Podcast Friday on Sunday, as one does - Exploding Hezbollah

[frandroid]

Popular Front - Exploding Pagers, Carpet Bombing, and a Dead Nasrallah

Popular Front is a podcast that covers armed conflict around the world, particularly resistance struggles, and gets into all kinds of obscure corners of weapons geekery and sometimes the most obscure insurgencies and related topics you can think of. Jake Hanrahan is a pretty good host but my level of interest from one episode the other varies greatly.

This episode though really hits it out of the park, thanks in great part to guest Elia Ayoub. Ayoub himself hosts another very excellent radical Middle Eastern politics podcast, The Fire These Times – Voices From the Periphery. So I thought this would be a simple post-mortem of the Nasrallah assassination, and it was that. But it was also a pretty good primer of the history and politics of Nasrallah's Hezbollah. It's not laid out in chronological order, but Ayoub is so knowledgeable that he just expounds about this stuff through the conversation with Hanrahan. This is episode is very anti-campist, and takes good care to highlight how while leftists can support the ontological point of the right of resistance and insurgent violence against an oppressor, they politically should not be supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, because they really aren't our friends. (Actually that's partly a point taken from a different Podcast Friday post that's sitting on my To Be Written shelf in my brain, but it's almost as explicit here as well.)

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THIS IS REVOLUTION ＞podcast - EP. 719: WHAT'S GOING ON WITH THE PKK? ft. Djene Bajalan

Another primer! This time with Prof. Djene Bajalan, who talks about the events related to the recent letter Abdullah Öcalan enjoining the PKK to lay down weapons. The host is pretty clueless but thankfully, he knows to just shut up and let Bajalan speak, which he does at length. It's a short and unvarnished history of the PKK and some other parts of the Kurdish freedom struggle at large, in particular its relation with Hafez al-Assad in Syria, where I did learn/refresh some things. Like the other episode above, this is not too didactic and comes out in a meandering but accessible way as well.

Time to get my bread before the bakery closes...

Comments

[ioplokon]

Yeah it feels pretty lonely sometimes being like, you do not have to hand it to Hezbollah/Hamas/Assad/etc...

Do you have any reading to suggest to catch upon Syria? I feel like I'm a few months behind now. (Can't do podcasts on anything serious bc it is in one ear & out the other)

[frandroid]

I can't think of any article at the moment... But really there hasn't been that much happening since Assad fell. Israel bombed the Syrian Navy, air defenses and Air Force to smithereens, a couple massacres of Alawites (it could have been a lot worse), and a deadlock between the HTS government and the SDF on how to integrate Rojava in this new state, in particular how to integrate the SDF itself. (The SDF wants to keep its units whole, HTS wants to disband SDF's units and integrate its soldiers as it sees fit.) Turkey was talking about moving some troops to three Syrian military bases and Israel also bombed these. Syria is still under paralyzing US sanctions and no Gulf countries have committed money to reconstruction yet, because no Arab country (other than Qatar) is interested in empowering Turkey. It's been surprisingly quiet other than Israel's bombing runs. I think a lot of the country is just exhausted.