Tubi has been acquiring numerous indie films for its catalogue. Having of late been on a horror film binge, however, I ran into the 2018 French war film "Girls of the Sun."
This is a French film set in 2012 Syria during the worst of the Syrian civil war, when ISIL and al-Nusra were in their ascendance..
The central character is an American photojournalist, Marie Colvin who is embedded with an all-female Kurdish rifle unit, who we later learned, was killed in a directed Syrian air strike.
Marie Colvin is a central character but the film focuses on the female militiamen. The film recounts through their eyes how they became involved as fighters of the Kurdish side, mostly about their interactions with a local ISIL, always involving rape and murder of Kurdish women.
The film doesn't spend much time with the room clearing the unit performed with none of the depicted heroics. Their involvement in combat is grim and the moments spent away from combat are punctuated about their reasons to fight the ISIL units.
The film is in French and the Kurdish language, with occasional English thrown in, but there are English subtitles.
I recommend the film for its portrayal of the times.
Today, July 12, marks twenty years since the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War in 2006, which began following a Hezbollah attack on an IDF patrol in the Zar'it–Shtula area (Aita al-Shaab–Ramyeh). During the attack, Hezbollah killed several Israeli soldiers and abducted two… pic.twitter.com/o65K3J9Wo8
Today, July 12, marks twenty years since the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War in 2006, which began following a Hezbollah attack on an IDF patrol in the Zar'it–Shtula area (Aita al-Shaab–Ramyeh). During the attack, Hezbollah killed several Israeli soldiers and abducted two others.
The operation was carried out by Hezbollah's Radwan Unit, which at the time was still known as the "Intervention Unit." The name "Radwan" was adopted only after the elimination of Imad Mughniyeh ("Hajj Radwan") in February 2008, when the unit was renamed in his honor. Today, the Radwan Unit remains Hezbollah's most important offensive force, and with direct Iranian support, Hezbollah continues to prioritize its rehabilitation in terms of both force build-up and force employment.
This comes after the unit's infrastructure and personnel suffered severe losses during the recent war, effectively depriving it of the capability to carry out the large-scale invasion of the Galilee that Hezbollah had planned for late 2023.
It is known that at least two of the unit's senior commanders who physically participated in the 2006 abduction operation were eliminated during the recent war: Wissam al-Tawil, commander of the Radwan Unit, was eliminated in January 2024, and Abbas Raad (the son of Mohammad Raad), a Battalion (Fawj) commander in the Radwan Unit, was eliminated in November 2023.
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.
