Excerpted from a 48 minute interview. Full video at the link.
[IsraelTimes] If ‘you walk away from once in a lifetime peace opportunities, you can’t complain 25 years later when the doors aren’t all still open,’ says former US president
Former US president Bill Clinton ...former Democratic president of the U.S. Bill was the second U.S. president to be impeached, the first to deny that oral sex was sex, the first to have difficulty with the definition of the word is... on Wednesday said young people in America today "can’t believe" that late Paleostinian leader Yasser Arafat walked away from a Paleostinian state during peace negotiations with Israel under his mediation as president.
Clinton added, in reference to the failed Camp David talks of 2000, that having turned down a "once in a lifetime" peace opportunity, "you can’t complain 25 years later when the doors weren’t all still open, and all the possibilities weren’t still there."
"I think what’s happened there in the last twenty-five years is one of the great tragedies of the twenty-first century," Clinton told New York Times
...which still proudly claims Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin, in an interview for the newspaper’s DealBook Summit, promoting his new book, "Citizen: My Life After The White House."
The Times posted a video of the interview to its New York Times Events+ YouTube channel; the video was removed on Thursday, but re-uploaded shortly thereafter.
"All [young people in America] know that a lot more Paleostinians have been killed than Israelis. And I tell them what Arafat walked away from, and they, like, can’t believe it," said the former commander-in-chief.
Arafat "walked away from a Paleostinian state, with a capital in East Jerusalem, 96% of the West Bank, 4% of Israel to make up for the 4% [of the West Bank to be annexed for Israeli settlements]," Clinton elaborated, repeating an account of the Oslo peace negotiations, to which the ex-president has returned repeatedly in recent interviews and remarks.
The talks, which aimed to resolve Israel’s conflict with the Paleostinians through a negotiated two-state solution, fell apart just six weeks before Clinton’s second term ended.
"I go through all the stuff that was in the deal, and they, like — it’s not on their radar screen, they can’t even imagine that happened," Clinton went on, describing his conversations with young Americans upset over the corpse count in Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... in the latest war.
The former US president also noted the sacrifice made by Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a Jewish krazed killer in Israel over his support for the grinding of the peace processor.
"I tell them, you know, the first and most famous victim of an attempt to get the Paleostinians a state was prime minister Rabin, whom I think I loved as much as I ever loved another man," Clinton said, repeating a phrase he has often used to describe his relationship with the late Israeli leader.
"You walk away from these once in a lifetime peace opportunities, and you can’t complain twenty-five years later when the doors weren’t all still open, and all the possibilities weren’t still there. You can’t do it," Clinton said.
In addition to his remarks about the grinding of the peace processor, Clinton also commented on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political survival, noting that he had remained in office "farther than I thought he would."
Clinton said that the Hamas ..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,... terror group’s October 7, 2023 attack — in which some 1,200 people were killed, mostly civilians, and 251 people taken hostage, starting the ongoing war — worked to Netanyahu’s political benefit, focusing attention away from domestic controversies.
John Ferguson, the CEOof Saxon Aerospace, a manufacturer of manned drones, gives his assessment of all the mysterious drones plaguing New Jersey and other places in America right now. pic.twitter.com/vx299AimAj
"You can read more about NORAD’s admission that its radars were not properly configured to spot and track non-traditional aircraft following the Chinese balloon incident"
#4
It suddenly struck me that a part of the paranoia behind the administration hiding the search for some WMD threat instead of enlisting the public's help might be the revelation of how this threat might have been brought across our porous borders!
Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin.
This film is a mix of testimonials in Russian and English for Russel Bentley, an American fugitive drug runner from Minnesota, who insinuated himself in the pro Russian militia in Donbass region.
On a technical note, rutube.ru has really improved to the point it is possible to embed its videos.
[ColonelCassad] A documentary about American volunteer Russell Bentley (call sign "Texas"), who in 2014 came from the USA to Donbass, where he stayed, linking his fate with the DPR. The film was shot by people who personally knew Russell.
In 2024, "Texas" was killed by a group of people from the 5th Brigade, who are now on trial in Donetsk.
