I haven’t seen much discussion here of what is going on in Northern Syria.
The Kurds (YPG) have been sweeping across the North, driving ISIS away from the Turkish Border, shutting off their supply lines into Turkey.
They cleared the area North of Hasakah City, and on the 15th of June, they liberated the border crossing town of Tel Abyad, which was the main route from the ISIS Capital at Raqaa directly North into Turkey. That takes the Kurds about halfway from Iraq to the sea, across Syria’s Northern border.
Now they are heading South and are attacking the big military base on the outskirts of Raqaa itself (the former Brigade 93 base). Refugees have been flooding into Raqaa for the last couple of days.
It is a pretty rapid, and quite significant development.
If the Assad regime is press-ganging these young men into military service, he may unwittingly be training future rebels. These people are bound to desert once they get a chance, and if they’re not able to leave Syria, they’ll have to join up with Sunni fundamentalists (what some folks annoyingly refer to as “Islamists”) to survive. But they’ll have at least the rudiments of military training, which will make them all the more useful.