Image is Israeli interceptors trying and failing to intercept missiles over their cities.
Israel just carried out a widespread bombing of Iran, which has killed a number of senior officials inside Iran (though it seems the leadership is more-or-less intact) as well as a number of civilians. Important facilities have been targeted, but the amount of damage is unknown so far (note that many important Iranian facilities are deep underground, making them both hard to damage but also hard to determine if they are damaged from just satellite imagery, so reports of damage will be he-said-she-said).
It appears the attack took Iran by surprise, given that a residential block was targeted that contained some senior officials - if one saw an attack coming, one would imagine they'd be in bunkers. Nonetheless, like the rest of the Resistance Axis, I suspect that Iran has adapted their military structures to be resistant to decapitation strikes by ensuring that replacement figures are ready to take the place of killed officials.
Iran has delivered a massive missile barrage in response to Israeli aggression, even though Israel is continuing to bomb Iran. Iran is now aware of the location of many important Israeli sites, including secret nuclear sites, due to their recent intelligence haul, giving them a distinct edge.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
I was listening to the radio war nerd episode (its free on podbean) and they think that Iran took an absolute beating and that their response was pretty pathetic. Any opinions on this?
Also Iran ffs get a nuke. The west will turn you into Libya if you let them.
These were the same people who said Russia spent a year and wasted countless resources and lives to take a small village called Bakhmut, and that’s why Putin is stupid. They were wrong from the beginning, and they were wrong even a couple years into the war.
If you note the episode description, they recorded the episode after Israel's unprovoked attack and after that wave of drones was launched but before all the missiles.
The War Nerds are hacks and military science illiterates, their coverage of the Ukraine War was laughable and always wrong, so it's no surprise they simply buy into western narratives about Iran without any critical sense, they're boomers afterall
RWN is usually pretty bad at reading breaking news, and depending on when it was recorded during the day will have a huge impact on what they even know to be able to comment on. We saw it plenty on this site, people jumping to doom Iran, and guys who spend large portions of their day on twitter like Mark Ames are going to be just as or more susceptible to it
RWN is good for historical analysis of conflicts, and to extent, covering conflicts that are not getting coverage elsewhere. Their coverage of conflicts that are currently happening is mixed.
they've been completely wrong about russia-ukraine. They were overly confident and sure of russia at the start and then overcompensated and became total doomers that have been wrong for years.
Them being doomers is definitely true. Maybe years of watching empire destroy the world will do that but your analysis also ends up biased
They've said that the war went terribly for russia early on, which is hard to refute, but every update they've given for the past year is how bad it's going for ukraine, I think their coverage is far
They were wrong at the beginning and then overcorrected and became wrong in a different way. Doesn't really inspire confidence in their reporting. I remember them swinging wildly and overcompensating and then stopped listening to them.
What were they wrong about at first? I don't remember them saying russia could lose the war just because it was going poorly at the time, or even after losing kharkiv, they mostly reported on how much the russians understimated ukranian capacities and went in with clearly not enough people IIRC. I also don't think they've since wildly overcompensated, like they're not going "russia is going to trounce ukrainian defenses in 1 week" or something like that, they've had a "this is a long game but it's gonna end in a peace deal that's bad for ukraine" perspective for a while.
They said no way there will be a war, Putin never would do it, that it was posturing to try and get Minsk II enforced, etc. No surprise there, most of the western left had a similar blindness and incuriosity regarding the Ukrainian civil war and the DPR. They knew nothing of the specifics or likelihood of the war because they were not in touch with those in the DPR/LPR who for months could tell something was building, and openly discussed it in their telegrams. Hell, you could follow that Texas guy on YouTube and know Russia was coming.
On Twitter they got owned by the libs, the libs were "right" in that they predicted that Russian would invade while RWN confidently stated they never would. So then they overcompensated, mimicking that neoliberal hysteria that followed Russia's intervention into the civil war. They also started talking about the destruction of Russia, the humiliation of Putin not taking Kiev, accepting the western narratives about defective Russian equipment and massive russian losses. None of this was true, Ukraine was losing at every single point of this entire war. There has never been a single moment where the odds didn't lean heavily in Russia's direction, where Russia did not outgun the Ukrainians, where Russia took heavier losses than the Ukrainians overall. Every phase of this war has been worse for Ukraine.
