Throatwarbler posted:

https://twitter.com/Dannymakkisyria/status/977215299182366722

Absurd Alhazred posted:

https://twitter.com/AlSuraEnglish/status/978021504465055744

This is giving me flashbacks to the first gulf war.

Saladman posted:

Funny because state media reports it as a successful intercept

http://www.arabnews.com/node/1273566/saudi-arabia

But something about the video you posted does not strike me as a fake made in Final Cut

E: That said the Houthi are amazing loving idiots. If they actually hit anything important in Riyadh at any point it just means that the US and Europe will manufacture sympathy to support the bombing of Yemen more than they tacitly already are. Attacking civilian airports or whatever isn’t exactly going to rally any support to their hopeless cause.

Saladman posted:

E: That said the Houthi are amazing loving idiots. If they actually hit anything important in Riyadh at any point it just means that the US and Europe will manufacture sympathy to support the bombing of Yemen more than they tacitly already are. Attacking civilian airports or whatever isn’t exactly going to rally any support to their hopeless cause.

Saladman posted:

E: That said the Houthi are amazing loving idiots. If they actually hit anything important in Riyadh at any point it just means that the US and Europe will manufacture sympathy to support the bombing of Yemen more than they tacitly already are. Attacking civilian airports or whatever isn’t exactly going to rally any support to their hopeless cause.

quote:

Dressed in a sharp black suit, Syrian President Bashar Assad smiles for selfies with his soldiers against a backdrop of blown-out buildings and a battered tank. Weary-looking men crowd around him and chant the slogan frequently heard on this side of the country’s war: “With our spirit and our blood, we will free you Bashar!”

This week, pro-regime media posted photos and videos of Assad visiting what they claimed was a town regime forces had recently captured in eastern Ghouta, an area east of the capital Damascus.

The message was clear: Assad is projecting confidence that the region will soon surrender to his control.

Even as the regime makes gains elsewhere in the country, tens of thousands of heavily armed rebels in eastern Ghouta — just miles from the presidential palace in the capital — continue to pose a serious threat.

Now after years of siege, airstrikes and shelling attacks by the regime and its allies, ground troops have pushed inside the suburbs, splintering the opposition enclave into separate parts.

Backed into a corner, rebel groups in the enclave are beginning to admit defeat. This week, Ahrar al-Sham became the first main faction of fighters to surrender to the Syrian army, in a deal that bused them and their families into exile in the northern province of Idlib.

Then Thursday night another larger group looked like it was willing to follow suit: Faylaq al-Rahman rebels announced a tentative pause in fighting and the start of negotiations with the regime and its allies. So far though, the ceasefire has failed, airstrikes have continued unabated and no deal has been reached.

In taking back eastern Ghouta, the regime would bring an end to the last main opposition-held enclave in Damascus. But as the prospect of a rebel surrender grows more likely, many questions over the future of the more than 350,000 residents that aid groups estimate are in eastern Ghouta remain. Whether civilians will be allowed to stay in their homes after the government retakes the territory, and what happens to rebel fighters, is the subject of intense negotiations.

This wrangling is largely behind the scenes. But so far the fate of eastern Ghouta looks similar to that which befell other defeated rebel enclaves in Damascus and its suburbs: in Moademiyeh, Yarmouk and Daraya.

Today those areas stand largely emptied of their original inhabitants, bullet ridden and pockmarked by tank fire — ghostly monuments to violence of the towns’ recent past.

“Daraya was the first town in Damascus to be placed under such a tight siege,” says Saeed Naqrash, a Syrian army defector who led a rebel group in Daraya, southwest of the capital.

His account of what happened there leading up to the rebels’ surrender in the summer of 2016 offers a window into the military strategy of the Syrian regime and its allies.

Daraya was placed under tight siege in November 2012. Just like the Ghouta offensive, food stocks dwindled. Naqrash describes how civilians picked grass from sidewalk cracks to pad out their thin watery. He’s haunted by memories of children wasting away from starvation.

While it kept Daraya choked off from the outside world, Naqrash says, the Syrian government regularly sent emissaries offering deals requiring the rebels to surrender. Once, he says, they even dispatched Syria’s grand mufti, the country’s officially appointed Sunni Muslim religious authority, to talk to them.

“We refused the deal,” Naqrash says. Instead, the armed men held out for a solution to be found through United Nations-led negotiations in Geneva. They hoped that by holding down Daraya and threatening the regime from there with their weapons, they would be able to force a deal that would include Assad stepping down. But those talks, as well as an attempt at a truce, failed. As per what’s happened in eastern Ghouta, with its failed ceasefire, the bombardment of the town by the Syrian military and allied militias only intensified.

