Robert Inlakesh Mint Press News

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Iran’s Army has revealed a new drone that carries a warhead twice the weight of the previous generation, as Tehran threatens a war without limits in retaliation for US-Israeli military operations – MintPress News’ Robert Inlakesh looks at the latest developments in the regional war, the economic fallout and weapons that are being deployed on the battlefield.

Yemen’s Armed Forces under the command of the Sana’a based government continue to advance upon new positions along multiple fronts, while striking vital targets deep within Saudi Arabia. The Ministry of Defense in Riyadh was struck with a ballistic missile, while large volleys of varying types of projectiles have taken out a series of targets at ARAMCO facilities and Saudi oil fields themselves.

In this Thursday’s edition of The Target, we look at the latest drone footage from the frontlines inside Yemen, as Saudi-backed PLC forces suffer rising casualties and equipment losses, while also analysing the new Iranian strike strategy in the Strait of Hormuz. Reports emerged of US strikes on an Iranian missile launch platform, which are yet to be formally announced, as oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz are running into mines planted by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)’s Navy.

Inlakesh provides an analysis of the current predicament, looking at US President Donald’s direct threats to strike Iran, the Iranian counter-threats that they will launch the Father Of All Bombs (FOAB), in response to US claims that they are preparing to use the Mother Of All Bombs (MOAB).

In this episode, the reason why Iranian armed forces are so difficult to significantly damage is explained. The newly revealed Arash-3 drones are being manufactured by the Iranian regular army (Artesh)’s own independent production lines, not being built to operate independent of GPS and with a 100 kilogram warhead, opposed to the previous models 50 kilogram warhead.

This stream’s analysis points out that the Artesh is separate from the IRGC, which has its separate drone and missile arsenal, operating through what is known as the Mosaic Defense structure. What this means is that the Iranian armed forces operate on a command structure that is autonomously operated by region, giving tremendous decision making power to local generals. It enables the Iranians to avoid any significant degradation to their ability to continue operations, even when more senior commanders operating on a national level are assassinated or injured in enemy attacks.

We also look into the recent escalation in southern Syria, the Israeli occupation forces executing a Syrian man with Down Syndrome, and its agenda to use separatist militias to carve out a greater zone of control inside the south of the country.
Israel has meanwhile prepared its air defences and shelters for the renewal fighting with Iran, raising its security readiness, as it also heads into its own national elections. Will Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu carry out his threats to strike Tehran and go after its nuclear facilities, or is the US-Israeli attack going to happen after the US midterms as President Trump claims?

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Robert Inlakesh on Iran, Yemen, Syria and the Regional War

Edited from the supplied transcript for clarity and readability. Timestamps, verbal fillers, repeated starts and nonverbal sounds have been removed. The speaker’s arguments, opinions and substantive remarks are retained. This transcript has not been checked against the recording. Unclear wording is marked in brackets; speech from embedded video clips that was not included in the supplied text has not been reconstructed. Section headings are editorial additions.

Robert Inlakesh: Welcome to the Target Stream for MintPress News. I’m your host, Robert Inlakesh.

Iran has unveiled new attack drones, escalated its strikes in the Strait of Hormuz, causing gas prices to spike, and says that the escalation of the war will be without limits. This comes as Yemeni missiles have struck Saudi Arabia’s Defense Ministry in Riyadh and destroyed Aramco facilities. It also appears that the U.S. has launched an attack on southern Iranian territory.

There’s an important escalation occurring in Syria that we will cover today, and we’ll look at footage coming out of the battlefield and more.

Before we begin, I wanted to bring your attention to an urgent call to action from all of us here at MintPress News.

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Trump’s rhetoric and the prospect of further strikes on Iran

Things are heating up across the region. We’re seeing photos emerge of the Israelis deploying more air defenses toward their northern borders—not that they’ve ever declared their border, but they’re moving air defenses north.

We’ve heard that they’ve moved air defenses and even radars into southern Syria. We’re going to talk about what’s happening in Syria and why it’s so important later in the stream.

We have also heard that there has been a U.S. attack on sovereign Iran. This is an image, and some footage also emerged claiming to show the results of the strike. We heard that launchers in southern Iran were targeted. We didn’t get any further information.

However, Iran appears to have escalated its strikes and the number of cruise missiles it is firing at vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. That, combined with what Yemen has been doing, has driven oil prices up.

Just before we came on stream today, Donald Trump said they were going to bomb Iran even more. He was also crashing out today. We’ll take a look at that before we look at some of this footage.

Trump says Iran is doing everything it can to drive up oil prices. In the midst of this crash-out, he now claims they’re evil—“They’re so evil”—and that 75,000 Iranian protesters have been killed in six months by the “evil Iranian regime.”

Those numbers have bumped up quite a bit from the 50,000 he was saying just a few months ago. In case you were wondering, there have been no protests across Iran in that time. The only protests that have happened are in favor of the government. People are still coming out daily, packing the streets in Iran, demanding that their armed forces continue to defend the country and vowing allegiance to their leadership.

We haven’t seen any riots or protests against the government. So where this extra 25,000 killed protesters came from, we don’t know.

Before we move on and look at what’s actually happening, I’ve got to say: U.S. propaganda used to be good. It used to be premium nonsense—high-quality, convincing nonsense. Now it’s just bumping up these numbers arbitrarily. It doesn’t align with reality at all.

I think the U.S. leadership, and Western leaderships in general, are so out of touch with their populations that they think we’ll believe anything they throw at us, and that we’re impressed with their rhetoric.

The Jerusalem Post reported that Donald Trump said he’s going to hit Iran with the “mother of all bombs.” Iran has come out and said it has built the “father of all bombs.” They’re calling it the biggest bomb in the world. I have no clue what they’re referencing there.

Some people are speculating that means a nuclear bomb. I don’t think that’s what they’re actually saying. But they’re calling it the “father of all bombs,” saying it will shock Israel and the United States and will find its way to targets.

Escalation in the Strait of Hormuz

Here’s some footage emerging of the damage being done. This is from one of the vessels recently hit in the Strait of Hormuz. This is the sort of damage being done to these tankers.

Trump is arguing that more oil is transiting the Strait of Hormuz than before the war. The reality doesn’t match up with that, but that is what he’s claiming.

