Sakhr Al-Makhadhi

Return to Damascus - ABC listen After more than a decade in exile, Syrian-Palestinian journalist Dima Khatib returns home to Damascus, where she says it would take a year to document the horrors of just one street. Dima revisits the...

This took me back to the streets of Damascus. I couldn’t press pause. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking. By Dima Khatib:

www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

I want rights for everyone in Syria, but Germany and France should learn to treat their own minorities well before staging meetings with Syrian minorities as if it were 1860. The Germans should stop participating in the slaughter of Palestinian women before worrying about Syrian women.

Control, censorship and ‘penalties’: inside the Assad regime’s propaganda arm For years reporters at Syria’s state news agency had to toe the line. As life in Syria grew harder, so did the their work

Life at SANA, Syria’s state news agency, where fiction became reality:

A Firsthand Account of the Liberation of Damascus Bashar al-Assad might have wanted his fall to precipitate chaos, but in Syria’s capital, order prevails and life is improving

This is excellent by Sami Moubayed for @newlinesmag.bsky.social

So disgusting. The absolute moral and political depravity of these people ...

WSJ Opinion: The Middle East is Up for Grabs Dec 15. 2024

Get your pith helmets ready, boys! It’s colonizer time.

The Fall of ‘Mr. President’s Province’ Latakia, long Assad’s heartland, is grappling with the prospect of a new era

The view from Latakia:

The more illegal settlers they have, the more they can claim they need a “buffer zone”.

And then they move settlers into the “buffer zone” and so the “buffer” needs to move again.

This is how colonisation works.

Why is the theft of Syrian land happening? Because the world is allowing Israel to do whatever it wants without consequences.

That’s how Israel pushes its luck (temporarily -> for the winter -> for the foreseeable future).

It’s why they want to double the illegal settler population in the Golan

This is how colonisation works, in three photos.

A palace in shock: Bashar al-Assad's final moments in Syria Hours before rebel forces seized Damascus and toppled his government on Sunday, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was already out of the country, telling hardly anyone, five former officials told AFP.

Another story of how Assad abandoned the people around him in his last minutes:

Families Seek Closure at a Damascus Morgue Syrians are combing through bodies to identify loved ones executed in Assad regime prisons

One of the most horrific things I’ve read since the liberation:

“We ask families for old photos where their loved ones are smiling because, as a body rots, the face starts to smile.”

By @newlinesmag.bsky.social

Assad uncle used Guernsey adviser to secretly manage vast wealth Rifaat al-Assad, the ‘Butcher of Hama’, identified as client of consultant who received ban and fine this year

The decades of crimes and theft of this family.

Rifaat’s theft has been known for many, many years. But European authorities have sat on their hands.

Oh. Incredibly this story gets worse.

bsky.app/profile/mait...

Live Briefing: Russia packing up military equipment in Syria, satellite imagery shows Images released by Maxar on Friday show cargo planes at a Russian airfield in Syria with their nose cones opened to receive heavy equipment.

👋🏽

Is Assad’s fall a loss for Palestine?

x.com/ajplus/statu...

Syrian rebels reveal year-long plot that brought down Assad regime Abu Hassan al-Hamwi’s HTS group coordinated rebels to create a unified war effort that included a specialist drone unit

And here are those events from the perspective of the opposition:

www.theguardian.com/world/2024/d...

Now, from inside the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus…
💚✌️✌️

Assad's final hours in Syria: Deception, despair and flight Bashar al-Assad confided in almost no one about his plans to flee Syria as his reign collapsed. Instead, aides, officials and even relatives were deceived or kept in the dark, more than a dozen people with knowledge of the events told Reuters.

Assad’s final moments in Syria: begging for help, and then betraying those he was closest to.

www.reuters.com/world/middle...

IMPORTANT: Kurdish Admin in North East Syria has ordered all government buildings in SDF controlled areas to raise the Syrian revolution flag.

“The flag embodies the hopes of the Syrian people for freedom, dignity and national unity” - statement

Editorial: With Bashar Al-Assad Gone, Syrians Now Have a Say in their Future (Open Access) The unimaginable has happened. Bashar Al-Assad, one of the bloodiest criminals of the past decades, is finally gone. After 12 days of fighting, the whole edifice that Hafez Al-Assad and his son had bu...

As is this:

syria-report.com/editorial-wi...

This is a really interesting thread, for anyone thinking about Syria’s future:

Can’t believe I need to say this.

What good did that intrusion do? It could have been filmed at a respectful distance.

Interviews should always be given with informed consent. That absolutely did not happen in this case.

www.instagram.com/reel/DDdmND8...

Western journalists should not be liberating Syrian prisoners.

Syrians deserve dignity. Going in to a prison cell and mumbling English words at a prisoner whose response is to think you’re coming to harm him is…

NOT journalism.

There are Syrians with you. Let them do it. Step back. Give space.

It's never been about evidence for Aaron Mate and his ilk, it's just about ideology, and finding anything that fits their narrative and boosting it as much as possible to their audience until it bounces around their echochamber enough to convince everyone in it that it's the truth.

Can we please stop humoring the tankies.

If they claim to support Palestine while also being Assad apologists, they don’t really care about Arab lives.

Palestine won’t be liberated over the dead bodies of Syrians. No one is free until we’re all free.

This was a few days before Bashar fell.

That country is consistently on the wrong side of history: Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Palestine…

This is heartbreaking. This is just the tip of the iceberg of pain

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A short history of Israel’s occupation of Syria: