That is right my friends, we are not alone and never been alone, and the Vatican knows it and they also know Planet X is coming.
Watch this video and Open Your Eyes!

Here is an excellent video from RedPill78 discussing the alternative health substances available to us all for a better life.
His guest, Maryam Henein, is very knowledgeable in this field, telling us which alternatives to use to help with certain health conditions.

Listen and learn.

There aren't that many shows I watch on t.v. these days, only about 6 on a regular basis. They are: The Voice, Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, Chicago P.D., The Good Doctor, and 911. Most of my time is spent on the computer staying up to date with current events and listening to my favorite podcasts.

I just want to vent a bit here about the propaganda I've seen on some of the shows above, especially The Good Doctor and Chicago Med. If you don't think those shows are being used to control the narrative and brainwash the viewer, think again.  Both these shows have had patients come in who refuse to vaccinate their children for certain things, and in turn, the doctors belittle them and tell them what terrible parents they are (in so many words), and they even called Children's Services in one show on Chicago Med.

This week on Chicago Med a couple brought in their little boy who had a slight cough and low fever. The doctor wanted to give him antibiotics, but the parents refused and said they chose alternative medicine and would start him on them as soon as they got him home. The doctor wasn't having it. She argued with them and refused to allow the boy to leave, which ended with the doctor locking the parents out of the child's room as she began a drip into the arm of the child with the antibiotics. The show ended with the parents standing at the door with security pounding to get in.  To be continued next week.
So now, they've moved from the vaccine topic into condemning alternative medicine.  


On The Good Doctor this week, the plot revolved around a doctor and his new bride, who shocked him when she pulled out her trusted friend and put it in the night stand in her new home: a hand gun.  The whole show was about him not wanting a gun in the house, talking about the dangers it posed, blah, blah, blah.  He installed a security system in the house thinking it would allow her to give up her gun, but she still refused. She told her side about being a single woman on her own up to this point and the gun made her feel safe. There was no need to get rid of it now.
Anyway, in the end, the woman won the argument, much to the man's disapproval.
They have also had previous shows of the doctors talking about people who refuse to vaccinate their children and how they are such terrible people!

As for The Voice, I watch the show because of my love for music and hearing new talent. It's fun to watch the singers grow and get better during the course of the show.
This season we have two alleged Hollywood pedophiles, or Satanists, as judges: John Legend and Gwen Stefani. Actually, I haven't seen anything suggesting any proof that John is a pedo, but his wife sure is. Chrissy Teigen has all sorts of pictures on her Instagram to let you know what she's in to.  I believe she has taken a lot of them down since Q outed her, but the Anons have them on the QMap board, tucked away all nice and neat for the world to see.

Gwen Stefani was shown in one of the QMap pictures attending a spirit cooking party, along with a bunch of other Hollyweirdos.
Every show so far this season, Gwen does the Illuminati symbol over her left eye when they announce the judges.  That's the fingers shaped in a V and placed sideways over the left eye. It's a symbol for Satan worship.

My point in this thread is not only to vent, but to spread awareness. It's not just in the news, but in t.v. shows, comic books, radio, movies, you name it; it's everywhere. If people become aware of the little things they slip in and the symbols, they will see them everywhere on t.v.  They are casting their spell over the masses without public awareness.

Can you name any shows you've watched where you recognize them slipping in their mind control programming?

And yes, it's called "programs" because that's what it is. It "programs" the mind.

There really are two sides to this story but the conditions these people find themselves in (regardless of the why and when) is something that the world should be condemning. Many will not as all they look at is the Chinese market and how much money they can make in China.
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.prem...-1.7994216

Full title is : A Million People Are Jailed at China's Gulags. I Managed to Escape. Here's What Really Goes on Inside

Quote:STOCKHOLM – Twenty prisoners live in one small room. They are handcuffed, their heads shaved, every move is monitored by ceiling cameras. A bucket in the corner of the room is their toilet. The daily routine begins at 6 A.M. They are learning Chinese, memorizing propaganda songs and confessing to invented sins. They range in age from teenagers to elderly. Their meals are meager: cloudy soup and a slice of bread.

