Huge defections from the Syrian Army reported in Turkey, with a total of 60, 000 having defected since the beginning of the conflict. (roughly 19-20% of the Syrian army If My Calculations Are Correct)

edited 3rd Jul '12 6:05:09 PM by TheGDude

That has got to hurt. You know, a lot.

O_O Damn, and here I have been wondering where the Damascus area's residents got the bravery to openly hold mass anti-Assad/pro-revolutionary demonstrations, and why the heck didn't they get bloodily stomped into terrified silence by the capital's local garrison forces, which should be quite large and well-equipped ^note Assad has a "Republican Guard", right?: The regime incurred sufficiently considerable manpower shortages that they can't suppress the FSA forces and the anti-regime protestors in more distant areas and completely secure Damascus (and its suburbs) at the same time!

edited 3rd Jul '12 6:46:18 PM by MarqFJA

Yeah, it's commanded by his brother Maher, widely regarded as Assad's Dragon (probably In-Chief too) and a complete psycho.

edited 3rd Jul '12 7:01:23 PM by TheGDude

That is a sizeable chunk, for proportional comparison, of the total Syrian army. The Syrian army has 220, 000 active duty personnel according to Wikipedia, and 280, 000 reservists (who I'd imagine Assad would be taking a very large risk mobilising right now). So that's over a quarter of Assad's military gone and 1/6th of his total potential army. (Not counting hired goons).

Source.

Al-Arabiya showed a few videos of Syrian regime army troops conducting torture sessions. The most notable one went on for at least one whole minute of repetitive beating, whipping, standing on the poor guy's back (which, even at the start, looked pretty bruised and bloody from past torutre) when he collapsed from the pain, and finally punctuated by punching the victim's face while manually holding it in place to maximize the pain/damage.

<insert private frothing rage tantrum at the blatant dehumanization>

The bodies of the two Turkish pilots, of the jet that was shot down, have been found. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18707069

While the Syrian opposition have been meeting in Cairo. They have managed to make both good agreements and fail to agree in other issues including something Kurd related (The Kurdish delegation walked out at one point). The big fail issue is that they have still failed to decide upon an overall international representation. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18706697

About Syria - Let's not forget the irregular militias, who have more Knight Templar behavior and less organization. The defection rate hurts, but I think it means everythings falling into total chaos rather than Assad necessarily losing.

About the rename, I vote yes.

About the useful notes thread, there was actually another thread (the first created for the event) that had been hidden a few weeks into the uprising. Could we take the information from that page and put it in the current page? Particularly the list of tropes represented....

The name change is done.

Robert Mood is requesting more personnel and extensive restructuring/reorganization of the UN monitoring mission to Syria before they can resume it.

Thanks, Best Of!

Danke.

BBC: "'Top Syrian defector' Manaf Tlas heads for Paris"

Huh. So the Brass is bailing out too.

US diplomatic efforts are starting to target Russia and China specifically over their support for the Assad regime.

And it may be working...

edited 6th Jul '12 10:49:33 AM by DeMarquis

I guess it's tough for people to break old habits and finally throw away support for their dictatorships. I wish we'd end our funding to the Egyptian military.

Oh, for Christ's sake. Seriously, do these idiots want to give the "IF GADDAFI GOES THEN LIBYA WILL BECOME SOMALIA 2.0 HERP A DERP DERP" crowd credibility?

edited 6th Jul '12 2:21:14 PM by TheGDude

Overall, I've been hearing that the election in Libya is going fairly well.

And now, some good economic news out of Libya.

edited 6th Jul '12 12:49:48 PM by DeMarquis

I think you're forgot to add a word or two after "crowd".

From the article linked a couple of posts above:

This raises a couple of questions. And I'm not talking about "how do you hit something with a rocket without causing damage?" 'cause the answer is very probably that the rockets failed to detonate, which is a fairly common occurrence in these kind of situations.

Groups in Cyrenaica are afraid that too much power will be centralised on and around Tripoli. I'm sure that this is not helped by the campaigning of the people who fought in Misrata to have power shared with them, too. From Tripoli, it must look as if everyone's trying to hoard all the powers that would be invested on the new government and Parliament, once those exist.

I just can't help wondering what kind of groups would think that they can advance their cause by murdering elections officials or by firing rockets at hospitals. When foreign volunteers were pouring into Libya, there were many people on all sides surprised to see people with al-Qaida links joining the ranks of the NTC, an organisation that was on the same side as NATO. Even military commanders of the NTC-led opposition at the time admitted that they had personally fought against NATO in Afghanistan.

So these people were in Afghanistan to defend their fellow Muslims from what they perceived as an unjustified invasion; and in Libya, the reason they fought was that they wanted to protect their fellow Muslims from another source of violence. So there's consistency right there, but I can't help wondering if the people doing those attacks now are somehow connected to the volunteers with previous experience of an insurgency or downright terrorism.

edited 6th Jul '12 2:29:57 PM by BestOf

Well the hard part is always after you take down the dictator.

Depends on your definition of "hard." I'd describe it as "tedious" and "requiring great patience on all sides, " which I suppose would qualify it as "tricky, " but the conflict itself is at least equally "hard" in the sense that I presume most people would understand it.

Was this thread renamed? I don't think I've seen it before but it's huge.

Yes. The thread's name had been discussed before, and finally I got around to bringing it up one final time before changing it.

This thread used to be "Egyptian/Middle Eastern Protests."

Somewhat off topic, but this is a really interesting map of the Sahara/Sahel region indicating recent population movements, troop deployments, and violent clashes. Events involving the Arab Spring are obviously connected to this, so I hope you all find it interesting.

I took a look at that map before checking where it's from, but I didn't really even need to check. Le Monde Diplomatique's maps really do stand out.