Update on the “Kanter Congress.” His term, not mine.

Not bad for a guy who learned English watching Jersey Shore.

NESN: Enes Kanter Explains How He Learned English By Watching ‘Jersey Shore’

He’s getting through to some people-he retweets them as they come.

And lest we think he’s just and attention whore.

I wanted to point out that the mouthpieces of totalitarian reforms are generally very fond of and similar to one another:

Take this Turkish media account:

Check the source of that heartwarming video:

Also, a lot of these accounts tend to be super fun precisely because they are kinda bullshit. Like, the RT model out of Russia is to put out real news they want you to know, bullshit they want you to believe, and then super interesting and fun shit.

The People’s Daily account that video is from operates similarly, but more focusing on fun and heartwarming stuff and positive news about China.

It’s all quite brilliant. It’s like the very underrated Anchorman 2 on steroids. And real.

And the totalitarian accounts are effectively colluding with one another to convince people that all the bad things people say about those other countries can’t be true.

It’s an integrated cross-borders presentation of the shiny happy public face of autocracy.

 

Jimbodandy

Rev, do you get the sense that this mini cold war will stay like this for a while?

I’ve been thinking about this. A lot.

Like, as per this thread, watching movement grind to an excruciating slowness while intensifying conflict was predicted in this thread. So that was, apparently, sorta clear.

The next move is not so clear to me. There are clearly significant information ops going on, but I don’t know to what extent they play that game a bit and see what happens while they… do what?

I would really welcome any thoughts on this.

Here’s the thing: What looks stalled to us is basically unlivable on the ground. So sustaining those conditions is basically the same as Turkish advance for Turkish goals.

Heck, they’re even putting minimal Turkish troops’ lives on the line by using a proxy army full of people everyone hates anyway. So even in an open society, you wouldn’t be getting that kind of pressure to withdraw that the sight of flag draped coffins causes.

(Side note: I also wanted to note there seems to be an uptick in referring to the relevant militias as TFSA instead of the umbrella SNA shell they incorporated into or whatever sort of evil organizational filings you do for such things. I’m pretty sure it’s to redifferentiate the fact that these have been dominated by radical jihadis, in distinction from many of the SNA groups that had acquired a more sympathetic following as a kind of punk rock opposition to Assad.)

The entire cease fire was identical to what a “muted” ethnic cleansing campaign would look like, just the muted version that can be seen across many posts in this thread by looking at it from multiple sides, for which the internet and a forum like this is an amazing vehicle, but it’s a process not easily communicated in a TV clip and sound bite. But the reality is that there have been three or four different plans that would entail a cease fire or reduction of violence and hostilities, and Turkey kept doing exactly what they were doing at every point along the way.

From the point of view of boots on the ground, it’s just Kabuki theater.  Or rather, as someone I know put it, it’s a performative act but Kabuki is meant to call attention to itself and have its meaning best understood by elites, so it’s the negotiations that are Kabuki and really are just distracting us from a war that is about anybody but the people actually fighting it who are pawns for other interests. But as with many things, it’s not symmetrical in effect; the Kabuki theater offers appearances constructive activity while actually providing legitimacy and cover for a status quo that is characterized by ongoing violence.

If they have the patience, they can just grind this out for awhile and devastate the area while claiming to not be doing anything. And they do know deep down that the Americans can blow their shit up in a heartbeat if the will were to resolve itself.*

So my best assessment is: It’s not a Cold War. It just plays one on TV.

*My regard for our elite troops has always been high, in terms of abilities, training, discipline, and extreme care taken in trying to get things right because they understand the importance of even subtle things to the mission, any mission. Anytime I learn more about them, I become more impressed with them. For all the fetishization of the Navy SEALs, the tip of the spear is just the most easily observable part of what are really amazing integrated operations; I’ve seen Green Berets matter bitterly about how they would be are actually  most effective disaster relief team in the world when deployed that way so it’s can be frustrating to usually only be used in war zones. Think a team of David Eubankses with air support and evac. I’m rambling a bit, but these guys are really amazing, and that’s only possible with an immense reserve of restraint and discipline.

