How the Lights Have Gone Out For the People of Syria (bbc.co.uk) 126
dryriver shares an excerpt from a report via the BBC that shows what the impact of the Syrian war looks like from space: Six years of war in Syria have had a devastating effect on millions of its people. One of the most catastrophic impacts has been on the country's electricity network. Images from NASA, obtained by BBC Arabic, show clearly how the lights have gone out during the course of the conflict, leaving people to survive with little to no power. Each timelapse frame shows an average of the light emitted at night every month from 2012, one year after the war began. They show that the areas where Syrians can turn lights on at night, power their daily lives and get access to life-saving medical equipment, have shrunk dramatically. The city of Aleppo was Syria's powerhouse and home to over two million people. But the country's industrial hub became a battleground and remained so for more than four years. Russian airstrikes against Syrian rebels began in October 2015 and the timelapse shows the city in almost complete darkness at night throughout 2016, when the battle for Aleppo was at its peak. As mains power supplies dropped off, ordinary people had to be creative in finding alternative sources for light and power.
End the War (Score:2, Insightful)
Ending the war is simple - the "rebels" should surrender. They have no chance of winning, not anymore.
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Ending the war is simple - the "rebels" should surrender.
'Cuz Assad will refrain from killing them, jailing the rest and taking the remnants of their possessions, right?
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The next batch of rebels were allowed by Assad to leave Damascus district Qaboon for Idlib with their wives, children, guns and possessions. I could not imagine that Stalin could allow Nazis to be evacuated to Berlin after they are caught in Stalingrad. I also could not imagine the same about Japanese and USA in WWII, Saddam and USA, Gadhafi and USA, Chechnya and Russia in 2000 and Taliban and USA after 911.
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You can choose to believe what you want, but the Nazis, too, did prisoner exchanges where it was useful to them. Assad's pockets of Foua and Kafarya have been being steadily evacuated to his territory in exchange for the rebel evacuations.
Right now, Assad is trying to create a contiguously unified territory while trying to shove the rebels into as small of a pocket in Idlib as he can. And it's proven too hard to eliminate them by force from their positions in these pockets because of how well dug in they ar
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Stalin, Saddam, the USA and Russia in 2000/2001 -- none of these had the type of data mining that even Assad has at his disposal today. They know the identity of every single person they let march out, will keep track of them, and will "take care" of them at a later date when the world is no longer watching.
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Why won't people just trust Assad's offers of Amnesty? [aljazeera.com] I can't think of a reason...
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Ending the war is simple - the "rebels" should surrender. They have no chance of winning, not anymore.
They have no chance of taking Damascus and deposing Assad. But they have a good chance of holding onto territory and negotiating for autonomy. Wars seldom end in total victory for one side.
Russia is Assad's main backer, but they have little to gain from an outright regime victory. Assad will no longer need them, so they will have less leverage. If the war drags on and on, the Russians can benefit from the continuing chaos, which they are skilled at exploiting.
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They have no chance of taking Damascus and deposing Assad. But they have a good chance of holding onto territory and negotiating for autonomy.
Or simply holding power until Assad is out of power for other reasons, at which point they might reasonably have a chance at a reconciliation agreement. Or holding out long enough for some sort of international resolution involving disarming and being protected by peacekeepers. There are lots of potential ways out, but none of them involve surrendering to a war criminal who would execute them.
Russia needs to be seen helping Assad, because Assad's family helped the Soviets in the past. Helping him is a recru
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And preferably along a route that would work for a pipeline for Saudi Arabia and Qatrar - the real reason for the "civil war" in Syria. Except the government of Syria has no reason to accept such an imperialist partition, nor should it.
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Ok, then we snuff it out and install one that is more sympathetic. The war is already running, it's not like we're the bad guy for putting in some "humanitarian effort". Whoopsie, looks like that bomb went astray. Oh well, such things happen in a war.
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It was not "bombing tarmac" [google.com].
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Assad had been in power for well over a decade before the war started. His family was in power long before that. He did not need to manufacture an enemy to consolidate his power.
