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To: StAnDeliver
--- "...Ankara's long-communicated desire to move against Kurdish forces there...."

This seems Ottoman-dreaming Sunnis moving against Kurds (supposedly defended with US forces) and the joined Salafists, all wrapped against Shia mentality, and with a shared aim in the end -- targeting oil revenue (the practical) and Israel (the theological).

One learns: "....the Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)" is translated for us into "Organization for the Liberation of the Levant." In historical terms, that stretched from Turkey down to Egypt, and in modern terms still means Syria, Jordan and Israel.

One fine and complex mess, to be sure.

8 posted on 12/06/2024 7:04:45 AM PST by Worldtraveler once upon a time (Degrow government)
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To: Worldtraveler once upon a time
Oil is secondary to chuds like HTS. It's a messy business to be an islamo terrorist and try to force oil crews to extract oil at gunpoint, much less ship it and get paid for it.

It is very much about this.

How Syria Became the Middle East’s Drug Dealer

"With the support of Iran and Russia, Assad has survived, and his government now controls about three-quarters of the country. In the past few years, he has found a desperately needed source of income in captagon.

In Syria, a single pill of the stimulant costs a few cents to produce. But that pill can be sold elsewhere in the Middle East—the only part of the world where captagon is a popular drug—for as much as twenty-five dollars, especially in wealthy cities such as Riyadh.

The Assad regime now controls much of the captagon trade, making billions of dollars a year. The most significant figure in the government’s production and distribution of captagon is reportedly the President’s younger brother Maher al-Assad, who is the head of the 4th Division of the Syrian Army, a unit founded in 1984 to protect the government from all threats to its authority.

Syria’s amphetamine business is worth some ten billion dollars. The country’s official gross domestic product is only nine billion.

Fighters on all sides of the conflict in Syria have taken captagon. On June 12, 2018, coalition forces battling ISIS found and destroyed three hundred thousand captagon pills belonging to the Islamist group. Last year, the Israel Defense Forces reported finding captagon pills on the bodies of Hamas fighters killed during the October 7th attacks.

Saudi Arabia claims that between May, 2023, and July, 2024, it seized seventy-six million captagon pills. The country has a population of only thirty-two million."


16 posted on 12/06/2024 9:40:37 AM PST by StAnDeliver (TrumpII)
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