Karim Franceschi Profile picture
Jul 21, 2025 11 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Hard to believe, but they held. The jihadist wave came like a flood, trucks full of zealots chanting for blood, believing Suwayda would fall by nightfall. But the Druze didn’t scatter. They stood. They bled. They fought for every inch. A thread, 🧵 Image
2/ They poured in from all over [MAP] — until the retreat order came. From none other than Ahmed al-Sharaa, the self-declared “President of Syria.”
A man who claimed he had no control over the fighters. One order, and the entire murderous circus packed up. The purge ended early. Image
3/ The “experts”, mostly Sharaa (Jolani) apologists in nicer suits, called Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri a troublemaker. Said he had no base. Yet the only ones still holding the line in Suwayda followed him. You don’t get that kind of defense without real backing, or a real cause. Image
4/ Even when faced with betrayal and calls for surrender, they fought... nine days, hundreds killed on both sides. But not thousands. Not another coastal massacre. Not this time. The difference?
They were armed. And they refused to bend the knee.
No matter the odds.
5/ That’s what made the difference. That’s what changed the equation.
Even Israeli airpower, cautious, late, and silent again, wouldn’t have moved without first witnessing valor.
States don’t act on morality. They act on pressure.
And Suwayda made them feel it.
6/ The Druze paid in full.
Regime forces gambled on tribal mobs and the sheer weight of the rabble, bused in by the thousands, to make up for the absence of tanks, armor, and artillery.
All to keep up appearances, to avoid an Israeli response.
But it wasn’t enough.
7/ They had drones, Starlink, veteran fighters in Bedouin garb, and overwhelming numbers, against a resistance under siege, cut off from water, power, internet, and phone signal by Damascus.
And still, they couldn’t advance.
Suwayda stood.
8/ You don’t get many stands like this in war. Most die quietly, disappeared in footnotes, replaced by lies. But the Druze armed resistance forced the world to look, to flinch, to speak. Image
9/ This wasn’t just resistance. It was a lesson in dignity, and honour, forged in blood, outside history’s polite grammar. Image
10/ And they came out on top.
The human wave of jihadis, for all their rhetoric, crashed against a Druze mountain that refused to move, and shattered like waves on rock.
What remains of their image of invincibility, built on the walking carcass of the Assad regime?
Foam.
And now it’s official: the al-Qaeda–linked “Interim Syrian Govt” has surrendered.

✅Militias expelled
✅ Regime forces banned
✅ Convoys blocked
✅ Aid allowed

Intl. inquiry coming

They won’t rewrite this like they did the coastal massacre. Suwayda will be remembered. /END

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More from @karimfranceschi

Jan 6
Deep-dive | Thread
Several major Kurdish opposition parties from Iran (Rojhelat/Eastern Kurdistan) have held a high-level coordination meeting to discuss Iran’s political crisis, the ongoing protest wave, and Kurdish strategy under repression. 1/14 Image
The meeting was chaired by Mostafa Hijri, Secretary General of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), in his capacity as rotating coordinator of the Dialogue Center for Cooperation among the Kurdish Parties of Iran. 2/14 Image
Participants included senior leadership from across the Kurdish political spectrum in Iran, notably:

[see image]

These are not minor actors, and they are not ideologically aligned. 3/14 Image
Read 13 tweets
Dec 18, 2025
🇸🇾 THREAD 1/9
THE SDF MILITARY INTEGRATION DEAL

This isn't SDF–HTS coming to terms, this is a Washington-driven compliance theater designed to:

→ Remove the Caesar sanctions
→ Prevent Congress from pulling the plug
→ Repackage HTS/Julani as a “state partner”

Everything else; 13 articles, 3+2 formulas, committees, constitutional talk, is delay architecture.
2/9
The “13-article written offer”, why now?

The Palmyra Green on blue attack raised Senate risks around the Caesar repeal

So, al-Julani is showing movement to Washington on paper, not on the ground, while official Syrian channels haven't confirmed anything.

Classic tactic: plausible deniability with Western legibility.
3/9
The military integration fiction (3 divisions / 3+2)

What SDF wants (and has consistently wanted)
Unit integrity, Geographic anchoring, Internal command continuity, No individual dissolution into MoD meat-grinder

That’s why the insistence on:

3 divisions tied to Hasakah / Raqqa / Deir ez-Zor
plus YPJ + CT units as distinct formations

This is not autonomy, but corporate survival.

What STG/HTS wants
Symbolic sovereignty, Flag planting, A claim they can sell domestically and to Turkey, The ability to say “the state is everywhere”

Hence:

Ambiguity on central force deployment east of Euphrates, insistence on MoD hierarchy without defining command chains

No defined Command & Control = future leverage point for coercion.
Read 9 tweets
Nov 22, 2025
🧵 1/
#Syria 🇸🇾 today is a chessboard where every actor claims survival, security, or ideology — but the actual game is pure Machiavellian statecraft.

Nobody embodies that better than Netanyahu, who just openly laid out Israel’s Syria strategy in a way few leaders dare. ↓ Image
2/
After touring the occupied Golan and Quneitra front, Netanyahu declared:

“Southern Syria is now our buffer zone… under our control. Neither the Syrian army nor Turkey will be allowed in.”

Spelling out the new doctrine of permanent Israeli protectorate carved out of Syria.
3/
This statement didn’t happen in a vacuum.
Turkey (the single most disruptive foreign actor inside Syria) has spent a decade weaponizing proxy factions, running intelligence networks, engineering demographic change, and blocking every attempt at Syrian reunification.
Read 11 tweets
Oct 1, 2025
1/ I was recently contacted about a man who claims to have been “in my battalion.” He rose on stolen valor, built a social platform, crowdfunded a boat—and then used other activists as his security blanket. I won’t make his name the story. This is.
2/ But before anyone labels me a spoilsport: I do not support the genocide in Gaza. My critique comes from a decolonial, field-worn anthropology — from fighting alongside Kurds in Syria and watching how solidarity is co-opted.
3/ The Sumud/Global flotilla is being praised as courageous. Yet it is being escorted — at least for part of the voyage — by the Italian navy. That matters. Reuters reports Italy will stop escorting only when the flotilla reaches ~150 nm from Gaza, and has already deployed ships.
Read 17 tweets
Sep 28, 2025
ASSESSMENT OF HAMAS VIDEO RELEASE
1/
Drawing on my experience as a former commander with the YPG International Battalion during the Raqqa campaign, I assess several key elements in this video.

2/
Much of the operational picture is deliberately absent. For example, sniper teams are not shown but were almost certainly employed to suppress defenses around the target site — a construction facility likely serving as a forward IDF outpost.
3/
The terrain provided unobstructed 360-degree visibility, and it is plausible that 20 or more IDF personnel were stationed there.
Read 12 tweets
Sep 27, 2025
1/ Syria is on the brink of another Civil War.
This week has been the bloodiest in months for the SDF, and the pressure is mounting. Image
2/ On 24 Sept, in Deir Hafer, Syrian government forces used two suicide drones and sustained artillery fire on SDF positions and nearby villages.

Casualties: 1 SDF fighter killed, 8 civilians killed (including children), 4 children wounded.
3/ On 25 Sept, in al-Bahra al-Wusta (east of Deir Ezzor), ISIS militants attacked an SDF position.

Casualties: 5 SDF fighters killed, 1 wounded.
Read 9 tweets

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