Then you have the stark reality. Here’s footage published by the IRGC Navy. Again, all the footage we play here is for educational purposes; it is not an endorsement.

Here’s footage of another tanker that was hit. It appears this one may have been hit by a mine. Trump is not very happy about the Iranians mining the Strait of Hormuz. Of course, that is something the U.S. already claimed it had dealt with. They said they demined the strait and got rid of all these mines. Well, now the Strait of Hormuz is mined again.

When you hit a mine and you’re commanding a tanker, or any kind of vessel passing through water anywhere, a mine is much more dangerous than the kinds of cruise missile or drone attacks the Iranians have typically been carrying out against ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

The mine can often create such damage that the ship could break in half. Even if they can tow the boat away, they’re never going to be able to use that vessel again because the structural damage is so dangerous. It’s gone. It just lies in a junkyard. That’s evidently the result of those mines.

That’s also why it has an impact on the market, as it is now. I think Brent crude futures got up to $114 per barrel today. It’s shooting up. There is nothing the Trump administration can do to stop this.

Iranian drones and the mosaic defense strategy

Amid that, the Iranians have unveiled a new generation of their Arash drone. There was footage, and we’ll play that in a moment. I’ll put it on screen now, actually.

This is an interview conducted by Iranian national media. You see him in one of these underground facilities. This is Iran’s army, not the IRGC.

The Iranian army has its own drone production facilities and its own kinds of drones. This is different from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC. The weapons you’re seeing the Iranians produce here are separate, and they have separate production lines for them.

They’re achieving new advancements and mass-producing drones that operate independently of GPS. That means they can’t be jammed, right? That is their great advantage. Their capabilities are improving with these drones. Again, this is the Iranian army.

The Iranian army has its own stockpile of drones. It typically uses these Arash drones, and they’re calling this the Arash 3. During the 40-day war, the Iranian regular army was using Arash drones with 50-kilogram warheads. Now they’ve jumped to 100-kilogram warheads, so they’re going to deliver a more devastating payload.

Another element to remember is that Iran has these different forces within the country. When the United States talks about trying to degrade Iranian military capabilities, which it proved incapable of doing last time around, it isn’t explaining to its audience that there are so many different actors to go after.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps collaborates with the Artesh, the regular army, but is separate from it. The IRGC has its own drones and missiles and more advanced capabilities. It operates separately from the regular army. Both have their special forces. The regular Iranian army also has dedicated drone units.

Another element is what’s known as a mosaic defense strategy. This graphic is just a demonstration to give you an idea of how things work. It is not completely accurate, so don’t take it as fully accurate.

Different commanders in different regions run the show. They operate semiautonomously and can make their own decisions to carry out different operations. You can imagine the IRGC as basically a separate armed force that aligns with the Iranian army.

Then you have the Iranian army. Its capabilities are developing. It has massive stockpiles and its own bases. You also have the Basij, a volunteer paramilitary group that can mobilize around a million people and has its own capabilities. On top of that, there are different levels of Iranian security forces. That should be kept in mind.

What another round of war could mean

Donald Trump is now saying he’s going to attack Iran and do more bombing. That’s the latest we’ve heard from him. In preparation, the U.S. has been evacuating troops and diplomats from Middle East posts, according to NBC News.

Iran has said that the war it will engage in when a large-scale attack occurs will be all-out. There won’t be any limits. According to IRGC officials, that includes going after American and Israeli officials; they won’t hold back from firing upon them. That’s important to note.

Israel has also been carrying out mock raids on Iran, flying its fighter jets over Iraqi territory. We heard reports yesterday about them doing that earlier in the week. They also did it again last night.

This is the Jewish Chronicle’s framing of it, somehow linking this to Ansar Allah, or what they call the Houthis, which doesn’t make much sense.

The withdrawal of U.S. military assets from bases in the Persian Gulf and the preparations being made are for an all-out war. We’re not just talking about strikes like the alleged strikes in southern Iran within the past 24 hours. We’re talking about a large-scale bombing campaign.

What they’re trying to do is hide the fact that they’re evacuating people, readying their forces and conducting these mock raids and exercises over Iraqi airspace. They’re trying to claim this has something to do with Yemen, which it most emphatically does not. This is an attack perhaps being prepared on Iran.

This is why I went into how Iran’s armed forces and security forces work. The U.S. and Israel have tried to destroy Iran’s armed forces and degrade its military capabilities. Even with Iran’s air defenses, there is now evidence that they have rebuilt their weapons and are ready for a new round. They’re producing, and they have larger stockpiles now than at the beginning of the 40-day war launched by the U.S. and Israel on February 28.

This strategy of destroying Iran militarily is obviously not going to work. They can use their “mother of all bombs.” They can bomb nuclear facilities or whatever it is. People have even said that perhaps tactical nuclear weapons could be used.

Some of these facilities are built with nuclear weapons being used against them in mind. Even if they’re reckless enough to use them, it’s not guaranteed that a nuclear weapon will penetrate these facilities.

Bear in mind that some of Iran’s underground missile bases have been attacked over two dozen times, and it has done basically very minimal damage. Iran has consistently been able to dig out the entrances and exits to its bases and continue firing.

The Israeli elections are coming up on the 27th, which is why a lot of people are speculating that there could be an escalation. There is the potential that Benjamin Netanyahu could be voted out of power. The polls reflect that he is basically level with his opposition, although some suggest the opposition bloc will get a few more seats.

It doesn’t look like either side will get enough seats to form a new government. That’s how it appears, anyway. But another round of escalation could delay the elections. Maybe Netanyahu believes he can benefit from delaying them in this way.

The only real way for the Israelis and the U.S. to do damage against Iran is to go after civilian infrastructure: power plants, water desalination facilities and so on. But Iran has something like 500 power plants and stations around the country that you would have to destroy. These are not easy targets to take out instantly. You have to bomb many of them multiple times.

There is an enormous number of targets just in energy infrastructure. Then there’s oil infrastructure, Iranian ports and desalination facilities. But desalination facilities aren’t actually that integral to Iran functioning because most of the country doesn’t use them. Maybe they’re going to bomb dams and things like that.

The reaction will be to strike infrastructure back in Israel and the Persian Gulf. How long they can take that is a big question. Ultimately, we’re looking at what appears to be a suicide mission.