Torture – metal nails, fingernails pulled out, electric shocks – takes place in the “black room.” Punishment is a constant. The prisoners are forced to take pills and get injections. It’s for disease prevention, the staff tell them, but in reality they are the human subjects of medical experiments. Many of the inmates suffer from cognitive decline. Some of the men become sterile. Women are routinely raped.

Such is life in China’s reeducation camps, as reported in rare testimony provided by Sayragul Sauytbay (pronounced: Say-ra-gul Saut-bay, as in “bye”), a teacher who escaped from China and was granted asylum in Sweden. Few prisoners have succeeded in getting out of the camps and telling their story. Sauytbay’s testimony is even more extraordinary, because during her incarceration she was compelled to be a teacher in the camp. China wants to market its camps to the world as places of educational programs and vocational retraining, but Sauytbay is one of the few people who can offer credible, firsthand testimony about what really goes on in the camps.
I met with Sauytbay three times, once in a meeting arranged by a Swedish Uyghur association and twice, after she agreed to tell her story to Haaretz, in personal interviews that took place in Stockholm and lasted several hours, all together. Sauytbay spoke only Kazakh, and so we communicated via a translator, but it was apparent that she spoke in a credible way. During most of the time we spoke, she was composed, but at the height of her recounting of the horror, tears welled up in her eyes. Much of what she said corroborated previous testimony by prisoners who had fled to the West. Sweden granted her asylum, because in the wake of her testimony, extradition to China would have placed her in mortal danger.
She is 43, a Muslim of Kazakh descent, who grew up in Mongolküre county, near the China-Kazakh border. Like hundreds of thousands of others, most of them Uyghurs, a minority ethnic Turkic group, she too fell victim to China’s suppression of every sign of an isolationist thrust in the northwest province of Xinjiang. A large number of camps have been established in that region over the past two years, as part of the regime’s struggle against what it terms the “Three Evils”: terrorism, separatism and extremism. According to Western estimates, between one and two million of the province’s residents have been incarcerated in camps during Beijing’s campaign of oppression.

I could have posted this in a thread that was already up, but this information is so important, it deserves a thread of it's own, and I want it to be seen.
Censoring is so incredibly bad now for just about any topic that shares the truth, and you need to see how "they" lie to us.
I've shared other interviews where Zach Vorhies was the guest, but he goes into more details in this one and shows documented evidence of what Google and You Tube are doing to suppress our truths from being shared with the rest of the world.
Towards the end he shows how the natural cures for cancer have been censored, but he discusses what those natural cures are, so PLEASE watch and share this knowledge with everyone!

It is a long video but it is worth a listen IMO

Does anyone remember this ? When I was growing up I think I watched to much Dragnet and really did believe in the FBI being a virtuous entity whose main mission was to be kinda like Dugly Do Right of the RCM...To protect and serve the Constitution and the laws of the land.. 

Anymore the FBI reminds me of a pack of rabid dogs that you better fear for if just one of them gets a whiff of your presence..... and thinks you look like a NWO political foe the whole darn pack is coming for you... How far they have fallen?  Not really as they have always been political and messed up..... they just hide it better since Hoover is gone.... 

Quote:A secret investigative team established in 1994 to identify the source of a series of damaging intelligence losses played a crucial role in the counterespionage probe that led to the arrest on Sunday of an F.B.I. agent, Robert Philip Hanssen, officials said today.
The ''mole hunting'' unit -- a joint operation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency whose existence has never before been disclosed -- was formed because investigators could not explain why intelligence operations against Russia continued to be compromised even after the arrest of Aldrich H. Ames, a senior C.I.A. covert officer.
Shortly after Mr. Ames's capture in February 1994, they concluded it was unlikely he could have been responsible for all the intelligence losses of the previous few years.
The most damaging was the apparent disclosure of an elaborate and costly technical intelligence program that focused on Russian activities in the United States, officials said. The apparent compromise of that program -- which remains highly classified and which officials refused to describe -- may have cost the United States hundreds of millions of dollars, according to current and former American officials.