[ArsTechnica] Earlier this year, officials at US Space Command released a list of priorities and needs, and among the routine recitation of things like cyber defense, communications, and surveillance was a relatively new term: "integrated space fires."
This is a new phrase in the esoteric terminology the military uses to describe its activities. Essentially, "fires" are offensive or defensive actions against an adversary. The Army defines fires as "the use of weapon systems to create specific lethal and nonlethal effects on a target."
The inclusion of this term in a Space Command planning document was another signal that Pentagon leaders, long hesitant to even mention the possibility of putting offensive weapons in space for fear of stirring up a cosmic arms race, see the taboo of talking about space warfare as a thing of the past.
"While we've held it close to the vest before, some of that was just kind of hand-wringing," said Gen. Chance Saltzman, the top general in the Space Force, who also serves on the joint chiefs of staff. "It wasn't really something we needed to protect."
One reason for the change in how the military talks about warfare in space is that the nation's top two strategic adversaries—China and Russia—are already testing capabilities that could destroy or disable a US military satellite.
The Space Force was established nearly five years ago, in December 2019, to protect US interests in space. Satellites provide the military with intelligence data, navigation, communications, and support missile defense, and in the next few years, they will become even more crucial for weapons targeting and battle management.
This week, Saltzman laid out the military's view of offensive weapons in space in perhaps the plainest language yet.
“Space is a war-fighting domain," Saltzman said at the Space Force Association's Spacepower Conference in Orlando, Florida. "Ten years ago, I couldn’t say that. That’s the starting point. Think about that. In 2014, we had senior leaders start to talk about space and war in the same sentence. They got kind of berated by the senior leadership. So this is still a relatively new condition when we’re talking about war-fighting in space. I don't think we should underestimate the power of that."
AN ALERT POSTURE
Gen. Stephen Whiting, the four-star chief of US Space Command, identified "integrated space fires"—again, these are actual offensive or defensive attacks against an enemy vehicle—as his organization's most pressing need. These could be based in any domain—land, air, sea, or space—and aimed against targets within and above the atmosphere.
So what would these weapons look like? They might be electronic or cyber in nature, allowing US forces to hack a satellite or its ground-based support network. Russia has already done this, when hackers launched a cyberattack on a commercial European satellite communications network in 2022, the same day the country began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Then there's directed energy, which would use a laser beam to blind or dazzle satellite sensors in orbit. Directed energy weapons could be based on the ground or in space. There's another option that would involve one satellite sidling up next to an adversary's and using a claw or robotic arm to capture it and take control.
Finally, there are the kinds of space weapons that can blow a satellite out of the sky. These antisatellite weapons (ASATs) are perhaps the most low-tech solution—the United States, China, Russia, and India have openly demonstrated them—but they come with dangerous side effects.
For example, a Chinese ASAT missile test in 2007 destroyed one of the country's own satellites, creating more than 3,000 trackable debris objects in low-Earth orbit, the largest cloud of space debris in history. The United States performed a similar ASAT missile test against a satellite in 1985.
Destructive ASATs, like directed energy weapons, can be based on the ground or in space. In 2021, Russia launched a ground-based direct-ascent ASAT missile to take out one of its own satellites. The year before, Space Command reported Russia tested a space-based ASAT weapons system in which a Russian military satellite released a projectile moving fast enough to destroy another satellite if it made an impact.
[IsraelTimes] Once loyal to the regime, Syrian Christians have ostensibly joined the national celebration after the ouster of Bashar al-Assad. But can they trust the new Islamist rulers’ pledges?
The lightning power grab by the Sunni jihadi group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, formerly al-Nusra, before that it was called something else ...al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, from which sprang the Islamic State... (HTS) in Syria has raised concerns about the fate of the Christian minority in the country.
Numbering 1.5 million before the outbreak of the civil war in 2011, Christians made up about 10 percent of the Syrian population. Within the span of a decade, their numbers dwindled dramatically, and in 2022, there were only 300,000 left, or about 2% of the current population of Syria, according to a report by the US-based NGO "Aid to Church in Need."
Traditionally wealthier and more educated than the average Syrian population, Christians emigrated en masse to escape persecution by ISIS, but also to flee Syria’s spiraling economic situation.