The clock is ticking for the Trump administration. He’s coming up to the midterms. Gas prices are going through the roof. Inflation is getting worse. We’re seeing tensions, protests and riots break out across Europe. There are a lot of repercussions and blowback from this war continuing.

The war has not stopped. There have been skirmishes between Iran and the U.S., but the war has also moved to other fronts. It moved to the Lebanon front. Now, in terms of the most intense warfare, it has moved primarily into Yemen.

Oil infrastructure is being blown up. There is only a limited amount of time they can keep doing this before there are tremendous repercussions for these Western leaderships.

If they bomb all of Iran’s infrastructure and still come out empty-handed, what comes of this entire war? What will the blowback ultimately be? These are important questions that have to be asked.

The war in Yemen and the Red Sea

As we’re on the topic of Yemen, here’s footage from Riyadh today. This is reportedly footage of the Defense Ministry getting hit. Here’s more footage of the Yemeni ballistic missile attack on Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

Saudi air defenses are failing to shoot down these munitions. Ansar Allah, or in the corporate media, “the Houthis,” often only need to fire one munition at their targets. They’re getting through and hitting them with great precision.

They’ve been targeting Saudi oil fields on the east coast. Today, they targeted Aramco facilities in [place name unclear in supplied text] on the west coast, the Red Sea coastline, of Saudi Arabia.

This footage is a few days old, but it’s important to note that the Yemeni armed forces of the Ansar Allah government in Sanaa have managed to take more territory surrounding the Bab el-Mandeb area and are encircling forces backed by Saudi Arabia. This is a major embarrassment to the Saudis.

The Saudis previously launched Operation Yemen’s Dawn, using 100 fighter jets to carry out more than 1,000 airstrikes in the opening round. They used what are called the Southern Giants Brigades. Their officers and strongest fighters are really composed of ex-al-Qaeda and ex-Daesh, ex-ISIS fighters.

They stormed forward and tried to seize Bab el-Mandeb. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait is a key economic chokepoint, very important to oil and gas prices.

Let’s zoom in so we have a better view. It gives access to the Red Sea and, through the Suez Canal, into Europe.

When the Yemeni forces managed to take Bab el-Mandeb and Mayun Island, the Israelis and Emiratis had been constructing an airstrip there. The seizure of this island and the infrastructure being built on it were part of a grander strategy. We’ve talked about it on this show, but it’s important to rehash it.

That strategy also uses an alliance with the breakaway separatist state of Somaliland, and infrastructure on Socotra Island used to monitor Iran, to assert dominance across the region.

The Emiratis and Israelis built military bases and surveillance equipment on this island. Islands along the Red Sea coast were also being used in this Israeli strategy.

The forces of Ansar Allah, whose capital is Sanaa, allege that the Israelis were seeking to launch a regime-change operation. They would participate with their air forces and launch a surprise attack against the Yemeni government in Sanaa to topple it. Ansar Allah alleges that it managed to preempt this.

The Israelis have been freaking out over this. They’re not very happy about the developments in the region.

We’ll also look at footage from the fighting on the ground between Yemen’s Ansar Allah government forces and the Saudi-backed forces of what is known as the Presidential Leadership Council.

If you follow mainstream corporate reporting, even in the Arabic-language media, they refer to the PLC, the Saudi-backed forces, as the “internationally recognized government.”

This internationally recognized government was formed in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. All of its leadership are living in Riyadh. They are proxies. They were not democratically elected. The Yemeni people had no say over this leadership council, created in 2022.

It doesn’t really have any sort of legitimacy, yet it is deemed the internationally recognized government. That’s quite interesting.

We hear that the Houthis, or Ansar Allah—which is a much bigger, broader movement encompassing many people, not just the Houthi family based in northern Yemen—are an Iranian proxy. Yet their leadership is not in Tehran, while the opposition’s leadership is based in Riyadh. You can draw your own conclusions.

That opposition also works and fights alongside al-Qaeda on the ground in Yemen. That’s not surprising if you follow this stream and have been keeping up with developments.

Drone warfare and fighting on the ground

Here’s footage that has recently come out of Yemen. Before we play it, this is not an endorsement. It is for educational purposes. We’re going to look at what’s been happening.

On top of the highly publicized missile attacks, especially against Saudi Arabia, Yemen, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, has been very effectively using FPV drones—first-person-view drones. Here, they’re hitting a tank.

Bear in mind that the tanks Ansar Allah’s forces are taking out are not like Israeli Merkava tanks. They’re not as well armored and don’t have active protection systems like the Israeli tanks. The hits on them are more devastating.

Another element is that, in using these FPV drones, they don’t need fiber-optic cables the way Hezbollah does. Hezbollah is dealing with the Israelis, who have jamming capabilities. The forces the Yemeni armed forces are up against are much less sophisticated.

This footage is all from the Marib area, east of Sanaa in northern Yemen. They’re hunting down military vehicles and Saudi-backed forces with these drones. This footage is sped up. That’s an attack on a vehicle; you can see that the individual manning it had fled.

What you’re watching is a dismantlement of those Saudi-backed forces on the ground. This is footage you won’t see broadcast in the corporate media.

Going back to the other point: Because these Saudi-backed forces don’t have jamming capabilities, it makes it a lot easier. Ansar Allah also has an abundance of these drones. These videos are coming out very frequently.

Now we’re looking at what I’ve previously called quadcopter drones. Technically, they have more than four propellers, but they’re typically described as quadcopter drones. They’re dropping unguided munitions.

We have to edit this footage. We can’t show direct hits because it will violate policies here. If you want to see the full videos, they’re uploaded elsewhere on our social media. You can go to X or our Telegram account and see the results.

Some people question what exactly happens. You see one of the fighters look up at the last moment before the munition hits, but we’ve had to edit out the results. They’re dropping antipersonnel munitions. Here’s another fighter looking up just before the munition hits.

They’re dropping these unguided antipersonnel munitions with insane accuracy. We’ve consistently seen videos documenting these attacks.

We also saw the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas in Gaza, use drones against Israeli soldiers at the beginning of what was called Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, carrying out similar operations. But the use of those kinds of drones and tactics didn’t last all that long.

