Syria’s Kristallnacht

17 February, 2025. For updated maps see the Institute for the Study of War website.

This morning’s inbox brought a query from a friend, noting that I haven’t posted for a few days and wanting to know if all is well. I replied:

Uppermost in my thoughts is Europe’s decline, not so much caused as synchronised and expedited by its leaders’ involvement in America’s proxy war on Russia in the Ukraine, a folly driven on the one hand by kowtowing to Washington in the absence since WW2 of any independent foreign policy, on the other by eagerness to share the spoils of a dismembered Russia.

I never get writers block, probably because I don’t write fiction. My source materials aren’t mined in my imagination but in the crimes of those who rule – and they never for a moment let up! What I do get are interludes of paralysis, with so much going on I don’t know where to begin. I take these as a sign I need to let my unconscious mind do the heavy lifting, confident – I’ve been doing this long enough to know myself  – that the words will surface when good and ready.

With my thoughts on Europe still fermenting, news has broken of the latest atrocities by ISIS cut-outs, rebranded as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and now governing those parts of Syria not under Israeli, Turkish and US occupation – if not West Bank style annexations whose drivers put at least two of the invading powers on a collision course.

I mean the two regional heavyweights, Turkey and Israel. This side of a major rift, of the kind we can’t in such turbulent times rule out, it’s hard to see Washington seeking further tension with Ankara over so trifling a matter as the Kurds. Subject to the same proviso, of unforeseen factors changing the picture, I expect the Kurds in Syria to go the way of Ukraine, “South Vietnam” and all the other friends for fifteen minutes in Washington.

Meantime as Daniel Kovalik, quoted three posts ago, put it:

Syria is now being carved up by Western powers, with Israel taking huge swaths of land as well as water resources and building a military base in the south, while Turkey is building a military base in the north. The USA continues to occupy the oil and grain-rich northeast. The new HTS regime, too busy massacring religious minorities, does not contest any of these foreign encroachments – Daniel Kovalik, below.

That was before recent events reported even in corporate media – and today referred to on Andrew Korybko’s substack as Syria’s Kristallnacht. As I put it this morning on the steel city masthead:

In a two day killing spree HTS (née ISIS) and foreign allies massacred Alawites following armed rebellion by some of their co-religionists. FB is featuring videos right now of the children and women executed. Did we learn nothing from Libya, following Gaddafi’s ousting by the criminal elites who sow mayhem in the region to create a new order answerable to Washington?

By “we” I meant both left of centre progressives and most of the far-Left who cheer-led for the fall, then danced on the grave, of the region’s last Ba’athist (‘Arab socialist’) government. Of which Mark Taliano, writing yesterday under the header, Mass-Murdering Chaos in Syria, had this to say:

The Assad government was not perfect, nor would any government be perfect under similar circumstances, but the chief orchestrator of the current mass-murdering disaster is Washington.

No quarrels from me on any part of that crisp summation. And not so much as a squeak of mea culpa  from the aforementioned cheerleaders and grave-dancers.

‘Twas ever thus.

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