It seems that this earlier assessment of mine of the situation in Syria was wrong:

As the conflict in Lebanon subsides Israel and the U.S. have reignited the war in Syria. There have been signs for a while that this was going to happen. Yesterday Al-Qaeda affiliated HTS fighters, which has been rebuild and sponsored with CIA money, have relaunched their attacks on Syrian government forces west of Aleppo. Syrian and Russian air force attacks have for now stopped their progress. Hizbullah's Rudwan forces have yet to intervene but are deployed to defend Aleppo.

I do not expect the situation to Syria to escalate further.

As of now the situation continues to escalate. I had underestimated the role of Turkey in this.

President Erdogan seems to have taken control of HTS and is using it to pursue his aims. These include to widen Turkish control over Syrian land, to further damage the anti-Turkish resistance movement within the Kurdish population of Syria and to impress on president-elect Donald Trump that he can be a reliable ally in a fight against Iranian influence.

Jihadists under Turkish control have attacked Syrian government position on the western side of Aleppo city and diversion commandos seem to have infiltrated the city itself. A large part of this operation is the (fake) news onslaught accompanying it. Current information from the area is way too confused to state with some certainty what exactly is under who's control.

There are several forces fighting in Syria. The Turkish 'rebel' side, supported by Israel, Turkey and the U.S., includes two distinct groups. The former al-Qaeda Jihadists in Hayat Tarhir al-Sham [HTS] under Abu Muhammed al-Jolani were, and likely still are, financed and armed by the CIA through proxy actors in Qatar. HTS includes a significant number of Turkmen and Uighur jihadists from Central Asia. The second group is the so called Syrian National Army which is a group of Sunni Syria mercenaries paid for and controlled by Turkey.

These 'rebels' immediately distinguished themselves through their depraved behavior:

Hala Jaber @HalaJaber – 17:40 UTC · Nov 29, 2024

🔴IMPORTANT🔴
I have just watched a most gruesome footage of the so called Erdogan-backed “freedom fighters,” beheading a Syrian soldier they captured. A POW in western military terms.
I thought those days of ISIS evilness were over, but here we are again as history repeats itself while we are again being told that these are the good “liberators.”
The footage shows a Syrian soldier surrounded by ‘rebels.’
He pleads with them & pleads to their Islamic faith.
They pull his hand away from his neck & one guy with a huge jaggered knife proceeds to slice his throat. When it gets stuck, he pounds the knife into the neck a few times, then proceeds to continue with the slaughter to the cries of “Allahahu Akbar.”
Whoever in the western world is supporting these NATO-Israeli backed extremists should really think again. …

On the other side of the conflict are the Syrian Arab Army (which seem to have forgotten all the lessons it had to learn during the previous phase of the conflict). It is supported by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps which has trained and is financing several groups of Shia fighters in Syria. This is done in strong coordination with Hizbullah in Lebanon which has some units of its Rudwan special forces stationed in Syria. Russia is backing the Syrian government in Syria and is currently using its air power to interrupt  further attacks from the 'rebel' side.

The Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) is an anti-Turkish movement. It forms a major part of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) which has been supported, on and off, by the Pentagon in east-Syria. It is currently fighting on the side of the Syrian government but has in own interest in securing areas with significant Kurdish populations.

While it was known that the conflict in Syria was soon to be revived the immediacy seems to have come as an surprise:

Sharmine Narwani @snarwani – 9:10 UTC · Nov 30, 2024

Russian newspaper Izvestia: The major terrorist attack on #Aleppo was coordinated between Turkish, Ukrainian and French intelligence with Israeli support and American approval. The planning was two months ago and the attack was supposed to be next March, but the events in Lebanon contributed to the urgency.

As said above there is no information yet that lets one make an unbiased assessment which side is really in control of what part of Aleppo or areas surrounding it. My impression is that many of the claims of Jihadist control here or there are only media operations without military significance.

But what can be said so far is that the Syrian government has obviously failed to secure its lines in the field and to prepare its army for a renewal of the conflict. The Syrian Arab Army seems to have given up many positions without a significant fight.

It will cost a lot of blood and treasure (again!) to regain control of them.

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The U.S. is willing to (proxy-)fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian.

White House presses Ukraine to lower draft age to meet manpower needs against Russia

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden's administration is urging Ukraine to quickly increase the size of its military by drafting more troops and revamping its mobilization laws to allow for the conscription of those as young as 18.

