There are a lot of subtleties to the messaging going on that I can tell are lost on me for anything from me not understanding the advanced theory intelligence operatives are employing, or simply. It understanding local vernacular.

So keeping that in mind, I don’t know what it means when the spokesperson for Operation Inherent Resolve—

—Tweets like a precocious over-caffeinated bilingual middle schooler from Illinois.

And I used to have the Tweet but they deleted it. I wish I had taken a screen shot.  “Fortunately,” as you’ll see below, Turkey did.

Anyway, they soon responded to the original tweet with this Tweet, now also deleted:

What it doesn’t say that the Tweet it was responding to was a clip of I the first all women’s class of SDF fighters from their new academy in NE Syria.

What it the OIR spokesperson’s Tweet especially doesn’t say is that it called them “lions” in Kurdish with lion and hearts and down pointy hand arrow emojis.

This war is so weird.

Anyway, the Tweet pissed Turkey off.

”””So called academy”

What condescending patriarchal douchebag put that in an international media report?

For the curious, here’s an explanation of the reference:

That said, it doesn’t really explain the emojis. This is either a really cool op or somebody is so fired, and I don’t think there’s really any good way to tell the difference.

Or, as a friend of mine mentioned, we can probably expect the OIR accounts to become much more boring for the foreseeable future.

There’s a short backlog of things to post, but I need to sleep; I will update these posts later.

I especially want to discuss why Operation Inherent Resolve all but sent a cootie catcher with “I Like You Do You Like Me?” written on it to the SDF.

I’m totally serious:

Maybe discuss why and how they deleted it to-though the reply Tweet is subtle but in some ways even more funny.

It’s like… we wouldn’t be surprised if someone said US troops had the best marksmen. Maybe some somewhere are as good, and maybe even some better, but in general, we wouldn’t be surprised, right?

Well, if it’s important for winning a war, wouldn’t we expect to have some kind of Elite Twitter Guard as well?

 

So it makes sense. I think. As much as anything else.

Anyway, until we get to that:

Here’s some stuff to watch.

VIDEO LINK: MSNBC: The Kurds: Did America betray an ally?

And I’ll leave you peeps with two things.

First: a man who, war be damned, just has to dance!!

And because I’m not gonna talk to Darnell’s Son for a bit: Keep on rockin’ in the free world:

 

 

 

So, some of you may have noticed I haven’t posted a ground update in a couple of days. I posted the internet messaging stuff instead because I’ve been seeing it unfold in real time based on my follows; it’s a function of diving a little deeper, and they meet people at the door of every rabbit hole just to see if someone is interested in what they’ve got cooking.

Not everyone who goes digging is a potential “recruit,” but all the potential recruits are people who go digging.

So in some ways, the visibility of the disinformation campaigns is a function of a reduction of anything ostensibly interesting happening on the ground.

What’s happening is that situations are intensifying while movement slows. And that is interesting.

So you get increasingly interesting and compelling images—

—and then it seems like nothing is happening. Which must be unbearable, by the way.

I think that gives us a clue to what’s going on.

Specifically, Turkey and Russia (or, perhaps, Russia and Turkey) think they can out wait out the attention spans of the West.

I believe there are two ”comparative” case studies that support this belief:

1. Differences in propaganda.
2. Differences in behavior according to “geography.”

So looking at the intersection of the two should allow us to triangulate on the crux of things.

Propaganda Differential.

I can give examples, but I’ve posted it all before. Russia is embedding reporters and showing video of how awesome their helicopters and trucks are to everyone who will listen. Sorta like we did in Iraq I? Has anyone seen anyone embedded and doing cool shit with the Coalition forces? 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.

Each country’s home presentation of their military in the regions is pretty different right now, ain’t it?

Of course, there was that one local guy that they took for a spin in a huey, which was pretty slick. But the fact that that was consumed locally and not internationally underscores the gulf between how the countries are managing perceptions of the war at home.

