Attention to the Unseen

The Guardian reports: Islamist insurgents have captured the Syrian city of Hama in a battle to seize a vital location on the road to Damascus, marking the latest challenge to Bashar al-Assad’s control of the country. Militants led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) entered the city from the east on Thursday after surrounding it during five days of fighting with forces loyal to Assad. Video circulating online suggested that the insurgents had captured a military airport outside Hama,…

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Pjotr Sauer writes: The walls of the military office in Aleppo were adorned with pictures of the Kremlin, flanked by Russian and Syrian flags hanging side by side. On the desks, documents detailing the cooperation between the two nations lay abandoned – telltale signs of Bashar al-Assad’s forces’ hasty retreat as rebels closed in on Syria’s second-biggest city over the weekend. The short clip circulating online was recorded in the office of Russian advisers at Aleppo’s military academy after it…

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Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss write: Aleppo was never meant to fall. A stunning offensive waged by two Turkish-backed forces over the space of the last five days has resulted in the conquering of Syria’s second-largest city and industrial hub, doing in under a week what more numerous and well-resourced anti-Assad rebels never managed. Yet Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Syrian National Army (SNA) found themselves the beneficiaries of neighboring conflicts, an opportunistic patron in Ankara, the recent election…

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Robin Yassin-Kassab writes: The rebels advanced out of the narrow strip of Idlib in which they and millions of Syrians from around the country had been crammed for over four years. ‘The rebels’ here means a military alliance under the umbrella of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – the greatly moderated and better organised reincarnation of Jabhat al-Nusra. It’s still an authoritarian Islamist militia, but it’s not at all ‘like ISIS’ as the uninformed are saying. It broke definitively from the ISIS…

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Phillips Payson O’Brien writes: Joe Biden filled his administration with geniuses: Rhodes scholars; Ivy League graduates; people with extensive global experience; a national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, whom the president has described as a “once-in-a-generation intellect.” The president himself has been immersed in foreign policy for half a century. Yet despite all of those impressive résumés, the Biden administration has badly mishandled the war in Ukraine, not only hampering a beleaguered ally’s ability to fend off a Russian invasion but…

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The New York Times reports: Syrian rebels breached the major city of Aleppo on Friday, according to the fighters and a war monitor, reigniting the country’s long-running civil war with an intensity not seen in years. The rebels, including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, took control of “more than half of Aleppo” within hours on Friday without resistance from Syrian government forces, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group based in Britain. Independent Syrian media shared images…

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Reuters reports: Britain’s foreign spy chief accused Russia on Friday of waging a “staggeringly reckless campaign” of sabotage in Europe while also stepping up its nuclear sabre-rattling to scare other countries off from backing Ukraine. Richard Moore, head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service known as MI6, said that any softening in support for Ukraine against Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion would embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies. In what appeared a message to incoming U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration…

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Rolling Stone reports: Within Donald Trump’s government-in-waiting, there is a fresh debate over whether and how thoroughly the president-elect should follow through on his campaign promise to attack or even invade Mexico, as part of the “war” he’s pledged to wage against powerful drug cartels. “How much should we invade Mexico?” says a senior Trump transition member. “That is the question.” It is a question that would have seemed batty for the GOP elite to consider before, even during Trump’s…

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Orly Noy writes: The international media was awash yesterday with clips of people in Lebanon celebrating news of the looming ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, which came into force early this morning. As one report explained alongside a video, “The news has brought a moment of hope and relief to those affected by the ongoing conflict.” The same video was shared by the Hebrew Instagram page “Push – Real-Time Reports,” which has more than 860,000 followers. They captioned it rather…

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The Times of Israel reports: Ousted defense minister Yoav Gallant said Wednesday that Israel’s taking security responsibility for the distribution of humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip would set it down the path of military governance in the enclave at an unacceptable cost to the lives of soldiers. “The discussion about ‘distributing food to residents of Gaza by private companies with IDF security’ is a euphemism for the start of a military government,” Gallant wrote on X. “The price will…

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