Other unexplained breaches -- including the 1989 disclosure to Moscow that the F.B.I. was conducting an espionage investigation of Felix S. Bloch, a State Department official -- helped prompt a new search for a spy inside the federal government, officials added.
Yet some officials said that the driving force behind the formation of the new counterespionage unit was the need to learn what had happened to the technical intelligence program; they believe that Mr. Hanssen's arrest may solve that mystery.
In addition to K.G.B. officers working as double agents for the F.B.I. whom Mr. Hanssen is believed to have betrayed, officials say that the loss of that one program represents the most severe damage he did to the United States during what they say was a 15-year career as a Russian spy.
The special investigative unit, which works within the counterespionage group at the C.I.A.'s Counterintelligence Center, was created by Paul Redmond, who had led the earlier effort to apprehend Mr. Ames. The unit was responsible for a series of investigations that led to the arrests of other significant spies caught after Mr. Ames, officials say.
Those include two cases concluded in 1997, when Earl Edwin Pitts, an F.B.I. agent, was sentenced to 27 years in prison for spying for Russia, and Harold J. Nicholson, a former C.I.A. station chief in Romania, was sentenced to more than 23 years.


Officials indicated that the Pitts and Nicholson cases were byproducts of the C.I.A.'s and F.B.I.'s shared desire to solve the mysteries that remained after Mr. Ames's arrest.
Most notably, American intelligence officials began an aggressive effort to recruit Russian intelligence officers who could identify the source of the leak of United States secrets. The effort to find talkative Russians was made easier by the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 and the severe economic and political troubles of post-Soviet Russia.
That effort paid dividends in the Pitts case. Information from a Russian source led the F.B.I. to run a 16-month sting operation against Mr. Pitts, with F.B.I. agents posing as Russian spies.
Information from Russia also played a role in the Nicholson case, though his troubles in passing a polygraph exam helped identify him as a spy, officials said.
But the two cases were unable to explain the earlier losses, officials said, and the mole hunt continued.
Officials said that the investigation took a series of wrong turns. Some reports from Russia prompted investigators to look for another Russian spy within the C.I.A., former officials said.
In fact, the post-Ames hunt for spies within the agency led to what some former intelligence officials considered crippling excesses, with C.I.A. officers who had worked on Russian operations forced to undergo repeated polygraph exams.


One officer, placed on administrative leave, has been the subject of an investigation to determine whether he spied for Russia. With Mr. Hanssen's arrest, officials said, the status of that case is uncertain.
Over the years, there were also suggestions that the losses could be attributed to a source inside the F.B.I. There was evidence, for example, that the Russians knew of a particular F.B.I. technical intelligence operation that a C.I.A.-based mole probably would not have known.
''It was plain that the K.G.B. knew what it was and went right to it and found it, and it was obvious that a source had to have told them about it,'' said one former intelligence official. ''That was completely an F.B.I. operation, which had produced very good counterintelligence information for the bureau, and it was inconceivable that Ames knew about it.''
After the Ames case, though, the F.B.I. did not impose the scrutiny that the C.I.A. did, officials now acknowledge.
Yet officials said that there had also been some effort to analyze the possibility of a mole in the F.B.I's ranks. Counterintelligence experts were starting to focus on the possibility that the Russians had a source in the F.B.I. before evidence was provided to the United States from a Russian source pointing to Mr. Hanssen, officials said.
The efforts of the joint mole hunt were finally rewarded late last year, when a Russian source provided what seems to be virtually the entire K.G.B. file on the Hanssen case.
The special investigative unit was a successor to an earlier and equally secretive C.I.A. internal investigative team that helped uncover Mr. Ames. The unit is still in operation today because officials believe it is possible other foreign agents continue to operate within the federal government.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence plans to hold its first closed-door hearing about the Hanssen case on Wednesday. According to the committee, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Director Louis J. Freeh of the F.B.I. and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, are scheduled to testify.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/will...0-election

Quote:Will The Democratic Party Exist After 2020 Election?



by Tyler Durden
Mon, 10/21/2019 - 23:05

0
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Authored by Renee Parsons via Off-Guardian.org,
Even before Rep. Tulsi Gabbard threatened to boycott the October 15th Dem debate as the DNC usurps the role of voters in the Democratic primacy 2020 election and with an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump on the table, the Swamp was stirred and its slimy muck may be about to come to the surface as never before.
If so, those revelations are long overdue.
It is no secret to the observant that since the 2016 election, the Democratic Party has been in a state of near-collapse, the victim of its own hubris, having lost their moral compass with unsubstantiated Russisgate allegations; those accusations continue as a futile exercise of domestic regime change.


