, Ayn Issa and Amud. The announcement was made via Twitter, in Russian.
Now, to add some detail (beyond the fact that if you map that on to where the US is, it splits Rojava in half territorily between super power presences, and that’s fun), note the mention of the silos in the Rojava Network Tweet above. I forgot to mention this in the Deep Operation post the other day, but it fits into both the large scale strategic assault on the economy and the more micro-oriented random violence and making it a terrible place to live thing, and how things like shelling the water station do both.
Anyway, as the main highway spanning the area, the M4 is obviously critical to transportation. Which means there would be—are—grain silos along the route, like, pretty much everyplace where people have food they need to move around, be it along rivers or major thoroughfares. It’s just the kind of stuff you get near major transportation corridors like the M4: grain silos.
So equally obviously, the TFSA guys have been stealing the grain. That’s just what they do. Hurts the people. Hurts the economy. Stealing bread from people is a classic bad guy move in stories, going back even before stealing bread, when everyone made their own bread, it was all about stealing the grain. Which is to say, the Turkish backed militia guys are basically medieval.
And they’ve been doing it for awhile.
So, broad view, Russia is taking over the policing of a new and expanded portion of Rojava (Wait? Hasn’t this happened before? Uh…) including the critical part of the M4 between Ain Issa and Tal Tamr and, notably, a base up north on the border a few clicks to the west of Qamishli where the US is setting up bases.
So the M4 will be maintained by Russia and Assad’s regime, and the silos will remain with Rojava.
So, circling back, as we allegedly know from that one Robert Frost poem, the only one which might have its meaning as commonly butchered as the one about the path less traveled: We’re apparently going to need a fucking wall to make this work.
Who could have seen this coming?
Interesting. But the way Tweets embed on WordPress, you can’t see the key information: The date.
Let’s look closer.
Oh.
Seriously, what the fuck is going on here?
Rojava to Rock 