The friends of "the moderates" are not through yet

1.  Having lost the Battle for Aleppo, the Assad must Go crew have now moved on to projecting memes involving false analogies to The Shoah and NAZI Germany as the aftermath of Jihadi defeat in the city.  Wild and unsubstantiated rumor is being spread by the UN, SOHR (MI-6) and Western media to the effect that Syrian troops are butchering civilians including THE CHILDREN in the streets in a re-enactment of every sack of a city the propagandists can dimly remember.  In fact the Syrians and Russians are evacuating civilians from the recently liberated combat areas, caring for them in makeshift shelters and preparing them for return to their homes.  Does the SAA have a list of hard core jihadis who they are looking for and aiming to eliminate?  SAA intelligence has had agents inside East Aleppo where they made appropriate lists.  These lists would include some fervent civilian collaborators with the jihadi cause.  This is war. Dead men don't bite.

2.  It seems that the former Nusra front and its allies are moving men up to the Aleppo area from Hama in anticipation of a next phase operation into Idlib province probably oriented on Idlib City and Jisr al-Shugur. 

3.  ISW is pushing the propaganda theme that the capture of Palmyra by an "army" of Technicals and suicide bombers is a major setback for the R+6.   It is not.  IMO the  attack was made on an opportunistic basis by IS seeking to take advantage of R+6 focus on the Aleppo battle. 

4.  Palmyra can wait.  The ruins and the propaganda leverage that IS capture of them provide are not worth diverting scarce ground assets from the center of gravity of the fight.  That center of gravity is in Idlib Province and the Turkish border crossing at Bab al-Hawa.  pl

Comments

[The Twisted Genius]

I just saw a report on ABC Nightly News saying the Syrian Army was going house to house executing civilians. Of course there was no film of this, just some battle footage and two different video shots of civilians, lots of them, peacefully walking out of their badly damaged neighborhoods. No one was shooting at them. What a crock. I'll have to go to RT for a more realistic report of what's happening in Aleppo. Lizzie Phelan has been reporting from there for weeks. She's showing a lot of the street celebrations going on now.

The jihadi propaganda coming out of Aleppo now would even have Baghdad Bob rolling his eyes in disbelief. The alleged pictures of atrocities are being discredited almost as soon as they are published. And no one has seen poor little Bana and her family yet.

[Cortes]

When I was courting Mrs C, her father had a dog called Khan, named for "Rifleman Khan":

http://www.k9history.com/WWII-great-britains-war-dogs.htm

A few years later I mentioned this to a friend who worked for a very odd Scottish paper "The Sunday Post " and he interviewed Bill, the father in law by then, and produced an article about the subject.

Over the next 18 months or so Bill got letters from all corners of the world about the article, many very poignant about the whereabouts of men who died and others who'd decided to sever links with their family. The dislocation produced by war is probably still poorly understood.

[FkDahl]

As a practical aspect: the Keyhole style high res photography satellites are close to earth (perhaps 700km) and need to move relative to Earths surface (Galilean orbital physics and all that), stationary or geosynchronous satellites need to be 36000 km away. It is possible that ISIS could have moved between two passes of US photo recon satellites. Orbit information is probably restricted to countries that have the ability to launch satellites themselves.

[Serge]

You say so yourself that you feel inundated by the media coming out of east Aleppo, an area with a civilian population of 25-50k. Heard any of these bloodcurdling testimonies of yours lately from Mosul,a city of 1-1.25 million souls? I rest my case. I'll preempt you by saying that the superior sensibilities and civilization of the Iraqi troops, a good part of which were dumping truckloads of bodies with nail gun holes to the back of the head every weekend in Baghdad just a decade ago , that these are not a factor in the equation.

[Jack]

"Are these to be discounted as false or cynical? As mere anti-Assad and anti-Russian propaganda?"

Yes.

Go back and review the past year of Syria stories in the Guardian. See how many, if any, stories there are that are pro-Assad.

[Jack]

All

Just like the wailing and gnashing of teeth with Trump's electoral college win, the Borgists are in complete meltdown with the R+6 crushing the jihadists in Aleppo. The reporting in the Borg media is hysterical. I believe we are witnessing massive cognitive dissonance. The Borg's treasured cows are being slaughtered. From Hillary is the best candidate to win so let's rig the primary to the Assad-must-go and the unicorn "moderates" will be westernized democrats, the reality has upended long held beliefs. We're seeing the denial phase in its full hysteria.

[different clue]

I still listen to BBC thru the night after getting home from work . . . a habit of some decades standing. Despite the audible decay of standards, it is still pleasant background ear-candy for the most part.

But over the last few days BBC reporting from Aleppo has also been a SenSurround Wall of Sound about the dead children, the massacres, the torture, the disappearings, etc. Also, high level United Nations guys are wailing louder than ever about how there must be an immediate ceasefire, how there can be no military solution, etc. The BBC is pro-CLEJ, obviously. But what explains the UN? I think the UN people are so invested in the sentimental thought-world that violence is never acceptable and never solves a problem that they are approaching a state of brain-layer delamination at being forced to witness a problem being solved ( perhaps for several decades to come) by military force.

Separately, I wonder how many of the strategists and planners for ISIS are still the legacy Saddam Baathists and the former Iraqi Army Officers and Secret Police leadership. If any of them are, I still find myself wondering if some of them are reading this blog for either ideas or perhaps things to watch out for.

[Ex-PFC Chuck]

dmr, see this video which, IIRC, I found in the comments on a post here a couple of days ago:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TjHniRRgOao

[Ex-PFC Chuck]

PS: don't miss the Q & A at the end of the video. It's 18 minutes long.