The new HTS leaders have repeatedly reassured Syrians and the international community that it will protect all minorities — which also include Shiites, Alawites, Druze, Kurds and others — and the new Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir has urged millions of Syrian refugees abroad to return home, vowing "the rights of all people and all sects in Syria" will be guaranteed.
However,
a clean conscience makes a soft pillow... it remains to be seen whether the country will once again become a tolerant, pluralistic place as its new leaders claim. Concern for the fate of Syria’s millennia-long Christian presence has been recently expressed by the Washington DC-based NGO In Defense of Christians.
In a statement issued after the rebels’ capture of Aleppo two weeks ago, IDC quoted sources in Aleppo saying that Christians were "living in fear" and had been the "target of widespread crime and vandalism."
However,
a clean conscience makes a soft pillow... Christian residents of Aleppo were recently interviewed by the Center for Peace Communications, a New York nonprofit, on the occasion of the Festival of Saint Barbara, a celebration observed by Middle East Christians. They said that they were afraid for the first two or three days after the HTS takeover, but now feel they do not have any reason to be concerned, and churches are operating normally.
During the 13 years of the civil war, Christians largely remained loyal to the Assad regime, which portrayed itself as a secular defender of religious minorities. Christians didn’t actively take action to support the regime, such as organizing armed militias to defend it, said Syrian analyst Hazem Alghabra, a former Senior Advisor to the US Department of State who runs a Washington DC-based Middle East security consultancy.
"For the most part, [Christians] were afraid. They were concerned about the Islamist elements of the Syrian uprising — and that is hard to ignore. But also, they repeated the regime messaging that anybody who stood up against the regime was an Islamist terrorist," Damascus-born Alghabra told The Times of Israel. He noted that describing them as regime supporters today, after the ousting of Bashir al-Assad, would "amount to an insult."
REBELS RETURN CONFISCATED CHRISTIAN PROPERTY
Like most other Syrians, Christians appeared elated at the fall of the brutal dictatorship. Bahjat Karakach, a Franciscan friar who serves as Aleppo’s Latin-rite parish priest, told Vatican News this week that Christians had been "completely exhausted by living under the regime" due to the economic hardships.
The holy man also noted that over the past years, rebels had shown increased tolerance to Christians, and returned confiscated property. In the Idlib area, controlled by HTS for the past decade, Christians had reportedly been allowed to continue practicing their faith.
Archbishop Hanna Jallouf, Apostolic Vicar of Aleppo, told Vatican News that he had met with HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, who had given him "assurances that Christians and their possessions will not be touched, and that [the murderous Moslems] will meet all our legitimate requests."
However,
a clean conscience makes a soft pillow... in 2015, al-Sharaa, back then known only by his nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Julani, said in a prescient interview with Al Jazeera that once the group took control of all of Syria, it would impose shari’a law over the country.
Christians, as "people of the book," would enjoy a privileged status and be allowed to practice their faith, the jihadi leader said, but per Islamic law, they would be obligated to pay the per capita jizya tax — even though HTS at the time was not imposing it in the areas it controlled.
At the time, al-Julani said that a different fate awaited other religious minorities in Syria, such as Alawites and Druze, whose doctrines originated from Islam centuries ago but then departed from Moslem Orthodoxy. Those two groups would have to "correct their doctrinal mistakes and embrace Islam," Julani said.
In 2013, two years prior to the interview, the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch that al-Julani led at the time, kidnapped 13 nuns amid fighting with regime forces. They were freed three months later after Qatar ...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi... agreed to pay the kidnappers $16 million.
Today, al-Julani appears to eschew those fundamentalist positions. He renounced ties to al-Qaeda in 2016 and now depicts himself as a champion of pluralism and tolerance.
In recent days, the insurgency leader dropped his nom de guerre and began referring to him by his real name, Ahmad al-Sharaa. He shed his garb as a hardline Islamist guerrilla and put on suits for press interviews, talking of building state institutions and decentralizing power to reflect Syria’s diversity.
SALVATION IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER?
The transitional government appointed on Tuesday only includes members from the HTS administration of Idlib, known as the "Salvation Government," and no representatives from secular rebel factions or religious groups other than Sunni Moslems.
