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Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by bbor on Sunday December 08, 2024 @02:39AM (#42355615)
Any regime change that involves freeing many thousands of women and children from prisons notorious for torture and mass-executions seems like a decent one! The future is uncertain, but it's not like "everyone chills out and gets into their hobbies" was an option -- it's gotta be one of the most war-ravaged places to exist in human history.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by lukan on Sunday December 08, 2024 @02:52AM (#42355679)
Have you heard of a thing called, Islamic State? They had a thing for creative murder. Aside from the usual behadings, they came up with things like pushing homosexuals from buildings in the public and alike. They are also now free again.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by j_maffe on Sunday December 08, 2024 @03:07AM (#42355742)
HTS has cut off ties with ALQaeda and IS since almost 10 years.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by lukan on Sunday December 08, 2024 @03:14AM (#42355779)
A) in the open

B) they released all prisoners now. And at least some of them were part of ISIS.

Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by j_maffe on Sunday December 08, 2024 @03:32AM (#42355858)
The majority of them (at the Saydenia) are political imprisoned citizens.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by lukan on Sunday December 08, 2024 @03:46AM (#42355898)
Well, technical IS supporters (who did not participated in killings themself) are political imprisoned citizens as well.

The point is, that no matter what they did, they are all free now.

Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by j_maffe on Sunday December 08, 2024 @04:23AM (#42356048)
What are you trying to state? There's a small number of citizen IS supporters and they're now free, along with all others who showed opposition to the regime. Ok. So what? Please don't use a general understanding of the patterns in the region to extrapolate wild takes when you don't know the specifics of each country and their people. Syrians are not Afghans are not Libyans are not whatever, as much as the west would like to portray them.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by lukan on Sunday December 08, 2024 @04:31AM (#42356093)
"There's a small number of citizen IS supporters and they're now free"

If their numbers are so small, why was the IS a global problem then, a couple of years ago?

Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by sabbaticaldev on Sunday December 08, 2024 @04:42AM (#42356140)
10 years ago. They were a problem because they used American cars, clothes, weapons and media.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by lukan on Sunday December 08, 2024 @04:46AM (#42356159)
Ah, so you claim they were a american controlled group?

While the US spend lots of effort on hunting them?

Keeping the flames high, to play firemen?

I don't think that there was a need of more flames, for that theory to be plausible. Occasionally some western weapons likely did found their ways towards IS as well, but they rather captured the bulk of it. Or do you have other sources?

Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by j_maffe on Sunday December 08, 2024 @05:24AM (#42356300)
Afghanistan is the obvious example, among many. Beyond that, American interventionism has fueled extremism in the region for decades. This is not a wild take, but one agreed upon by scholars.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by guerrilla on Sunday December 08, 2024 @07:27AM (#42356744)
Oh did the terrorists tell you that they aren't terrorists anymore?

Seriously, do you also believe North Korea is a People's Republic or that the Soviet Union consisted of a literal union of soviets?

Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by dralley on Sunday December 08, 2024 @08:49AM (#42357122)
I mean, they've literally gone to war against both ISIS and Al-Qaeda. You don't have to trust them exactly but it's not like there's no grounds to believe they're at least not going to be ISIS.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by guerrilla on Sunday December 08, 2024 @10:34AM (#42357702)
I'm not sure why you think that means they aren't terrorists. Al-qaeda and ISIS have also been at war for a decade. Does that make one of them any less terrible than they have always been?

It's not about trust. We have enormous amounts of evidence from all human rights organizations monitoring the situation. You may not understand this but the entire war was filmed. You can just go look up who they are, what they believe and what they have done to people. They advertised it themselves for the majority of their career.

Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by dralley on Sunday December 08, 2024 @10:39AM (#42357722)
I said no such thing. I also wouldn't dispute that the PKK are also "terrorists".

I still think it's pretty clear that there can be some hierarchy within that category. HTS and the Kurds are less evil than the Taliban, which is less evil than Al-Qaeda, which is less evil than ISIS.

Like you said, there is plenty of history to look at here. HTS has run Idlib for years and they have done nothing that compares to the likes of ISIS. Maybe that will change if they consolidate total power, but neither of us have any evidence to state definitively what will happen. There are plenty of reasons to be either pessimistic or optimistic.

Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by guerrilla on Sunday December 08, 2024 @10:54AM (#42357802)
I misunderstood then. My bad.

> I still think it's pretty clear that there can be some hierarchy within that category. HTS and the Kurds are less evil than the Taliban, which is less evil than Al-Qaeda, which is less evil than ISIS.

This I can agree with for sure. There are lesser evils and a hierarchy. I think the hierarchy also depends on the situation on the ground for who it's tolerable to support at a specific time. If it would have taken HTS as much bloodshed to get to where they are today as it did Assad to originally regain control, then I think it would less favorable than what actually happened, for example.

Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by codedokode on Sunday December 08, 2024 @12:14PM (#42358344)
"Soviet Union" means the Union of (16) Soviet Socialistic Republics. It's an abbreviation. The republics originally were parts of Russian Empire, so their status was raised, at least nominally.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by IndrekR on Sunday December 08, 2024 @02:44PM (#42359776)
Quite a few ex-soviet states, who were independent countries before being occupied by USSR, will not agree with this.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by guerrilla on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @05:01AM (#42375393)
You understand what I mean. Nothing was run by soviets. Lenin stopped that immediately.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by orwin on Sunday December 08, 2024 @03:21AM (#42355810)
I mean, unlike another nation south of them, at least for now, they didn't destroy Christian churches (the opposite in fact, rebel-controled territory rebuilt Christian churches), and let Christian orphanage/school stand without expropriation under false pretense.

How it will develop has yet to be seen, but I'm hopeful.

Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by aaa_aaa on Sunday December 08, 2024 @04:19AM (#42356034)
How is this an answer to the op's statement?. Assad was a war criminal just like his father. Remember the Hama 1982. Son followed dad by killing thousands, torturing and displaced millions. West will support and try a rosy picture of so called secular totalitarians as long as it fits to their agenda.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by lukan on Sunday December 08, 2024 @04:29AM (#42356085)
It is an answer to the claim, that freeing everyone is always to be considered a good thing.

Freeing all the political prisoners, yes, I support that. I am not a fan of Assad.

But also all the IS militants who while being free, made a competition, of who can be the most cruel?

I am sceptical. And also about where those people will end up. And they are more than a handful.

Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by jajko on Sunday December 08, 2024 @04:38AM (#42356125)
Hamas has been killing homosexuals in Palestine by throwing them from buildings long before any form of ISIS existed, plenty of stuff on internet. When its written in holy books you only need few sadistic rednecks for such things to happen, regardless if place or religion.

Lets not get too emotional in these discussions, facts are enough.

Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by skissane on Sunday December 08, 2024 @06:07AM (#42356474)
> Hamas has been killing homosexuals in Palestine by throwing them from buildings long before any form of ISIS existed, plenty of stuff on internet.

That's misinformation which has been debunked:

https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.347B339

https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/video-people-thrown-roof-...

To quote Wikipedia:

> Homosexuality is not a capital offence in the Gaza Strip or elsewhere in Palestine.[54][55] The laws against homosexual behavior in Palestine[d] are a relic of the British and Ottoman rule in Palestine; they specify prison sentences of 10 to 14 years.[54][55] There is no evidence that these British colonial-era laws are actually enforced in Gaza.[54]

> Reports of extra-judicial killings of LGBT people in Palestine have circulated, without being confirmed. Sources such as the news agency Reuters, the news outlet The New Arab, and the NGO Human Rights Watch, characterise many of these reports as misinformation: the stories are exaggerated, oversimplified, or misattributions of events that occurred elsewhere.[56] Examples of this include:

> Two members of Palestinian nationalist militant groups were accused of espionage and killed by their comrades in situations that included rumours about homosexuality or bisexuality.[57][58]

> During the Israel–Hamas war, a video described as "Hamas executes people by throwing them off a roof of a building!" circulated on social media. Some derivatives of the meme claimed the men were executed for being gay.[56] The video, however, was from 2015 and not from Palestine.[56] A July 2015 report from Al Arabiya, included identical images and states that they were originally shared by the so-called Islamic State, and showed the execution of four gay men in Fallujah, Iraq.[56]

> In February 2016, the Al-Qassam Brigades (the militant wing of the Hamas movement) executed Mahmoud Ishtiwi, the commander of Al-Qassam's Zeitoun Battalion.[59] The alleged offences were described evasively, the stated reason was Arabic: تجاوزاته السلوكية والأخلاقية التي أقر بها, lit. 'for behavioral and moral violations, to which he confessed',[58] which some western news media interpreted as a euphemism for homosexual activity.[60][61] Local sources clarified that Shteiwi was convicted of spying for Israel.[62] The Qassam Brigades alleged that Ishtiwi had been executed by firing squad,[63][58] but people who saw his body before burial alleged that he might have died in custody and been shot after death.[64][58]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_for_homosex...

Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by aguaviva on Sunday December 08, 2024 @12:51PM (#42358653)
Plenty of stuff on internet.

There's plenty of "stuff on internet" about piles of beheaded babies on Oct 7, too.

Links to reasonably trustable reports needed, please. Otherwise what you're saying is just more "stuff".

Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by HideousKojima on Sunday December 08, 2024 @03:31AM (#42355851)
>Any regime change that involves freeing many thousands of women and children from prisons notorious for torture and mass-executions seems like a decent one!

Overthrowing Gaddafi didn't make Libya a better place. Now it has open air slave markets, amongst other loveliness.

Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by MoreMoore on Sunday December 08, 2024 @04:06AM (#42355978)
People here are extremely naive and ignorant. Assad was awful, but it's leaving a power vacuum that will be filled by awful people too. People are going to continue to suffer after this.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by threeseed on Sunday December 08, 2024 @04:04AM (#42355969)
Slavery was common place during the Gaddafi era as well.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by inglor_cz on Sunday December 08, 2024 @04:12AM (#42356000)
American education tends to concentrate on American history of slavery, so many American are ignorant about just how widespread slavery was/is in the Islamic world and how many Muslims until today consider it a regular institution explicitly endorsed by God.

I certainly wouldn't like to be a black manual worker in any Arab country. Even if you aren't a formally legally enslaved person, you will be treated as one.

Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by jajko on Sunday December 08, 2024 @04:41AM (#42356136)
Or any other place from Asia, ie nepalis or philippinos are treated absolutely horribly in many rich middle east places. That culture, barring exceptional ethical individuals, has nothing in common with modern western values.
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Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by throwup238 on Sunday December 08, 2024 @03:12AM (#42355764)
Sednaya wasn’t a regular civilian prison. It was run by the military to house and torture political prisoners and anyone the government considered a “rebel.” Its notoriety long predates the civil war.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by nozzlegear on Sunday December 08, 2024 @03:25AM (#42355825)
Just to be clear, you're talking about prisons like Sednaya, the infamous "Human Slaughterhouse?" The one where Assad imprisoned thousands of political opponents, journalists, military deserters, Muslim minorities and civilians, and then systematically tortured and executed those people?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sednaya_Prison

Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by selivanovp on Sunday December 08, 2024 @04:35AM (#42356113)
I do remember the same shit promoted when Gaddafi was toppled.

And then Western mass media stopped showing news from "freed" Libya. Because, you know, public executions and human slave markets kinda not something, their population should know about, unless it's done by "bad guys".

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Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by 7952 on Sunday December 08, 2024 @05:25AM (#42356308)
It is curious that you don't mention the fact that the Sha was in power due to an American/British coup that deposed a democratic government to protect oil interests.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by jampekka on Sunday December 08, 2024 @05:00AM (#42356208)
And then liberals in UK and USA joined hands with Islamists to overthrow the Mossadeq government.
Re:Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad f... by cladopa on Sunday December 08, 2024 @04:55AM (#42356181)
Please don't use the word "liberal" to refer to something outside the US, because the concept of "liberal" only exist there.

This concept of neoMarxist sympathies of educated people(white collar workers) in urban areas and Ivy Leagues, that focus extremely on sex and wokeism, that concept only exist in the US.

In Europe "liberal" means he who follows economic liberalism, that is being part of the "right".

In Asia and Middle East is even weirder. Iran is probably the place of Earth that had more Empires in its History. Nationalism, ethnic identity and religion is way more important than anything else, specially on Sha's time. If you call communists people you are referring to Chinese land type of communism instead of industrial, very different from Europe or the US one.

I had a great time skiing on Iran back on the day.