Today’s Dems are less than a bona fide opposition party offering zero policy solutions, unrecognizable from past glories and not the same political party many of us signed up for many years ago. Instead, the American public is witnessing a frenzied, unscrupulous strategy.
Desperate in the denial of its demise, confronting its own shadow of corruption as the Dems have morphed into a branch of the CIA – not unlike origins of the East German Stasi government.
It should not be necessary to say but in today’s hyper volatile political climate it is: No American should be labelled as anything other than a loyal American to be deeply disturbed by the Democrat/CIA collusion that is currently operating an unprecedented Kangaroo Court in secret, behind closed doors; thus posing an ominous provocation to what remains of our Constitutional Republic.
As any politically savvy, independent thinking American might grasp, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and their entire coterie of sycophants always knew that Russiagate was a crock of lies.
They lied to their willing Democratic rank n file, they lied to American public and they continue to lie about their bogus Impeachment campaign.
It may be that whistleblower Ed Snowden’s revelations about the NSA surveillance state was the first inkling for many Americans that there is a Big Problem with an out-of-control intelligence community until Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned that Trump was being ‘really dumb” in daring to question Intel’s faulty conclusion that Russia hacked the 2016 election.

Quote:“Let me tell you. You take on the intelligence community = they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Inescapably, Schumer was suggesting  that the Congress has no oversight, that there is no accountability and that the US has lost its democratic roots when a newly elected President does not have the authority to question or publicly disagree with any of the Intel agencies.
Since the 2016 election, there has been a steady drumbeat of the US Intel’s unabashed efforts to undermine and otherwise prevent a newly elected President from governing – which sounds like a clear case of insubordination or some might call it treasonous.
The Intel antipathy does not appear to be rooted in cuts to a favorite social services program but rather protecting a power, financial and influence agenda that goes far deeper and more profound than most Americans care to contemplate.
Among a plethora of egregious corporate media reactions, no doubt stirred by their Intel masters, was to a July, 2018 summit meeting between Russian President Putin and Trump in Helsinki emblematic of illegitimate censures from Intel veterans and its cronies: 

Quote:“Trump sides with Putin over US Intelligence” – CNN
“Did Trump Commit Treason at Putin Meeting?” – Newsweek, and
“Trump Slammed Over Disgrace, Disgusting Press Conference with Putin” – Newsweek.