It made absolutely zero sense for Assad to use chemical weapons at that particular time. His forces were winning the war, so it's not as though this was some desperate, last-ditch effort to stave off imminent defeat. Furthermore, this supposed attack occurred shortly after U.S. Secretary of State Tillerson had publicly stated t
The most catastrophic impact? (Score:2)
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Reliable electricity may not be absolutely essential, but it does make it a heck of a lot easier to put edible food on the table.
Think refrigeration. Cooking. Boiling water. If you can't do these things, then the "put food on the table" task becomes fully an order of magnitude harder. (Where "hardness" is defined as a measure of how much time you have to put into it.)
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What I'd do? Grab my gun, evict the neighbor and use his. Duh.
Re: Foolish Moves of War Maniacs (Score:2)
Where do you stand on vi versus emacs?
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Because of neocon regime change, that's why. (Score:3)
Nothing more, nothing less. Western Exceptionalists, try and explain why Syria was targeted before the Arab Spring, or why the United States continued to sell weapons to the dictatorship of Bahrain. Which was busy, and violently, putting down it's Arab Spring protests at the same time as the U.S. was bombing Libya because Qaddafi was 'oppressing Arab Spring protesters'.
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Nothing more, nothing less. Western Exceptionalists, try and explain why Syria was targeted before the Arab Spring, or why the United States continued to sell weapons to the dictatorship of Bahrain.
Because neocons use eternal warfare as a jobs creation program and an economic stimulous as long as it is other people's children who get to die.
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Well since this was happening during Obama's Presidency, why do you call them neocons?
I was pissed that O'Blama didn't do more to stop 9-11 as well. He knew, and did nothing.
What looks like a non-sequitur is actually the answer.
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Because he's a neocon. Duh. Being a Democrat no more prevents one from being a neocon than being pro-choice precludes one from being pro-choice. [gopchoice.org]
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Name a recent prez that wasn't.
Night sky (Score:5, Insightful)
Orence (Score:2)
Look on the bright side! (Score:2)
I guess their greenhouse gas emissions would have gone down...
Pun intended!
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And what good did it do them? It's still friggin hot in the area.
Climate change, my ass.
Metaphorically (Score:1)
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Not quite.
A great deal of ancient Greek texts are readable today because of Islamic scholars. Islamic doctors were far ahead of their Christian counterparts 1000-500 years ago.
You might also take note of the fact that Arabic numerals have largely replaced Roman numerals.
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What did the Arabs ever do for us?
Besides teaching Newton about optics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
That's ok (Score:2)
New approach for US: (Score:2)
Don't overthrow governments.
DOn't have SF and CIA in almost every country
Don't have military bases in every country.
Stop thinking proxy wars are a magical long term solution with no consequences.
Take care of your existing troops.
So many of today's problems are past actions by our own government. When will we realize that no person, or government, can predict the fallout from their actions. But this time "it is different"!!!! Right?
Looks like North Korea (Score:2)
Gonna party like it's 1177 BC? (Score:1)
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American policy in Syria has been a disaster.
1. Give the rebels enough support to fight but not enough to win.
2. Insist that a precondition for peace is that Assad has to go.
3. Refuse to acknowledge that Assad is winning the war and has no reason whatsoever to agree to #2.
4. Watch the war drag on as Syrian refugees flood into Europe, spreading discontent and instability.
The obvious solution is a partition. The Syrian Kurds can join with the Iraqi Kurds in an independent Kurdistan.
The Sunnis can form th
Re: Hillary would have started a war over this (Score:2)
Why does Turkey seem to have such an active, long-standing dislike for the Kurds? It's not like they could have presented any real threat to Turkey during Saddam Hussein's reign (they were too busy being persecuted & repressed by Hussein), and I've gotten the impression that BOTH Turkey & the Kurds have generally been friendly with the US... so why do they seem to hate *each other* so much?
Re: Hillary would have started a war over this (Score:4, Informative)
Why does Turkey seem to have such an active, long-standing dislike for the Kurds?
