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And next, Syria?

Maybe they know he’s spent the last two years being ‘debriefed’ in a shipping container on an airbase somewhere?
 
You mean being treated as an enemy combatant? Not sure he'd have that much useful info for two years worth of 'debriefing' unless he turned out to actually be al-Baghdadi himself.

The last serious reports were mid 2017 when many captured fighters said he was in mosul just before isis lost it, some said he was smuggled out with top isis, some that he was killed in an airstrike. Then v similar stories when raqqa fell. Now a surge of isis captures and consequent interrogations and he's back alive - and someone high up and clearly informed of what went on in those interrogations saying something pretty bloody definite.
 
More seriously I do hope he’s OK.

I do wonder about the wisdom of publicly stating that he’s still alive, as that will doubtless increase his value to his captors and put him more at risk. Could be other games in play I suppose.

Is there even any kind of ISIS media operation still functioning that he could be used for like in the past? Is it not more useful for them to point out he is still alive, either as a bargaining chip or human shield?

On a more general point there has definitely been a change in the way hostages are reported on in the last few years, looks like deliberate downplaying, not like when ISIS has control of the front pages.
 
Wallace getting strips torn off him by the civil service for speaking out of turn. Couldn't resist the opportunity to say something newsworthy.

"Our position on Mr Cantlie has not changed for some time. We genuinely do not know if he is dead or alive. But if he is alive it is genuinely irresponsible for Ben Wallace to make the comments he has because this could put his life in jeopardy. It could massively undermine any investigations. This could prompt his captors to move him, or even worse. It is a massive own goal by Ben Wallace. The threat on Mr Cantlie’s life has increased exponentially.”

The original info seems to have come from the SDF, who tweeted it last month (as a reported sighting, nothing more), & now confirm they passed this info to the Brit foreign office in December. More lives than a cat, if true. And yeah, as butchersapron said above, could be linked to the ISIS propagandist captured recently, who presumably would know/recognise Cantlie from the video production work they were both involved with.
 
Pls cld you c&p the paywalled text
The far-right Alternative for Germany, which describes the influx of Middle Easterners into Europe as “knife migration”, appears to have found a refugee of whom it can approve.

Kevork Almassian, a Syrian who sought asylum in Germany and who has become a prominent apologist for the Assad regime, has been given a job in the office of one of the party’s most radical MPs — a sign of the strange power constellations that are forming on the fringes of German politics.

It appears to have been love at first sight. Within days of Mr Almassian’s arrival in Stuttgart three and a half years ago he was pictured drinking wheat beer with Markus Frohnmaier, who was then a local AfD activist but is now an MP and Mr Almassian’s boss.

Mr Almassian divides his time between disseminating “counter-propaganda” in support of the Syrian government and appearing at AfD rallies alongside some of the fiercest figures in the radical right. In one speech he denounced the majority of his fellow refugees as hostile Islamists and warned that there would be a massacre at a German train station unless the state clamped down on immigration.

Mr Almassian, who is in his early thirties, comes from a Christian family in Aleppo. After taking a degree in international relations at the Kalamoon private university near Damascus he moved to Lebanon to continue his studies in 2010. After the outbreak of the Syrian war the following year his father’s business in Aleppo was bombed and his brother was kidnapped.


In 2015, after Angela Merkel lifted the controls on Germany’s borders, Mr Almassian flew to a conference in Zurich and then took a bus to Freiburg in the Black Forest. He now plans to apply for a German passport. “I believe in the system and the way of life in Germany,” he told T-Online, a news website. “It suits me.”

He describes himself as a journalist and political commentator, and runs the English-language Syriana Analysis channel on YouTube, which has more than 27,000 subscribers.

He has made no secret of his support for President Assad, and frequently criticises what he portrays as biased and error-ridden western news coverage of the war in Syria. Last month he posted a video accusing Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times journalist who was killed in Syria in 2012, of “sneaking” into the country and “choosing the wrong side”.

Mr Almassian seems to have made his first acquaintance with the AfD in 2013, when his name was mentioned in a right-wing German magazine edited by Manuel Ochsenreiter, a former employee of Mr Frohnmaier.

Mr Ochsenreiter, who was expelled by the party in January after being accused of orchestrating an arson attack in Ukraine on behalf of a Russian spy agency, met Mr Almassian on a visit to a war zone in Syria the following year. In early 2015 both attended a conference held by Kremlin-backed separatists in Donetsk, east Ukraine.

Mr Almassian denied being a member of the AfD. “Any political party that supports the Syrian army gets my support,” he said.
 
Tank mad(have you seen his videos? This man loves a tank) Almassian, of “Syriana Analysis” propaganda vids on YouTube, has only gone and joined the Afd!

Assad supporter flees to Germany . . . and wins job at anti-migrant AfD
Tank mad he may be but he doesn't fancy doing his military service. Perhaps he's performing a role for the regime in Germany. He needs to be fucked out pronto. Before he set his instagram to private I noticed that he had a pic of himself at the 'antiwar' cafe in Berlin which is a hub of weed addled conspiraloon delirium and has been used for pro-Assad events.
 