That said, and I don’t think it’ll happen, but if one of our snake eaters comes back and goes Joe Hallenbeck on Lindsey Graham, I won’t be the least bit surprised and only thing I’ll be wondering about is this:

Jimbodandy

Thanks, Rev.  That’s a bit worse than I thought but makes sense.  So Turkey and Assad are happy with this status quo.

It might be close to optimal for Erdogan, once you put aside things like wholesale slaugher vis-vis world opinion and response.

Assad is more of a puzzle. Like, what works for Assad and what works for Syria are not totally aligned. I think they only need Assad around because they need a dictator who’s a useful idiot to consolidate the territory once Putin and Erdogan have a steady state of affairs they like.

As far as I can tell, Assad’s only leverage here is being the devil they know along with the basic conservative principle that entails that older regimes are more likely to, if not appear legitimate, have a better case that they can survive than new ones do, for obvious reasons.

But nobody of any significance needs Assad, much less cares about his goals. I think you can see this in how differently the players interact in the east and west parts of the war; you can see the basic situationalism and relativism of real politic play out in that the same entities are basically rivals in one place and effectively allies in another… which happens in real world international relations, but not usually a six hour drive from one another.

If Trump put up the money for the gambling license himself, Assad is Fredo.

Who the fuck knows what happens with him, but he’s the only one who thinks he’s the protagonist of the movie.

 

 

Meet the Yazidi. Or rather, a look at what they’ve been putting up with the last five years.

Genocide of Yazidis by ISIL

Wikipedia: Genocide of Yazidis by ISIL

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, calling itself Islamic State) is recognized by the United Nations as the perpetrator of a genocide of Yazidis in Iraq.[1][10][11] The genocide led to the expulsion, flight and effective exile of the Yazidis from their ancestral lands in Northern Iraq whose women and girls were forced into sexual slavery by the Islamic State and whose men were killed by the thousands.[12] The genocide led to the abduction of Yazidi women and massacres that killed five thousand Yazidi civilians[4][13] during what has been called a “forced conversioncampaign”[14][15] being carried out in Northern Iraq by ISIL, starting in 2014. The genocide happened following the Kurdish Peshmergawithdrawal, which left the Yazidis defenseless.[16][17]

These events were the impetus for the US to begin air strikes and form Operation Inherent Resolve.

From the wiki above:

ISIL’s persecution of the Yazidis gained international attention and led to the American-led intervention in Iraq, which started with United States airstrikes against ISIL. Additionally, the US, UK, and Australia made emergency airdrops to Yazidis who had fled to a mountain range. YPG and PKK fighters opened a humanitarian corridor to the Sinjar Mountains and helped the Yazidis.[18]

As with the Jewish people, I think they basically get fucked over on the regular basically because they won’t give up their religion. Which traditionally pisses other people off.

I think I read somewhere that in their history they count like 72 incidents of something awful like this, but I’d have to double check. I know there’s been, like, a lot.

Here’s the last few before ISIS.

Ottoman era

• In 1640, 40,000 Ottoman soldiers attacked Yazidi communities around Mount Sinjar, killing 3,060 Yazidis during battle, then raiding and setting fire to 300 Yazidi villages and murdering 1,000–2,000 Yazidis who had taken refuge in caves around the town of Sinjar;[24][non-primary source needed]
• in 1892, Sultan Abdulhamid II ordered a campaign of mass conscription or murder of Yazidis as part of his campaign to Islamize the Ottoman Empire, which also targeted Armenians and other Christians.[25]

Post 2003 Iraq invasion eraEdit

• In April 2007, a bus in Mosul was hijacked, Muslims and Christians were told to get off, the remaining 23 Yazidi passengers were driven to an eastern Mosul location and murdered.