The Kurds were the one "other" that they couldn't get rid of, as they did the Armenians and Anatolian Greeks.
Too many to ignore, too similar to drive out, it's like the damn Irish.
Re: Hillary would have started a war over this (Score:4, Informative)
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert. This is a layman's understanding of the situation
The short version: Another example of ethnic tensions in west Asia. Segments of the Kurdish population consider Turkey an occupying power. Segments of the Turkish population view Kurds as terrorists. Both feel justified in inflicting pain on the other.
A slightly longer version: The Kurds haven't done well in the grand game of empires. To my knowledge, while the Kurds have traditional homelands, known as Kurdistan,, they've never been their own nation. Kurdistan encompasses portions of northern Syria, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and, you guessed it, southeastern Turkey. Kurds haven't been particularly well treated by any of the aforementioned nations (Saddam Hussein infamously used chemical weapons on the Kurds during the Gulf War) but Turkey generally deals with Kurdish uprisings more harshly.
Kurds have been rebelling against the Turkish government since around 1920. As I understand it, they placed a lot of hope in the Wilsonian ideal of ethnic self-determination, but the Turkish government had other ideas in the wake of WWI. The Turkish government routinely cracks down on the Kurds, going so far as to ban the use of the Kurdish language. In response, there have been a handful of Kurdish uprisings or sustain terrorist campaigns by Kurdish nationalists against the Turkish government. In response, the Turkish government routinely cracks down on the Kurds. And so the cycle goes.
For their part, nationalist Turks don't recognize Kurds as a separate ethnic group. They refer to Kurds as "mountain Turks", considering a subset of the Turkish ethnicity who somehow lost the Turkish language. The Turkish government is adamant about maintaining territorial integrity and views any sort of Kurdish political autonomy as a threat to the sovereignty of the Turkish government.
Re: Trump Towers Istanbul is a name license (Score:1)
And yet the US are still going to arm the Syrian Kurds, much against the Turkish tyrant's wishes.
There's still the Flynn connection to Turkey but that's most likely due to Trump's habit of valuing loyalty and friendship over honesty and competence, rather than anything sinister.
Re:Hillary would have started a war over this (Score:5, Interesting)
We'd pretty much have to kick them out of Nato and give Russia carte blanche to fight Turkey, which Russia would probably do in order to secure control of the Bosphorus if they knew that the west wouldn't get involved. After the shit Erdogan has pulled, I wouldn't even feel bad about throwing them under the bus like that, and it would probably be better for the country in the long term to have him deposed and the country broken up.
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1> Turkey owns both sides of the rather narrow strait the Russian Black Sea fleet has to pass through to reach the Mediterranean.
2> Their old buddy Saddam Hussein really didn't like Kurds, going so far as to use chemical weapons on his own civilians instead of on the Iranians he was presumably meant to use them on.
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We'd pretty much have to kick them out of Nato and give Russia carte blanche to fight Turkey, which Russia would probably do in order to secure control of the Bosphorus if they knew that the west wouldn't get involved. After the shit Erdogan has pulled, I wouldn't even feel bad about throwing them under the bus like that, and it would probably be better for the country in the long term to have him deposed and the country broken up.
Actually, the fact that Erdogan is leading an illiberal dictatorship he was legally elected to that pretends to be a democracy makes him extremely useful to Putin and makes it almost impossible that Russia would want to attack Turkey and risk him being removed from power. Yes, Russian and Turkish interests do not overlap much for sure, but Turkey has mostly given up on the idea of removing Assad and Russia is continuing to try to leverage Turkey as a business partner (some kind of oil pipeline). Both Erdo
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A caricature says more than words could: http://www.tomz.ch/wp/wp-conte... [www.tomz.ch]
(the soldier says "both target got hit").
Re:Hillary would have started a war over this (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree fully with your statements on our policy.
The obvious solution is a partition. The Syrian Kurds can join with the Iraqi Kurds in an independent Kurdistan.
Which Turkey will never tolerate along its boarder. Resulting in another probably inevitable war, but this time with a NATO member involved, which will tie the hands of both American and much of the EU.
