Syrian army retakes Palmyra

[mr friendly guy]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-35906568

Palmyra: Syria forces 'retake' Islamic State-held city
39 minutes ago

Syrian government forces have re-captured the ancient city of Palmyra from so-called Islamic State (IS), say state media and a monitoring group.
The Syrian army had been gaining ground for several days, supported by Russian air strikes. Military sources say the army now has "full control".
IS seized the Unesco World Heritage site and modern town in May 2015.
Images released by the Syrian military on Saturday showed helicopters and tanks firing at positions in Palmyra.
The date of the footage could not be independently verified.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, said there was still gunfire in the eastern part of the city, but the bulk of the IS force had pulled out and retreated further east.
In a statement released on Saturday, Russia's defence ministry said the strikes hit 158 IS targets killing more than 100 militants.
Destruction of ancient sites
When IS seized the city it destroyed archaeological sites, drawing global outrage. Two 2,000-year-old temples, an arch and funerary towers were left in ruins.
The jihadist group, which has also demolished several pre-Islamic sites in neighbouring Iraq, believes that such structures are idolatrous.
The prospect of the city's liberation was welcomed by Unesco, the UN's cultural agency, which has described the destruction of Palmyra as a war crime.
The head of Syria's antiquities authority, Mamoun Abdelkarim, promised to repair as much of the damage as possible as a "message against terrorism".
Ancient city of Palmyra
This file photo taken on March 14, 2014 shows Syrian citizens riding their bicycles in the ancient oasis city of PalmyraImage copyrightAFP/Getty
Unesco World Heritage site
Site contains monumental ruins of great city, once one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world
Art and architecture, from the 1st and 2nd centuries, combine Greco-Roman techniques with local traditions and Persian influences
More than 1,000 columns, a Roman aqueduct and a formidable necropolis of more than 500 tombs made up the archaeological site
More than 150,000 tourists visited Palmyra every year before the Syrian conflict

[K. A. Pital]

Good. Hope ISIS eats more lead.

[Thanas]

The head of Syria's antiquities authority, Mamoun Abdelkarim, promised to repair as much of the damage as possible as a "message against terrorism".

This really scares me. I very much doubt that Syria will have the millions (or billions) such a reconstruction would cost if done right and if they do it in the matter some nations "reconstruct" things they will just ruin it further. Some sites in Turkey have suffered much due to "reconstruction" using modern materials like concrete and equipment, all in the name of boosting tourism.

I hope this guy will act with as much competence and heroism as the former director of Palmyra (tortured for days and eventually murdered by Isis for refusing to give up antiquities) did.

[Darmalus]

There's more of Palmyra left than I had thought. Previous reports had left me with the impression it had been completely reduced to a gravel pit.

[Honorius]

There's more of Palmyra left than I had thought. Previous reports had left me with the impression it had been completely reduced to a gravel pit.

Fighting was largely on the outskirts. IS didn't really do a standup fight in the city proper. Still eight Regime Generals died taking the City along with hundreds of causalities. I won't lose sleep over both sides losses.

Guess the next town to be taken from IS will be el-Rai. FSA has been pushing against heavy resistance with only Turkish Artillery support and minor A-10 support. Once they got it, they can resupply better from Turkey before moving on al-Bab, Jarabulus, and Manbij to secure them, push the YPG terrorists back across the Euphrates and begin the process of cleansing Afrin district of YPG Terrorists so they don't stab them in the back anymore before liberating Aleppo.

This war will continue on for years yet. FSA, Assad, YPG//PKK, and IS are in it to the death and neither will negotiate. FSA has a few million refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan to recruit from as well as Syria itself plus foreign fighters joining it. It also has al-Qaeda still on its side but its a marriage of convenience seeing as Obama stabbed them in the back and they often are their best shock troops in the same manner Hezbollah is for Assad. Turkey is trying to fix that on its own now seeing as Obama fucked up every step of the way and disregarded everyone of Erdogan's workable plans to end this years ago. As it is, the FSA no longer gives a shit what the US has to say, it long lost the right when it ignored Assad gassing children on live TV.

Assad is receiving regular streams of Shia Militias from Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan to replace his largely destroyed Alawite backers and bulk up his Sunni Backers and Hezbollah is in this to the death as well. Putin has braced him up, but hasn't given him the means to win, and he isn't willing to pay the price for it with a full scale intervention. Still Putin gave Assad enough T-72B3s and T-90As with Shtora that TOWs are no longer effective and FSA is using them on other targets. More and more TOW vids are showing Shtora, when its turned on, working as advertised as seen in this youtube video which while not showing any bodies or blood, only the T-90 deflecting the missile off course, but probably should be consider NSFW to be on the safe side. Still its not a war winner.