Now you’re seeing hits on tanks that make them useless, and hits on vehicles, these Toyota trucks, taking them out of service. That is working against the Saudi-backed forces on the ground.

Saudi Arabia and its proxy forces regularly release claims, on a daily basis, about destroying more than 100 military vehicles belonging to Ansar Allah’s forces, the Yemeni armed forces. Yet we don’t get footage like this. Only one side is producing all the footage, giving us actual evidence and showing us the spoils after defeating the enemy in battle and pushing them back.

We’ve seen a number of attempted offensives. We saw one in southern Yemen near Bab el-Mandeb, an attempt to push through. Now we’re seeing advances by the Yemeni armed forces in the south to surround them. They’ve pushed back that attempted offensive.

We’ve seen lots of offensives in Marib. They get pushed back each time; they just get battered.

There’s also been more fighting on the Taiz front. That’s the major city where they’re currently clearing neighborhoods. During this time, the opposition forces have refused to surrender.

Instead of storming areas very violently and taking over quickly, as a lot of people anticipated, they’ve been doing it slowly. That has actually reduced the civilian death toll inside Taiz city.

There is, again, a lot of propaganda being pushed. We addressed this on the last stream, including some of the most effective propaganda being pushed by individuals like Sami Hamdi and others. If you want my rebuttal of that narrative, you can find it on our channel’s previous stream.

I go through it, explain the history of the Ansar Allah movement and explain the faults in the timeline presented by individuals like him.

You hear across the corporate media “Yemen’s Ansar Allah” or “the Houthis” used interchangeably. But the Houthis are a family; Ansar Allah is the movement. That’s why we use Ansar Allah here: It’s accurate.

Yemen’s political history and civilian casualties

Here’s an article from 2015 written by Ryan Grim. What he was able to obtain from former U.S. President Barack Obama—the one who greenlit the Saudi war on Yemen and backed it with logistical support and weapons supplies—was that Iran had actually told Ansar Allah not to move into the Yemeni capital of Sanaa in 2014. Iran had tried to stop them from making this decision.

Of course, the Obama administration carried out its own independent drone strikes and military activity across Yemen. But this was before the takeover and the deterioration of the situation on the ground in 2015.

The reason I’m showing this is that this is Obama admitting it. It was spoken about publicly at the time: Iran had urged Ansar Allah not to move into Sanaa in 2014, and they ignored Iran.

Some promote the idea that the Yemeni armed forces are an Iranian proxy and that the Houthis were working on behalf of Iran to take over Yemen. We’ve also heard others make two arguments.

One is about their being Zaydi Shia. There are Sunni and Shia Muslims; the Shia of Iran are Twelver Shia, while the Shia of Yemen are known as Zaydis. They’re different. Within the Zaydi faith is the concept of the right to rule being in the hands of descendants of the Prophet Muhammad.

Now, that is not something the Ansar Allah movement has ever publicly advocated as what it is going after. It is what the Saudis argue they do, and what people claim their whole movement is based on, but it isn’t what they claim.

Then people say they’re so controlled by Iran that they’re becoming Twelver Shia, the same sect as the Iranians. But that would mean the Zaydi belief about a divine right of only the Prophet’s descendants to rule would go away if they converted to Twelver Shiism. Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the leader of Ansar Allah, is from that lineage. So that does away with that argument. I thought it was important to bring that up.

Another development on the ground was a message that has since been deleted. It was published by—let’s just call it what it is—Saudi Arabia. They call themselves the Yemeni Defense Ministry, but this is written in Riyadh by people on Saudi Arabia’s payroll. Those individuals were chosen by Saudi Arabia to be part of this so-called Yemeni government, the PLC.

This message basically threatened Yemeni tribes, saying they shouldn’t gather in large numbers. They try to blame that on the “evil Houthis” recruiting young people, saying, “We may mistake it for a military gathering.” They encouraged people not to gather for these tribal meetings.

That was evidently a justification for bombing these meetings and Yemeni civilians. We spoke about this on the last show. Saudi attacks on urban areas have increased.

Saudi Arabia is using Israeli intelligence to bomb targets inside Yemen. Saudi pilots flying U.S.-supplied F-15 fighter jets are using Israeli targeting data. The same Israelis who put together target lists in Gaza to kill children are handing over intelligence and working with the Saudis to strike Yemen.

We’re seeing more civilian casualties coming out of Yemen. They’re hitting more civilian targets, and then we have these threats coming out again. That indicates that, unfortunately, perhaps the intention is to escalate attacks on civilian areas to put pressure on Ansar Allah.

In the past, this happened frequently. The Saudis bombed schools, mosques and funerals. At one funeral, because a number of Ansar Allah officials were attending, they bombed the funeral and then bombed first responders who came to help. They ended up killing more than 150 people and injuring more than 500.

The Saudis have done this for a while, even without Israeli intelligence, with U.S. help instead. In this case, they’re directly using Israeli aid to fight their war.

When this war began, Saudi Arabia started it by bombing Sanaa International Airport, killing more than 30 people. Over the years, they proceeded to bomb the airport more than 227 times. They even broke the recent ceasefire by bombing Sanaa International Airport to stop a civilian airliner from Iran landing there.

That is how the ceasefire deteriorated in July. But we hear that the Houthis started it, that they broke the ceasefire. That’s how we heard it reported.

We looked at a Reuters article published at the time that said the Houthis fired a missile, breaking the ceasefire in place since 2022. In that same article, they had an embedded video of the initial Saudi strikes on Sanaa International Airport, but the title read that the Houthis broke the ceasefire.

We also hear about a “Houthi-run” Yemeni Health Ministry, just like the “Hamas-run” Health Ministry in Gaza. The propaganda is atrocious when it comes to Yemen.

We have to keep in mind that, according to the United Nations and the leading human rights organizations, the party responsible for the largest number of direct civilian deaths and injuries in Yemen was Saudi Arabia’s air force. They were the number one cause of direct deaths, according to the authoritative sources. Attempts to tell you otherwise are fictitious.

The estimates for Yemeni people killed in Saudi airstrikes since 2015 range from around 9,000 at the low end to more than 20,000 at the high end. That’s the range of people killed by Saudi airstrikes.