"The concerns are not exclusive to Christians. They are also shared by the average moderate Sunni population," Alghabra told The Times of Israel. "If we end up with a Taliban ...Arabic for students... -style governance in Syria, then Christians will be targeted first, but down the line, moderate Sunnis will be targeted as well."
HTS’s experience ruling the Idlib area over the past years could provide an indicator for its future behavior governing the country.
Aaron Zelin, Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said in a recent interview with La Belle France 24 that HTS’s rule in Idlib was "an authoritarian governance model, not quite as bad as the totalitarianism of the Assad regime. It wasn’t a liberal democracy by any stretch of the imagination." But the Islamist group had apparently abandoned any aspirations for "global jihad," Zelin noted.
In a recent article, Zelin said that Christians in those areas were treated as second-class citizens, as they were not represented in the local government, the General Shura Council, and their interests were dealt with by a "Directorate of Minority Affairs."
La Belle France24 journalist Wassim Nasr visited Idlib in 2023 and reported that the few hundred Christians who remained in the region were allowed to hold masses, but not to display crosses or ring church bells.
Syrian analyst Alghabra remained optimistic that once HTS becomes the internationally recognized government of Syria, it will have to make compromises and show more openness.
"In Idlib, HTS did not have to deal with the concerns of the international community," Alghabra said. "It will need technical support, aid, fuel, a lot of things. So the international community’s approach will need to be transactional. HTS will have to allow every religious group to practice unobstructedly in order to get outside help."
[X]
Red Flag -- New #Syria ruler Ahmed Sharaa signals to a woman to cover her hair. If the revolution was not about liberty, it was not worth all the sacrifice. pic.twitter.com/rGUSV6wJRX
by Artemy Sharapov
After the immediate collapse of the Syrian Arab Republic, ruled by the Assad dynasty, the country, which was stitched together in the 20th century from a multitude of ethnic, clan-territorial and religious “patches”, began to fall into the past. And not only into the pre-Assad past, but also into the era before the Turkish invasion of the 16th century.
Before the Ottomans brought their Levantine vilayets (provinces) into submission with an iron fist, this part of the eastern Mediterranean and northern Mesopotamia was the scene of a war of all against all. And interesting ghosts have begun to emerge from that past.
Many observers have noticed that when the so-called "independent" Syrian militants now threaten war against their "colleagues" who are directly supported by Turkey, they use the word "Mongol", which is offensive to any Arab, meaning "irreconcilable enemy" and "stranger". The phrase from the press release of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham* militants during the capture of Aleppo, when the victors immediately began civil strife, looked completely unexpected: "You are an army of Tatars and Mongols, we will not spare any of you."
For a person even well acquainted with the history of the Middle Ages, the invasion of the Tatar-Mongols is associated first of all with the Battle of Kalka and the enslavement of Russia, with the devastation of Central Asia by the hordes of Genghis Khan, at most - with the Battle of Liegnitz, when the Polish knights, Templars and Hospitallers stopped the rush of the noyons - the "generals" of the Great Khan "to the last sea". But the Middle East?
However, it is here that the "almkol" - the Mongols - left perhaps a greater and more tenacious memory than in Russia and the Eurasian steppe. To understand many of the events currently taking place in the disintegrated Syria, we should recall the events of 800 years ago.
Yellow Crusade to the West
By the end of 1224 AD, or 621 AH according to the Islamic calendar, the Mongols had completed their conquest of Central Asia. Having caused terrible devastation and destroyed dozens of cities, many of which were never rebuilt, Genghis Khan created a new ulus on the captured lands and returned to the steppes. Genghis's successors temporarily halted their expansion to the west, concentrating on the final subjugation of Rus', the countries of Southeast Asia, and the Indian kingdoms.
In 1253, a kurultai was held at the headquarters of the Great Khan, where the grandson and successor of the great Genghis Khan, Mongke, gave orders to his younger brother Hulagu : to prepare a campaign to Persia and further - to Jerusalem itself. Hulagu was given a large-scale task: to subjugate the Arab states and all the territories lying between Persia and the Mediterranean Sea to the Horde. But it is interesting that part of the Mongolian army also had religious motives for the campaign to the West.