In June 2016, pressure from a U.N. Security Council resolution did lead to a single aid convoy being allowed into Daraya. When the convoy arrived though, Naqrash says, it felt like a cruel joke. Medical equipment had been confiscated at the government checkpoints. “After all that and a four-year siege, we received contraceptives and mosquito nets,” he says with a bitter laugh.

Medication has also been confiscated at government checkpoints from aid convoys going inside eastern Ghouta.

The siege on Daraya became harder and harder to resist. The Syrian government and its ally Russia escalated their air campaign, blitzing the area with such force that civilians lived in their basements in search of protection from the bombs. “We had daily raids and shelling, just like what’s happening in Ghouta right now,” says Naqrash. “On the ground, we were retreating.”

By July 2016, he says, residents couldn’t take it anymore. They begged the rebels — most of the fighters from the neighborhood themselves — to find some way to stop the bombing.

“We knew that surrender now was the only option, but it was about how we surrendered,” he says.

The U.N. process failed them. So Daraya’s rebels turned to Russia, Assad’s ally, and agreed to let the Kremlin lead a negotiation between them and the Syrian government. But at each attempt, Naqrash says, promises failed to materialize into action.

As seems to have happened in eastern Ghouta, Russia would promise safe access for aid convoys but then fail to secure a path on the ground. “We soon realized they were lying,” he says. “Or maybe they weren’t able to do anything.”

It was only by turning to Hezbollah, the Iranian-funded militia that backs Assad, that they managed to push the Syrian government into serious talks.

Naqrash’s account of what happens next is a rare insight into the dynamics between these two allies. While Assad and Hezbollah are on the same side in the wider war, they compete for control over individual battlefields, says Naqrash.

In Daraya, he says, both Hezbollah and the regime wanted to be the ones to claim success at securing the rebels’ surrender. Naqrash says the Daraya fighters used this to get the best deal they could.

They played one side off the other, getting better terms with each bargaining round. In the end, the Syrian government agreed to allow the rebels and their families to be exiled in Idlib, a rebel-held province. They were also allowed to take their lighter weapons with them.

In eastern Ghouta, the regime and its allies are pressuring for a solution that also requires rebels and their families to evacuate.

“They keep setting ultimatums, telling us again and again that to stop the bombing we have to evacuate,” says Ahmed Taha, a representative of the pro-opposition civil council for rural Damascus.

The regime’s strategy is starting to bear fruit. Ahrar al-Sham’s surrender sent fighters walking out of the enclave, their arms high in the air. They and their families boarded buses and were driven to Idlib. Russian media estimated that some 1,500 fighters and 6,000 family members and supporters will leave under the agreement.

Taha is from Douma, a main town in eastern Ghouta. He saw five close family members die during the siege. He is now in Turkey and spends his days appealing to diplomats from U.N. Security Council countries for a better solution than a surrender that sends rebels to Idlib.

The government’s forced mass population displacement to Idlib is not humane, Taha says. Thousands of people, most of them civilians, get ripped from their homes with no prospect of return.

Nor is Idlib a safe place of refuge. It hosts more than a million displaced people, many of them the families of rebel fighters who surrendered in past sieges. It has also become the focus of an aerial bombing campaign by the regime and its allies, and much of the rest of the area is being ravaged by a battle between rebel factions.

“By sending people to Idlib you’re sending them from fire to fire,” says Taha.

NPR’s Ruth Sherlock and Lama al-Arian reported in Reyhanli, Turkey.

Cat Mattress posted:

The US and Europe already support the bombing of Yemen more than tacitly -- they provide the Saudi and Emirati coalition with intelligence, logistics, aerial refueling, weapons, and even special forces.

What the Houthis are doing is trying to damage Saudi morale and cashflow. With the current upheaval of Saudi society, who knows what will happen to the ambitious and power-hungry prince if he fails to protect the country against the Houthis? What if foreign investors stop coming because they don't see Saudi airports as safe anymore?

Crowsbeak posted:

Good to see Assad restoring peace. Now to destroy Erdogans turkish outposts.

Also hope more rockets hit Riyahd.

Crowsbeak posted:

So they should just sit down and die? Because that is what the Saudis want. Really love how much this thread tows the line for wahabi fascsits.

Throatwarbler posted:

https://www.opb.org/news/article/npr-how-the-syrian-regime-keeps-winning-territory-from-an-army-defectors-perspective/

khwarezm posted:

Crowsbeak posted:

It is simple, Wahabis and their supporters bad. Those who oppose them, good.

Crowsbeak posted:

It is simple, Wahabis and their supporters bad. Those who oppose them, good.

Cat Mattress posted:

This isn't simple, it's simplistic.

Here's an example to illustrate:

"Soviets and their supporters bad. Those who oppose them, good."

Crowsbeak posted:

It is simple, Wahabis and their supporters bad. Those who oppose them, good.