The Sunnis can form their own statelet or join up with the Iraqi Sunnis.
Which sounds nice but won't be economically viable, land locked and we all know the future of mid east oil revenue isn't good, and that isn't the most productive area of region to start with. What else of value can come out of there.....
The Alawites can keep Assad and the land along the coast and the Lebanon border.
Sure right up until the Sunni groups decide to invade.
As nasty as it sounds this is a case where the devil we know was probably the best. We should have just kept our hands clean, and let Assad crush the rebels. This thing would be over by now. thousands would be dead or displaced rather than millions.
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Well, aside from writing, glass, the wheel, agriculture, and irrigation, what else of value could ever come out of the fertile crescent?
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I did not say nothing of value came from there. I suggested little more of economic value will come out of there. When was the last time you bought a wheel, agricultural product, irrigation system etc from Syria.
Go ahead check all your receipts, I'll wait.
The point is that in no way will that region if carved out into its own state be able to support itself. Literally the MOST you can hope for is sub-subsistence productivity with a small enough gap that international charities and UN could fill the hole.
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Which falls apart on scrutiny. Imagine a parallel universe, where a foreign power armed and funded the worst drug cartels to start a "rebellion" in the United States. And the "moderate proposal" was to let those foreign drug cartel fighters keep Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. Why would the United States government agree to such a partition?
Re:Hillary would have started a war over this (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would the United States government agree to such a partition?
I would be willing to let them keep Texas.
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Wait, in that parallel universe a people is automatically equal to a drug cartel?
Re: Hillary would have started a war over this (Score:1, Troll)
You've wrongly assumed that the Syrian civil war was caused by outsiders. It was mainly caused by the al-Assad family's dictatorial, kleptomaniac, discriminatory and murderous behaviour.
Re: Hillary would have started a war over this (Score:1)
Israel? No, the Israeli state's treatment of the Palestinians is despicable but it's paradise compared to Syria.
Hello cognitive dissonance my old friend. (Score:2)
3. Refuse to acknowledge that Assad is winning the war and has no reason whatsoever to agree to #2.
The obvious solution is a partition.
GOTO 3.
Assad, or people of Syria loyal to him, has no reason whatsoever to agree to any kind of a partition of their country.
Even should they be losing the war.
That was all a joke, right?
But besides that... partition doesn't solve the ISIS issue.
Or the issue of dozens of other "armed groups" taking part in the war. [wikipedia.org]
There's even a diagram of who's fighting, supporting or opposing who.
Sadly, it can't show all the factions and groups or all the political relations involved. Cause such a diagram would look close
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That's called aggressive negotiation.
Certainly the Kurds would consider it diplomatic.
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Then you obviously didn't deal a lot with international diplomacy. Arming some group that harasses some group we don't like has been the staple of diplomacy in the past century.
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Right. Hillary totally said "Let's attack Russia."
Meanwhile, in our universe, what she did was express support for no-fly zones against Assad's aircraft. Which the right pretended means "go to war with Russia", because if you attack one of Assad's planes, then you might accidentally hit Russian planes, and then everything will spiral out of control.
Now, ignoring the fact that the US at present actually maintains de facto no-fly zones over Kurdish and Daesh territory (including threatening Assad with shootin
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But it worked so well in Afghanistan, why not repeat it?
Re:Hillary would have gone to war with... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which it totally part and parcel of vowing to enforce a no-fly zone in an area patrolled by Russian jets. If it was Putin promising to enforce a no-carrier-fleet policy in the region, threatening to sink American aircraft carriers and other vessels in the process, would you argue with people who said Putin said "let's attack the US"?
Uh, yeah. The first world war was started over less. President Hillary starts enforcing her no-fly zone and some Russian jets are shot down. Then Russia starts enforcing Syrian sovereignty and starts shooting down U.S. jets - and navy ships firing missiles. You really need a picture painted for how this "spirals out of control" in a few very short, easy steps?
Yes, for forgetting all those violations of Syria's sovereignty, all those acts of war.