A senior Biden administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private consultations, said Wednesday that the outgoing Democratic administration wants Ukraine to lower the mobilization age to 18 from the current age of 25 to expand the pool of fighting-age men available to help a badly outnumbered Ukraine in its nearly three-year-old war with Russia.

The official said “the pure math” of Ukraine's situation now is that it needs more troops in the fight.

"Pure math" also says that following the advice order from Washington will guarantee that there will be no future Ukrainians left to fight for:

Cont. reading: To The Last Ukrainian

Pressed by their allies Lebanon and Israel have agreed on a cessation of fire.

The 13 points of the ceasefire agreement are reinstating UN Security Council resolution 1701. Thus the status quo ante has been restored.

I do regard as a pause in fighting, not as an end to the war.

Both sides are in need of a pause.

The Israeli Defense Forces are depending on reservists. It is organized to fight short, high intensity wars. But it has now been in the field for over 14 month. Many of its reservists simply fail to show up when they are recalled for another round of fighting. High material and human losses at the front in Lebanon, where little to no progress was made, have further weakened the force.

The Lebanese resistance movement Hizbullah is likewise in need of a time-out. The Israeli attacks on its leadership have seriously weakened its organization. Its local fighters have managed to resist Israeli attacks on the frontline and its missile forces were able to hit Israel where it hurts. But the utter destruction caused by Israeli air attacks were threatening its support within the wider population of Lebanon.

Both sides will claim to have won the war. Hizbullah has managed to resist against a very capable Israeli enemy which is in itself a victory. Israel has managed to dampen the support of the resistance for the population of Gaza.

But neither side has achieved any of its aims. Israel has failed to destroy Hizbullah. It has failed to capture any new land. Its settlers will still reject to return to the north. While the population in south Lebanon will return to its villages it will take several years for it to rebuild all the places that Israel has destroyed.

The original UNSCR 1701 had kept a semblance of peace between Lebanon and Israel since 2006. Its reinstatement is very unlikely to hold that long.

As the conflict in Lebanon subsides Israel and the U.S. have reignited the war in Syria. There have been signs for a while that this was going to happen. Yesterday Al-Qaeda affiliated HTS fighters, which has been rebuild and sponsored with CIA money, have relaunched their attacks on Syrian government forces west of Aleppo. Syrian and Russian air force attacks have for now stopped their progress. Hizbullah's Rudwan forces have yet to intervene but are deployed to defend Aleppo.

I do not expect the situation to Syria to escalate further.

The Axis of Resistance had promised to support Gaza. The cessation of fire in Lebanon has for now blocked one way of doing so. It will have to activate new vectors of attacks to prevent Israel from finishing its genocide in Gaza.

To describe a weapon system as a game changer on the battlefield is always open to be ridiculed. Many of the weapon systems that have been delivered to Ukraine were called game changing but failed to make any difference in the outcome of that war.

So why did I call the new Russian Oreshnik missile a 'game changer'?

There are several reasons.

For one the missile with its 36 kinetic war heads is an unexpected response to the U.S. abolition of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Force (INF) treaty. The U.S. had hoped that the stationing of nuclear missiles in Europe might give it an advantage over Russia. Oreshnik denies that advantage WITHOUT resorting to nuclear force.

Any U.S. attempt to pressure Russia into a situation where it would either have to concede to the U.S. or to go nuclear has been demolished.

This is most visible in Ukraine. Over the two plus years of the war the U.S. has used a 'boiling the frog' strategy against Russia. It increased the temperature by slowly increasing the reach and lethality of the weapons it has provided to Ukraine. In each such step, the delivery of tanks, of Himars, of ATAMACs, of allowing Ukraine to use these on Russian grounds, was declared to be a move across imaginary Russian red lines. Each such step was accompanied by propaganda which claimed that Russia was looking into a nuclear response.

The aim was to push Russia into a situation where it could either make concessions over Ukraine or use nuclear weapons. The U.S. was sure that Russia would refrain from the later because it would put Russia into the position of an international pariah. By going nuclear it would lose support from its allies in China and beyond. It would also risk an all out nuclear war.

The strategy would probably have worked if Russia had not found an asymmetric response against it. It now has non-nuclear weapons, (the Oreshnik will not be the only one), which allow it to apply the equivalent of nuclear strikes without the dirty side effects of actually going nuclear.

Cont. reading: How The New Russian Missiles Are Changing The Game

The Washington Post editors are trying to exceed the immense hypocrisy 'western' leaders usually display towards against the rest of the world.

The Post declares that the International Criminal Court is the wrong place to hold Israel, and its leaders, to account for war crimes.