PKK can still reinforce its YPG branch a bit by kidnapping and training child soldiers constrained by how much Turkey pounds its main branch in Qandil and Turkey itself. Iran tolerates them recruiting in Iran, provided those recruits fight IS and don't return to Iran. But the majority of Kurds despise PKK and its branches and without someone backing them, they fold like a wet rag. Nor do Kurds make up a majority in supposed Kurdish territory.

IS is a self-replicating cell network going by the plans seized from its operational mastermind when FSA killed him and stuffed him in a fridge till they could decode his works. It would be very difficult to root it out and Obama blew the best chance when the FSA captured the entire organizational setup of the group and confirmed it by their own spies. Now its spreading like a cancer to other areas and the Obama Administration rather than backing democracy, backs dictators who make the problem worse and allow IS to flourish due to their repression, corruption, and mismanagement.

[Alyrium Denryle]

The head of Syria's antiquities authority, Mamoun Abdelkarim, promised to repair as much of the damage as possible as a "message against terrorism".

This really scares me. I very much doubt that Syria will have the millions (or billions) such a reconstruction would cost if done right and if they do it in the matter some nations "reconstruct" things they will just ruin it further. Some sites in Turkey have suffered much due to "reconstruction" using modern materials like concrete and equipment, all in the name of boosting tourism.

I hope this guy will act with as much competence and heroism as the former director of Palmyra (tortured for days and eventually murdered by Isis for refusing to give up antiquities) did.

I... did not know that, about the director. Fuck. That makes me sad, angry, and yet fills me with a sort of upliftedness. It always does. Agronomists in Leningrad starving rather than eating their own collection, a curator being tortured to death before he gives up clay tablets, an illiterate janitor smuggling books out of a library in Mali as a hostile army advances on a city. A biologist being bitten by a newly discovered venomous snake (for which there is no treatment yet) and taking notes on symptom progression as he slowly dies (yes, that happened)

[aerius]

US State Department spokesperson is not convinced it's a good thing

[Simon_Jester]

I suspect the State Department bureaucrat's problem is that he's stuck with a party line that says "we hate the regime so much we can't cheer for them when they beat up on Da'esh." He can't turn around and be human about it because if he puts himself on the record as a State Department spokesman saying Da'esh losing ground in a regime offensive is good, he's saying the regime is preferable to Da'esh, which of course everyone with a brain already knew, but the State Department is trying to avoid saying so because they think that would somehow constitute endorsing Assad.

Plus he's got bureaucracy for brains.

[K. A. Pital]

Sure, better have Palmyra in the hands of people who seek to destroy all of the world's cultural and historical legacy in their fanatical iconoclasm.

US State Department, best of the best of the best... Sir!

[aerius]

I suspect the State Department bureaucrat's problem is that he's stuck with a party line that says "we hate the regime so much we can't cheer for them when they beat up on Da'esh." He can't turn around and be human about it because if he puts himself on the record as a State Department spokesman saying Da'esh losing ground in a regime offensive is good, he's saying the regime is preferable to Da'esh, which of course everyone with a brain already knew, but the State Department is trying to avoid saying so because they think that would somehow constitute endorsing Assad.

Or he could just say something along the lines of "Assad is a horrible dictator and the US does not support his regime in any way, shape, or form. However, it's better for Palmyra to be in his control instead of ISIS since at least it won't get blown the fuck up". Really, it's not that hard, except the guy's a fuckface with shit for brains. The sad part is he got a re-do the next day and fucked it up even worse!

[Simon_Jester]

Worse than shit for brains. Like I said, bureaucracy for brains.

This is what that does to you. You become incapable of expressing normal human feeling because you're so busy thinking about how to cover your ass and tout the party line.

[Sea Skimmer]

More and more TOW vids are showing Shtora, when its turned on, working as advertised as seen in this youtube video which while not showing any bodies or blood, only the T-90 deflecting the missile off course, but probably should be consider NSFW to be on the safe side. Still its not a war winner.

Ugh, that isn't a TOW video. Most people labeling videos from Syria call all missiles TOW, but this is blatantly not. If its spinning its a Soviet missile, they spin because they only have one moving guidance fin which is not great for accuracy, they are also very obvious because they make a significant amount of smoke while TOW is nearly smokeless even on launch. That missile is some model of Soviet Konkurs or Metis series which are very common in Syria, sourced from government stockpiles, ISIL just captured another pile of them in fact, and also shipped in by the Saudis and Turkey. They also tend to be old and unreliable and from that video you cannot even tell if the target is a T-90 let alone why the missile failed, no small number of high resolution videos show ATGMs missing of all types.

Shtora is in fact just about useless against the TOW-2 series. Seriously people are just morons about this online, in part because they are just dumb, in part because this is a topic which largely predates the internet on the action/reaction cycle it caused. This was actually a major point of replacing ITOW with TOW-2 in the first place, adding the extra beacon to counter such simple jammers.

