S. Rifai Profile picture
29 Mar, 13 tweets, 4 min read
Thread: How various governments would respond to the #EVERGIVEN crisis:

Syria: deny all reports of a stuck ship. Ban media from reporting, hunt down/kill anyone providing evidence that a ship is actually stuck + call truthers terrorists, imperialists & zionists.
Lebanon:

Country is divided into 2 camps

Camp 1 says Israeli agents stuck the ship, sends mercenaries to the canal to kill the ship crew.

Camp 2 complains about above camp, and does nothing about it.

Country will go into crisis for 25yrs after the crisis itself ends.
Turkey will host the ship crew, provide them with shelter+food.

It'll let in 100s of dinghies full of amateurs who dig holes into the ship's hull, thinking that sinking it a lil bit will make it more manageable.

Plan fails miserably & ship's crew remain in Turkey a decade later
Israel wd've loved 2 see the canal mgmt team fail but it dsn’t want 2 directly interfere bcz canal operators wd say “See!? Ever Given is an Israeli stooge!"

Little did Israel know: Canal ppl did that anyway and like clockwork, Iran already made the best out of the situation.
Qatar just got on a phone with Turkey and decided to pursue a "shut up and take my money" policy.
UAE and Saudi just wanted to do the opposite of what Turkey wanted.
Oman secretely invited the Deputy GM of the Suez Canal & Ever Given’s Quartermaster into Muscat, and informed the US, Russia and UN Sec Gen that there might be a breakthrough- Inshallah.
UN issued a strong statement saying it was monitoring the situation closely. The Sec General expressed his “deep concerns”, he later named an envoy and sponsored a live charity concert in Berlin where Bono sang in support for all the ships and canals in the world.
Every Euro country had an approach, it'd take a thread of its own. But overall: the EU issued a whole lot of statements, hosted a shit tons of Track II’s, studies & emphatically said they are ready to support* any serious effort to end the crisis.

____
* Waiting for USA.
Russia drops a thermobaric bomb over the Ever Given, eviscerating the canal & the ship + bombs hospitals treating survivors. Then it hosts an int'l conf 4 the Canal in some former CIS cnoutry and calls out the West for being hypocritical for not rebuilding the Suez canal.
The Arab League…

nevermind, no one gives a fuck about the Arab League.
China is monitoring the situation, it has already instructed its UN Ambo to polish that red veto button just in case. In the meantime, the CCP has identified 3 districts in the mainland that are well equipped to send teams to re-build the canal, if the concessions are right.
Iran gets caught sending 1000s of fighters into Suez. When confronted, Iran says these jihadis r only there 2 defend underwater Shiite Shrines.

Months later, twitter sleuths find sat imagery of Iranian rocket factory 300 KMs away in Taba, just across the border with Israel.

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More from @THE_47th

20 Jul 20
Biden’s chances of winning went from almost a zero pre-COVID to now significant.

This is great news, at least you have a normal human being in office who is respectful of gov institutions, basic tenets of decency & relatively better understanding of the world.

But as a Syrian😐
Syria surely is not looking forward to a repeat of Susan Rice, Samantha Powers, McGurk, Blinken, Sullivan..def not the Donilon brothers.

It is now obvious that the above will be running Biden’s FP and Nat Sec should he win. But with all due respect to all..that’s terrible.
We don’t have 2 wait until 2021. If you are from the region (Middle East), and if you view Biden’s lineup strictly from that prism: The rap sheet of Biden and his potential FP/NS team is disasterous.

You think Trump fucked up in the Middle East? Trump is in office bcz of them.
Read 17 tweets
20 Jul 20
Corona is out of control in #Syria.

Earlier, I was relaying on forwards on wahtsapp groups/local pgs, but now I have friends and extended family who have the virus. There is a crisis in Damascus with hospitals overfilled.

Some are speaking of 50-60 deaths a day
Regime is not issuing or recognizing COVID deaths. Causes of deaths are always attributed to “lung failure”, “severe lung infection” or “pneumonia”.

Just last week, about 8 Mosque Sheikhs passed away, these have the highest risk, deal with masses, are old...etc ImageImageImage
I’ll tell u JUST my fam’s case. This is One case. A cousin of mine in Damascus is now on a ventilator in a hospital with confirmed COVID. Just b4 he fell ill, he went to the Friday prayer, then had a huge family lunch with friends & family.

Potential reach from him alone: 100s.
Read 4 tweets
12 Jun 20
In my free time, I sometimes go into pro-Assad Syrian FB pgs & try 2 gauge thr mood/current state of mind. I also stir shit up by throwing a few facts that they find hard to chew.

For example, recently, Syrian FB has been lit with criticism agnst the Syrian Prime Minister...
So what I do, I seek out ”influencers” with +50K followers, who have been speaking out against the corrupt PM/ Ministers within this current gov. I then calmly & respectfully argue with them, hoping that their followers read the conversation..
My fav approach, is to get them to curse at the Prime Minister, redicule the stupid policies and plans that the government had in place, get them to say things like “only an idiot would let such ppl do these plans” and “why are we cursed with such people in power?”...
Read 17 tweets
5 Jun 20
If I were extremely (almost unrealistically) optimistic, I'd say the average salary in Syria is about 70,000 Syrian Pounds/month.

Today: $1= 2150 Syr Pounds.

This makes the avg salary of a Syrian $32 a month.

Acc to UN standard, that's almost twice below the poverty line.
Check this restaurant bill in Damascus:

Soda+mineral water+ 3 Turkish coffees+ 3 cups of tea = 9,150 Syrian Pounds (SP).

If you're lucky to have a job and make the avg salary (70k SP), you just spent 9.1k (or 13%) of your salary for an afternoon outting.
to put things in perspective:

Imagine if your salary is $5,000 a month and you decided to go out for a coffee with friends, and end up paying $600. That's 13% of your salary in one after noon.

That's how rediculosly expensive things are in #Syria.
Read 7 tweets
21 May 20
The situation inside regime controlled areas in Syria is changing significantly. Over the lst 2mnths, and given the extra time I have had due 2 self isolation: I hv been in daily contact with Syrians in Damascus, Homs, Latakia & elsewhere. The things I hear changed my thinking.
Ever since Russia fully intervened in Syria in 2015 tipping the balance in fav of the regime, my thinking was as follows: Alas, no matter what happens, and unless Assad accidentally dies, he was the only strong man in Syria. He will not be given up until a stronger man is found.
Regional players may disagree on how they want Syria to play out, but they all want one thing: a strong man.

- Israel would not accept someone who can’t control Syria.

- Turkey will not take decentralization and a Kurdish canton.
Read 21 tweets
9 Feb 20
#Syria: After flattening entire towns, killing residents en masse & forcing remaining survivors to flee. And after seeing that there are no humans left to kill, Assad regime soldiers are now roaming cemeteries in Idlib promising -ON CAMERA- to defile the remains of the dead. 1
As he promised, the same soldier, called Samer Halum, comes bk w his platoon & starts desecrating/digging up corpses of the civilians they previously killed.

There’s no shame shown here. Just jovial psychopaths exploiting the impunity they have faced during 9yrs of mass crimes.
Later on that night, Assad soldiers have some fun w the remains of the Syrians they have previously killed & later dug up from their graves.

I want to leave this little thread with you, and ask: do you think any of us would want to come back to live with these monsters? #Syria
Read 7 tweets

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