“Kobane, Syria, was home to one of the most famous military turning points in history. A small force of Kurdish guerrillas, pressed between the advancing Islamic State group and the Turkish border, was supposed to have fallen quickly in a tragic last stand. Obama administration officials said as much. Instead, the Kurds of Kobane successfully held out for six months, enough time for the cavalry—the U.S. Air Force and rebels from elsewhere in Syria—to arrive.”
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“Kobane came under attack again. With the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus and the uncertainty over what comes next, Turkey has been seeking an opportunity to wipe out its Kurdish opponents and carve out a puppet state in Syria’s north. With air cover from the Turkish Air Force, militias known as the Syrian National Army (SNA) overran the nearby city of Manbij and marched toward Kobane.
“In the last war, the people fled to Turkey. This time, it will be a genocide,” Berivan Hesen, a member of Kobane’s local government who lived through the Islamic State group’s siege, said via text message on Tuesday. “They are all ISIS by a different name.” Hesen notes that many of the people living in Kobane now had fled from other parts of Syria under Turkish and SNA control, such as Afrin, where the same forces have committed looting, rape, and torture since occupying it in 2018.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) agreed to “American mediation” with Turkey, the SDF’s Gen. Mazloum Abdi announced on Tuesday night, withdrawing forces from Manbij in hopes that Kobane would be spared. (The next day, Turkey launched drone strikes across North and East Syria.)”
“Last year, student-led protests over the Israel-Hamas war broke out at dozens of college campuses. With the new school year well underway, student demonstrations have begun again in earnest.
While many students expressed their opposition to the war in Gaza through peaceful means, some protests devolved into property destruction, trespassing, and even violence on a handful of college campuses, including at some of America’s most elite universities. Many students erected large encampments claiming public space on campuses—a form of protest that colleges are generally free to limit under reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions.
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), attempts to deplatform speakers were surging by this April. Of the 67 attempts it had recorded from January to mid-April, 73 percent involved controversy surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So how did a year of raucous—and occasionally disruptive and destructive—protest affect student opinions on free speech?
In September, FIRE released its fourth annual College Free Speech Rankings. The survey, which polled almost 60,000 undergraduates from more than 250 colleges, asked students a wide range of questions about free speech and the campus climate affecting it. The survey—as in past years—also asked questions about whether they would find it acceptable for students to engage in various kinds of disruptive protests of a hypothetical controversial speaker on campus.
About 37 percent of respondents agreed it was “sometimes” or “always” acceptable for students to shout down a campus speaker; last year, only 31 percent said the same. In all, fewer than one in three students said that it would “never” be acceptable to shout down a speaker.
Less than half of all students said it was “never” acceptable to protest by blocking other students from attending a controversial speech—a decline from last year’s 55 percent. Nearly one in three said they would support violence to stop a campus speech in at least some circumstances. In 2023, only 27 percent of students said the same.
These results don’t necessarily show the percentage of students who would engage in these activities themselves—rather, they reveal the proportion of students who might condone actions from other students that restrict speech. ”
“Airwars, a team of conflict researchers affiliated with the University of London, went back and cross-checked the casualty lists from the first 25 days of the Israeli air campaign against news reporting, social media, and other local sources. And unlike the Palestinian ministry, they differentiated between civilians and fighters, using data such as social media funeral notices to determine Hamas affiliation.
The Airwars report, released on Thursday, shows a rate of civilian slaughter “incomparable with any 21st century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.” The Palestinian ministry reported 8,525 wartime deaths, including 3,542 children, from October 7, 2023, to October 31, 2023. Airwars was able to verify a minimum of 5,139 civilians killed by Israeli air raids in that timeframe, including at least 1,900 children.
Most of them were not the collateral damage of combat against Hamas. Out of 606 incidents of civilian casualties studied by Airwars, only 26 overlapped with the death of a militant. And in those 26 incidents, the killing was still incredibly lopsided, with 32 militants killed in total, at a cost of 522 civilian lives.”
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“”Families were killed together in unprecedented numbers, and in their homes,” the Airwars report states. Over 90 percent of women and children killed by Israeli air raids died in their homes, and in 95 percent of cases where a woman was killed, at least one child was also killed, according to the Airwars report.”
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“Although the Israeli government and its supporters often argue that its military tactics are more humane than the American “war on terror,” Airwars found the exact opposite to be true. Before October 2023, the deadliest month for civilians ever recorded by Airwars was March 2017, when a U.S.-led coalition was battling the Islamic State group for Mosul, Iraq. That campaign killed 1,470 civilians, only one-fifth of the verified Palestinian civilian death count in October 2023. Children made up 9 percent of casualties in Mosul overall, and 36 percent of casualties in Gaza in October 2023.
These numbers are a conservative estimate, based on the minimum reported casualties in cases that Airwars was able to verify were Israeli bombing rather than Hamas misfires. And the study only covers one month of the war. More than a year later, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reports that 45,600 people have been killed and 11,000 are missing. Again, unlike the Airwars report, these numbers don’t distinguish between civilians and Hamas fighters.
But with hospitals overwhelmed, communications cut, and thousands of bodies left in the street or trapped under rubble, 45,600 deaths is possibly an undercount. Other researchers have estimated that the total death toll from war, starvation, and disease in Gaza could be greater than 100,000 or even 300,000.”