Shorta is decades old, and the US has a very similar system I forget the designation of, it mounts on top of the vehicle turret, Iraq had a Chinese made strobe system in the Gulf War ect... all very simple shortwave IR strobe technology and easily defeated via adapting a two color tracking beacon on the missile. So pretty effective against ATGMs produced before the late 1980s, but near useless against any produced after that point. Which is why most of NATO simply never fielded a similar system and the US version is seldom seen anymore. It might work on a Konkurs, but the frontal armor on a T-90 would have a high probability of stopping that missile, and for that matter the TOW-2A warhead anyway. You will notice the T-14/15 didn't have Shorta. The Russians know its obsolete against modern kit.

The real path to countering modern ATGMs is just using a low power laser to blind the launcher optics (and everyone around it in the process, handy), which will negate all present non radar guided weapons, but that sort of technology has been held back by high cost and above all by political concerns, the US itself fielded several systems including the Stingray Bradley in the Gulf War but then withdrew them as they were not reasonably eye safe. Russia has known cold war projects for this too, but absolutely nothing post cold war, and its laser technology is now far behind the curve, while the US is throwing automatic solid state blinders on every helicopter.

HD Video does exist BTW of a TOW hitting smack on the turret of a T-90 followed by crew bailout, though it appears the vehicle wasn't destroyed. Just typical horrifically bad Assadism sourced tank crews in action. This is not the original, but its not worth my time to find the true HD version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4NQsg8WGRQ

[Ziggy Stardust]

Or he could just say something along the lines of "Assad is a horrible dictator and the US does not support his regime in any way, shape, or form. However, it's better for Palmyra to be in his control instead of ISIS since at least it won't get blown the fuck up". Really, it's not that hard, except the guy's a fuckface with shit for brains. The sad part is he got a re-do the next day and fucked it up even worse!

I think it's unfair to say the guy's a moron for saying what he said, because we don't know what his superiors told him he was and was not allowed to say. Remember, this guy is just doing his job, which SHOULD be completely independent of whatever his personal views are on the matter. It's rather presumptuous and arrogant to automatically assume that the guy is an idiot just because he is A) doing his job and B) what his superiors told him to say isn't what you wanted to hear.

[Channel72]

Whatever. Assad is pretty much here to stay. After a much-needed rescue from the Czar, Assad has pretty much cemented his regime's long-term sustainability at this point. The big losers are of course, the US, who just looks stupid having to say anything negative about an ISIL defeat, and of course ISIL, who are now locked up in Raqqah and Mosul and have to resort to blowing up subway stations because they can barely keep up the charade of being an actual state any longer.

[Sea Skimmer]

Your making a mistake looking at it so narrow like that. ISIL is already moving people into Libya on a large scale including some of its top Iraqis from the former Special Republican Guard, and supporters are spreading in Africa in general. They hit a real roadblock in Afghanistan in the form of local war lords, but they've not gone away either.

The bombings in Turkey and Europe aren't death throes, and at the rate they are actually loosing ground that matters they still have years left at this even in the central theater. Assads guys on the ground are so ineffective and so spread out they just have no chance of advancing rapidly. The entire span of government offensive power appears to be limited to one brigade sized operation at a time.

The other problem being that while in Syria ISIL really does have a large fraction, as much as 70% foreign fighters, in Iraq its more like 70% local people. So the problem doesn't go away just because the government rolls back into Mosul....

[Channel72]

A lot of their "romantic" appeal was the idea of this unified, impregnable Caliphate they had established that would just keep expanding its borders, just like the good old days back in the days of The Prophet. But that image is much more difficult for them to project anymore, in light of numerous setbacks and their diminishing territory. With the loss of Ramadi, and now Palmyra, not to mention the huge numbers of Kurdish and Iraqi forces massing around the Mosul area, ISIS I think is seriously "downgraded" from a propaganda standpoint - whereas just last year they could project an image of being some kind of impenetrable Caliphate, they are now basically just a network of Islamist militias in the Levant/Mesopotamia and Libya, vaguely united under a unified banner with a shitty-looking logo.

I mean, seriously - people say OMG ISIS has expanded into Libya! Well, sort of... it's not like ISIS actually annexed Libyan territory or anything. It's more like one particular native faction in the Libyan civil war pledged allegiance to ISIS, as many small militias throughout the Middle East and Africa have done. (Now that it's stopped being cool to pledge allegiance to Al Qaeda) You think that pledge of allegiance is really going to mean much if Raqqah falls and al-Baghdadi is obliterated in some drone strike? The Libyan government would be fighting with various rebel groups anyway, with or without loyalties to ISIS.

I mean, I'm not saying they're in any sense defeated. Hell, realistically they'll never be completely defeated, at least not for decades. But they're far from the height of their glorious Khalifa (declared by the will of Allah on Ramadan 1435 AH). And from now on they'll just slowly decline, losing territory, maybe regaining it here and there, until they mostly morph back into a Al-Qaeda in Iraq type group with more of an exclusive focus on terrorist attacks throughout the Middle East and possibly Europe.