• In August 2007, two Yazidi communities, in Qahtaniyah (just south of Sinjar) and Jazeera (Siba Sheikh Khidir), near Mosul, were hit by a total of four vehicle bombs carrying two tons of explosives, leaving 336–500 dead and 1,500 injured. Perpetrators are unknown; the U.S. saw “al-Qaeda as the prime suspect” because of the scale and the co-ordinated nature of the bombings.[26]

Now, the careful reader would have noticed who were the first people to intervene to save Yazidi people from ISIS: That’s right, the mother fucking Kurds.

December 2014 Sinjar offensive

Wikipedia: December 2014 Sinjar offensive

So, it’s not like these people haven’t been aware of fighting ISIS in the past when the West wasn’t on the ball.

And then it gets fuzzy. The Peshmerga have been criticized for being responsible for Yazidi getting whacked because of their withdrawal against ISIS.

Forbes: Can The Peshmerga Fighters Be Held Liable For Abandoning The Yazidis In Sinjar?

24. As they moved into Sinjar, ISIS fighters faced little or no resistance. Many of the Peshmerga reportedly withdrew in the face of the ISIS advance, leaving much of the Sinjar region defenceless. The decision to withdraw was not effectively communicated to the local population. No evacuation orders were issued and most villages were initially unaware of the collapse of the security situation.

25. As word spread that the Peshmerga had left their checkpoints, a few ad hoc groups of lightly armed, local Yazidi men mounted a very limited defence of some villages, such as Girzerik and Siba Sheikh Khedir, in an attempt to give their families and neighbours more time to escape. By daybreak, Yazidi families from hundreds of villages across Sinjar were fleeing their homes in fear and panic. They took little with them. Others were advised by Arab neighbours to stay in the villages and raise white flags over their houses.

That looks bad. Of course, putting aside the some might argue that holding the Kurds responsible for the fate of another people might be a bit rich, it somewhat runs against the grain of what appears to be a fair amount of gratitude to the Kurds for their intervention—

PRI: ‘If it wasn’t for the Kurdish fighters, we would have died up there’

—but even beyond that, the Peshmerga aren’t the YPG, but the tendency to refer to the Kurds as a unified homogenous people allows for the distortion of what “the Kurds” have done.

Which totally complicated both our ability to support them or even understand them, especially since anti-Kurdish entities such as Turkey promote the conflations.

So, since I’ve been talking about media and how major news organizations have been dropping the ball so consistently: Forbes can probably go fuck themselves.

VICE: ‘Everywhere Around Is the Islamic State’: On the Road in Iraq with YPG Fighters

Yazidis in Iraq are unanimous on who saved them from the Islamic State — the Syrian Kurdish fighters of the People’s Protection Units.

And this confusion about who is doing what and who is responsible for what leads to shit like this.

WaPo (Aug 2014): A U.S.-designated terrorist group is saving Yazidis and battling the Islamic State

Which is to say, Turkey’s NATO membership has been hamstringing the fight against ISIS for over five fucking years now.

And this isn’t just a problem for the Kurdish people which, as has come up a lot, become the focus for what are much larger regional problems.

As in, this Kurdish stuff is just about their attempts to fight ISIS which saves not just themselves but other peoples in the region.

Like the aforementioned Yazidi.

The New Yoker did a more involved piece in Aug 2018 through the lens of Yazidi in America traveling to Washington to urge action:

New Yorker: The Daring Plan to Save a Religious Minority from ISIS

When the terrorist group attacked the Yazidis, a small group of American immigrants knew they could do something.

I mean, Americans think that we’re taking the fight against ISIS seriously. Which I think we all agree is worthy cause. But the idea that the US is really taking this seriously—

Fucking, compared to who?

Daily Beast: Yazidi Child Soldiers Take Revenge on ISIS

They’re probably not angels either, though  they’ve heard worse, being accused of devil worship and the like.

