Everything on Resistance media is indicating one thing: Iran will strike Al Udaid Base in Qatar possibly tonight. Every piece is moving in that direction.

iShowSpeed is absolutely massive, I had no idea he was so big honestly. Over 30m Instagram followers, constant 150k+ viewers on his live streams, 37.5m YouTube subscribers, hell they even made him the fucking mayor of Lima in Peru for an hour when he was there. Outside of like Messi, Ronaldo and a handful other top athletes, he has to be one of the most popular people in the world right now. I wouldn't be surprised if at least half of zoomers all over the world know who he is. I was looking at his Instagram today and I noticed that my zoomer cousins in Lebanon follow him and they don't even know any English lol. I don't think that the Chinese can get a bigger influencer than him right now, but who knows maybe communist tech can bring back Jesus Christ himself in 10 years and make him ride high speed rail and heal Chinese grandmas in Chongqing.

Honestly kiss my ass, we all know that HTS is fucking trash, but one can still be moderately happy about Assad and his murderous government eating shit.

We now move into Lebanon again, where Hezbollah have transformed from a religious militia into the most influential political party in the country. Lebanon after the end of the civil war was dominated politically by the Future Movement, which was founded by liberal Saudi-Lebanese Sunni Muslim businessman Rafic Hariri. Hariri was an interesting character, he moved to Saudi Arabia very early after finishing his university studies in Beirut, and even acquired Saudi citizenship and basically lived as a Saudi for a large part of his life, but he caught the “philanthropic” billionaire bug during the civil war as he realised how much power his money would give him in Lebanon. His companies’ re-built large sections of Beirut after the war, but he was an indecisive Prime Minister and his relationship with the Syrians deteriorated quickly in the mid-00s. Lebanon got rid of the Israeli occupation in the south after Hezbollah’s first victory in 2000, but the Syrian Army still had a presence in Lebanon until 2005. Hariri got assassinated in 2005, most likely by members of Hezbollah who were unhappy with how he’s dealing with the Syrians. What followed is the Cedar Revolution, where thousands of Lebanese civilians protested massively against the cancerous presence of the Syrian Army in Lebanon. I must add a personal anecdote here. As an eight-year-old, I was in Beirut with my family on a long summer holiday in the early 00s. We were in a Kaak (basically Lebanese bagels) shop with my uncle and my young cousins, and the streets were suddenly shut down by armoured trucks. It was the first time my diaspora eyes had seen an army on the streets, so I vividly remember literally being glued to the window of the shop watching the Syrian Army raid a nearby shop while my uncle tried to keep everyone inside until they were finished. A few years later, I learned that they were basically extorting the poor guy, and he refused to pay. Such incidents were very common, and the Syrian presence were viewed very negatively in Lebanon, so it wasn’t surprising that people took the assassination of the most popular guy in Lebanon as the last straw. The Syrians left after the Cedar Revolution, but fumbling Lebanon wasn’t the last big mishap by Assad, and more on that later when we examine Syria’s position in the pan-Shia world.

We move into the 2006 War now. I won’t go into the specifics of the war, but the whole mythology of the war is wildly exaggerated in my opinion. Hezbollah defeated Israel, that is certain, but it wasn’t an extremely bloody war for both sides. The number of dead Israeli civilians + IDF soldiers in that war was less than 500, and the number of dead Hezbollah fighters + Lebanese civilians was less than 2000. Israel’s mass bombing of Beirut generated no tangible military advantage and just made people hate them more. The current war has been bloodier on both sides already, and the number of displaced civilians in Israel + Lebanon is already way bigger and more permanent. The real victory was that Hezbollah once again confirmed that they’re the most successful anti-Israel side in history, and with that also confirmed that there is an existential conflict between the Axis of Resistance and Israel. A decisive Israeli victory like 1967 could not happen anymore. Egypt in the leadership of the anti-Israel axis had lacked the ideological discipline and were simply way too incompetent to accomplish a permanent victory over Israel. Arabism as the leading anti-Israel ideology was not radical enough to defeat the crazy settler-colonial state. But the pan-Shia Khomeinism was definitely radical enough to create groups that Israel simply can’t defeat. Hamas can still not be defeated, Hezbollah can’t be defeated, and Ansarallah couldn’t be defeated despite the combined naval power of the West. What 2006 did was confirm that the strongest and most disciplined anti-Israel ideology could be found in the pan-Shia Hezbollah. The psychological victory was enormous, and it couldn’t be achieved without the expertise and the weaponry of Iran, once more confirming the strength and unity of the Axis in the face of Israeli aggression. Hezbollah emerged out of the war as a heroic group across the Arab and Islamic worlds, and Hezbollah was probably the most popular army in the Arab World until the Syrian Civil War, but more on that later when we cover Syria.

