Syria in 2018-2019

[davidbfpo]

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-44271676

[davidbfpo]

An article from Open Democracy that starts to explain why Assad used / uses chemical weapons and offers an explanation of a civil war where nothing is simple. For once the few comments and the author's response are worth reading too.

I'd not spotted this:

In reality, there have been hundreds of chemical attacks in Syria reported since 2012 - including up to 85 merely in the past year since Trump’s ‘airfield strike’ of April 2017 (according to Human Rights Watch) - most of which only garner marginal media coverage and provoke little media and online commotion.

Or how territory changes "hands":

In reality, the military support provided by the US administration to the Assad regime, whether by allowing the influx of tens of thousands of fighters from the Popular Mobilisation Units (PMUs) backed by the Coalition in Iraq, or by returning former ISIS territories exclusively either to factions collaborating with the regime (the SDF) or the regime itself, has been infinitely more valuable.
(Later) Indeed, one of the biggest ironies of the conflict is that in the fight against ISIS, there have been more recorded occasions of the US-led Coalition supporting pro-regime militias than there have been of active anti-Assad groups.

Link:https://www.opendemocracy.net/north-africa-west-asia/omar-sabbour/why-would-assad-do-it-debunking-abstract-theories-surrounding-sy?

[davidbfpo]

Border defences, whether in an insurgency - Algeria and Rhodesia come to mind - or to control border crossing are often controversial:

In related news, Turkey has completed construction of a 764-km (475 mile) concrete wall along its border with Syria. Ankara launched the construction project in 2015 for a barrier along 826 of the 911 kms of the border. The modular walls consisted of seven-ton mobile blocks, two meters wide and three meters high, topped with a one-meter height of razor wire. A furhter electronic layer has close-up surveillance systems, thermal cameras, land surveillance radar, remote-controlled weapons systems, command-and-control centers, line-length imaging systems and seismic and acoustic sensors. There is also laser destructive fiber-optic detection, surveillance radar for drone detection, jammers, and sensor-triggered short distance lighting systems.

Link:http://eaworldview.com/2018/06/syria...investigation/