I’m ending this post here not because there isn’t more to say but because reading all this from 2014 is pissing me off and the cat looks concerned.

Looks like the ground chatter about coming moves on Kobane were accurate. Fighting has been intensifying and there’s is now a significant increase in drone use, which also means rescuer operations in the villages are not possible.

I’ll begin with a glimpse of what things already looked like as the heat started being turned up a few days ago.

As per some of the recent posts, it doesn’t need to be an all out onslaught to make life unbearable.

Like, what makes this more insidious is that Turkey does not want a quick, decisive victory. If they had done that, they’d be stuck with all the people there—including, God help us all, Kurds, Christians, Yazidi, etc.

They’re outsourcing it to mercenary jihadis who work basically for weapons and are utterly expendable. This grinding nastiness is a feature not a bug.

This is what life there is like now.

<WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES BELOW>

And it appears that shit is now getting real. Which beyond the obvious is a problem as Kobane already has its own IDP situation.

And now there is an increase in drone strikes in the area hitting people, including civilians and making evac from the area impossible.

The attacks almost makes you forget that Russia is in Kobane—in the US base no less.

So what the hell are they doing if not stopping the violence?

Seriously? Is Russia basically auctioning off Kobane?

Somehow, I expect Putin will get what he wants from Assad and Erdogan. I don’t know how, but he has at every point thus far. Somehow.

Keep in mind that Kobane is the first great victory of Rojava over ISIS, and therefore has massive symbolic and historical significance for both of them.

It’s not a long history, as both are young movements, making it even more significant.

And just so we don’t lose sight of the fact that there are regular people there, let’s check in on how they feel—this one set to music (cover of Rage Against the Machine).

I don’t know what this is all about, and it seems weird, but it’s almost definitely foreshadowing something-this is coming up again.

So, much like with the announcements that the US is not there for the oil, Turkey is not pursuing the repatriation of Syrian refugees, a cruel idea that he attributes to the political opposition.

Bianet: Erdoğan: We Won’t Send Syrians Back
In a departure from his recent promises about repatriating millions of Syrians, Erdoğan has said that they cannot send people who “ran from barrel bombs.”

Erdoğan said Turkey makes a “conscious” effort to make the lives of civilians in Syria better, unlike other countries that pursue their personal interests in the region.

When you control for the superior grammar and rhetoric, these propaganda pieces are fundamentally the way you express yourself to convince a six year old to love you because you’re the greatest daddy ever. It’s fucking insipid.

Officially speaking, though, especially if you throw in ISIS being defeated, there are almost no officially stated reasons for the armies involved to be fighting left.

With one notable exception: ridding the region of what he terms the YPG which, even if this were a fair characterization of the SDF, somehow includes everyone in northern Syria.

And then a brief look at Twitter suggests that the US military has its own idea of what its orders are.

One of the Israeli articles I posted upthread noted that the US doesn’t actually have two sides to its split personality disorder, but three—POTUS, State, and the military.

This is an interesting and evocative juxtaposition.

<WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT BELOW>

That’s a good look. Of course, that’s not the graphic video.

This is.

The Turkish supported militas can’t even put blankets over bodies without being jerks?

Oh, well: As long as Turkey is happy-which is well covered by the pro-government papers:

 

 

So I had occasion to think of this again today:

Where the fuck are our flags?

The two images I’ve seen most used to galvanize or discourage people have been flags: The Russian one triumphantly flown over a former US base; and the American flag pictures from the oils rigs.

I didn’t use to be a big Lame Stream Media basher, but this is how far behind the story they are not just in the facts but with respect to any narrative coherence.

I mean, they posted this story yesterday. So now they are all in the kind of flag image that was hugely symbolic for anyone watching… weeks ago the first time it happened.

Fucking yesterday.

Democrats here were claiming it would be political malfeasance not to plaster the “Come and Take It” pics all over.

Well… I gotta feeling that ain’t happening.

dhappy42

The editors and executive producers at America’s newspapers and TV networks are patriots. Or something something …

Seriously, how can this not be a big story?