The majority of people who have died in Yemen since 2015 died because of the siege imposed on the country and the port of Hodeidah by the Saudis. The United States sent its armada there and backed the Saudis at sea with its navy.

The Americans endorsed this attack on Yemen straight away. Within a month of the takeover of the capital by Ansar Allah and its allied forces, the U.S. had not only condemned it but fully backed and helped prepare a Saudi attack.

The Saudi attack included terror bombing and cluster munitions. The United States deployed its navy in support. The Israelis were on the side of the Saudis and Americans. They began acting covertly, as they did in the 1960s when they backed the Saudis during the North Yemen civil war.

The Israelis covertly backed the war effort, primarily for the United Arab Emirates. They were involved inside Yemen.

We have reached a point where hundreds of thousands of people have starved to death or died of preventable illnesses inside Yemen since March 26, 2015, when the attack happened and the blockade was imposed.

Saudi Arabia is responsible for the largest number of direct deaths, despite the presence of al-Qaeda and all these other groups fighting on the ground. Saudi Arabia is also responsible for the largest number of indirect deaths. I’ve heard propaganda going around, so it’s important to understand and keep that in mind.

We’ll go back to Yemen and Iran in a bit. Perhaps we’ll enter Syria in a different way.

Israeli operations in southern Syria

There have been major developments on the ground inside Syria. The first point we’re going to look at is what happened within the past 24 hours.

Israeli occupation forces are occupying a strip of southern Syria, which they call their buffer zone. It is beyond the occupied Golan Heights, also part of southern Syria.

They raided a village, and the Israelis executed a Syrian man with Down syndrome. They claimed he was a threat and was walking toward their forces. It’s utterly tragic. These sorts of incidents have been going on over the past years, and nothing happens to address them.

Here’s footage from the funeral. I obviously can’t show you the images of the man who was killed—not that it’s required here. Here they are next to his grave. This is the funeral procession. They were chanting against Israel. This is in the Daraa area of southern Syria.

That’s one development that has angered a lot of people, not just in Syria but across the region: executing a man with Down syndrome.

When they raided the village, they came with helicopters flying over the Daraa area. Maybe we should pull up a map so we know what we’re looking at when we talk about Syria. This leads into a development with larger implications.

Here’s the so-called buffer zone. The Israelis go way beyond it. You’ve got the occupied Golan Heights. The Israelis typically go into Quneitra and Daraa, into the countryside around these areas.

They do things like shoot tear gas at children coming home from school. If you’ve traveled to the West Bank—and I reported from the West Bank—this is the sort of thing you see them do there.

They’ve basically set up an occupation in southern Syria where they treat Syrians like cattle, like animals. They shoot at children. They come in and arbitrarily detain anyone they want. They can just kidnap you.

At least in the West Bank, people will normally know what happened to someone who was kidnapped—that they were taken—and eventually be able to inquire about which military prison they were taken into for doing absolutely nothing or being accused of throwing a stone.

But in Syria, they just disappear. They might get dumped back on some random land months later. They might disappear and you hear absolutely nothing about them. Or they might be bloodied up and thrown somewhere within a few hours.

Similarly, they believe Syria is like the West Bank: It was promised to them three billion, cajillion years ago, and they have this divine right to rule all this territory.

Israeli forces are now within the municipal boundaries of Damascus. They occupy this land. They have seized key water resources in southern Syria, secured them and kept them away from the Syrian people.

Their execution of this man with Down syndrome last night has just become normal. This is the new normal.

Not a single bullet is fired at the Israelis by the new Syrian government, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, formerly Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda wing inside Syria. They rebranded and said they split from al-Qaeda. They were backed by Israel, this group.

Now they’re in power, and it’s, “We can’t fight Israel because we have to repair our country and the economy.” The whole mission was supposedly to overthrow the government in Syria and then go fight for Palestine. But you can’t fight for Palestine; you can’t do anything when they’re starving right now.

They’ve closed all the borders to Gaza. People are struggling to find enough to eat. Prices for basic things like wheat, which is in low reserve in Gaza right now, are shooting through the roof. Prices are becoming astronomical, and there are warnings famine could set in again.

As that’s happening, Syria got sanctions lifted. It got off terrorist designation lists. It got back oil resources in the northeast that were formerly occupied.

Maybe it’s good to look at a map to demonstrate this. Syria’s oil fields were de facto occupied by the United States, which had forces in northeast Syria until regime change happened in December 2024. They controlled this northeastern portion, including the oil fields, with the help of their Kurdish SDF forces.

Now, because there is a U.S.-backed force and a U.S.-backed government in Damascus, they’ve made an agreement to integrate. Syria technically got access to its oil fields and its most fertile agricultural lands.

Yet people in different parts of Syria are struggling to put food on their tables. Energy prices have gone through the roof. Gas prices keep hiking. They were promised infrastructure, reconstruction and all of this.

At this point, the Syrian government can’t pay its armed forces. Again, they’re not a properly formed armed force, not a real army like the old Syrian Arab Army. They’re a collection of militias. It takes time to make them a real army.

All their strategic weapons were destroyed by Israel when regime change happened. Israel used the opportunity to go into the south and seize a swath of Syrian territory larger than Gaza. They occupied that amount of land, and now they’re carrying out these attacks.

When people like this poor man are executed—and many other people have been killed in Israeli bombings in southern Syria—there are so many ongoing human rights abuses. They kidnap people. We could go through these abuses in sovereign Syria for quite some time.

But the Syrian government doesn’t deploy its forces to the border, or to its own land in southern Syria, to fight Israel. It deploys them to Yemen.

Reports of Syrian fighters being sent to Yemen

There have been discussions between Syria and Saudi Arabia about deploying thousands of fighters. Initially, there was some denial that these discussions had happened. The number discussed in Foreign Policy magazine was around 10,000.

However, according even to Western corporate media sources, around 1,500 Syrian fighters have already been sent to Yemen. Some evidence has emerged that some of those fighters have been killed.

Multiple sources in the Arabic media, from different sides, have alleged that at the very least Syrian fighters are there. The Syrian government has been in these talks. This is a terrible idea.