They eventually mellowed out it seems and regulated with the rest of the anti-imperialist left but they were obnoxious for a good while, like until summer 2023 and the botched counter-offensive. How am I supposed to trust these people to give me vibes on things when their vibes are fucked? All over the place and never accurate. Like why was Texas a more accurate source of analysis than RWN was? Isn't Russia supposed to be Mark's area of expertise? If he was this far off there, this disconnected from on the ground sources, then why should I trust him on anything else?
Oh ok I see where you're coming from now. I didn't even consider them being wrong about putin invading in the first place cos everyone I listened to was there too, and I remember the early days they were pretty shocked in their reporting, that's the overcompensation you were talking about. I though you meant they were russia doomers in the early phase and overcompensated to being russia boosters for the late phase
Not directly related but I listened to a radio War Nerd episode for the very first time on Rwanda/Congo and I was sorely disappointed, the host just echoed the cookie-cutter western narrative that has been unchanged since the 90's. Notable (french) experts on the subject have firmly established in the wake of the genocide in Rwanda that the Rwandan Patriotic Front both during and after the genocide participated in mass killings of Hutus inside the Congo near the border regions that rivaled the scale and mass casualties of the Rwandan genocide. Some scholars allege that the Rwandan genocide should be better understood as a "double-genocide_ but this knowledge is nearly completely absent in Western narratives on the conflict. I've heard good things about the Podcast so I hope it was a fluke.
Just goes to show that podcasts simply are not a replacement for actual reading.
I mean, can't reading still have the exact same problem?
Their episode on the recent Pakistan-India war felt weirdly biased to me, very pro-Indian narrative. I haven't really listened as much lately. They've always had some weird preconceived notions, like one of them always goes on about how x group of people "are very tough people" or "are the only good fighters in the region" which always feels pretty odd.
“Good/Tough fighters” is also an idealist statement.
And seems kinda like the racist/colonialist "martial races theory"
4x player-ass worldview
Yeah they fall into that quite a bit. Gary does that when praising Vietnam a lot. They also fall into some generalizations, like they have a neat point about ranchers vs riverine people or whatever the specific divide is, but they take it to the extreme when describing why tribes and ethnic groups have conflicts.
I love the guys, but they generalize a LOT
Yeah its just another avenue of orientalist/primitivist tropes that many have not yet deconstructed.
I don't see how damage on either country is objectively verifiable and able to be analyzed by civilians without that particular (presumably top-secret) intelligence knowledge. Israel is under strict military censorship, and while Iran certainly isn't saying everything, they are at least freely releasing the death tolls including those of murdered senior officials, so you're only going to get half the story, and that half is mainly whatever the Zionists said happen and what Iran admits happened.
Even so, the fact that Iran can, to this day, get most of their missile barrages through the nominally most protected air defense zone on the planet (in actuality, parts of Russia are almost certainly better protected) cannot simply be shrugged off for what Iran has done and is capable of doing (namely, taking down critical Israeli infrastructure like power stations, transformer stations, oil pipelines, desalination plants, etc). Yesterday was proof delivered at supersonic speeds: after nearly two years of genocide and war, there remains no physical barrier for Iran to make Israel uninhabitable and depopulated. The same is mostly true of Israel doing that to Iran (especially with nukes), which is why the war is so scary, but there is absolutely a power balance in that sense.
I was expecting Iran to fire 5-6 volleys to retaliate for 5 boming runs, and then leave it at that. If Iranian volleys continue, it's because air defences once online proved more successful than expected/many aircraft were destroyed by ballistic missile, so Iran is safe from further agresión. In wich case it may be the end of the entity, we will know latter today, so far it's been 5 volleys.
Thank Allah for that. Though they are gonna be asking some serious fucking questions about how the infiltration attacks that took them down in the first place occurred. Because defenses being better than expected is great, but is less impactful if we all can see that security failed like that. All eyes on Azerbaijan, no matter what happens between Iran and Israel, we have not even seen the beginning of the fallout from THAT.
also we need an Azerbaijan cool emote