A) in the open

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

The majority of them (at the Saydenia) are political imprisoned citizens.

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.

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.

"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?

10 years ago. They were a problem because they used American cars, clothes, weapons and media.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Quite a few ex-soviet states, who were independent countries before being occupied by USSR, will not agree with this.

You understand what I mean. Nothing was run by soviets. Lenin stopped that immediately.