Syrian Chaos: Can this end well?

Well, there's a few other things wrong there:

1. Late Romans also used a longer sword called a Spatha, which was an evolution of the same design that replaced the Gladius.
2. The uniform equipment of the Roman army is much over-exaggerated.
3. Dude dieing of an infection days afterwards is not at all a battlefield consideration. Or even very probable, because they would keep on stabbing you until the point was moot.
4. Barbarians didn't use two-handed swords either, because...
5. Until the late Roman period nobody had the metallurgy or quality of metal ore required to make such a weapon. Nobody even had the choice, and when the Roman had the choice to make longer weapons, they did.

The Atlantic and, I assume, others are reporting mounting evidence of chemical weapon use in Syria in December. I read back a few pages and I saw some "will he really do it?" posts but I don't believe this has been reported yet. My apologies if I'm mistaken.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2013/01/Evidence-syria-used-chemical-weapons-stacking/61299/

Increasing confirmation of suspicions might be a better way to put it.

That's been floating around for a month or so, and still seems just as unconfirmed. To an extent "Riot Control Agent" also doesn't have quite the same ring as Mustard Gas or Sarin.

I was tempted to come back and suggest that riot control agents might have been used, because they are occasionally fatal.

...On the other hand, that is an awesome chemical weapon. Maybe Assad just wants to party.

If it's true such toxins were used, it looks like Assad is desperately walking the line on what constitutes full on "Chemical Weapons", looking for as much edge as he can get while stopping just short of pissing off the Russians and Chinese enough to lose their support.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/01/2013130165625330449.html

Some really striking war photography from Damascus. NWS, includes death, etc.

A painful, drawn-out death penalty for anyone who fucks with an architectural landmark like a mosque is my one vice.

More seriously, seeing guys who look like suburban dads get shot is just unsettling.

Are you just tuning in? What did you expect was happening? It's not great to see, but that's pretty minor compared to the mass of brutal images that have been coming out of Syria for nearly two years.

Amazing photography! The photographer is crazy brave. I have a colleague who used to work at Reuters and she tells really interesting stories of the special safe they kept the 'expenses' for the war correspondents in - complete with gold, and large scads of very used US dollar bills.

Is Nike sponsoring that war?

I knew it was happening, but I hadn't looked to photos of it much. I'm a bad news consumer, I guess.

I went back to look for the Nike logos and one other thing just struck me - there are several shots of a Free Syrian Army member getting shot and ultimately dying. You know what you don't see - heaps of blood. In fact it is really hard to even make out where he is hit and wounded. Just goes to show much modern "military" first person shooters overdo the blood fountains.

This is not what I would call a representative sample. While I would never claim modern FPS set a high standard for accuracy in many things, the visually apparent damage done from one casualty scenario to another varies widely, even with the same weapons.

The Daily Telegraph interviews a female sniper, one of the few female Syrian rebel fighters.

A lot of interesting specifics in that article, not least of which is the reference to Hamas training. I tend to be inherently cynical about these things, but thanks for pointing that out.

On the other hand, I think you're right to be cynical. The Dragunov she's reported to be shooting with; well, isn't.

That may just be reporters knowing nothing about guns.

Huh. They changed the photo when I first posted the link. Originally instead of the female sniper they had a photo of a 1st-person perspective looking through a scope down a street.

There was a similar story about a woman with a gun over at aljazeera a while ago:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/01/201312871343706714.html

Well, that and the pattern of story. It's not that these things don't happen, but it just seems to be connecting too many dots. I mean, I know how the US military airbrushes people for PR sometimes, and that's really little league in some ways compared to what insurgents do in that capacity.

My perhaps misguided impression is that being a reporter in a war zone would correct that shortcoming awfully quick. The editor back home is a different matter, he might decide to punch up the article a little bit without bothering with research.

I see what you mean. Some details you sort of expect people to share because the old guys like to take the piss out of the younger ones or whatever (see: "Syrian rebel bakes delicious pastries"). Personal tragedy on the other hand generally isn't talked about and rarely come out as anything but a simple statement of fact without any grand meaning attached to it; because people in a PTSD state have a tendency to be bad at creating or articulating coherent thoughts on all the messed up shit they're coping with. So the complete narrative is a little suspect.

A last unrelated point is that a lot of snipers seem to be very disturbing people.

I don't mean that part, so much, fwiw. I just mean the overall process of having the two children killed, the Hamas training, the dramatic photo with the unDragunov, the implied equality stuff, and so on. It just pushes propaganda buttons, although it's just as likely it's simply an unappealing journalistic frame and that I'm kind of jaded.

The Daily Telegraph has a different version of the story dated to one day earlier. For Sheepherder's benefit, it's now an FN FAL. I forget if I just misread the other version but this is the tack this one has:

Sometimes truth is more cliche than fiction, he wrote before imploding into a logic-hipster black hole.

It's easy to see propaganda in such front line reports, especially ones that "feel good" (payback!) in an otherwise nasty affair. Certainly both sides can benefit from propaganda and have plenty of reason to use it.

I would imagine though that given the staggering civilian casualties cliches like someone becoming a soldier because their family was killed are a common affair. Plenty of opportunity for someone to feel like they have nothing to lose.

I probably worded that badly, I'm not suspicious of every individual event in that sequence, just the sequence as a whole all meshing together in a neat little story to fire up the warriors and foreign observers. It's very much the sort of thing that gets carefully cultivated as agitprop, and repeated with embellishment and confabulation.

The polymorphic rifle is hilarious though.

I am nto a gun person, but one thing JA2 has taught me is that the picture in the National Post of the woman in question is not holding either of a "Dragonov" (as the article still states) nor an FN FAL.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/0...eppos-female-sniper-vows-to-take-her-revenge/

She has one in the publicity stills highly journalistic photos featured in the Telgraph and Daily Mail. But the video (from AP) shows a different rifle again (I cant identify). It might be the same as the one in the National Post article.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-children-killed-airstrike.html#axzz2K83Eo5O3

So, the rebels have quite a bit invested in her.

The rifle in the daily mail article is a FN FAL (or one of the numerous knock offs)

The improvised weaponry of the Free Syrian Army. Including a console-controlled machinegun mounted on top of an improvised armoured vehicle!

Ew. Not even the PS1 Dual Analog Controller.

Hey, they aren't the US Army!

Some of the mortars and shells made on the lathes are surprisingly precise

He installed the iron sights mod because he's hardcore. I bet he's playing ironman with no saves.

Hey Lum or someone else who knows about such things: is the Bath party in Syria the same as that in Iraq? Do they have a coherent ideology beyond "strongman stays in power"?

They're related but have been different for a long time. Wikipedia's got the Silmarillion version.

That doesn't look like a tank getting hit. That looks suspiciously like a round cooking off in an overheated breech.

I can't figure out what the guy running away was about. I can see him prior to the explosion, I think, but the explosion itself certainly fits what you describe.

Some sites are reporting it as an RPG hit from behind, it's hard to tell.

Yep, it's another tank derp. If you go frame by frame you can see the RPG coming in from second story on the street side of the building. That's with the other tank watching the rear.

Must have just caught it while loading.