The Syria Analysis Thread

10 posts

Jude
Local Daimyo
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/BYSCuAfOc5g

I'm just posting it here because I'm not sure where else to post it. I want to post this video because it shows something that many posters here would be loath to acknowledge: regular US Army line infantry is still very professional and very good at what they do. I've watched a lot of videos of infantry combat and studied the theory, and here I can say that what you're seeing is textbook: it's a video of men doing small things right, and in a way that indicates they have some experience and both individual trained skill and leadership. For example: syncopated firing, with a light machine gun burst alternating with volleys of single aimed shots from rifleman, punctuated with a rifle grenades from one man, all in a rhythm, suppressing the area where enemy fire and movement were detected. Communication pointing out reference points for the location of the invisible enemy. An enlisted man waits for a lull in the firing then finds an officer to advise on how best to use concealment to flank the general area where the enemy was firing. This is all good stuff.

Even the Obama-era pozzed US military, with an increasingly high percentage of milennials, was still capable of producing very good infantry units. That's the point of this post. We often thing US power is declining, and that's probably true, but the performance of these infantrymen is a datapoint that goes against that narrative.
Niccolo and Donkey
Jude
Niccolo and Donkey
Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS

You should be able to find it elsewhere on JewTube.
Amadis

I watched 50 minutes and gave up. It has the usual problems of modern documentaries: too much emotion, not enough facts, in too short a running time. The problem with building a documentary around generalities and experiences is this: whose experiences? There's far too many English speaking exiles and far too little from the kind of unemployed rural worker eking out a living in the decadent city who joins Jaish al-Islam.

Condensing the complexity of Syria into 90 minutes is near-impossible but it barely tries. There's little on pre-war Syria, the Assad regime isn't explored, little attention is paid to the role of foreign intervention (including by the CIA), and the numerous differences between rebels aren't explained. In the 17th minute it happily skips from an FSA commander talking about how spontaneous and non-ideological the uprising was to footage of the "Liwa al-Tawhid brigade" [just lol...Liwa means brigade] who were Qatari backed and openly Islamist. Later Amr al-Absi is described as the "coordinator, ISIS media" when he was in fact one of Baghdadi's point men in Syria, who ran Halab province at one point and marshaled most of the European jihadis who became the external operations force responsible for the Bataclan etc. These kind of mistakes don't inspire confidence about the level of research done.

Like most attempts to explain the conflict it fails by stripping the 'bad guys' of their agency. Jihadi successes can only be the result of failures to intervene by the West or brutalities committed by Assadists. The idea that they had external backers or internal support is completely absent; it's impossible for the writers to imagine that large numbers of people might agree with the jihadis. In the 42nd minute this culminates in pious liberal flagellation about how 'ISIS beheads people but the USA killed lots of people too'. Sixteen years after 9/11 the USA is still incapable of trying to understand the complexity of the Middle East or to understand that some people hold illiberal views for reasons other than anger at US foreign policy decisions.

Oz Identitarian
Cadavre Exquis

Spot on, Amadis.

I watched it all the way through. As you mention, it's very difficult to condense even the key themes driving the conflict down into 90 minutes. Apart from some OK combat footage, there's not much else of value here. It's mostly standard boilerplate 'analysis' of Assad being a bad guy, Sunni grievances against America's invasion of Iraq, Russia joining the war and targeting only the 'moderate' rebels and largely ignoring ISIS.

This part was unintentionally funny. This FSA commander talking about building a democratic and secular country and the very next scene shows him with that Islamist brigade shouting, 'Allahu akbar, takbir!'
Local Daimyo
Derrick

One, lol, two, the Antifa admiration for a bunch of ethnic-cleansing militants will never stop being infuriating.