“Video clips purporting to show torture of Palestinian civilians by the Hamas militia in the Gaza Strip during the years 2018 to 2020 were published by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Sunday.
The IDF said the material had been found during its operations in the area and proved “severe abuse perpetrated by the Hamas terrorist organization against the civilian population,” along with human rights violations and oppression of those opposed to its rule.
The videos are reported to show torture carried out by Hamas operatives in so-called “Outpost 17″ in Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of the Gaza Strip.
The material shows people with bags over their heads, tied up, sometimes into twisted and painful positions. One of the men is suspended by his feet from the ceiling and beaten on the soles of his feet with a stick.
The victims are reported to include political opponents of Hamas, suspected collaborators with Israel, suspected adulterers and homosexuals.”
Undersea cables that support much of the internet and services are vulnerable to Russian attack. Russia uses mostly a land based internet network, so is not similarly vulnerable. Russia can attack such cables with civilian vessels and then pretend like they had nothing to do with it.
Leader of Syrian rebels/jihadists fought against the U.S. in Iraq, joined ISIS, was affiliated with Al Qaeda, then broke with them and now supports a just government in Syria that will supposedly protect minorities.
For those following preparations in Syria, this attack was not a surprise! The attacking units appear well-trained and many seem to be mercenaries from many locations, likely paid for by Turkey.
“Since taking Aleppo, HTS has “said all the right things,” said Ford, noting that Christian services were held on Sunday. The group has published a statement proclaiming “diversity is our strength” and calling for solidarity with Aleppo’s Kurdish population.
Alhamdo, the activist from Aleppo, told Vox he was not a supporter of HTS’s ideology, but gave them credit for their tactical leadership on the battlefield and felt that “they are developing their mentality.”
Ford, who spearheaded the move to designate the group — under its former name — as a terrorist organization when he served in the Obama administration, told Vox he “would be hard-pressed now, in 2024, to legally justify a listing” for the group in its current incarnation.
Of course, not everyone is likely to buy the group’s rebranding effort. That includes the Biden administration as well as regional governments, like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which used to staunchly back the Syrian opposition, but are fearful of the overtly Islamist turn some opposition groups have taken. These are the governments that have also been reaching out to try to normalize relations with Assad.
“For the UAE especially, HTS is Islamist. It is the Muslim Brotherhood. It is evil incarnate, no matter how many permutations it has undertaken,” Slim said. “This group was al-Qaeda, and it’s going to take a lot of change to convince the US, or the Saudis, or the Egyptians that it really has changed.””
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“Another group involved in the rebel coalition is the Syrian National Army (SNA), which despite its name is a Turkish-backed proxy militia. Turkey has a more wary relationship with HTS, but reportedly gave the green light to the SNA’s involvement in the operation due to Assad’s unwillingness to engage in talks earlier this year.
Turkey’s bigger concern, though, is the Kurdish-dominated statelet that has emerged in Syria’s northeast. The Syrian Kurdish forces, known as the SDF, have been America’s primary allies in the ongoing campaign against ISIS, but Turkey views them as a branch of the PKK, the Turkey-based Kurdish militant group that has fought a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish government. The Turkish military and its proxy forces have launched several incursions over the border into Syria to push the Kurdish forces back.
The SDF also controlled some pockets of territory in and around Aleppo but has withdrawn from these as the rebels have advanced. Sinam Mohamad, the representative in Washington for the Syrian Democratic Council — as the predominantly Kurdish government in northeast Syria is known — said she believes Turkey is “planning to occupy some Syrian lands in order to destroy the autonomous administration of northeast Syria.” Despite the HTS’s assurances that Kurds have nothing to fear from Aleppo’s new rulers, she told Vox the group is a “terrorist organization” and that “we are really afraid about the minorities, especially the Kurdish people, in Aleppo city.””
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“Iran and Russia — even in their diminished capacity — are unlikely to completely abandon a regime they see as strategically vital.
But even if the rebel offensive does not get much farther than the area it currently controls, their rapid success demonstrates a couple of important lessons. One, the war in Syria is not over. Many of the fighters who entered Aleppo this week were young children when the uprising against Assad began more than a decade ago, and there could well be years more fighting to come.
Second, it’s a mistake to consider conflicts like Syria in isolation. The Syrian conflict is often called a “civil war,” which generally means a war fought by factions existing within one country. But at the conflict’s height, it drew in countries from around the region, as well as the United States and Russia, presaging similar lines of conflict in Ukraine. Through the rise of ISIS, the massive global refugee crisis, and the spread of illegal drugs, it has had truly global ripple effects. Like a feedback loop, events abroad — particularly in Lebanon and Ukraine — are now helping drive events on the ground in Syria.
The latest offensive will have its own ripple effects. Optimistically, it could allow for refugees from Aleppo living abroad and elsewhere in Syria to return home, and weaken or even topple a truly odious regime, one that has used chemical weapons on its own people and is believed to have killed tens of thousands of civilians.
Pessimistically, it could lead to more chaos and displacement. HTS may yet go back to its former jihadist ways, the horrific levels of violence we saw years ago could return, more regional actors could be drawn in, and jihadist groups like ISIS could take advantage of the chaos to reconstitute themselves.
The world may have thought it was done with Syria. But Syrians themselves are not done, and the world has no choice but to pay attention again.”