Syrian. Not Russian. But the goalposts do look quite lovely in the new location you've chosen for them.
As if consistency is the strong suit of Democrats? They switched so fast from hating Comey to singing his praises, it's a wonder they aren't all in traction from herniated disks. Besides, there's a gap between your premise and your conclusion - Republicans have loved imperialism and bombing other countries for several decades now - you think this is a change for them?
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Uh, yeah. The first world war was started over less.
A little off topic, but the first world war was started because the heir to the throne of the Empire was murdered. He was an archduke, but people don't realize that he was also about to become emperor.
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WWI started because Austro-Hungary, being backed by an alliance with Germany, imposed conditions on Serbia regarding the assassination investigation that pretty much made it a suzerain state, so they refused (btw, these were no mere diplomatic faux pas - the conditions were made excessively onerous so that they would be rejected, in order to have a casus belli). That led to both Austro-Hungary and Germany declaring war on Serbia. Since Serbia was backed by Russia, Russia declared war on the Central Powers,
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Seriously? There were Russian troops on the ground at that base. You're going to act like the odds of accidentally hitting Russian troops while lobbing dozens of cruise missiles from hundreds of kilometers away is totally a nothing thing, but that the odds of hitting Russian aircraft when shooting at Assad's aircraft (after tracking them from takeoff from Assad's airbases (rather than the Russian airbase at Hmeimim)) is by contrast absurdly high? Do I even need to mention that as a consequence of Trump's
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Oh, and guess what? The US just launched an air attack on Assad's troops again. This time airplanes against ground forces - a mix of SAA (Syrian Army) and various paramilitaries - because they were getting too close to US special forces. Current estimates 6 dead, 3 injured.
But oh no, it's Hillary who was going to risk igniting a conflict in Syria...
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Which it totally part and parcel of vowing to enforce a no-fly zone in an area patrolled by Russian jets. If it was Putin promising to enforce a no-carrier-fleet policy in the region, threatening to sink American aircraft carriers and other vessels in the process, would you argue with people who said Putin said "let's attack the US"?
Yes, because Putin has established no-fly zones before without attacking other countries. In fact, it's a fairly routine thing to do when any military operation is in progress. You warn non-hostile nations that you will be operating in an area, so don't fly there or you might get shot down. Same works for long term no-fly zones, and in Clinton's case she probably meant "go to the UN and get a mandate to establish a no-fly zone" rather than just talking about unilateral action.
The first world war was started over less.
Fortunately over the last centu
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Which it totally part and parcel of vowing to enforce a no-fly zone in an area patrolled by Russian jets. If it was Putin promising to enforce a no-carrier-fleet policy in the region, threatening to sink American aircraft carriers and other vessels in the process, would you argue with people who said Putin said "let's attack the US"?
Uh, yeah. The first world war was started over less. President Hillary starts enforcing her no-fly zone and some Russian jets are shot down. Then Russia starts enforcing Syrian sovereignty and starts shooting down U.S. jets - and navy ships firing missiles. You really need a picture painted for how this "spirals out of control" in a few very short, easy steps?
Yes, for forgetting all those violations of Syria's sovereignty, all those acts of war.
Syrian. Not Russian. But the goalposts do look quite lovely in the new location you've chosen for them.
As if consistency is the strong suit of Democrats? They switched so fast from hating Comey to singing his praises, it's a wonder they aren't all in traction from herniated disks. Besides, there's a gap between your premise and your conclusion - Republicans have loved imperialism and bombing other countries for several decades now - you think this is a change for them?
Between Hillary and Trump, there is no doubt that Hillary is the smarter and more knowledgeable of the two. It takes knowledge to lead a country, not like the bungling baffoon that is Trump with the grade 7 vocabulary. Regarding war mongering, Hillary may not have done what Trump did -- drop a mother Sucker of a bomb to obliterate the caves. Trump is a proud racist, and one definitely would not be able to say that of Hillary.
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Hillary said she would attack Russia over this, and Trump isn't so that proves he is a Russian Puppet. Not bombing Russia is immoral.
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