For example, here’s a Foundation for Defense of Democracies piece about Syria sending its forces to Yemen. They’re advocating against doing it, saying it’s a mistake, while noting that they have in fact done it.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, FDD, is a pro-war think tank based in Washington, D.C., and pro-Israel all the way. It was involved in promoting the Iraq War and every war since. It has praised developments in Syria under the new leadership and advocated what that leadership should do next, trying to advise it.

Why would Syrian leaders who can’t pay their army send it to Yemen? Well, Saudi Arabia could pay some salaries. I think that is perhaps literally the calculation.

Will they send 10,000? I don’t think there’s any point, though it could happen. But even 1,500—why are you sending your forces?

According to the sources and reports coming out, this includes foreigners inside Syria. A convenient way to clear up the problem of foreign fighters is to send them to Yemen to get butchered: blown up by ballistic missiles and used as cannon fodder. A convenient way to get rid of them.

They’re willing to send forces to fight in Yemen, but they won’t fight the Israelis in sovereign Syria.

Another threat has come up, and we’ll return to that point in a moment. It has been emerging for some time.

Druze militias and the conflict in southern Syria

The big threat now, and Israel’s project across southern Syria, has involved the Druze. [Druze leader’s name unclear in supplied text] is a Druze leader. The Druze are a minority sect based in southern Syria, as well as in Lebanon and Palestine.

Their leadership has had disputes and fights, and there have been sectarian battles between the Druze and forces aligned with Damascus.

In July 2025, there were a number of ambushes and accusations from both sides. My understanding is that the Syrian government-aligned forces started it by killing people on the Druze side first. Then Druze factions started going back at them and killing them. Bedouin tribal militias came in to back the government side.

These separatist Druze militias got direct backing from the Israeli military. This is from August, where they’re talking about the Druze community being an integral part of Israel, basically advocating joining with the Israelis.

Before I go further, to finish what I was saying about the sectarian killing: It happened on both sides. Druze separatist militias would go into another area and massacre people from a Bedouin community, for example. There were accusations of people being thrown off roofs and all sorts of war crimes.

Similarly, the Syrian government-aligned forces and Arab tribal militias were accused of doing the same. Both sides were accused of war crimes and sectarian killing.

For everyone following events, the Israelis are obviously seeking their Greater Israel project. One pillar is conquering southern Syria.

For people who may not be aware, the Greater Israel vision associated with Oded Yinon, who wrote a paper explaining the strategy, didn’t advocate physically taking over all the territory across the region between the Euphrates and the Nile. It wasn’t openly advocating that Israel put a settlement in Iraq and completely dominate there.

If you look at Israel’s recently published security doctrine, the Israelis view the entire Arab world as a collection of tribes and sects, not sovereign countries. Yinon agreed with this. He believed Israel had to create an empire across the region to achieve Greater Israel.

Achieving an empire meant creating sectarian fights, infighting between different people, dismantling modern Middle Eastern states and getting them all killing and fighting each other.

Now the Israelis have these Druze separatist militias and gangs on their side in Suwayda, in the south of the country.

I don’t know why the names aren’t coming up here. Maybe we can fix that. What’s important to understand is that the Syrian state is worried about this.

There have recently been attacks by those Druze separatist militias on checkpoints belonging to the new Syrian security forces, killing a number of them. In retaliation, they’ve bombed back. That has been happening over the past few days, so they’ve moved more troops into the area.

It has also been revealed that Israel has been moving military hardware into Suwayda.

The proposed corridor through Syria

The Israelis have openly been conspiring to move radars into Suwayda in southern Syria. They’re providing logistical support, and there’s some evidence they’ve also been moving weapons into sovereign Syria.

Let’s pull this up and zoom in again. In Suwayda, the Israeli military has been using helicopters to transport equipment. We know from Israeli media that they had a direct communications room where the military supplied support for Druze militias on the ground. They began doing that in 2025.

Israel’s vision, which fits into the Greater Israel plot, is to have a Druze rump state in southern Syria. Then they would seek to take over the rest of this pocket. They already have their buffer zone, which reaches Mount Hermon. They would like to close this gap, which they believe would give them de facto access straight to the Iraqi border.

There are also sectarian tensions in the country. Kurdish forces that have been sort of abandoned by the United States are constantly having sectarian battles with Arab tribal militias in places like Deir ez-Zor, Hasakah and other areas. Israel could form alliances with those groups later. Then they would have what they call “David’s Corridor” all the way to the Euphrates.

That is a real Israeli plot. Israel wanted to establish its buffer zone and implement this strategy of creating a Druze breakaway state, and it had publicly advocated it since 2013. It was presenting plans to the Jordanians and Americans at that time.

It was too dangerous to try something like that then. But with the collapse of the former Syrian leadership and the new U.S.-backed leadership in place, they have the opportunity.

There’s no Syrian Arab Army with strategic weapons capable of doing much damage to the Israelis. They believe they can get away with this. They have to do it in phases.

If it is true that the Israelis are moving sophisticated technology and surveillance equipment in—they are definitely working with and arming the Syrian Druze militias—then it’s very clear what their intentions are, as well as those militias’ intentions toward the Israelis. They’re looking for separation.

That’s the Israeli plot. They want to use Syrian Druze militias as cannon fodder, get them to fight Damascus, and then get their zone in southern Syria that they can capture. That is possibly in the cards. It’s obviously very sad to see.

Previously, Netanyahu revealed that he had spoken directly with Ahmed al-Sharaa on the phone. Such an anti-Israel leadership, definitely going to fight for the ummah, a Sunni resistance leadership. I’m obviously being sarcastic.

According to Netanyahu, this direct phone call with Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani, happened around the conflict with the Druze. People get angry when you call him Golani, except that’s what he and his supporters called him throughout the war. They can’t bear you calling him another name. It’s sort of like Trump supporters, this cultish support with no critical thinking.

The phone call was what I was saying at the time had happened. The reason the Israelis were bombing Damascus and threatening Ahmed with strikes—they even bombed near the presidential palace at one point—was to signal to the new Syrian leadership: “Don’t step out of line. We’re going to do what we’re going to do. If you can’t pull your guys back from Suwayda, we’re going to eliminate you.”

It’s the relationship between a slave and a slave master. That’s what has happened here. Sometimes you have to lick the master’s boot, and that is what is happening.