Just a quick question - I've seen on a couple of threads and in the media that the raised index finger is seen as a gesture that has been used by ISIS (signifying the oneness of Allah or some such), but as an 'ISIS' thing as opposed to a gesture that just happens to be local to the region.

However, I saw a short (and harrowing) film* at the weekend involving a lot of GoPro helmet-cam footage from Syrian resistance fighters (YPG, I think), and this gesture was used quite a lot, especially when they had won a small victory in the gruelling grind of the conflict.

Made me wonder whether we in the West had misjudged the significance and applicability of the gesture. Any thoughts?

* - People Of The Wasteland, if you want to look it up
 
Just a quick question - I've seen on a couple of threads and in the media that the raised index finger is seen as a gesture that has been used by ISIS (signifying the oneness of Allah or some such), but as an 'ISIS' thing as opposed to a gesture that just happens to be local to the region.

However, I saw a short (and harrowing) film* at the weekend involving a lot of GoPro helmet-cam footage from Syrian resistance fighters (YPG, I think), and this gesture was used quite a lot, especially when they had won a small victory in the gruelling grind of the conflict.

Made me wonder whether we in the West had misjudged the significance and applicability of the gesture. Any thoughts?

* - People Of The Wasteland, if you want to look it up
It's like shouting Allāhu akbar - a generic reaction based on pre-existing culture rather than a sign of ideological commitment. Like shouting fuck or please god or anything. It's a multiple use thing that can mean, exactly that's a victory, that's one up. Like flicking the Vs at the away fans.

And the YPG are not resistance fighters. They never have been - they should have been - but too late. They fought ISIS not the regime.
 
It's like shouting Allāhu akbar - a generic reaction based on pre-existing culture rather than a sign of ideological commitment. Like shouting fuck or please god or anything. It's a multiple use thing that can mean, exactly that's a victory, that's one up. Like flicking the Vs at the away fans.

And the YPG are not resistance fighters. They never have been - they should have been - but too late. They fought ISIS not the regime.

Cheers, that was the sense I got from it.
And yes, fair point about my sloppy language there - I think this must have been resistance fighters and not the YPG.
 
As Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, closes in on victory over an eight-year revolt, a secret, industrial-scale system of arbitrary arrests and torture prisons has been pivotal to his success. While the Syrian military, backed by Russia and Iran, fought armed rebels for territory, the government waged a ruthless war on civilians, throwing hundreds of thousands into filthy dungeons where thousands were tortured and killed.

Nearly 128,000 have never emerged, and are presumed to be either dead or still in custody, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, an independent monitoring group that keeps the most rigorous tally. Nearly 14,000 were “killed under torture.” Many prisoners die from conditions so dire that a United Nations investigation labeled the process “extermination.”

Inside Syria’s Secret Torture Prisons: How Bashar al-Assad Crushed Dissent
 
Today came confirmation of the death of Syrian goalkeeper and revolutionary hero of Homs, Abdul-Baset al-Sarout, who was critically injured on the frontline two days ago. It came as a shock, as yesterday his condition was reported as being stable.

He lost almost his whole family but he never stopped fighting, and we will never forget him.

Come O May! The people await you
Their hearts longing for freedom await you;
Sweet Easter of those who work
Come and shine in the glory of the sun.
Sing a hymn of winged hope
To the great greenness that brings the fruit to ripeness
To the great flowering Ideal
Within which the shining future trembles.
O phalanxes of slaves, run away from
The worksites, the parched workshops,
Flee from the fields, from the swelling seas,
Put aside never-ending toil.
Let us raise our calloused hands,
Let us join together in a growing force.
We want to redeem our world,
Tyrannized by both sloth and gold.
Youth, grief, yearnings,
Springtimes of secret fascinations,
Green May of humankind,
Give your courage and your faith to our hearts.
Give flowers to the rebels who failed
Their sight fixed upon the break of dawn,
To the bold rebel who fights and works
To the far-seeing poet who sings and dies

Pietro Gori, 1890.
 
Every hospital burns. 100s of dead patients. Double tap- few more of responders - 10 or 20. Every school. Every place people gather. They burn. Few hundred more - each week over 2 months.

He uploaded his manifesto - it said assad or the country burns.

He is doing it - right now.
 
Just a wee bump, saw this on the Syria Solidarity page today, presumably taken by Raed Fares? I mind Robin Williams’ death bothered me cause I knew he spent all his life battling depression and you imagine at some age if you keep fighting you just win, but it doesn’t work like that, not many deaths of that nature do bother me but that did cause it kind of brought reality to the myth that keeping on will necessarily end well for you. That’s not why you carry on though, is it. He was a fighter.
As are these guys, I’m so glad to have been around to witness their determination, and spirit. Fucking no words can do it justice so I won’t go on, heroes.

TL;DR

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Just saw stuff on Sky News, no words, but it is going like the Thirty Years War in its brutality, intensity, and increasingly length.
 
it's over. Not saying that as a positive. going to be a lot of fall out from this in the next 2-3 years. turkish nationalism is going to spike even more rapidly than it already has.
 
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