Not one praised Trump for pursuing peace with Russia.
And yet, fellow Americans, it is curious to consider that there was no outrage after the 911 attacks in 2001 from any member of Congress, President Bush or the Corporate Media that the US intelligence community had utterly failed in its mission to keep the American public safe.
There was no reckoning, not one person in authority was held accountable, not one person who had the responsibility to ‘know’ was fired from any of the Intel agencies. Why is that?
As a result of  the corrupt foundation of the Russiagate allegations, Attorney General Bob Barr and Special Investigator John Durham appear hot on the trail with law enforcement in Italy as they have apparently scared the bejesus out of what little common sense remains among the Democratic hierarchy as if Barr/Durham might be headed for Obama’s Oval Office.
Barr’s earlier comment before the Senate that “spying did occur’ and that ‘it’s a big deal’ when an incumbent administration (ie the Obama Administration) authorizes a counter-Intelligence operation on an opposing candidate (ie Donald Trump) has the Dems in panic-stricken overdrive – and that is what is driving the current Impeachment Inquiry.
With the stark realization that none of the DNC’s favored top tier candidates has the mojo to go the distance, the Democrats have now focused on a July 25th phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which Trump allegedly ‘pressured’ Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden’s relationship with Burisma, the country’s largest natural gas provider.
At issue is any hanky panky involving Burisma payments to Rosemont Seneca Partners, an equity firm owned by Joe’s errant son, Hunter, who served on Burisma’s Board for a modest $50,000 a month.
Zelenskyy, who defeated the US-endorsed incumbent President Petro Poroshenko in a landslide victory, speaks Russian, was elected to clean up corruption and end the conflict in eastern Ukraine.  The war in the Donbass began as a result of the US State Department’s role in the overthrow of democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
Trump’s first priority on July 25th was Crowd Strike, a cybersecurity firm with links to the HRC campaign which was hired by the DNC to investigate Russian hacking of its server. 
The Dems have reason to be concerned since it is worth contemplating why the FBI did not legally mandate that the DNC turn its server over to them for an official Federal forensic inspection. 
One can only speculate…those chickens may be coming home to roost.
Days after an anonymous whistleblower (not to be confused with a real whistleblower like Edward Snowden) later identified as a CIA analyst with a professional history linked to Joe Biden, publicly released a Complaint against Trump. 
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the initiation of an ambiguous Impeachment Inquiry campaign with little specificity about the process.  The Complaint is suspect since it reads more like a professionally prepared Affidavit and the Dems consider Pelosi’s statement as sufficient to initiate a formal process that fails to follow the time-honored path of a full House vote predicating a legitimate impeachment inquiry on to the Judiciary Committee.
Of special interest is how the process to date is playing out with the House Intelligence Committee in a key role conducting what amounts to clandestine meetings, taking depositions and witness statements behind closed doors with a still secret unidentified whistleblower’s identity and voice obscured from Republican members of the Intel Committee and a witness testifying without being formally sworn in – all too eerily similar to East Germany.
The pretense of shielding the thinly veiled CIA operative as a whistleblower from public exposure can only be seen as an overly-dramatic transparent performance as the Dems have never exhibited any concern about protecting real whistleblowers like Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Bill Binney, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Julian Assange, Jeffrey Sterling and others who were left to fend for themselves as the Obama Administration prosecuted more true, authentic whistleblowers than any other administration since the Espionage Act of 1917.
As the paradigm shift takes its toll on the prevailing framework of reality and our decayed political institutions, (the FBI and DOJ come to mind as the Inspector General’s report is due at  week’s end), how much longer does the Democratic Party, which no longer serves a useful public purpose, deserve to exist?

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/e...ia-vietnam

Quote:Authored by Pepe Escobar via ConsortiumNews.com,
What is happening in Syria, following yet another Russia-brokered deal, is a massive geopolitical game-changer.

I’ve tried to summarize it in a single paragraph this way:

Quote:“It’s a quadruple win. The U.S. performs a face saving withdrawal, which Trump can sell as avoiding a conflict with NATO ally Turkey. Turkey has the guarantee – by the Russians – that the Syrian Army will be in control of the Turkish-Syrian border. Russia prevents a war escalation and keeps the Russia-Iran-Turkey peace process alive.  And Syria will eventually regain control of the entire northeast.”

Syria may be the biggest defeat for the CIA since Vietnam.
Yet that hardly begins to tell the whole story.
Allow me to briefly sketch in broad historical strokes how we got here.
It began with an intuition I felt last month at the tri-border point of Lebanon, Syria and Occupied Palestine; followed by a subsequent series of conversations in Beirut with first-class Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian, Russian, French and Italian analysts; all resting on my travels in Syria since the 1990s; with a mix of selected bibliography in French available at Antoine’s in Beirut thrown in.
The Vilayets
Let’s start in the 19thcentury when Syria consisted of six vilayets — Ottoman provinces — without counting Mount Lebanon, which had a special status since 1861 to the benefit of Maronite Christians and Jerusalem, which was a sanjak (administrative division) of Istanbul.
The vilayets did not define the extremely complex Syrian identity: for instance, Armenians were the majority in the vilayet of Maras, Kurds in Diyarbakir – both now part of Turkey in southern Anatolia – and the vilayets of Aleppo and Damascus were both Sunni Arab.
Nineteenth century Ottoman Syria was the epitome of cosmopolitanism. There were no interior borders or walls. Everything was inter-dependent.