Opinion – The International Criminal Court is not the venue to hold Israel to account (archived) – Washington Post
The ICC is needed to help resolve war crimes in Russia, Sudan, Myanmar. Targeting Israel makes that harder.

The argument the piece tries to make is irrelevant and has nothing to do with the courts judgment:

Israel is not a member of the ICC, and the warrants will have limited practical effect, except possibly preventing Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant from traveling to countries which have pledged to enforce it.

The war crimes Netanyahu and Gallant are accused of are happening Palestine, outside of Israel's recognized borders. Palestine is a state party of the Rome Statute. The ICC thus has jurisdiction over what happens on its ground. The (im-)practicality of the court's decision is not an argument against it.

But the arrest orders undermine the ICC’s credibility and give credence to accusations of hypocrisy and selective prosecution. The ICC is putting the elected leaders of a democratic country with its own independent judiciary in the same category as dictators and authoritarians who kill with impunity.

The prosecution and the pre-trial court have found a strong likelihood that Israel is committing war crimes and genocide. To not prosecute those crimes against Israeli citizens because the country claims(!) to be democratic and to have its own independent judiciary would be "hypocrisy and selective prosecution".

By doing the opposite, by prosecuting Israeli citizens, the court is attempting to apply justice equally. The Post defies logic when it claims otherwise.

The Post editors go on to willfully misunderstand the Rome statute which forms the courts legal basis.

Cont. reading: Washington Post Calls For Selective (Non-)Prosecution Of War Crimes

News & views related to the war in Palestine …

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Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:

Empire:

• Nov 18 – U.S. Foreign Aid Is Embarrassing Itself
  Related:
  – What is “the West”? – Contours of a civilization at a crossroads – Stefan Heeb
  – The Defeat of the West – Emmanuel Todd (in English via Anna's archive)
  – China looks to step into global vacuum as Trump vows to pull U.S. back – Washington Post
    At the COP climate conference, China has been presenting itself as a stable and reliable global leader

Ukraine:

• Nov 18 – To Prolong The War In Ukraine U.S. Allows ATACMS Use On Russia
• Nov 20 – Biden To Send Antipersonnel Mines To Ukraine
• Nov 22 – Why These New Russian Missiles Are Real Game Changers
  Related:
  – Fyodor Lukyanov: Biden is trying to throw Trump under the Ukrainian bus – RT.com
  – Why ending with a whimper may be better – Bhadrakumar /Indian Express
    By allowing Ukraine to bomb Russia with US-made missiles, Biden may have strengthened Putin’s hand.
  – Statement by the President of the Russian Federation – Kremlin.ru
  – Meeting with the Defence Ministry leadership, representatives of the military-industrial complex and missile system developers – Kremlin.ru

  – On the Brink – Scott Ritter
  – "Oreshnik" Enters The Chat [i] – Black Mountain Analysis
  – Prof. Ted Postol Assessing Russian Attack on Ukraine by Hypersonic Missile (vid) – Dialogue Works
  – US missile defense base in Poland long among Russian army’s targets — Foreign Ministry – TASS

—
Other issues:

Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review – OT 2024-281

In response to a U.S. decision to arrange for ballistic missile attacks from Ukraine into Russia, the great magician and President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin pull a rabbit from his hat.

Yesterday the six independent war heads of a new intermediate range ballistic missile hit the Yuzhmash missile plant in Dnipro Ukraine.

Until now the new missile and its mission profile had been unknown. It is the clear counter to decade long efforts of the U.S. to gain supremacy, especially in Europe, over Russia.

Missiles can be classified by the range they are able to achieve:

1. Short-Range Ballistic Missiles (SRBM) are designed to target enemy forces within a range of approximately 1,000 kilometers. Typically employed in tactical scenarios, they allow for rapid response to regional threats.

2. Medium-Range Ballistic Missiles (MRBM) extend the operational range to about 3,500 kilometers. These systems enhance a nation’s deterrent capabilities by allowing strikes on targets further away without resorting to intercontinental systems.

3. Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) represent the longest range category, with capabilities exceeding 5,500 kilometers. These missiles serve as a strategic deterrent, capable of delivering payloads across continents and significantly impacting global security dynamics.

The U.S., Russia and China have developed all three types of weapons. In the late 1980s, on the initiative of the Soviet leader Mikhail Grobaschev, the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty):

Cont. reading: Why These New Russian Missiles Are Real Game Changers

News & views related to the war in Palestine …

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News & views not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine …

U.S. president Joe Biden was found to be too senile to stand for re-election. But that does not hinder the powers that be to let him launch world war III.