We end with a little failure of the pan-Shia revolution. Bahrain had some of the most intense protests during the Arab Spring, with the whole island being crippled by Shia protestors demanding an end of the Bahraini Monarchy and the abdication of King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. Bahrain is very special demographically and also occupies a special place in the pan-Shia heart. The majority of the population are Shia Muslim, and a large part of that Shia majority are people with Persian ancestry, but Shias have literally 0% real representation in Bahraini politics. If you visit an Ashura mourning ceremony in Bahrain even today, half of the service will probably be in Persian. Some of the most famous recited poems were written by Bahraini Shias and many of the highly regarded reciters are also Bahraini. Hussein Al Akraf would recite back in 2005 the famous poem of “In you Khomeini, the world taught me how to be free” on the anniversary of Khomeini’s death. A few years later he would recite another famous poem where the chorus were “You oppressed us with how oppressive you were, and you’re always against us in opposition, O government”. The government of Bahrain basically let Shia Bahraini do the religious stuff with all its political undertones freely in order to sort of ease the pressure, but that wildly backfired when the Shias were all charged up with pan-Shia ideology and poured out in the streets with Iranian flags and pictures of Khamenei and Khomeini. The pan-Shia connection into Bahrain is Sheikh Isa Qassim, who also studied under Al Sadr in Iraq and became the highest ranked Shia cleric in Bahrain after his return to Bahrain from Iran in the 90s. The revolution took the famous Pearl Roundabout as HQ, and things quickly snowballed into a situation where either the Royal Family abdicates due to the enormous pressure, or things could snowball into armed conflict very soon if Iran “accidentally” ships some weapons through the sea. The king instead begged some support from Saudi Arabia who were fighting their own Shia insurgency in Awamiya and Qatif in Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis completely crushed the uprising through excessive violence and massive arrest campaigns. Influential Khomeinist voices like the previously mentioned Al Akraf and Isa Qassim fled the country, and even mere participators in the protests like football legend Alaa Hubail were arrested and imprisoned for years. Historic Shia mosques were razed and destroyed, thousands were arrested and tortured in prison, and nearly a thousand fled through Iran and had their citizenships revoked. The iconic Pearl Roundabout itself was bulldozed by the government. My commentary on Bahrain is “don’t do protests if you don’t have guns and an implicit threat of violence”.

That's the end of part three, hope you enjoyed reading this. We have one big and two small stories saved up for part four. The big one about Syria's alliance with Iran from the Hafez Al Assad days, then the Syrian Civil War and Iran's entry there. One small story will be about pan-Shia movement's religious business in non-Shia countries such as Nigeria and Egypt. The last story will be about the failures of the movement in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

cont.