Ethnic groups in the Balkans and Asia Minor, early 20th Century, Historical Atlas, 1911.
Then the Europeans, profiting from World War I, intervened. France got the Syrian-Lebanese littoral, and later the vilayets of Maras and Mosul (today in Iraq). Palestine was separated from Cham (the “Levant”), to be internationalized. The vilayet of Damascus was cut in half: France got the north, the Brits got the south. Separation between Syria and the mostly Christian Lebanese lands came later.
There was always the complex question of the Syria-Iraq border. Since antiquity, the Euphrates acted as a barrier, for instance between the Cham of the Umayyads and their fierce competitors on the other side of the river, the Mesopotamian Abbasids.
James Barr, in his splendid “A Line in the Sand,” notes, correctly, that the Sykes-Picot agreement imposed on the Middle East the European conception of territory: their “line in the sand” codified a delimited separation between nation-states. The problem is, there were no nation-states in region in the early 20thcentury.
The birth of Syria as we know it was a work in progress, involving the Europeans, the Hashemite dynasty, nationalist Syrians invested in building a Greater Syria including Lebanon, and the Maronites of Mount Lebanon. An important factor is that few in the region lamented losing dependence on Hashemite Medina, and except the Turks, the loss of the vilayet of Mosul in what became Iraq after World War I.
In 1925, Sunnis became the de facto prominent power in Syria, as the French unified Aleppo and Damascus. During the 1920s France also established the borders of eastern Syria. And the Treaty of Lausanne, in 1923, forced the Turks to give up all Ottoman holdings but didn’t keep them out of the game.

Turkish borders according to the Treaty of Lausanne, 1923.
The Turks soon started to encroach on the French mandate, and began blocking the dream of Kurdish autonomy. France in the end gave in: the Turkish-Syrian border would parallel the route of the fabledBagdadbahn — the Berlin-Baghdad railway.
In the 1930s France gave in even more: the sanjak of Alexandretta (today’s Iskenderun, in Hatay province, Turkey), was finally annexed by Turkey in 1939 when only 40 percent of the population was Turkish.
The annexation led to the exile of tens of thousands of Armenians. It was a tremendous blow for Syrian nationalists. And it was a disaster for Aleppo, which lost its corridor to the Eastern Mediterranean.

Turkish forces under entered Alexandretta on July 5, 1938.
This emergent Syria — out of conflicting Turkish, French, British and myriad local interests —obviously could not, and did not, please any community. Still, the heart of the nation configured what was described as “useful Syria.” No less than 60 percent of the nation was — and remains — practically void.Yet, geopolitically, that translates into “strategic depth” — the heart of the matter in the current war.To the eastern steppes, Syria was all about Bedouin tribes. To the north, it was all about the Turkish-Kurdish clash. And to the south, the border was a mirage in the desert, only drawn with the advent of Transjordan. Only the western front, with Lebanon, was established, and consolidated after WWII.
From Hafez to Bashar
Starting in 1963, the Baath party, secular and nationalist, took over Syria, finally consolidating its power in 1970 with Hafez al-Assad, who instead of just relying on his Alawite minority, built a humongous, hyper-centralized state machinery mixed with a police state. The key actors who refused to play the game were the Muslim Brotherhood, all the way to being massacred during the hardcore 1982 Hama repression.
Secularism and a police state: that’s how the fragile Syrian mosaic was preserved. But already in the 1970s major fractures were emerging: between major cities and a very poor periphery; between the “useful” west and the Bedouin east; between Arabs and Kurds. But the urban elites never repudiated the iron will of Damascus: cronyism, after all, was quite profitable.
Damascus interfered heavily with the Lebanese civil war since 1976 at the invitation of the Arab League as a “peacekeeping force.” In Hafez al-Assad’s logic, stressing the Arab identity of Lebanon was essential to recover Greater Syria. But Syrian control over Lebanon started to unravel in 2005, after the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, very close to Saudi Arabia, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) eventually left.
Bashar al-Assad had taken power in 2000. Unlike his father, he bet on the Alawites to run the state machinery, preventing the possibility of a coup but completely alienating himself from the poor, Syrian on the street.
What the West defined as the Arab Spring, began in Syria in March 2011; it was a revolt against the Alawites as much  as a revolt against Damascus. Totally instrumentalized by the foreign interests, the revolt sprang up in extremely poor, dejected Sunni peripheries: Deraa in the south, the deserted east, and the suburbs of Damascus and Aleppo.

