The Arab Spring

@ demarquis: They've got worse in their own Parliaments!

edited 28th Sep '14 6:42:00 AM by Greenmantle

Exactly.

So now apparently Nursa and IS are working together because of the US Air Strikes?

Yes.

And thus Assad wins.

He may hold onto power,but he can never fully win. His international reputation,once that of a reformer,is now damaged beyond repair,his family name is mud in the Arab world. The Kurds have had several years of autonomy and I don't imagine they will be keen to give it up,nor will the west be keen to watch the inevitable massacre that would follow an Assad victory. Most of his subjects hate him even more than they already did. In short he will probably never be overthrown, but he won't be able to regain control of the country,he will just be one faction out of many.

Reputation matters very little to dictators, he could care less about the Kurds (or anything else beyond the Euphrates), and the west already is, unfortunately, allowed him to commit several massacres and have done not a thing.

The rest of the world screwed this up. We didn't help the rebel movement (in the proper way that is), so they go to the only people who would, which are radicals. Now those radicals have run of the movement. Anyone who could have been supported is either dead, fled, or has their own names muddied by association.

It will take Assad a couple of more years, but he just won this civil war. The factions opposed to him are getting massacred.

Well at least the Kurds are getting some support. But it still hasn't stopped the ISIS advance.

Surprised more Kurds aren't pouring in there. If they want Kurdistan, this is the only way they will get it.

The Iraqi Kurds probably feel they need to defend their own territory,plus invading Syria without authorization could be seen as burring the bridge with the federal government in Bagdad. Fighters from Turkey have been trying to cross over,but are being held up by Turkish authorities. Plus the Syrian Kurdish forces are an offshoot of the opposition party in Iraqi Kurdistan,and the government probably doesn't want to add thousands of new opposition voters.

Edit: That or they have been pouring everything they have into it,but it still isn't enough.

edited 28th Sep '14 2:25:45 PM by JackOLantern1337

Speaking of the Kurds

ISIS attacks threaten Kurdish-Turk Peace deal Apparently senior Kurdish partners in the process have publicly accused Turkey of backing ISIS against the Syrian Kurds. Also I didn't know the fighting was going on so recently,the peace is barley a year old. Also the Kurds are naturally worried that Turkey's plan to establish a buffer zone inside Syria will involve attacking them.

Stop double posting will you. Not the first time you've been asked. And keep the ISIS stuff to the Terrorism thread. Also not the first time you've been asked.

Also, I'm speaking more about the Turkish Kurds, since they actually border that town. As for that deal, interesting find. I'm increasingly curious just what the average Turk thinks about all this.

Nothing wrong with double-posting if the subsequent post is different in topic or germane to the thread, imho.

edited 28th Sep '14 3:20:58 PM by Achaemenid

It's the same topic and it's barely been fifteen minutes between posts. I don't see how it qualifies as either. If it'd been a few hours or a day or something, it'd at least fit the latter.

My post about the peace deal pertains to the Arab spring,IMOP because it deals with political liberation movements in the Arab World,and a historic peace deal that's being undermined because of ISIS,a key part of the Syrian conflict. Anyway you asked what the Kurds were doing,and so informed you to the best of my (limited) ability. After that I stumbled upon an article in the BBC that seemed to be relevant,yet on a slightly different topic,and so I posted it. And as for the Turkish Kurds,as I said above,they've been trying to get over the border,but the Turkish army won't let them. I apologize if I have broken forum rules.

Edit: And since I've been told to post about something other than ISIS,Libya's foreign ministr,speaking before the UN general assembly,has appealed for international help in dealing with the chaos his nation has fallen into.

An excerpt: Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Agila Saleh Essa said the growing violence in his country "could not have happened" if the international community had taken "the situation in Libya seriously."

edited 28th Sep '14 3:41:55 PM by JackOLantern1337

Assad "won" some time ago, when the survival of his regime became secured. This situation with ISIS is just icing on the cake (though I'm sure he is well satisfied). What his long-term prospects are is anyone's guess.

Dont count the secular resistance out just yet. If they can get some credible firepower into the field, several of the local militias will likely switch sides back to them. ISIS has made a lot of enemies inside Syria, and not all of them work for Assad.

Obama: U.S. 'Underestimated' ISIS, Overestimated Iraqi Army.

You'd think people would realize that most people in Iraq don't hold loyalty to Iraq the "Country"

That is what the west continuously doesn't get about the Middle East and many swaths of Africa. Tribalism, family, clans, they are more important followed by faith. Borders and saying you belong to these borders is very much a western thing.

The middle east does have borders, they just don't match the colonial doodlings that exist now. Broadly you have the west sahara, the east sahara (or rather, Egypt+North Sudan+East Libya), the peninsula, and the levant+mesopotamia. And within that, tribal territorial borders.

But yes, Iraq as created from the former post-Ottoman Mandate is meaningless. Maliki by himself nearly brought it down. If it happens again, it's more than just a personal thing...it'll be seen as a structural problem too.

What it's like to live under ISIS When a new school year began in Iraq this month, children from Mosul reportedly returned to a new curriculum created by the jihadist group, Islamic State (IS), which captured the city in June.

One mother spoke to the BBC World Service about life in Mosul and her fears for her eight-year-old son.

Netanyahu: "Hamas and ISIS are the same."

The fuck is Bibi talking about? He went on an anti-Palestine, anti-Hamas, anti-ISIS, anti-Iran tirade over at the UN recently.

edited 29th Sep '14 11:28:06 PM by Sledgesaul

It's Netanyahu. He's been smoking the crazyweed for years

More like choking on the crazy weed. He's a far right wingnut through and through. He was the first major wingnut who began this "Obama is weak" meme. Dude needs to get his own Watergate immediately.

Just be glad he's the lesser of two evils. And to get things in perspective, even Netanyahu gets occasionally appalled by some of Lieberman's proposals for solving whatever problem they're currently having with Hamas, the Palestinians, or whatever.

/end derail

edited 30th Sep '14 3:01:21 AM by MarqFJA