Good question. Like, you know how dogs can’t talk, but you can still figure out what they want you to know?

I think the military wants us to know that Trump is trying to throw the war on ISIS.

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Almost two years after the Islamic State group was announced territorially defeated in Iraq, the US-led coalition fighting the militant group has said it conducted 47 airstrikes on targets over September and October, while Iraq’s counter-terrorism forces and predominantly Shiite militias have reported counter-ISIS gains in operations conducted on Monday.

Nineteen airstrikes were conducted against ISIS targets in Iraq in October, according to a November 13 press release from the US-led Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR). In September, it conducted 28 airstrikes against ISIS targets in the country, their November 16 release detailed.

The coalition was established in 2014 after ISIS militants seized vast swathes of northern Iraq, including Iraq’s second city of Mosul, and threatened to march on Baghdad and Erbil. It has conducted some 34,674 strikes against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria between August 2014 and the end of September 2019.

The group was declared defeated by former Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi in December 2017. However, remnants of the group continue to operate, returning to earlier insurgency tactics including ambushes, kidnaps and targeted killings.

The US-led coalition has supported the Iraqi army in operations to eradicate these remnants. Operations have focused on the northwest of the country, including areas disputed between Iraq and the Kurdistan Region. As yet, operations have failed to entirely clear their presence, and military bodies worldwide have warned the group is still resurging.

ISIS propaganda outlets have continued to publish claims of attacks it has conducted. According to the group’s weekly Al-Naba newspaper, its militants conducted more than 161 attacks against security forces and locals in Iraq in September alone.

Iraqi Counter Terrorism Forces(ICTS) conducted an anti-ISIS operation on Makhool Mountain, Saladin province on Monday, destroying six ISIS ‘nests’ in the area, according to state media outlet INA .

The Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF, also known as Hashd al-Shaabi), a predominantly Shiite group of militias and a long-term partner in Iraqi security force operations against ISIS, claimed on Monday that it had detained a number of ISIS militants and family members in Mosul.

The detained were reportedly smuggled into the city from northeastern Syria’s notorious al-Hol camp, where tens of thousands of ISIS suspects, widows and children are being held.

“A unit of Hashd al-Shaabi detained a number of ISIS militants and ISIS families who have been smuggled into the Iraqi city of Mosul on Monday,” a Monday statement from the PMF read. “The Hashd al-Shaabi unit handed the detainees over to the Iraqi army for investigations.”

They can’t tell us that. But they’d really like us to know. And for all the support Americans say they give these guys, listening to them might be a start.

Like, there are several things that should independently be big stories here. Like, GWOT is often in the news, yeah?

UPDATE: CNN Still Awful

I just thought of this post because the whole, hey, this conflict may have a negative affect on the war against ISiS thing is now official.

CNN: New Pentagon report says Turkey’s Syria incursion is helping ISIS mount a comeback

The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency said in the report “that ISIS has exploited the Turkish incursion and subsequent drawdown of US troops from northeastern Syria to reconstitute its capabilities and resources both within Syria in the short term and globally in the longer term.”

Also, it seems I’m this report, the Pentagon denies Turkey’s claim that it is fighting ISIS (actually, their claim is that they do the mostest ISIS fighting of anyone in the world):

The report said the intelligence agency assesses that ISIS is “postured to withstand al-Baghdadi’s death, and probably will maintain ‘continuity of operations, global cohesion, and at least its current trajectory.’ ”

Over the weekend, the Turkish Ministry of Defense issued a statement saying it was the only member of NATO or the coalition fighting ISIS “toe to toe.” That statement ignored US operations against ISIS, including the mission that killed al-Baghdadi, and US casualties that have been incurred while fighting ISIS.

And the Pentagon report judges it to be an empty claim, finding that the Turkish-commanded militias that compose the majority of Ankara’s invasion forces are unlikely to fight ISIS.

So that’s bad. Awful really. But we’ve known this for ages. CNN is official Pentagon report. It makes sense to a degree to wait for official sources. Of corse, the problems wirhndoing so should seem quite obvious—some stories are important as they develop, not just something to know after the fact.

But here’s a further problem: They do a shit job assessing the report. Now, we usually think of assessing a government report as looking bullshit. But that’s very limited and makes a lot of assumptions.

CNN omits a crucial piece of info that RUDAW points out:

This merits paragraph 2 of the RUDAW coverage:

Published on Monday, the report extended beyond its quarterly deadline of September 30 in order to account for the US troop withdrawal and subsequent Turkish invasion of northeast Syria in October. Citing intelligence reports, Lead Inspector General Glenn A. Fine was clear in characterizing the US withdrawal as detrimental to the Combined Joint Task Force -Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) mission against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

It’s a quarterly report. The Pentagon delayed it a month, which effectively means not wanting to wait two additional months to over the results of our withdrawal. And for that matter, they offer plenty of reason they delayed it because they knew our withdrawal would have this effect.

That information seems pretty important to me: The Pentagom isn’t just telling us stuff, they think it’s so important that they reorganizes reports.

So basically, I can’t decide which is more important here: Turkey and ourselves and Russia are exacerbating the ISIS problem  (strangely, Assad is the not—just along for the ride on this one, though that is where he eats), or that outlets like CNN are a month or more behind things.

If you’ve been reading this thread, then you know there is easy access to highly established sources screaming about this stuff.

It’s not like I got my news from CNN before and have long told people that they are unbiased because that would require content. But except for some good special reporting on MSMBC and some good stuff on the ISIS camps, none of the major networks are rally covering it.

I thought they’d at least be lured in by the sensationalist aspect. Like, every human drama/tragedy/tragicomic narrative is going on over there somewhere.

Who is it that Marie Claire.uk is the largest outlet to interview hat Dani Ellis woman that I found in like a week on Twitter?

Like, I went over the intentional conspiracy building to fuck with our sense of reality the other day (I haven’t gotten into it, but that really fucked with me. I still fee covered in shit and vaguely paranoid. It’s a powerful effect.). And we all bash the major news outlets. But I’ve never watched a story like this closely enough or had a theead like this where I could go back and track the coverage, and it’s like, really bad.

But that’s just what I discovered as a sidebar to the news I was looking for:

tl;dr: The Pentagon delayed a quarterly report to cover the month following. US withdrawal from Syria and reports that the ISIS problem is worsening and Turkey is not helping.

CNN not bothering to tell us they delayed the report to get the information out more quickly is just the whipped cream on top.

By comparison, account still doesn’t have a fucking blue check despite becoming a go to resource for other news outlets.

Why does infinite news mean less content. This is dumb.

Here is a great example of the “What can I believe problem?”

There was an explosion in a town occupied by Turkish backed militia who blamed it on SDF.

So who blew up the bomb. I don’t know. Could I figure it out with any reasonable certainty? Probably.

But it takes time and effort, and that’s from the comfort of my living room—by way of comparison, every post by me in this thread has been made in a  if comfy chair on my iPhone—and I’m a trained researcher with a doctorate in social stuff. And whatever I learn might only apply to that event and offer only limited information as to how to actually survive.

And even then, it might not be advisable to act even on certain knowledge because the knowledge of who committed the bombing may be only loosely related to who will control the territory in the short, medium, and long terms which is what you really need to understand if you’re less interested in the ruling philosophy of the various combatants and more about continuing to live.

Which ironically, in the context of what appears to be Turkey’s strategy, only increases the power of blowing shit up arbitrarily.

It’s just another day of not knowing who to trust; that becomes the new norm-which is of course, again, intolerable.

Update on the aforementioned aforementioned bomb that blew up:

So it really was a terrorist false flag operation by the occupying TFSA against the people of the town.

Lemme put on my surprised face.