Protest in Damascus, April 24, 2011. (syriana2011/Flickr)
What was not understood in the West is that this “beggars banquet” was not against the Syrian nation, but against a “regime.” Jabhat al-Nusra, in a P.R. exercise, even broke its official link with al-Qaeda and changed its denomination to Fatah al-Cham and then Hayat Tahrir al-Cham (“Organization for the Liberation of the Levant”). Only ISIS/Daesh said they were fighting for the end of Sykes-Picot.
By 2014, the perpetually moving battlefield was more or less established: Damascus against both Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS/Daesh, with a wobbly role for the Kurds in the northeast, obsessed in preserving the cantons of Afrin, Kobane and Qamichli.
But the key point is that each katiba (“combat group”), each neighborhood, each village, and in fact each combatant was in-and-out of allegiances non-stop. That yielded a dizzying nebulae of jihadis, criminals, mercenaries, some linked to al-Qaeda, some to Daesh, some trained by the Americans, some just making a quick buck.
For instance Salafis — lavishly financed by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — especially Jaish al-Islam, even struck alliances with the PYD Kurds in Syria and the jihadis of Hayat Tahrir al-Cham (the remixed, 30,000-strong  al-Qaeda in Syria). Meanwhile, the PYD Kurds (an emanation of the Turkish Kurds’ PKK, which Ankara consider “terrorists”) profited from this unholy mess — plus a deliberate ambiguity by Damascus – to try to create their autonomous Rojava.

A demonstration in the city of Afrin in support of the YPG against the Turkish invasion of Afrin, Jan. 19, 2018. (Voice of America Kurdish, Wikimedia Commons)
That Turkish Strategic Depth
Turkey was all in. Turbo-charged by the neo-Ottoman politics of former Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the logic was to reconquer parts of the Ottoman empire, and get rid of Assad because he had helped PKK Kurdish rebels in Turkey.
Davutoglu’s Strategik Derinlik (“Strategic Depth’), published in 2001, had been a smash hit in Turkey, reclaiming the glory of eight centuries of an sprawling empire, compared to puny 911 kilometers of borders fixed by the French and the Kemalists. Bilad al Cham, the Ottoman province congregating Lebanon, historical Palestine, Jordan and Syria, remained a powerful magnet in both the Syrian and Turkish unconscious.
No wonder Turkey’s Recep Erdogan was fired up: in 2012 he even boasted he was getting ready to pray in the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, post-regime change, of course. He has been gunning for a safe zone inside the Syrian border — actually a Turkish enclave — since 2014. To get it, he has used a whole bag of nasty players — from militias close to the Muslim Brotherhood to hardcore Turkmen gangs.
With the establishment of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), for the first time Turkey allowed foreign weaponized groups to operate on its own territory. A training camp was set up in 2011 in the sanjakof Alexandretta. The Syrian National Council was also created in Istanbul – a bunch of non-entities from the diaspora who had not been in Syria for decades.
Ankara enabled a de facto Jihad Highway — with people from Central Asia, Caucasus, Maghreb, Pakistan, Xinjiang, all points north in Europe being smuggled back and forth at will. In 2015, Ankara, Riyadh and Doha set up the dreaded Jaish al-Fath (“Army of Conquest”), which included Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Qaeda).
At the same time, Ankara maintained an extremely ambiguous relationship with ISIS/Daesh, buying its smuggled oil, treating jihadis in Turkish hospitals, and paying zero attention to jihad intel collected and developed on Turkish territory. For at least five years, the MIT — Turkish intelligence – provided political and logistic background to the Syrian opposition while weaponizing a galaxy of Salafis. After all, Ankara believed that ISIS/Daesh only existed because of the “evil” deployed by the Assad regime.
The Russian Factor

