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 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

🇸🇾 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.

🧵 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. ↓ 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.

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.

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.

https://x.com/TheCradleMedia/status/1972376564433072157/video/1

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.

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. 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.

That’s me in 2016, one of the founders of the Antifascist Internationalist Tabur—later dubbed Antifa Platoon by Rolling Stone magazine.

Now, as Trump announces he’s designating Antifa a major terrorist organization, I want to share my own experience. You be the judge. Thread 🧵 As an Italian antifascist, I carry a heritage. When I sang “Bella Ciao” with my Kurdish comrades during the siege of Kobani, I was using the same words my father had sung on the hills of Tuscany with his partisan comrades as they fought against the Nazi-Fascist occupation. /2

In the month of August, the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) executed twelve combined strike operations against PKK positions in northern Iraq.

Why is this happening against the backdrop of the ongoing peace process?

A thread—🧵

https://twitter.com/karimfranceschi/status/1939421501519704535

These operations incorporated air-delivered munitions and artillery fire support. Simultaneously, persistent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) activity was observed across the battlespace, in support of strike coordination & damage assessment. [HPG sources]

/2

Picture a bar in Nepal. Modam Kumal serves tea, makes barely enough to live. Then comes the offer: “security job in Russia.” A contract he can’t read. He signs. Weeks later, he’s not guarding doors in Moscow — he’s crawling through mud in Donetsk, under fire. Now imagine Sierra Leone. Richard Kanu sells what he can, pays $3,000 for a visa. A new beginning, he thinks. Instead, recruiters hand him a rifle. His dream of wages becomes a trench. His labor — stolen, militarized. 2/8

Mehmet is yet another Kurdish activist getting extradited by Germany under the absurd Art. 302 of the Turkish penal code (“disrupting the state’s unity”). Why is Europe outsourcing its borders to Erdogan’s Clepto Sultanate — a regime breaking records for jailing journalists? 🧵 Italy extradited him to Germany on the promise he’d never be sent on to a third country—and his Italian asylum case is still pending. Now, in just 7 days, Berlin plans to hand him to Turkey, where Art. 302 = life without parole. /2

Welcome to the theater of the absurd: on one stage, Trump crowns an al-Qaeda figure as Syria’s “new face of governance.” On the next, they insist it’s all about counterterrorism.

Let’s pull back the curtain on the latest OIR report. From someone who’s worn an SDF patch. 🧵 2/9 The reports begins with the OIR objectives in Syria:
☑️ Prevent Syria from being used as a base for ISIS, Iran, or other terrorist groups;
☑️ Complete and verifiable destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons program;
☑️ Determine the fate of U.S. citizens missing in Syria.

Combat Readiness of “SAA 2.0” — A Clausewitzian Lens 🧵

The fighting strength of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has undergone a severe degradation by absorbing 90,000 opportunistic, undisciplined SNA troops. This is how HTS has diluted its own military core. ↓ 2/
Clausewitz wrote that combat strength lies not only in numbers, but in cohesion, discipline, and will. In this merger, HTS traded away its professionalism for bulk. Numbers became the enemy of force.

Three days ago, The New Yorker asked: How much will Trump profit from the presidency this term?

Estimates run to $3.4B, spanning crypto plays, real estate, corporate settlements, & high-value partnerships in the Gulf. 1/4 Those Gulf ties go through Tom Barrack, the most powerful envoy in US history. Part diplomat, part lobbyist, part deal-maker, stitched together to turn U.S. foreign policy into an opportunity for Trump’s inner circle to access immense wealth. 2/4

I broke it down here 👇

https://twitter.com/karimfranceschi/status/1948098062611591320

Eleven years ago, ISIS came to Sinjar. They called the Yazidis infidels. Men were lined up and shot. Women chained and sold in markets. Children stolen. It was meant to erase them from the earth.
A thread, 🧵 Thousands fled to the mountain. No food. No water. A slow death awaited. /2

[Thread 1/5] English subtitles of Al-Hadath’s interview with SDF General Mazloum Abdi:

--> Commitment to the March 10 agreement (one Syrian land, one flag, one army)
--> Talks necessary
--> Why Paris meeting was postponed
--> Debunks fake news on travel restrictions

https://twitter.com/karimfranceschi/status/1950158695565840842

[2/5]
--> Syrian foreign minister statements on the Paris meeting postponement
--> Rumours about divisions within the SDF
--> Concerns after the events in Suweyda without constitutional protections #Syria

EXCLUSIVE — Two days before Congress passed H.R.1327, a bill ordering DHS to assess terrorist threats from Syria, Marco Rubio quietly announced that HTS (Al-Qaeda’s former branch in Syria) would be delisted as a terror organization, effective the next day.🧵 1/ That delisting ensures DHS’s assessment will exclude HTS, formerly Al-Qaeda’s arm in Syria and by far the country’s largest Salafi-jihadist group. This, despite its long and expanding record of terror bombings, massacres, and direct links to ISIS’s founding leadership. 2/

The highly anticipated Paris meeting between the Syrian interim government, SDF, and DAANES officials, which was supposed to be brokered by Macron, was postponed indefinitely. A lot of wild stories out there on the reasons why. 1/4

https://twitter.com/karimfranceschi/status/1948359063781404711

Syrian govt officials came in with a set of preconditions that the SDF was expected to accept just to sit at the table:
- SDF to disband / lay down arms
- DAANES to submit not as a partner, but as a subject under full government authority. 2/5

U.S. envoy to Syria Tom Barrack brokered Trump’s Gulf alliances. Now he’s running PR for a regime that executed civilians in hospital beds—while scheming to dismantle the SDF.

Let's follow the money, and the bodies...🧵 1/ Over the past week, Suweyda endured a brutal siege: a city cut off, its people surrounded by thousands of jihadists. Massacres followed. Yet Tom Barrack, is lying through his teeth:

"The world is confused, the Syrian troops haven't gone in the city..."

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, 🧵 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.

“What’s happening inside Suwayda right now is darker, more vile, and more revolting than anything we’ve seen in the past seven days.”

A thread based on direct testimony from the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. #Suwayda #Syria 2/
“We are witnessing executions, just like the case of Munif, a fighter from northern Aleppo, whose head was severed.”
“They asked me not to publish it. I did. Because this is the truth. So far, we’ve documented 185 summary executions, and counting.”

The hordes answering the Friday prayer call to jihad didn’t pause, after Tom Barrack's Tweet. They poured into Suwayda, overran the initial line of Druze defenses, and are now carrying out a war of extermination, block by block.

As someone who’s seen HTS tactics up close. Here’s why the Syrian government is neck-deep in this. 1/4 Let's break down how core HTS veterans (responsible for the blitz from Idlib to Damascus) are now coordinating the mob’s war effort. Officially “dissolved” into Syrian govt ranks, but clearly running the show behind this campaign of extermination. 2/4