After 'allowing' Ukraine to fire U.S. controlled ballistic missiles onto targets in Russia the Biden administration is adding largely prohibited antipersonnel mines into the mix.

Biden approves antipersonnel mines for Ukraine, undoing his own policy – Washington Post

Over 160 countries, including Ukraine, have signed treaties which prohibit the use of antipersonnel mines. During his campaign Biden had spoken against the use of such weapons.

Despite that he has now authorized the provision of antipersonnel land mines to Ukraine. The claimed reason for that is born out of propaganda:

“Russia is attacking Ukrainian lines in the east with waves of troops, regardless of the casualties that they’re suffering,” one of the officials said. “So the Ukrainians are obviously taking losses, and more towns and cities are at risk of falling. These mines were made specifically to combat exactly this.”

There are no and have been no 'waves of troops' with which the Russian army is attacking Ukrainian positions. I challenge everyone to find me a video that shows such a 'wave'.

There are instead small groups of troops which infiltrate Ukrainian positions after these have been ravaged by artillery fire. The WaPo piece admits as much:

Ukrainian troops have struggled to build strong defensive lines in the face of relentless drone sorties and small assault teams.

Antipersonnel mines, even deactivated ones, continue to be a danger for the population even decades after a war ends. It is criminal to use these in a war that has already run its course:

[H]uman rights campaigners said that the U.S. decision to provide antipersonnel land mines to Ukraine — a signatory to the Mine Ban Treaty — is a black mark against Washington.

“It’s a shocking and devastating development,” said Mary Wareham, deputy director of the crisis, conflict and arms division at Human Rights Watch, the advocacy group, who said that even nonpersistent mines hold risks for civilians, require complicated cleanup efforts and are not always reliably deactivated.

The most significant effect of Biden'S decision will be the proliferation of a type of weapon that was rightfully on its it way to total banishment:

The Ukraine conflict has spurred other countries to reevaluate their opposition to antipersonnel land mines. The Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia considered withdrawing from the Ottawa Convention earlier this year in order to bolster their defenses against Russian aggression, although they ultimately decided to reinforce stocks of antitank mines and other tools that are less hazardous to civilians.

President Joe Biden, or whoever is thinking for him, is doing his best to make peace in Ukraine less likely:

President Joe Biden has authorized Ukraine to use U.S.-supplied missiles to strike deeper inside Russia, easing limitations on the longer range weapons ..
…
Putin has warned that Moscow could provide long-range weapons to others to strike Western targets if NATO allies allow Ukraine to use their arms to attack Russian territory.
…
The longer-range missiles are likely to be used in response to North Korea’s decision to support Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, according to one of the people familiar with the development.

The ATACMS missiles Ukraine had so far been allowed to fire, mostly against Crimea, have been carriers of cluster ammunition with a reach of some 160 kilometer.

We do not know yet if the new authorized use for ATACMS munition on targets within Russia is only relevant for the cluster ammunition missile type or for high explosive ATACMS missiles with a reach of 300 kilometer.

However, the Russian President Vladimir Putin has correctly pointed out that ANY use of ATACMS requires the involvement of NATO (U.S/UK) assets for acquiring the targeting data and for planing and programming the missile's mission.

Any use of ATACMS onto Russian proper is thus an act of war by NATO against the Russian Federation. The Russian response to such will be appropriate but may well surface in a theater far from Ukraine.

The military usefulness of ATACMS attacks on Russia is in doubt:

Cont. reading: To Prolong The War In Ukraine U.S. Allows ATACMS Use On Russia

Three days ago the President of China Xi Jinping opened a Chinese financed a deep-water port in Chancay, Peru.

LIMA, Nov 14 (Reuters) – Chinese President Xi Jinping launched a week-long diplomatic blitz of South America on Thursday by inaugurating a massive deep-water port in Peru, a $1.3 billion investment by Beijing as it seeks to expand trade and influence on the continent.
…
Xi and Peruvian President Dina Boluarte participated on Thursday by video link in the opening of the Chancay port, about 80 kilometres (48 miles) north of Lima on the Pacific Ocean, and signed a deal to widen an existing free trade agreement.

Xi said that Chancay, a 15-berth, deep-water port, was the successful start of a "21st century maritime Silk Road" and part of China's Belt and Road Initiative, its modern revival of the ancient Silk Road trading route.

The U.S. is, according to Newsweek, considering Peru to be in its "backyard" (for the record: the distance between Washington DC and Lima, Peru, is 5,700 kilometer):

Cont. reading: U.S. Foreign Aid Is Embarrassing Itself

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