By the middle of the 13th century, most Mongols still retained their ancestors' faith in the Eternal Sky - Tengri and the spirits subordinate to him and, despite all their religious tolerance, were distrustful of the preaching of Islam among their own. However, part of the horde had professed Nestorian Christianity since ancient times.
The teaching itself, named after its founder, Archbishop Nestorius of Constantinople, was banned in Byzantium by the Second Ecumenical Council back in 431. However, followers of Nestorianism settled outside the empire - in the Middle East, Armenia, Iran, and reached modern China and Mongolia. One of the main companions of Genghis Khan, Wang Khan, the leader of the Kerait tribe, belonged to the Nestorian faith. In subsequent years, the Nestorians played an important role in the politics of the Horde.
This is most likely where the legend that has long been current in Europe comes from, that in the east, beyond the lands of the “wicked Hagarenes” – Muslims, there is a Christian kingdom of the sovereign-presbyter John, who is ready to come to the aid of his brothers in Christ.
Although Hulagu, who was entrusted with leading the campaign to the Middle East, was not a Christian, his wife, Van Khan's granddaughter Dokuz Khatun, and many of his confidants adhered to this religion. The future ruler of the empire patronized the Nestorians and made rich donations to churches and monasteries. The Christian part of the horde was in favor of going to the Holy Land and, no more and no less, liberating the Holy Sepulcher from the hands of the Arabs. When speaking about the Mongol conquest of the Middle East, a number of historians often use the term "Yellow Crusade".
Hulagu and Dokuz Khatun. Manuscript of Jami at-tawarikh, 14th century
The legend of Prester John probably had a direct reason. According to a number of sources, before the start of the campaign, the Mongols entered into an agreement with the King of France Louis IX, who was preparing the Seventh Crusade at that time to recapture Jerusalem. The rulers of Georgia and Armenia and representatives of other Christian communities also joined Hulagu's army. A huge army of several tens of thousands of people set out from Mongolia to the west, but it only reached the borders of Persia in 1256.
It is also interesting that the campaign that destroyed Persia and the Middle East began… partly at the request of Middle Eastern rulers. And also partly for religious reasons.
Assassins Creed
The Baghdad Caliphs, the rulers of the Abbasid dynasty, traditionally considered Persia and Central Asia to be part of the great Caliphate. But by the 12th–13th centuries, the Abbasid Empire, a state of scholars and artists, celebrated in the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, was in decline. Present-day Syria, Iraq, the lands of the Kurds and Turks were a conglomerate of warring emirates that had yet to dislodge the “Franks” — the Crusaders — who held Palestine.
And in the east, in Iran, a new threat was brewing. Here, a new radical Shiite movement was gaining popularity: the Ismaili Nizari. Back in 1090, the sheikh of one of the Nizari sects, Hasan ibn Sabbah, with a group of fanatically devoted followers, captured the mountain fortress of Alamut in northern Iran.
It is believed that Ibn Sabbah, nicknamed the Old Man of the Mountain, reinforced his sermons by distributing a narcotic potion based on hashish to his students, making them more suggestible. This is where the name "hashishins" - hashish smokers - came from. This word entered European culture in a slightly altered form - "assassins". The order of assassins from the Alamut castle is still remembered today - it is enough to recall the popular series of games Assassin's Creed - "Assassin's Creed". And for a political murder or terrorist act in English there is still a learned word - assassination.
The credo of the followers of the Mountain Elder consisted of renouncing their personality for the sake of a higher goal, unquestioning obedience to the sheikh - and, as a consequence, a willingness to participate in “targeted liquidations” of those whom the Elder called the enemy of the teaching.
The heirs of Ibn Sabbah who ruled in Alamut captured another dozen fortresses in today's Iran, Iraq and Syria, mostly in hard-to-reach mountain valleys. The network of fortified castles became a stronghold of the sect. And the feuding Middle Eastern rulers did not skimp on offerings to the rulers of Alamut in order to eliminate their competitors - who could always be visited by a ruthless fanatical "liquidator". Thus the shadow of the "elders of the mountain" covered the entire Middle East.
The Assassins, who had settled in the mountains around the modern Iranian city of Qazvin, were harassing the new Persian subjects of the Horde with their raids. And then the ruler of Qazvin turned to Khan Mongke with a request to send troops to protect against - as they would say today - terrorist threats.