Remember that I said that Khomeini wanted to export to revolution to other countries. It did happen, but not fully successfully and not in a conventional manner. The first seeds were of course the Dawa Party movement in Iraq, which we previously mentioned, and it ended with mass executions including the whole leadership. The next organized group was the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, led by the 2nd generation of the Al Hakim family. The top brass managed to flee to Iran in 1983 and later fought in the Iraq-Iran War on the side of Iran. The rest of the Al Hakim family were brutally executed in 1983 by the Iraqi state, with literal kids getting executed. A very important detail here needs to be mentioned. The Shia Islamist ideology was powerful enough transcend borders here, Sykes-Picot was effectively broken for the third time since the establishment of the Middle East borders. It was broken by the Arabists under Nasser with the United Arab Republic which lasted for five stupid years. And it was broken by Communists who were popping up from Algeria to Oman fighting for each other’s causes. Then it was broken by Shia Islamists under the leadership of Khomeini. It would be broken again in 2013 by Sunni Jihadists fighting for ISIS. Only one of those projects still remains, and it’s Khomeini’s project. The third attempt of Shia Islamist uprising was in 1991, and it was the most successful attempt, but it still failed. The Shaaban Uprising in Iraq lasted for around a month and large sections of the country fell under Shia rebel rule, but Saddam managed to reorganise his army after the massive defeat in Kuwait and crushed the uprising. The sources of the uprising were both expected and unexpected. The Al Hakim family and their newly formed militias breached the Iraq-Iran border and stormed into the country, which was an expected source considering the semi-collapse of the Iraqi state after the withdrawal from Kuwait. The unexpected source came from the Al Thawra (now Sadr City) ghetto in Eastern Baghdad. Another Al Sadr family member, Muhammed Sadiq Al Sadr, had secretly organised his followers and unleashed them in the uprising. His eccentric son Muqtada would later form the Mahdi Army and fight the US during the occupation of Iraq. The uprising failed, but it confirmed how deep the penetration of the pan-Shia Islamist ideology had come in Iraqi minds.

In Bahrain, a Khomeinist group tries a failed coup in 1981. These seeds that were planted would later be the ideological backbone of the Bahraini uprising in 2011, which was mercilessly crushed by Saudi Arabia, but that’s a story for a later episode of this effortpost. In Saudi Arabia, a Shia group called Hezbollah Al Hejaz fought a low-level insurgency against the government and later bombed the Khobar Towers and killed a bunch of US soldiers. Now we have to go to Lebanon, what happened there? Well Israel invaded the country in 1982 and occupied everything up to Beirut. Musa Al Sadr’s group, the Amal Movement was ideologically disoriented and very disorganised following the disappearance of Al Sadr in 1978. The Shias of Lebanon were basically left without competent leadership for four years while Israel quickly the Shia heartland in the South. Enter Khomeini again. Hezbollah was basically founded in Iran, the group doesn’t exist without the efforts of the IRGC in organizing Shia Lebanese leadership from those who had prior connections to Khomeini or Al Sadr. The first real leader of Hezbollah was Sayyid Abbas Al Musawi, who studied under Muhammed Baqir Al Sadr in Najaf, Iraq. Hezbollah’s mission in Lebanon was very simple, follow the ideology of Khomeini, kick out the Israelis, and end the collaborationist South Lebanon Army who formed a fake state that was fully propped up by Tel Aviv. Hezbollah succeeded in all three tasks. Khomeini’s pan-Shia ideology is now the de-facto ideology for Lebanese Shias, Israel would finally be kicked out from Lebanese soil in 2000 after a successful guerilla war, and the SLA was crushed in the 1980s by an alliance of Hezbollah, the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Lebanese Communist Party. Sayyid Abbas Musawi was later martyred by an Israeli strike in 1993, and his successor was Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah. In the 1990 Taif Agreement to end the Lebanese Civil War, Hezbollah was the only armed group who did not have to disarm and were allowed to control Shia areas.

Thanks for reading! Next episode, we learn about the Houthis who I was supposed to cover here but I was too lazy. We will also learn about the 2006 Hezbollah defeat of Israel, the Mahdi Army, the Bahraini uprising, and the 2nd shia identity formation post-ISIS.