[Tel]

The way I see it, getting large vehicles in or out of Palmyra across that open plain is very vulnerable to air attack. That leaves no way to reliably get supplies through.

ISIS need to capture that airbase if they are to have any hope of sitting in Palmyra for a long time. It's all or nothing for them. Maybe they can wait a few weeks, maybe a month, but if you have 5000 people, they have to eat and drink.

[BraveNewWorld]

"IMO we are always just one or two bad decisions away from a major regional conflict in the Levant."

Truer words ...

http://www.timesofisrael.com/trumps-team-already-exploring-logistics-of-moving-embassy-to-jerusalem-report/

[Mac]

Colonel,

In my circles, my US friends actually thinks the "moderates" are the good guys....I just don't know how to enlighten them....they think Assad is the problem....SST is the only sane space I have left.

Any help is appreciate in relieving them of their misguidedness.

[BraveNewWorld]

You forgot snake face to the north. The Turkish military is still tied in enough that they could have put it together. I'm not saying they did, but that is where I would put my money. If they were involved and Russia found evidence ...

[Bandit]

This has been my main issue all along; how easy it is to dupe the American public who refuse to do any independent research and analysis on whatever subject is being propagandized. It has been pointed out on this site and many others that the propaganda machine runs 24/7; it never stops; it has lots of actors who are willing to agonize in front of a camera or to tweet through whatever form of digital media.

Once the White Helmets were uncovered to be nothing more than propaganda ops, an intelligent person might have some reservations about believing in government controlled media. But, sadly, this does not seem the case. Nothing personal here dmr, just stating the facts as I see them.

[BraveNewWorld]

The weather was also reportedly pretty bad for air ops at least in the beginning when the focus was more on Pamyra than T4. I don't know how good modern equipment can see through cloud and fog. I took it as a given that any thing the military flies these days would be impervious till I saw this.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/with-fog-delay-f-35-ceremony-turns-farcical-but-it-couldve-been-worse/

[BillWade]

laughing here, did you see the dead cats? I saw the pic, one's definitely a cat while the other is a mountain lion, a bit of snow on the ground for added realism, lol.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Business as usual among competing centers of power. As Sa'adi wrote:

دو درویش در گلیمی بخسبند و دو پادشاه در اقلیمی نگنجند

[Babak Makkinejad]

I hope some day Istanbul will be rid of them.

[turcopolier]

tel

who and what would be sending IS supplies by air? pl

[turcopolier]

TTG

I have said from the beginning of this discussion that most of the IS were already there. IMO the rest were brought in by infiltration in bad visibility conditions. pl

[different clue]

Mac,

Everyone has their own style, and has their own friends. And everyone's friends have their own styles. So every different reader-of-SST will have to craft herm's very own way of making herm's friends and aquaintances aware of SST. And will have to vary that style to best match the style of every one of those friends and aquaintances.

Here is how I have aquainted a few-couple people with SST. I have gained a little credibility with a few people over the last few years by offering a few predictions about things. If those predictions have come out more often right than wrong . . . to the point where a few people are respecting my opinion about things and stuff . . . I will then mention that "you know, it isn't really my analysis. It is analysis and description of events coming from a blog called Sic Semper Tyrannis." And some of those few have begun going there and giving it some due consideration at least.

The process can work faster and spread farther on line. People ready for something a little bit new have already self-selected themselves and clumped up around various PSS ( Parallel Side Stream) blogs and other media. Such people are already a little bit more ready to receive word about another also-valuable blog. For example, I have been mentioning SST over at Naked Capitalism and mentioning Naked Capitalism over here. And so have others. And I see each blog being sometimes cited or referred to at the other blog.

And so word spreads.

But if your friends and aquaintances are among the overworked overstressed beat-down majority, they won't even have the time-energy to look at something new. One shouldn't let a very low and slow rate of recruitment among most of the people one knows . . . be too discouraging.

[Lemur]

"According to a military source in Damascus, the Syrian Arab Army's High Command sent reinforcements from the Aleppo Governorate to eastern Homs today; these units were made up of soldiers from the elite Tiger Forces and Military Shield.

At least 2,500 more soldiers are expected to be redeployed to the Palmyra front in the coming days, as part of the greater force to retake the oil fields surrounding this ancient Syrian city."
https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/reinforcements-pour-palmyra-countryside-syrian-army-attempts-push-back-isis/

If this is true, the SAA wants Palmyra back.

Re propaganda, I watched One News tonight here in NZ (our equivalent of the BBC). They showed a BBC clip about the 'horrors' of Aleppo, and then the valiant Samantha Powers giving Churkin what-for in the UN. They used the Obama administration's stance to segue into Trump's SoS pick Tillerson (PUTIN GAVE HIM A MEDAL!) and his views on de-escalating with Russia. So they told whoppers about Aleppo and then made Trump look like he was in favour of their fictional accounts.

[Jason]

Mac,
Same here, I am at a loss.

[Tel]

I'm saying IS supplies travelling in ground vehicles would be attacked from the air as they move in the open.

Thus, if IS don't keep the momentum going they won't be able to just sit tight in Palmyra, they will run out of food. This time of year it's fairly cold there too, so they will also need fuel.

Perhaps bad visibility can protect them, remains to be seen.

[b]

There is allegedly a new deal with Ru/Sy allowing Turkey to take al-Bab in exchange from not intervening in the Idleb fight.

But will Erdogan stick to this deal? No one knows ...