Baghdad was told not to joke about war
By the time of the Yellow Crusade, the golden age of the Assassins had long since passed. The Mongols were not particularly intimidated by the sinister reputation of the sect, they guarded their commanders zealously, and they did not stand on ceremony with the mountain fortresses of the Assassins - they consistently and effectively razed them to the ground. The sinister castle of Alamut was no exception, of which only the foundation remained, excavated by archaeologists.
The road to Baghdad was open to Hulagu. And – as with the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and their attempts to “enter” Syria in the 2010s – the fight against terrorism was just a cover for plans to establish dominance in the Middle East.
Moreover, the chaos that reigned there made the task easier. The Arab caliphs submitted to the power of the Turkish Seljuks and Egyptian Mamelukes, but for now they retained the nominal title of leaders of the Muslim world. The capital of the caliphate, Baghdad, remained the center of sciences and arts. The Abbasids still, albeit nominally, claimed supreme power in a huge region from Tibet to Spain. Which categorically did not suit the Mongols, who believed that the only source of power was the Great Khan.
Having finished destroying Alamut, Hulagu founded a new ulus on the captured lands, after which he addressed a message to the Caliph of Baghdad, al-Mustazim, demanding that he recognize the authority of the Horde. According to legend, the commander of the faithful responded arrogantly to the message of the Mongols, believing that hordes of infidel nomads from somewhere on the edge of the world could not give orders to the descendant of the Prophet. Of course, this was a fatal mistake.
From conquered Persia, the Mongol army moved south and reached Baghdad in 1258. Hulagu decided to split the army and sent some warriors across the Tigris River to besiege Baghdad from both sides at the same time. The Caliph's troops managed to inflict several defeats on the army that had crossed, but then the Mongols used a military trick: they lured the enemy into a narrow valley, after which they opened one of the dams on the Tigris. The Arab army was washed away by the raging stream of water and destroyed. Baghdad was left without protection.
Chinese technology decided the fate of the caliphate
By the end of January 1258, Chinese military advisers and "technical specialists" in Hulagu's army had completed the construction of siege engines, after which the Mongols launched an assault. Gradually, the conquerors managed to capture several city towers, after which the caliph decided to surrender the city. The capitulation, however, did not save the Abbasid capital.
On Hulagu's orders, the city was subjected to brutal devastation. Arab and Persian historians testify to hundreds of thousands killed and enslaved. The Mongols burned famous libraries and educational institutions, so that the Tigris River was "black with washed-off ink and red with the blood of murdered scholars." Palaces and mosques were razed to the ground, city fortifications were razed, and the surviving inhabitants were enslaved. However, the greatest damage was done to the region's economy.
The Fall of Baghdad. Illustration to Rashid ad-Din's Jami' at-tawarikh
The Mongols swept across Mesopotamia, destroying the unique canal system that had been built over thousands of years. The territory of modern Iraq was turned into a desert unsuitable for agriculture. The conquest of Baghdad ended the imperial Arab state.
But despite the successes achieved, the main goal of the Yellow Crusade was never achieved.
Having destroyed Baghdad and rolled through Mesopotamia, burning everything in its path, Hulagu's horde reached the northern borders of modern Israel. Here the Mongols learned of the collapse of the Seventh Crusade and the capture of the French King Louis. Without the help of Western allies, the march on Jerusalem could have turned into a disaster for the Mongol army, which had already broken away far from its "rear". As a result, the conquerors returned to the conquered Persian lands, where one of the uluses of the Great Horde existed for a long time under the rule of Hulagu's descendants.
Elder Hasan and his disciples
For the Arab world, this campaign of the Turco-Mongol army had almost the same consequences as the invasion of Batu for Rus'. Since then, the "army of the Tatars and Mongols" has become a synonym for barbarism.
The Arabs who survived the invasion were subjugated by the Turks, once again reverting to the tribal system. Therefore, when the Arabs call someone a Mongol, they are talking about an eternal enemy with whom it is impossible to negotiate - only to fight.
With Syria's current collapse into archaism, this attitude towards armed "political opponents" will only increase.