The news mega podcast is unironically a good idea. We do 10 mins of Russia Ukraine, 20 mins of dunking on Israel and the remaining 30 mins is reruns of bad cumtown bits but about Zelensky, Netanyahu and Kamala Harris.

Syria and Lebanon are basically the same. I rate Syrian/Lebanese over Iraqi, Iraqi breakfast is way too sweet and fat, while Syrian/Lebanese is balanced and nutritious

Really hate this feeling of being on the verge of a week where decades happen.

I feel like the lines of the current/upcoming global conflict have solidified even more in the last week. USA/EU/JP/SK/ISR on one side, PRC/RUS/IRN/DPRK/RSA on the other side. Then you have the current collection of Latin American leaders firmly on the anti-colonial side, but that usually swings back and forth. The Islamic World is pretty much entirely on the Chinese/Russian side if we're talking about the people, but you have too many US vassal states like Qatar, UAE and Jordan who will commit to the US side when shit is real. Africa is 50/50, but that's quickly changing too. The real remaining wildcards are Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan and Egypt. Saudi Arabia are quickly drifting away from the US and I feel like they are now more independent than ever in their decisions. The other three are just confusing countries, way too much instability internally and you never know when the army's genocidal instincts kills a bunch of people.

Back in Beirut today after 10 days in Syria, I definitely have lots to say, but give me a few days.

On a completely unrelated note, I was reading the news on Twitter today and saw some guy make an interesting point that I dismissed as cope, but made a lot of sense when i thought about it. Since the start of the war in Feb 2022, Russia with its regular troops has only committed to one single major offensive, which started in Feb 2022 when troops crossed the border and ended in the southern direction after the capture of Mariupol, then ended in the east with the capture of Lysychansk in July 2022. Then they went into a transitional phase from attack to defence, which was uncoordinated and chaotic, and then led to the Sep-Nov 2022 period of Ls for Russia. After Surovikin's undoubtedly correct decision in withdrawing from Kherson in November, regular Russian troops have not gone on a large offensive in any sector and have committed to a clear defensive organisation. Wagner was the only Russian side making territorial gains during that period, but that operation also had Russian regular troops in only defensive positions on the flanks.

Ukraine on the other hand have started two and a half major offensives since July 2022. They started shifting from defence to attack around that period, and went on the first real offensive in Sep-Oct 2022, which lasted around 2 months and was successful. They also had a big offensive in Kherson starting from Aug 2022 and ending in Nov 2022, but that offensive didn't have any western toys, and the commitment wasn't big enough to call it a major offensive. They got mostly mauled in Kherson, and only reached their objectives when Surovikin ordered the retreat due to the river conditions. The third counter-offensive finally came three months ago, which is the current disaster around Orikhiv. So in 580 days or so, Russia have only gone on the offensive once in the first months of the war, then committed to almost pure defence. Ukraine have gone on the offensive two and a halv times in around 13 months.

Looking at this, it's easy to see why optimism is slowly rising on the pro-Russia side. All the mobilised dudes have been getting high level training for a year now, assualt troops have been chilling for over a year, and Russian rear logistics finally seem fixed as well. Ukraine have burnt through their best men and equipment in random fields in Zaporozhye, with their offensive potential now drastically reduced for at least a year. I don't believe that Russia will begin an offensive any time soon like most Pro-Russian media are hyping right now, but the potential is surely there now when Ukraine has to transition from attack to defence and Russia having the potential to active at least 2-3 dead fronts.

New rankings after 14 days hiatus. Nothing big is happening, Ukraine vs Russia has never been this boring, West Africans are just fighting with words now thank god and even the Middle East is chilling and watching Saudi football.

Russia - Ukraine cuck n chad power ranking

International cuck n chad power ranking

Russians troops are closing in on Kupiansk. Would be quite funny if Russia captures the first mid-sized town before Ukraine despite the Ukrainian counter-offensive. Looks like it's soon time for the Russian Kharkov Civil Administration folks to go back to work after chilling since Russia lost all these areas back in September 2022