You definitely should watch it all. Martin Smith knows what he's doing. But if you're reading this you're probably just glancing through this trying to find some way to own your online political opponents so I'll break it down for you:
Notice that it was actually Assad who created al-Qaeda in Iraq/ISIS/whatever. For some reason nobody has mentioned this for like 20 fricking years but I remember. Contrarian zoomers love to say that Assad/Ghaddafi/etc. were actually good guys because they were our bulwark against Islamists. No they weren't, dipshits. They invented all this stuff.
Jolani = Golani: This explains a lot. People tend to get "radicalized" when they're run off their land. Fortunately Israel is now creating a buffer zone to protect their buffer zone in the Golan. If that doesn't work, they can just go forward and make a buffer zone for their buffer zone for their buffer zone and never face any consequences.
He swears he was the high-level AQI leader who was against the strategy of sending suicide bombers to kill as many civilians as possible. He just went along with it. I would be sympathetic if it was a 15-year old boy getting peer-pressured into smoking a cigarette once. I'm not when this guy has the blood (and shredded guts) of a thousand children on his hands.
He swears that his suicide bombings in Syria were different. He didn't target civilians, and definitely not civilians just because they were Alawi. Sure, Abu Muhammed.
Torture? Torture??? No, he's the one guy in the Middle East who has never ever been involved in torture.
Overall there's just way too much of this that reminds me of the Mafia. There's this very sanctimonious code of honor among jihadis, but when it comes down to it they're really all just about money. If you can generate money for your bosses then you get promoted.
Many of the leaders of the various factions in the Lebanese Civil War said afterwards something to the effect that yeah, I fricked up, I made mistakes, I did things that were wrong, I bear some share of responsibility for what happened. Now these are not great humanitarians, most of them are basically gangsters, but they at least can look back in hindsight and have some remorse for what they did. When this guy has sent God knows how many kids off to suicide bomb other kids and then he tells us did nothing wrong, I start to feel like I'm being lied to.
I'm cautiously optimistic that the future will be not quite as bad because this guy seems like he's just a sociopath. A sociopath won't hurt unless he has a reason to. The Assads were actually actively trying to be evil. They got off on hurting people. This guy though, he's just a complete fraud. And I would not be surprised if there's quite a few people in the New York PR world who were involved in creating his newer, friendly, compassionate jihadist persona.
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This isn't a fricking Agatha Christie novel where someone is trying to "get away with it". This was done totally in the open. The media put it somewhere around page A3 in the newspaper (you could do that back then
) but nobody ever tried to deny it was happening.
Things were really fricked up back then. You had Peepee Rumsfeld and the Neocons (I mean actual Neocons, Wolfowitz, Feith, etc.) saying that we'll go to Damascus next, and then Tehran. These guys were actual r-slurs. (Again not exaggerating, Gen. Franks called Douglas Feith the "fricking dumbest guy on the planet" and he was one of their great thinkers.) When they "took over" Baghdad they actually thought they won. And they were saying we'll go to Damascus next, then Tehran. The Neocon dream wasn't "blood for oil" like the quarterwits would have you believe. It was about spreading "democracy" in the region in a reverse domino theory where Iraq falling is the begin of the rest of the region.
So Assad and the Iranians do everything they can to nip this in the bud, even if it means dealing with people they don't like. Happens all the time. Sunnis & Shi'a, even extremists, there's no rule that they can't ever cooperate. Look at the alliances in the 1500s. It's something like England, France, and Morocco against the pope.
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Huh, makes sense. I was only asking cause Googling it didn't bring up anything.
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And if your really want to know about Syrian history in the decades when Assad regime emerged...
Naw, I'm just fricking with you. It was really simple. They wanted to bog down the Americans and didn't care who did it.
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It was happening and not a secret but you'd have to go one layer deeper than the MSM. They were trying to cover Iraq like Vietnam ("our boys are heroes/babykillers"). They had no interest in telling you who we were fighting.
And one level deeper, it's been 20 fricking years so you're just gonna have to believe me and Martin Smith.
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