Russian President Vladiimir Putin meeting with President of Turkey Recep Erdogan; Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov standing in background, Ankara, Dec. 1, 2014 Ankara. (Kremlin)
The first major game-changer was the spectacular Russian entrance in the summer of 2015. Vladimir Putin had asked the U.S. to join in the fight against the Islamic State as the Soviet Union allied against Hitler, negating the American idea that this was Russia’s bid to restore its imperial glory. But the American plan instead, under Barack Obama, was single-minded: betting on a rag-tag Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a mix of Kurds and Sunni Arabs, supported by air power and U.S. Special Forces, north of the Euphrates, to smash ISIS/Daesh all the way to Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor.
Raqqa, bombed to rubble by the Pentagon, may have been taken by the SDF, but Deir ez-Zor was taken by Damascus’s Syrian Arab Army. The ultimate American aim was to consistently keep the north of the Euphrates under U.S. power, via their proxies, the SDF and the Kurdish PYD/YPG. That American dream is now over, lamented by imperial Democrats and Republicans alike.
The CIA will be after Trump’s scalp till Kingdom Come.
Kurdish Dream Over
Talk about a cultural misunderstanding. As much as the Syrian Kurds believed U.S. protection amounted to an endorsement of their independence dreams, Americans never seemed to understand that throughout the “Greater Middle East” you cannot buy a tribe. At best, you can rent them. And they use you according to their interests. I’ve seen it from Afghanistan to Iraq’s Anbar province.
The Kurdish dream of a contiguous, autonomous territory from Qamichli to Manbij is over. Sunni Arabs living in this perimeter will resist any Kurdish attempt at dominance.
The Syrian PYD was founded in 2005 by PKK militants. In 2011, Syrians from the PKK came from Qandil – the PKK base in northern Iraq – to build the YPG militia for the PYD. In predominantly Arab zones, Syrian Kurds are in charge of governing because for them Arabs are seen as a bunch of barbarians, incapable of building their “democratic, socialist, ecological and multi-communitarian” society.

Kurdish PKK guerillas In Kirkuk, Iraq. (Kurdishstruggle via Flickr)
One can imagine how conservative Sunni Arab tribal leaders hate their guts. There’s no way these tribal leaders will ever support the Kurds against the SAA or the Turkish army; after all these Arab tribal leaders spent a lot of time in Damascus seeking support from Bashar al-Assad.  And now the Kurds themselves have accepted that support in the face of the Trukish incursion, greenlighted by Trump.
East of Deir ez-Zor, the PYD/YPG already had to say goodbye to the region that is responsible for 50 percent of Syria’s oil production. Damascus and the SAA now have the upper hand. What’s left for the PYD/YPG is to resign themselves to Damascus’s and Russian protection against Turkey, and the chance of exercising sovereignty in exclusively Kurdish territories.
Ignorance of the West
The West, with typical Orientalist haughtiness, never understood that Alawites, Christians, Ismailis and Druze in Syria would always privilege Damascus for protection compared to an “opposition” monopolized by hardcore Islamists, if not jihadis.  The West also did not understand that the government in Damascus, for survival, could always count on formidable Baath party networks plus the dreaded mukhabarat — the intel services.
Rebuilding Syria
The reconstruction of Syria may cost as much as $200 billion. Damascus has already made it very clear that the U.S. and the EU are not welcome. China will be in the forefront, along with Russia and Iran; this will be a project strictly following the Eurasia integration playbook — with the Chinese aiming to revive Syria’s strategic positioning in the Ancient Silk Road.
As for Erdogan, distrusted by virtually everyone, and a tad less neo-Ottoman than in the recent past, he now seems to have finally understood that Bashar al-Assad “won’t go,” and he must live with it. Ankara is bound to remain imvolved with Tehran and Moscow, in finding a comprehensive, constitutional solution for the Syrian tragedy through the former “Astana process”, later developed in Ankara.
The war may not have been totally won, of course. But against all odds, it’s clear a unified, sovereign Syrian nation is bound to prevail over every perverted strand of geopolitical molotov cocktails concocted in sinister NATO/GCC labs. History will eventually tell us that, as an example to the whole Global South, this will remain the ultimate game-changer.