Squalid posted:

Worth noting the Houthi have long tried to bring the war to Saudi soil. Their raids have penetrated deep across the border and displaced tens of thousands of Saudi civilians. Presumably none of the princes in Riyadh give poo poo about what happens to poor customers country folk in the south though so these missile attacks might have more effect on the opinions of those who matter.

MiddleOne posted:

Yeah it's the old adage of car versus plane accidents. If you're a dangerous but predictable threat, people will respond rationally. If you're an extremely unlikely but unpredictable threat in which the person has no real agency over the outcome, people loving lose their poo poo. The missiles, while not a very effective tool of warfare, are extremely effective at making the people with power grow war-weary.

Crowsbeak posted:

It is simple, Wahabis and their supporters bad. Those who oppose them, good.

Saladman posted:

E: Kind of curious on Al-Saqr's personal take on this, if he's still around in this thread.

Al-Saqr posted:

What is there to say? The houthis have successfully held off every non-direct invasion efforts to defeat them. as I said from the start, because they're trained by Iran, they're going to be very difficult to dislodge, and as I also said, the only way forward is to march in there and take sanaa physically, the problem is, the the saudi government started a war they didnt have solid plans for based on the assumption that they can snap their fingers and Pakistan or Egypt will do the groundwork for them for free, which they didnt and now they're stuck so instead they literally starved out the Yemenis in a really bad fashion. so now the government has to make sure that this missile incident doesn't happen that often so that people can turn a blind eye to their failures.

Although I will say that by and large saudi citizens have been lulled into a sense of security because they really haven't felt the actual effects of regional conflicts since the gulf war, so it should be interesting to see how it reacts if the houthis keep at this. But I will say that saudi's are so propagandized and sectarian I would not expect any kind of anti-war sentiment to come up anytime soon.

Sinteres posted:

It can definitely cut the other way though. What was once a war of choice fought over regional influence becomes a war to eliminate or severely curtail the capabilities of a group that's demonstrated their ability to threaten the capital. Yes, of course Saudi Arabia has a vastly greater ability to inflict punishment on Yemenis than vice versa, and has been using it, but people waking up to a new vulnerability from an outside threat aren't likely to care much about that part of it.

MiddleOne posted:

Saudi Arabia is already in total war with the Houthis, there is no way to escalate more than they've already done because if they could they would have already.

quote:

A Houthi leader hailed the attack, which took place as Yemen marked the third anniversary of the start of the war.

“We praise the successful advance of military capabilities,” Houthi political council chief Saleh al-Samad told tens of thousands of supporters in the Yemeni capital Sanaa.

“If they want peace, as we have said to them before, stop your air strikes and we will stop our missiles,” he said. “If you continue your air strikes, we have a right to defend ourselves by all means available.”

cochise posted:

https://gfycat.com/RelievedAshamedLeopardseal

Doesn't look that successful.

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

See the problem here is that the Soviets and their supporters weren't bad. So you're starting from a false premise.

Randarkman posted:

The Soviets and their supporters killed as many as 2 000 000 people in Afghanistanand drove the survivors to flee the country to live in pakistani refugee camps where their children were educated by wahhabbis (that's the origin of the Taliban to a large extent). Their anti-insurgency strategy mostly came down to attacking and destroying the nearest villages as retaliation for soviet casualties. During the war almost all infrastructure in the south and east of the country was destroyed and the country lost more than half of its population. No one deserves more blame for the destruction of that country than the soviets and their supporters.

Coldwar timewarp posted:

Does anyone know how the Hazara aligned during the Afghan civil war, and back during soviet occupation?

Randarkman posted:

Off the top of my head I can't remember if they figured that much into the whole thing at all, I seem to remember having read about some Hazara islamist mujahideen being active during the civil war*, but can't quite remember how they aligned, maybe with the northern alliance (who were supported by Turkey and Iran for a time during the 90s, and I am pretty sure the hazara islamists were aligned with Iran). I think the DRA mostly drew its support from Pashtuns, Tajiks and Uzbeks, again with the Hazaras not figuring much into it. You have to remember that the DRA was essentially a regime drawn from the military, particularly the officer corps, many of whom had been educated in the Soviet Union during the 60s and 70s, that's where socialism, or what passed for socialism, had any support at all in Afghanistan. after the war and when the DRA government (which became an Islamic republic shortly after the Soviets left) began to fall apart in the early 90s alot of army units essentially went into business for themselves and ended up aligned with various mujahideen groups in a number of bewildering ways.

*well, to be correct Afghanistan has been in a civil war going all the way back to 1978, it hasn't ever really stopped. The Taliban were still fighting the northern alliance and other hostile groups in 2001, in fact it was those groups who did alot of the ground work (made possible by US airpower) during the US invasion.

Volkerball posted:

Published by national enquirer lol. Did bat boy give a glowing appraisal of vision 2030