And the war zone that the former Syrian Arab Republic has become, alas, could become a breeding ground for terrorism, a phenomenon that appeared in the East long before the Muslim Brotherhood* and, even more so, Al-Qaeda*. Osama bin Laden or the ISIS* “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi were merely good students of Hassan ibn Sabbah.
Text taken from the Telegram channel of S. Shilov SYRIAN "BLACK GOLD"
Before the war, Syria was an insignificant oil exporter – production was only 0.5% of the world total. This gave the budget 25-30% of income. And it was not a very rich country.
However, before the war, it covered all its consumption and exported "black gold". The production record was about 600,000 barrels per day, but the figure has been steadily falling over the years. In 2010 – 383,000.
Many associate support for the protests in 2011 with a severe drought and problems in the economy. However, even without the drought and then the war, sooner or later, without investment in production, the budget would have lost significant export income.
Today, oil exports are out of the question – if you add up all the oil produced, including in the Kurdish territories, you get a maximum of about 116 thousand barrels per day.
In the current deplorable situation - with a destroyed industry, the "old" Syria of Assad consumes about 140,000 barrels per day. Oil consumption in the pre-war and calm 2010 was about 290,000 per day (a drop of more than two times).
Of these current 140,000 consumed, about 60,000 (over 40%) were imported by Iran by sea on credit, 16 thousand were produced by the Assad government (11.4% - a pittance!). Another 20,000 were given to him by the Kurds under the agreement - from sources I read that the volume was 30% of what was produced in the Kurdish territories. But no one in Damascus could check the volumes. Or did not really want to... You understand - in these matters people have many temptations.
The rest of the deficit of 44,000 (approximately 30%) the government sought on the black market... from the same Kurds. And here there were even more temptations to buy at one price and sell at another.
The government needed money for oil supplies from Iran and the Kurds. Given the temptations of the clans, for the population all this resulted in a constant depreciation of the national currency against the dollar, to hyperinflation. This is in addition to the unofficial levies on businesses and the population by the Syrian 4th Division and the like. And other problems in the economy.
But let's get back to the Kurds. There was a figure that production on their territory was 100,000. The fields themselves had previously been barbarically exploited by ISIS and many wells were essentially finished. But 100 thousand is the most optimistic figure. In 2020, the Minister of Oil and Mineral Resources of Syria described the situation as follows:
“Oil production in Syria reached 89,000 barrels per day. Of these, about 80,000 were stolen. That is, almost all the oil produced in the east of the country is stolen.”
And it is stolen by the Americans, sold through their company Delta Crescent under black schemes to the same Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan.
One of the beneficiaries of Delta Crescent is an ardent Russophobe and extremist - Republican Lindsey Graham.
He recently threatened sanctions against Turkey - what a coincidence - if pro-Turkish groups attack Kurdish territories. The senator's hat flares so brightly (like a gas torch) when he worries about the Kurds.
Now there is an attempt to agree between the Kurds and the new Syrian authorities - how the oil will be divided. This issue knocked out the previous government.
Meetings are underway between the Turks and the Americans. For the United States, in addition to business, oil is a lever of pressure on HTS and the new Syria. They will try to hold on to or bargain something from the Turks.
But in all cases, the oil produced inside Syria will not be enough under the current status quo. There are no reserves - and soon there will be problems with fuel. Because Iran has stopped supplying its 60,000 barrels per day.
They will have to import. Most likely, the new authorities will turn to Qatar for help.
Perhaps, for now they will supply it free of charge - the treasury of the new Syria is empty and there is nothing to pay with. Exports have also collapsed during the years of sanctions, like everything else.
So the mythical wealth of Syria in the form of oil is a fairy tale. Yes, this income is a profitable business for clans. But this is more a story about the redistribution by shadow players from the States, Damascus, Iraq, Turkey, "Syrian Kurdistan", etc.
Syria does not yet have any export potential in terms of oil. I read that Western companies will come and invest - but so far it is a theory. As well as statements about the Qatar pipeline. But oil will be needed now.
S. Shilov
Posted by: badanov ||
12/15/2024 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11126 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Syria
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,...
...al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, from which sprang the Islamic State...
