Syria War, 14 December 2024

Hello everybody!

Amid mass celebrations all over Syria, yesterday (below a scene from central Homs)…

…Israel continued both air strikes and the land grab. One of targets were the ‘Defence Laboratories’ in the Masyaf area, then the Khelekhlekh AB (south of Damascus IAP), another was the S-125 (ASCC/NATO-reporting name ‘SA-3 Goa’) surface-to-air missile site atop of Mount Qasyoun, overlooking Damascus.

Interestingly, the Syrian media is almost completely void of reports about air strikes: so much so, I almost wonder if somebody there is not excelling at preventing provision of ‘open source intelligence’ about results of their air strikes to the invaders.

(The reason I came to this idea is that during the offensive that eventually toppled Assad, the CMO was excelling at delaying all the related media reports by at least six hours… and that in the middle of the war, and despite the activity of dozens of activist-reporters.)

On the ground, the Israeli invasion of Syria is meanwhile closely resembling the initial Russian invasion of Ukraine, back in 2014. Not only because over the last 36 hours the IDF deployed the 77th Battalion of the 7th Armoured Brigade to the Umm Batna area, and moved deeper into Syria to seize Mazrat Bayt Jenin (west of Bayt Jenin), possibly also Tel ash-Shahm, next to Dayr Maker (area marked in light blue, with two arrows, on the map below):

…but, and especially because: in Hader, the Israelis offered the local Druze to ‘join Israel’. To publicly declare they want to become Israeli citizens, and then the town is going to be annexed.

Might appear ironic considering the locals were (and, probably: still are) ‘ardent Assadists’: so much so, they were sending their youngsters to fight for Hezbollah in Lebanon, for most of the last 12 months. Of course, one can also call this the ‘survival strategy’, because Assad declared himself their ‘protector’, and thus they are scared of the ‘HTS’ now. Fact is, gauging by released videos of the local gathering, they seem to have accepted.

And so, there you go: the ‘temporary buffer zone’ is near-certain to fix this land grab.

On the contrary, the Druze in Majdal Shams have refused the Israeli offer.

A Merkava main battle tank of the peaceful, humanist, and secular Zionists as seen in position outside Khan Arnabeh. Yesterday, there were reports that some of Israeli tanks have entered that town, too.

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BTW, I love reactions to the visit in Damascus by Ibrahim Kalin, the chief of the MIT (Türkish military intelligence): this should now be ‘evidence of tight cooperation/control’ of the ‘HTS’, even of ‘Turkey wining the war’ (against Assad). Sorry but: as reported time and again - even if letting the CMO receive at least some arms and supplies via Türkiye - Erdogan was actually against the CMO’s offensive and even betrayed it to the Russians (and thus Iranians, too). Almost unnecessary to say: that only provoked dozens of Russian and Assadist air strikes on IDP camps in western Idlib, back in October, and again in November, killing hundreds. Of course, presently, the SSG has few options but to ‘ignore’ this fact, and is ignoring even Ankara's claims how it convinced the IRGC to give up its military intervention.

This is so because Syria is not only going to depend heavily on the Türkish influence for its recovery, but also because the Türkish foreign minister became the first semi-important talking-head to publish something like ‘stronger-worded’ reaction to the Israeli air strikes and the land-grab. And so, the Türkish FM Hakan Firdan said that, ‘we sent a message to Israel to abandon their dangerous strategy of provocative occupation of Golan Heights region in Syria’.

…Netanyahu - sought for by the ICC for crimes against humanity - must’ve had a sleepless night about this, even massive stomach pains.

….because he was laughing for hours…

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The one that was certainly not laughing and had not only one, but few sleepless nights is ‘General’ Mazlum Abdi (real name: Ferhat Abdi Sahin), ‘military commander’ of the PKK/PYD/YPG/SDF. He can’t stop complaining about Türkish air strikes on positions of his conglomerate in north-eastern Syria, how these are ‘making it impossible to fight the ISIS’, and indeed are ‘paralyising’ his operations. Indeed, so much so, his ‘special forces’ were busy raiding Raqqa on the search for those protesting against his rule… erm, sorry: that’s ‘ISIS sleeper cells’ in PKK’s vocabulary.

Reason is something I’ve mentioned yesterday and the day before: meanwhile, de-facto all the Arab population north of the Euphrates River is up in protest against the PKK/PYD/YPG/SDF.

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Further east, back on 12 December, the USA have bombed the earthen bridge over the Euphrates River, connecting Dayr az-Zawr with the eastern bank. Reason: they do not want CMO-affiliated troops to reach villages like al-Shamiya and al-Jazeera that are still occupied by the PKK/PYD/YPG/SDF (and were the scene of the famous clash from February 2018, for which many believe the USA ‘killed 200+ Wagner mercenaries’m, but actually destroyed an IRGC-recruited formation).

BTW, it was also ‘somewhere in that part of Syria’, that the SSG has handed over the US citizen Travis Timmerman to the US military officials in Syria (photo below; to the left is a representative of the SSG, Timmerman is in the centre, and a US Army officer is visible to the right).

In turn, after nearly a week of ‘ever better news’ about Austin Tice - arrested and then disappeared by the Assadists in 2012 - Washington is all but falling silent over his issue: RUMINT has it that Tice was killed in one of Israeli air strikes of the last few days…

If so, be sure: there are going to be no further official reactions from Washington in this regards. At most, they are going to ‘have no information’ because, as should be known by now, the standpoint there is that Israel simply can’t do any wrong.

Ah yes… and the Russian evacuation from Syria went on. An-124s and Il-76s are regularly landing at the Hmeymim AB, and a huge column is slowly moving along the highway from Homs to Tartous (actually: the column is reportedly so long, it’s occupying the first lane of the entire highway from Homs to Tartous). Between others, An-124s have flown out the last parts of the Russian S-300/400 SAM-systems (including this 91N6E radar).

Must admit, when I read press reports about the German intelligence assessing that the Russians are evacuating, I’m this short >< of concluding the Russians are never going to withdraw from Syria (yes, to quote one of my readers: ‘there’s some reporting in my sarcasm’, too).

Well, at least I’ve found the link to that video showing a Russian column that stampeded in direction of the Türkish border, yesterday. Arguably, this was taken 5km south of the Hmeymim AB: apparently, they came from the Tartous area, passed by the Hmeymim AB, the Latakia and then drove all the way to the Türkish border.

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Overall, recovering from early shocks caused by Assad’s downfall, multiple powers are now back to their usual business of tearing Syria apart, like ever since the country became independent, back in 1946…