People go, “But the Syrians condemned the killing of the man with Down syndrome.” I mean, [word unclear]—what resistance. You know what? Iran’s ballistic missiles and Hezbollah’s FPV drone attacks on Israeli soldiers pale in comparison to Damascus’s condemnations.

These same people condemned the former leadership under Bashar al-Assad as performative for doing exactly the same thing. Except back then, the Israelis weren’t invading Syrian villages, executing people with special needs, seizing more territory and kidnapping civilians every day.

People ask, “What do you expect them to do?” Well, I don’t expect an independent government to want to disarm its people in the south, or to listen to the Israelis in a conflict over its own sovereignty with Druze separatist militias, allowing those militias time to arm themselves, gain strength and collaborate with the Israelis.

If you’re a sovereign government, you would fight them. If you made your own decisions, you wouldn’t get a call from Netanyahu and then stop.

Competing interests in Syria

The danger is that if a conflict starts there, it could spiral out of control. The Syrian leadership may not be able to control its forces, especially the tribal militias.

If they can’t control them, another call could come from Netanyahu. If they can’t do anything about the predicament in Suwayda, an airstrike could take out the leadership. There’s a chance that might happen, because the Israelis at this point want utter chaos. They want to collapse all the states in the region.

Right now, they’re happy with this arrangement because Ahmed al-Sharaa ensures there is no resistance against Israel. He has gutted Palestinian resistance groups and arrested Islamic Jihad leaders inside Syria.

He arrested the head of the PFLP-GC for the Israelis and, according to reports, tortured him to get the locations of the bodies of Israeli soldiers captured in 1982 that were being kept in Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus.

Then the Israelis were apparently allowed to come in—the Mossad physically went to Damascus—and took these bodies, according to reports. Other reports say the Syrians physically handed them over. That’s just as bad.

They handed over the belongings of Eli Cohen, the most infamous spy in Syrian history. They allowed Israelis to tour military bases inside Syria and make documentaries. Israelis came openly to Damascus. Ahmed al-Sharaa openly has a call with Netanyahu.

Al-Shibani, his foreign minister, meets regularly with the head of the Israeli Mossad. They signed a joint fusion mechanism with the Israelis that includes commercial endeavors. All of this was done to signal: “We’re going to do whatever the United States wants.”

There is another influence inside Syria, and this is where competing interests work in the country: Turkey. Turkey has a large presence, particularly in the northwest, and a very large influence. Israel has influence in the south.

There have been a number of times when the Turkish military tried to deploy radars, air defense systems and things like that, and the Israelis instantly bombed the sites. They’ve even killed Turkish soldiers. Turkey just ignores it and doesn’t react. It doesn’t cut ties, just as it didn’t during the genocide.

Turkey wants its influence inside Syria and wants stability. Israel wants chaos. In this equation, the United States wants what is best for Israel’s stability. But Israel wants to collapse and destroy. The United States almost wants to protect the Israelis from themselves, because they could overplay their hand.

If the Israelis get heavily involved in Syria and this battle they appear to be planning in Suwayda breaks out, a lot of forces could end up participating. There are also resistance cells in places like Daraa in southern Syria that could start popping up and attacking the Israelis.

The Israeli army could get dragged into something inside Syria that spirals out of control. The Americans don’t want that. They also have to juggle their relationship with Turkey, a NATO member and ally. Turkey is not as important to the United States as Israel, but the U.S. wants to maintain the situation as best it can without everything collapsing. If it collapses, it has to favor the Israelis.

Turkey doesn’t want it to collapse because it wants to continue having influence in the country. This could screw all that up and put the Turks to the test. Either they throw their weight in—and the only way to do that is by arming, training and backing resistance forces against Israel—or they don’t. That is something they’re just not going to do.

Throughout the Gaza genocide, Turkey has provided the cheap energy supply Israel gets from Azerbaijan, which makes up a big portion of Israel’s cheap energy supplies. They’ve kept up their trade relationship despite Erdogan going to the United Nations and saying this and that.

Saudi Arabia uses Israeli intelligence to bomb Yemen and works with Israel to implement its agenda in the Red Sea and protect it. During the Gaza genocide, it allowed goods to pass through its territory and then Jordan to circumvent the blockade imposed by Yemen’s Ansar Allah forces in the Red Sea, which ended up bankrupting the Israeli port of Eilat.

The Saudis work hand in glove with them. There have been many secret meetings with Israelis over the years. More recently—and I’ve covered this a number of times, but it’s important to bring it up again—the heads of the Saudi and Israeli militaries were revealed to have attended a joint military retreat in Germany. They sat around discussing how bad Iran and Yemen are and what strategies they would employ together to combat them.

Regional governments and military alliances

We heard last week, and covered on the last stream, that the Egyptians were thinking of sending forces to fight in Yemen. Historically, that is a very bad idea. I won’t get into why today, but Egypt has historical experience with it. So, by the way, does Turkey.

It appears now that Sisi, the coup leader of the Egyptian government, has backed out of sending troops to Yemen. That is the best possible thing for him. I think he got a phone call saying, “You know the Suez Canal can be locked down just like that, right? Your economy is done.” I think that’s the call he got and what has been signaled.

Turkey, too: For some time, Erdogan was said to be considering sending troops into Saudi Arabia to fight Yemen, to respect the Mecca agreement. Then he said, “First, we have to pass it through parliament. It hasn’t been passed into legislation yet.” He started giving excuses, because ultimately it’s a trap.

All these countries may have elements of economic competition with the Israelis and slight differences in how they view things, especially the Turkish government. But one thing you hear sectarian people talk about is “Sunni governments.” There aren’t Sunni governments.

Maybe the only one you can argue really exists is in Afghanistan with the Taliban. That’s about it. The rest are rulers of countries with Sunni-majority populations underneath them. They sell propaganda to make those populations feel good, then work on the basis of pragmatism and realism. That is how they work as state actors. They’re not ideological.

If you look at Iran, for instance, it is ideological in how it operates. It still operates as a state, so it has certain constraints. It won’t behave like Hamas or Hezbollah because it has a lot of considerations as a state. But it’s not like these other countries.

Let’s look at what Netanyahu says about Saudi Arabia and the Arab world. This recently came up. Netanyahu has been letting a lot out recently, bragging about everything he does.

[Embedded video plays; its spoken content was not included in the supplied transcript.]

If you weren’t able to see the captions, what he was saying was that Saudi Arabia, with its public demands for a Palestinian state, says something else in private. That’s what all these regimes are like. There’s no difference in how they operate.

The Syria situation is incredibly concerning because you have one of these regimes, except Syria is not like Lebanon.

Lebanon has a “toilet regime,” as I call it, operating out of Beirut: Nawaf Salam and Joseph Aoun, the prime minister and president. They are puppets of the United States, picked by the United States for their positions.

They signed this memorandum of understanding with the Israelis, just as Ahmed al-Sharaa signed his and agreed to a joint fusion mechanism. The memorandum accepts the status quo and seeks to deescalate tensions while Israel retains the territory it occupies in southern Lebanon.

The difference is that Lebanon has resistance forces. Syria doesn’t allow a resistance force to exist. Syria doesn’t have resistance, so it can be taken advantage of.

It’s even worse than that. In Lebanon, there is Hezbollah, but also a large number of Palestinian resistance groups and camps, and many armed forces. The Amal movement is there, fighting alongside them too.

Lebanon is not a country you can easily take advantage of. There is a real fight, real resistance. There are calculations the Israelis have to make.

In Syria, small armed factions have announced themselves, but they will need time to build up if they’re going to do anything major against Israel.

On one side are militias that used to be based in Idlib, basically al-Qaeda militants—let’s call it what it is. Tribal militias from across the country can come in and ally with them, but they’re not a real army. Their orders now are to stop resistance.

They tried to disarm factions in the south. When they went to villages in Daraa and asked people to give up their weapons, the answer from different groups was basically a big middle finger: “Get out of my village or I’ll shoot you in the face.”

Those were the sorts of answers they got when they came around saying, “Give up your weapon, habibi.” It was, “I’ll give up all my bullets into you. Leave. Get out.” People still had weapons in the south, and there were tensions over attempts to disarm them.

If you care about your sovereignty as a government—a government that plays basketball with CENTCOM, has meetings with influential figures in the World Zionist Organization, has direct calls with Netanyahu, has a foreign minister who meets the head of the Mossad, has a joint fusion mechanism and sent Eli Cohen’s belongings back to the Israelis—then why do you arrest Palestinian resistance fighters and factions and make sure they can’t operate from your country?

You are a slave.

The sad thing is that many people, including people who are now part of the Syrian armed forces, would like to fight Israel. There are videos of them chanting in reference to the historic battle of Khaybar during the Prophet’s time, when he fought against the Jews in [location unclear in supplied text]. That’s one of the chants used to declare that they want to fight the Israelis.

But they’re not going to be allowed to do anything. The only way they’ll fight Israel is if it happens chaotically, almost by chance, and those forces get the ability to fight. Otherwise, the same project that happened elsewhere in the region is happening in Syria.

Iraq, Afghanistan and the consequences of regime change

There is a reason for this. Look at what happens if you ally with the United States. I’ve gone through this before, but it’s important to bring it back up.

They went in and destroyed Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government. They used Saudi territory in the Gulf to invade Iraq and take out the leadership. They told us they had to invade because Saddam killed his own people and had weapons of mass destruction.

The highest estimates are that Saddam Hussein killed about 250,000 of his own people, more than the civilian death toll inflicted by the Syrian Arab Army during the war, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Different numbers exist. It might have been 150,000, which is still pretty much equivalent, and there was no civil war.

Saddam Hussein wasn’t exactly a good guy. But I think we can all agree that regime change in Iraq was not a good thing.

When they went into Iraq, what did they do? They disbanded the army and built up a new one. From 2003 until 2014, they were building a new Iraqi state and army.

The U.S. took control of everything, including Iraqi oil revenue, which would go to the Federal Reserve. The United States would release something like $500 million in physical cash to transfer into Iraq. Of course, this would end up in the hands of extremely corrupt politicians who put money in their walls and all sorts of places to hide it.

Then ISIS came and took over large swaths of territory, and the Iraqis didn’t have an army to defend themselves. Why? Because the United States wouldn’t allow them to.

The United States trains, conducts exercises with and directly supplies weapons to the Lebanese armed forces, a glorified police force. They’re not capable of defending against Israel or defending themselves. They’re not supposed to be. They’re not allowed to be.

Look at Saudi Arabia and how weak it is. It has all the equipment in the world: U.S. forces stationed in the country, military bases, air defenses and F-15 fighters. It can’t defend itself. Yemen is blasting it to pieces.

Saudi Arabia is a different case because they deliberately keep the army weak. They’re scared of being overthrown and of members of the family killing each other.

Look at Afghanistan. The U.S. was there from 2001. The Taliban took over the second they left, with basically no fighting. The Afghan army they trained had Apache helicopters, armored vehicles, U.S. tanks and an air force. It fell apart, and the Taliban took over the entire country.

There was regime change in Libya. The U.S. is not so involved in postwar Libya, but has Libya recovered militarily? Can it defend itself? No. It’s still in chaos and can’t defend itself.

That’s how they designed this. They take out these countries and make sure they’re defenseless. Syria is the same.

That’s why they tell Syria, “Hey, you want some money to pay your soldiers because your people are poor?” And it’s not as though there isn’t enormous corruption in Syria, just as in all these other places. You don’t think these people are living well?

Every time tensions arise and people protest in the streets, they arrest another henchman accused of torture under Bashar al-Assad—someone from his intelligence forces whom they previously granted amnesty.

People are protesting because the government hasn’t done anything for them, is corrupt, and isn’t delivering what it promised. Democratic elections? No. Reconstruction? No. More electricity for people in different areas? More government jobs? Instead, slash the government jobs.

Then it’s, “Here’s a guy who tortured a bunch of people. We’re going to execute him.” They play things all day about how bad Assad was. Bro, he’s been gone for two years. He’s never coming back. You can’t keep [unclear in supplied text].

It’s the same as the Iraqi experience. Iraqis said Saddam Hussein had to be overthrown. Everyone can agree these weren’t perfect people being removed. You can look at their records.

Saddam Hussein killed far more people than Bashar al-Assad and [name unclear in supplied text] combined before the Syrian war. The Syrian war is a different thing, but before it, there’s no comparison. