🧵A detailed timeline on escalations in the lead-up to yesterday's clashes between Thailand and Cambodia.
Much of the escalation seems to stem from Cambodia, with their troops fortifying many sectors before the May 28 clashes and surging strategic assets immediately after.
🗺️ - heatmap of Cambodian military developments prior to July 24th. 2025-02-13. The immediate tensions seem to originate from an incident on February 13, when a group of Cambodian soldiers escorted civilians to visit an ancient temple. The group reportedly sang the Cambodian national anthem and was later stopped by Thai security officials.

The craziest thing is that the LA protests are remarkably normal, dare I say pedestrian. Theres no significant or widespread destruction, barely any meaningful resistance to law enforcement.

It's so transparently obvious that the Trump admin wants to fabricate a crisis. There is absolutely zero tactical or strategic need for any federal support to control what we've seen this weekend. Yet the admin has been able to completely dominate and distort the conversation with barely any pushback from the democratic establishment or even the media.

🧵Geolocations of ALL sites that the Indian Army has claimed to have hit in Pakistan and Kashmir.
1. Masjid Syedna Bilal/Hazrat Bilal
34.385846°N 73.456974°E
It appears to have been a direct hit, according to after-strike ground photos.
google.com/maps/place/34%…
2. Reported training camp in Gulpur, Kotli
33.402328°N 73.876957°E
No post-strike imagery yet.
google.com/maps/place/33%…

There's a horrendous amount of violence happening over the past few days in Syria, and a tremendous amount of uncertainty in numbers, details & actors. Yet it's astounding just how few people (including mainstream journalists) are engaging with these incidents in any good faith. So many people are visibly giddy at the idea that the new Syrian government is committing atrocities. And as a result, absolutely misrepresenting the violence that is occurring. It's pulling in the pro-SDF crowd (biji!biji!) the Assadist crowd (counter-revolution!), the pro-Israel crowd (only the IDF can protect minorities!), the idiot Westerners (Assad was the thin blue line!) and even mainstream journalism (finally some spice to report).

And as a result, its the most counter-productive information environment I've seen around Syria since the chemical attack information ops.

🧵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 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.

🧵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.

Read it in full ⬆️ and follow along ⬇️ aspistrategist.org.au/they-left-a-tr…


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.

🧵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.

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

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.

In Loikaw, a State capital in Myanmar, the district court has been overrun and destroyed by the KNDF and its armed resistance. After capturing the university on Wednesday, they are now barely 1km from the state capital building.

The attack on Loikaw comes simultaneously as an attack on Moebye, another major town nearby where ~6 Junta posts have been captured. The KNDF has been spending the last week systematically eradicating junta presence from between Moebye and Loikaw, to stage for these attacks.

😮‍💨
Looking at the 'splash' analysis is only relevant if the projectile had completed a nice parabolic trajectory & fired correctly.

It has next to no relevance in a hypothesis where there's a misfire and a mostly 'falling' projectile. Therefore, this isn't really helpful.

https://twitter.com/ForensicArchi/status/1715422493274427414

I have the utmost respect for Forensic Architecture, but when the analysis conducted is only valid in the scenario of one hypothesis and is invalid had the circumstances of another hypothesis happened, then it's not really useful in determining between them.

This 'investigation' is flawed. It concludes that the al-Ahli hospital explosion was from an Iron-Dome intercepted rocket that fell/exploded.

This is demonstrably untrue as the Iron-Dome is a terminal-phase interceptor. It does not intercept in the launch phase.

https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/1714984258358391057

This is why it can be known as the 'Iron-Dome shield', each missile battery can defend against ~150km2 and targets the rockets towards the end of their trajectory, after the fuel has burnt off and the trajectory is more predictable.

This thread is going around attempting to show 'proof' that Israel was responsible for the explosion at the Gazan hospital.

It does not, the video is from a totally different incident, hour after the hospital blast and shows a strike 1.5-4km away. I'll explain why.

https://twitter.com/AyazK100/status/1714558676378488832

First, I want to preface this analysis by pointing out that this account has been spreading disinformation and denialism about Ukraine for over a year. They have never acted in good faith, but for the people sharing his crap without knowing this I'll refute it at face value.

🧵Now that day has broken, and we're getting better evidence, I'm willing to share some PRELIMINARY thoughts on the al-Ahli hospital explosion. The photos of the scene are, to me, not consistent with an airstrike and are not consistent with claims that 500+ people were killed.

First, I should mention that this thread isn't a forensic or expert investigation, I'm just sharing what I see and what I've seen previously. Nor am I attributing one way or another. Nor does this negate the countless civilians killed in Israel's campaign.

A 🧵of military defeats of the Burmese junta, who have faced 2 two years of concerted, nationwide revolt against the Sit-Tat and their coup.
Starting with the Daru H'ka bridge outpost. The first major outpost S of Sumprabum, fell to the KIA on Wednesday (2023-09-20) morning.



On Monday (2023-09-18), PDF/CDF fighters overran a Pyu Saw Htee checkpoint near Kant Thet at the entrance to Ka-Pa-Sa (Defence Manufacturing Plant) 23. This attack highlights junta's dwindling manpower, relying on civilian militias to protect a missile-manufacturing facility.

🧵I've updated this fortifications data to include all Southern occupied Ukraine (Donetsk city - Crimea - Kinburn) with 2,389 fortifications traced from new satellite imagery. A download link is included.
nrg800.users.earthengine.app/view/russianfo…
So what does this mean for the Ukrainian offensive?

https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1667119808494829568

Obviously, the purpose of this data is to provide insight to people far more knowledgable in the military tactics and strategy than me, so I won't focus too much on my armchair general takes, but I do want to share a few quick things that mapping this mas made me realise.

While Ukraine's offensive in Zaporizhia is starting to ramp up, Russia has spent the last 2 months fortifying defensive lines across the entire oblast.
Ive made an interactive map that shows the most recent satellite imagery and these lines.
nrg800.users.earthengine.app/view/russianfo…
Download below The satellite imagery shows land over the past two months (since April 15th). Overall, around 1,000 fortification lines have been mapped in the area. These certainly present a challenge to Ukrainian forces trying to move through the landscape and attack in depth.

This is incredible, since the collapse of Kakhovka Dam, you can actually see (in @PlanetImagery) the baymetry reflected in the surface currents and flow along with the old path of the river before it was dammed in 1956!
If anyone knows why this is happening, super fascinated. @PlanetImagery It is also evident in Sentinel-2 imagery, though less clearly.
I'm sure it must be some form of how old stagnant water is mixing with the surface flow? but very interested in getting a better idea.

Using satellite imagery to gauge the flood-level along the Dnipro River on June 7th, this map shows an estimate of the flood depth on the 7th.
The satellite imagery used to estimate the flood was centred on Kherson, and uncertainty grows as you get further away from there. To make this, I used RFERL extracts of @planet imagery (huge thanks to @Mike_Eckel and @kromark)

https://twitter.com/IrynaVoichuk/status/1666528705378766859

, georeferenced the images, plotted points at the edge of the floodwaters to create a flood-elevation surface and compared that to FABDEM elevation models.

OK, ISW is becoming a major problem in the media ecosystem. This assessment is just a hunch from their mapping team (one that I disagree with), and yet their role in providing maps will see this (bad) opinion laundered as fact by many journalists who print what they say verbatim.

https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1653906530087890947

You can have reasonable theories that this was a false flag, I disagree for the simple fact that it makes the Kremlin look inept and weak as hell. But the point is, it's irresponsible to throw these largely baseless theories out there knowing how they'll be consumed.