One facility out of a total of 380 detention camps is a school in Nilqa. Bad-faith actors/trolls have desperately tried to disprove this site. I'm going to tell the story of Dina Nurdybai to highlight the cruelness that denying the trauma of victims has. She was detained here.
Dina was a business woman and a business owner, she owned a clothing company in Nilqa, and in 2017 was summoned for 'a chat' with police. This chat ended up with her being detained without rhyme or reason for almost a year.
She was taken directly to this facility, the Wuzan Middle School, where she was ordered to strip, undergo a full cavity search and then crammed into a room with 30 detainees and three beds.
When she met with a party cadre asking why she was detained, she was told that it was Uyghurs who were to blame for her detention, not the party, because they were terrorists. Which is shockingly similar to the psychopathic justification of this shocking regime I've seen on here.
At least every two weeks she was made to write “thought reports” (思想汇报), “statements of repentance” (悔过书), and “speak out and brandish one’s sword” (发声亮剑) declarations. Some of these often needed to be more than 3 pages long.
Dina says that it took her a while to learn that this place was a “education and training center” (教培中心). She says that when she looked up at the sign saying that, she was hit with an electric-shock baton by a guard.
She was also once made to sit next to a torture (tiger) chair for 24 hours, she needed to 'repent' by looking at it, or else they would strap her in and torture her with electric shocks.
They were allowed to call home twice per month. Following her release she was told she was required to pay interest on loan totally $250/day, when she was detained this loan had no interest. As a result all the machines and materials for her company were confiscated.
She told the AP that anyone with children were forced to have an IUD implanted while detained at the camp.
Dina's story, compared to many other detained individuals, is quite light, she was released relatively quickly, she wasnt tortured, she wasn't grossly mistreated in the camp. Even so, when she left she was sick, her "fingers were swollen and my nails were almost falling off."
That's because this is an exceptionally low security facility, compared to many of the other ones in Xinjiang. But it's still deeply traumatic. For the online reactionary left to search high and low for any smidgen of mistake, like sharks in the water is speaking over victims.
What matters more than these stories, to the derranged portion of the podcast-tankie-left, is an incorrect ideological belief that these people have no agency and have no experience unless they completely agree. Anyone who doesn't is a US imperialist pawn.
Pretty much every Uyghur I know has friends and family who, to this day, remain detained. A lot of them have far more horrific stories than Dina, one of the lucky people who was able to get out.
To dismiss all of that in favour of amature and incorrect assumptions (this facility is marked as a school on an online map therefore it can't be a camp) shows that to them the suffering of Uyghurs and others means nothing, anything counter to their belief is false.
It's distinctly cruel, and it's distinctly typical of a toxic part of the online Left that has been denying the agency, the experiences and the trauma of oppressed people of colour for decades.
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🧵Look towards the light.
As Rebel forces in Syria advanced across Syria & never stopped a key question was why the Regime evaporated. Syria by night provides some clues on how the Regime's social contract collapsed.
Read my analysis here
& read onaspistrategist.org.au/just-look-at-t…
There are three pillars to why the Regime collapsed so suddenly and drastically: 1. Complete lack of foreign firepower and air support 2. Increased professionalism and good governance in Opposition territory 3. Economic stagnation and the collapse of Assad's social contract.
I'm sure lots will be written on that first pillar, @azelin recently wrote a detailed and helpful article on the 2nd (warontherocks.com/2024/12/the-pa…), and @E_of_Justice's thread here is helpful too x.com/E_of_Justice/s…
I think the rest of the world just has to realise the US we thought we all knew probably just doesn't exist and hasn't for a while. We need to shift our assumptions and look at the US in the same way we look at India.
Harris didn't lose this race, and post mortems are useless. America made an informed and considered choice and picked the man they did. There's probably not much a reasonable democratic campaign could've done to change that. America saw Trump. And they liked him.
This also isn't a slight on India, it's a remarkable (and deeply flawed) country that we work with productively and well, it's just an entirely different ballgame (and sense of exceptionalism), and honestly the lens we will need to look at the States through imo.
🧵On May 17, fire swept through Rohingya neighbourhoods in Buthidaung.
Satellites show what burnt and when, and my new investigation reveals an arson campaign against 50-60 villages & demonstates who carried it out.
Through April and May, arson attacks burnt around 900 acres and over 10,000 homes across Buthidaung township in the most concerning and dangerous bout of sectarian and communal violence since the 2017 pogrom that expelled Rohingyas from much of northern Arakan state.
As flames rose above Buthidaung town on the night of May 17th, the activist community and eyewitnesses pointed the finger at the Arakan Army, an ultra-nationalist Ethnic Resistance Organisation rapidly capturing that part of Burma. Something the AA viciously denied.
🧵A very brief OSINT methods thread to share how I found the location of a Burmese junta camp that was captured by the resistance today, it's a method I've used a lot for more obscure unnamed places that would be nearly impossible to find otherwise.
Today news came out from a reputable local media source of a junta camp that was captured in Southern Myanmar, normally news in Burma is reported with the name of a nearby village or at least the township. But not here, only that it was in the KNLA's 4th Brigade 11th Battalion.
The KNLA's 4th Brigade operates in Tanintharyi Region, and google searching for info about the 11th battalion shows it is mainly active in Bokpyin township
But of course, finding one tower with a loose lead of maybe a township is going to be tricky.bnionline.net/en/news/killin…
I've started reading Our Enemies Will Vanish, a masterful book on the Ukraine War by @yarotrof. Highly recommend it. It contains heaps of tidbits and insights that even someone who followed the invasion closely (i'll count myself) had no idea of.
I'll share some threaded here.
@yarotrof (get your hands on the book if you possible can, the tidbits here are just the tip of the iceberg, truly recommend reading the whole thing).
Firstly, this account of a meeting between Bill Burns and Putin months before the invasion where Putin cited US' impotence post Afghanistan
@yarotrof And that Ukraine's military preparations on the heel of US intel warnings were so secret that even Washington had no idea about them (to prevent info going from GUR > DC > Kyiv > Russian Fifth Column)
I was wanting to check if this IDF graphic was an approximation or a measured/to-scale diagram, so by tracing the various video walkthroughs, I was able to make my own NOT TO SCALE map, suggesting it was a pretty accurate representation but missing some 'branches' explored since.
The most notable difference is a partially-blocked tunnel leading beyond where the walkthroughts turn left to go towards the spiral staircase. A seperate IDF video showed a 3rd entrance around 125m beyond that intersection, so I've assumed that's where it leads.
I've done my best geolocating that entrance by looking for a wide-ish street (with no road markings), that curves slightly to the right & goes downhill, and that has two visible small but distinct orange-roofed areas, along with some vegetation in a front yard. Decent match.