Americans barely know what Syria is. Which I get; I didn’t know all this stuff two months ago and I am aware of the formidable amount where I have no idea. I don’t know the names of individual militias, or the nuances in ideology or theology and how those affect alliances, or the tribal affiliations that frequently underly all of that and create interlocking lattices of allegiances. That shot is super hard, and yet what we’re getting is mostly how ancient and complicated this situation is, ergo it is not resolvable so we have no responsibility to undertake such an impossible task. QED.

In other words: The government isn’t presenting it to us in a way that makes sense.

And certainly not to find engaging.

Have you ever thought about how hard it is to make a war seem boring? I never did before.

If anything, they’re presenting it in a way such that we don’t think about it. Or as per above, so that we’ll give up and tune out—If anything, the bickering about our fucking oil is tedious and annoying. You can literally see even the Pentagon, Dept. of State, and military all but rolling their eyes about it. They want to fight ISIS.

Russian behavior on this conflict suggests wanting their people to revel in their national glory through the vehicle of martial glory. Our side has a public other confused and maybe tuning out if they even ever managed to clear through some of the bullshit in the first place, which I think we can all agree is fucking hard.

Geographical *cough* ethnic *cough* differences.

If Americans are a little uneasy about the idea of fucking over these “Kurds” we’ve been hearing about for ages but remain ignorant about, they have no fucking clue there is basically a whole ‘nother civil war going on in the other half of the country.

Now here’s the thing: Russia and Syria behave very differently there:

PRI (Audio + Transcript)

Baker: Well, they, as with, as you mentioned, the international community and human rights groups right, are saying that this is a war crime, and their biggest problem there is that it’s hitting civilian areas. These are not weapons that can be targeted like a missile or even a rocket or a mortar. There’s no way. You just roll it out the back of a helicopter or the plane, so the impact is completely arbitrary and that’s where the problem is.

Werman: What does that say about the Syrian government’s kind of approach to its offense at this point?

Baker: You can look at it in two different ways. I mean they immediate assumption would be, “OK, well, the Syrian regime is running out of weapons.” That’s really not the case. They get enough from Russia and Iran to suit their needs militarily. But as a weapon of terror, this thing is extremely effective because it has no predictability. You can’t say, “I’m safe if I stay here or if I sit there or if my house is in the civilian area.” It’s completely arbitrary and that is what is so terrifying.

No fucks given. Hell, they’re both hammering the same people on the ground there despite being kinda tetchy with one another in the northeast.

So what’s different?

It’s Arab against Arab. Basically. And that’s not about being racist agaisnt Arabs, but it’s about how we are less naturally inclined to intervene when it’s considered “within the family” than we are when we see someone intruding upon someone completely foreign.

Right or wrong, that’s just how people work. It’s human.

Of course, it’s more than just Arab against Arab. I mean, it’s also become a voluntary lobster trap for the sorts of people itching to fight because anyone or anything a person could want to fight? That’s the place to do it. Religion. Ethnicity. Ideology. Death to America. Women are all Stacys. Fuck Russia. Hate your parents. Whatever. They have it all.

As I’ve mentioned before, some of the people who just want to fucking live there sound furious.

And even compared to Rojava, nobody gives a shit. Fundamentally, it’s Arab rebels under the banner of SNA (which is a slick trick to distort important differences beteeen different militias. In fairness, they probably learned from us when we asked YPG to rebrand as SDF for similar reason of mindless formalism, i.e. the world is sufficiently weird today that people actually get fixated on the specific nomenclature when deciding whether or not they are allowed to kill a person.). And now is your average American Joe find the times to discern which Arabs are hostile to Stalinist autocracies but also not aligned with militant Islam, and also related to appropriate tribes for legitimacy in social relations, and that doesn’t even include religious disagreements, etc. The situation is perfect for a Dull Details informational overload campaign.

So the two comps suggest that Syria, Turkey, and Russia are:

1. Treating the two theaters very differently in terms of, well, violence.
2. The difference appears to stem from group identities and relationship to public opinion.

If you think about all the messaging going on, it’s actually more daunting and depressing even than it seems… when you realize that the people of northern Syria are basically hoping that racism will be their last hope for protection from Europe’s image of the barbarian hordes Turkey so often intentionally stokes.

In fairness, they tried “western values” first but it didn’t sell. There’s a reason they’ve been screaming bloody hell that there are Christians there. Maybe we’ll care about that. But fundamentally, all of the main actors appear to be operating on the presumption that the world reacts differently if one race kills another, whereas if they wail on each other a bit, who cares, right?

02m06s in case the auto start feature doesn’t work correctly.

Frankly, the whole routine is well worth watching. Especially the part about colonialism.

So, bring all the strands together: Time is on Turkey’s (and, by extension, Russia’s) side. The day of the quickly and decisive genocide have run up against world opinion and intervention that is messy and costly the perpetrators of war crimes even if the interventions fail.

Decisive if more gradual ethnic cleansing where people surrender even attachment to place and/or are driven out by slow inexorable processes can similarly not be undone, but appear less outrageous from a distance.

So the time they need to obliterate the population from memory coincides nicely with with the time they want for everyone to forget what they’re doing.

So not a lot of movement on the ground, but an intensification of conditions to make more life unbearable and to signal mire if that to come.

That’s an intensification that doesn’t require any shots to be fired. It just makes the cities more miserable.

I’ve only been able to articulate this more recently, but this is definitely why I’ve been so intent on posting about Idlib despite it having almost no strategic importance to the parts of the conflict Americans have any interest in. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was an aspect to it that seemed to make it almost more fucked up. But it’s one of those things that, once you see it, there it is.

Intensification is also harder to see, especially if the sides aren’t making lots of territorial gains and losses.

At the end of the day, it’s simply easier to see and understand this:

Than this—at Rmelan airfield near Qamishli, where the Russians said that in the immediate future they were going to put like three helicopters to assist with the daily rock fest patrols of the border.

And that’s not going to change.

Which means much of modem war can be made invisible; I mean, when the right information is presented you can literally see what is happening up to and including the attempts at manipulation of the information.

Which reinforces the need strategically to control Information.

And if we squint a bit, we can divine the intention of actors by looking at how they try to control information and disinformation.

So if we’re still into this civilization thing, we have to figure out how to grapple with how these information campaigns and wars actually operate.

Which totally fucking sucks.

Humorous side note: When I went looking for that Izzard video, this happened—

Seemed a bit on the nose.

 

 

 

Ultimately, this is a super cost effective way to fuck up the ground situation. Keep in mind, also, that the Kurds getting confused and frightened and fleeing their homes may be an acceptable arrangement to Erdogan, thigh ideally for him they wild disperse to the wind and cease to be a people anymore.

These are all Tweets from my feed on the Syrian Civil War that came up organically in my search for news on the ground. They’re all from around the same time, so they could actually theoretically come up on a feed in this order even. But here, I did a little arranging to build a coherent story. It was surprisingly easy once I put a few Tweets for the task in one place.

Also note that some of the tweets below are true. The ISIS one is true. Also, the RIC one is a true story about a disinformation campaign—about a false story if you will; those helicopters are American Apaches.

Note the blend of legitimate and illegitimate and confusing about what true even in legitimate stories in the collection. Basically, introducing crap obscured our ability to discern sources we can trust.

And now imagine your a civilian on the ground in northern Syria armed only with news from the interwebs to survive.

Anyway—

Let’s build a bullshit narrative of fear!!

So, wait, what is going on again, these days?

Wait, what? Does he mean this?  Or does he have to thank Trump to curry favor?

Yeni Safak: US senator wants to hold off sanctions bill on Turkey

Jim Risch says it is better to hold off sanctions as negotiations over S-400 between US, Turkey are ongoing

Wait, what? The US won’t even sanction Turkey?

NBC News: Russia moves into Syria after U.S. troops withdraw

Wait, what? Russia? And they’re talking US bases? I thought they were enemies… or at least not friendly.

Wait, what? The US refuses to retake control of the airspace, and now there are Russian helicopters overhead?

NPA: Turkish-backed armed groups negotiating the body of a Syriac fighter for $10,000

Wait, what? I thought the Americans were helping fight ISIS, weren’t they? Isn’t that why they’re here? What do I do now? 

Maybe I can go to those nice people I saw on TV for help…

Wait, what?? Who can I trust then?

Wait, what? Freedom for who? What about us?

Newsweek: DONALD TRUMP’S OIL MOVES IN SYRIA PLAY INTO OLD FEARS OF U.S. POLICY IN MIDDLE EAST

Wait, is that what this is really about?

The Arab Weekly: Confusion marks US role in north-eastern Syria

The oil idea especially appealed to Trump who likes transactional foreign policy.

AMN News: Syrian Army enters oil rich part of northeast Syria

Wait.

Are we clear on what the US mission in Syria is? Fighting ISIS or oil? What is the US even thinking? Is it obvious whom we can trust?

The process converts a lack of information into visceral fear. That’s how it works.

What does the future hold in store?

This weakens people. It can weaken a people, whole communities. And it’s cheaper than tanks, that’s for sure.

Of course, if people are kinda people everywhere, that means the seamy underbelly as well.

The region has its own Epstein Conspiracy intended to delegitimize key actors and breed general distrust.

Except instead of going after the entrenched ruling class, this one has a different kind of target:

Take These jerks, for example.

Are they really heroes? Are they, though?

Of course, maybe they’re not such good people after all… I mean, sure, they were up for the Nobel Prize, but that’s run by creepy snooty Europeans so fucking them, y’know… y’know what it could be? Like, maybe it’s all just a false flag operation!

Whoa.

I mean, it must be true… and not just because it’s a government blue check account.

But, really, who’s to say?

I mean, how can anyone tell from so far away?

We just don’t have the facts, is the argument here. Of course, when we demand every fact be accounted for, inevitably things look suspect. It just seems like it’s too easy…

There’s a name for this theory: specified complexity. It was developed by Intelligent Design types to prove the theory of evolution was insufficient (Sound familiar? Insufficient understanding?) to explain human life. It was declared not bunk science so much as not science at all by a US District Court in Pennsulvani.

(The complex issues of philosophy of science addressed to reach a ruling are top notch, by the way, both in terms of content and accessibility, by the way. Adjudicating in what is science is obviously a tricky and touchy subject. Good read for anyone interested in such things.)

This basic approach was literally developed to undermine the central theory of the science of biology. So we know it works.

Woah, this goes to the highest levels!

Fuck this guy. Seriously. I think he might actually be more disliked than Erdogan. Like, he’s a different flavor of loathesome and people seem to either think he’s a useful idiot or a dork, but not one of the sympathetic dorks from movies. He should own an NFL team. Just a total tool.

Oh, right. He’s a tool. I get it now.

The world of shadows.

Remember that part of True Lies where Bill Paxton plays a used car dealer who pretends to be a secret agent letting Jamie Lee Curtis in on his world of action and intrigue to get  heightened emotional response so that it would be easier for him to manipulate and ultimate fuck her-and, for that matter, fuck her over?

Same shit. It’s always the same shit.

So the conspiracy’s all around us and we can’t see it. Awesome. Or so it seems…

Russia isn’t saying, they’re just saying…

Note how this next one is an article about news coverage. It doesn’t even try to get at fact, it just stirs the shit of the above.

BBC backtrack on their own fake news as claims regarding Istanbul death of White Helmets co-founder are deleted

The best Russian propaganda sows doubt even when they say something true. They’re not trying to reveal with more information, but to fill the scene with more dirt, more junk, more shit for people to get fed up, because a checked out populace is a docile populace.[/spoiler]

As with Epstein Didn’t Do It, the more this effect takes hold, the less it even matter what the actual facts are or were. It’s a post-modern shade cast over discourse.

I want to emphasize that I do not go looking for this crap.

Another Day in the Life of Resistance Twitter:

We see a lot of serious and sometimes intense shit here, yeah? But I think when life gets to real, for whatever reason, people get bad at it. By the same token, I think we all know how we can lose sight of the important things.

Therefore, for that reason, I’d post a sampling (5, to be specific, as that’s all the board software can handle at a time.) of Tweets. I don’t want to veer too far in to “They’re just like us!” But, well—

I don’t have a lot to say here, as it’s mostly self-explanatory.

They talk trash:

Like dogs

But understand the internet is primarily a vehicle for sharing images of cats.

And still have time to complain about politics

Poor Lindsey Graham, by the way.

When is the last time that guy slept?

I guess there was no reason to believe it would be otherwise, but the degree to which what post to Twitter in their downtime is just what people post is kinda wonderful.

As much as anything, I think I get almost moved sometimes that, in a war, they actually have downtime. People still fuck around. So many of the Tweets in here are so momentous, I wanted to share a glimpse of normalcy in it all.

Now, we just need to get them an NBA team. I mean, I’d say the NFL, but the last thing they need over there is another soulless autocratic regime and, anyway, NBA Twitter is way better. Not even close.

ZMart100

 

Reverend

I mentioned before that the Rojava types basically have follow Friday’s, right?

https://twitter.com/_helbesta_roje_/status/1195369394303578114?s=21

<ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME TWITTER??>

If you’re on Twitter, once you follow a few and tool around in the “network” you’ll find all sorts of wild stuff. Many of them are big on photos and videos to paint as an unmediated picture as possible. Of course, those accounts sometimes get deleted… but anyway.

It’s no Weird Celtics Twitter, but what is?

I guess if it’s good for basketball, it’s good for war.

 

 

West to East: Kobanî in Separate Post

Idlib: Air Strikes & Fighting

Manbij: Troop Movement, Fighting

Ain Issa: Back & Forth

South Front: MAP UPDATE: CLOSE LOOK AT MILITARY SITUATION AROUND SYRIA’S RAS AL-AYN

Tal Tamr/Hossakah: Fighting, Water Station Repaired-Damaged

But they get by.

Deir ez-Zur: US Presence Complicated Things for Kurds

I shouldn’t laugh at titles like this.

Qamishli:Russia Moves into US Airbase

The Moscow Times: Russia Launches New Air Base in Former U.S. Syria Stronghold

Russians Enter US Air Base

As per usual, I didn’t expect to ever see something like this. It’s probably time to stop even thinking that altogether.

The Moscow Times: Russia Launches New Air Base in Former U.S. Syria Stronghold

NewsFront: RUSSIAN MILITARY POLICE START MONITORING THE AIRFIELD NEAR KOBANE IN SYRIA

 

Pentagon’s Esper sees Syria pullback taking another “week or so”

MEMO-Middle East Monitor: Pentagon’s Esper sees Syria pullback taking another “week or so”

 

Withdrawal Going Faster than Planned

Kurdistan24: Russians enter US air base near Kobani after US forces left: SDF official

Civilians Are Not Pleased

Civilians we speak to in the city would prefer any option, even Assad, to the slaughter and random targeting of civilians which Turkey and its jihadist proxies have brought to the newly-occupied regions.”

 

Withdrawal Underway

Rubio Knows About Kobanî, But What?

 

US Pilots Send Hearts For Kobanî

Is this real? I’ve been burned before. Eh, fuck it-somebody drew that. And I didn’t know that was a thing.

Pompeo: Coalition v. ISIS Wicked Successful

 

Video Erdogan Showed Trump

Al-Tanf, South: Russia Mad US Won’t Leave

Google Maps: Al Tanf

 

Attack Feared: Gen. Mazloum

SkyNews: Major terror attack in West ‘expected’ over Syria inaction, Kurdish general warns

Islamic State returnees ‘will not face arrest in Germany’

The Local: Islamic State returnees ‘will not face arrest in Germany’

The sources said there was insufficent evidence for warrants to be issued against the nine, prompting criticism from opposition politicians who said the deportations have caught the government unprepared.

 

Medicine Shortage

Rudaw: Medicine shortage in NE Syria could create a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’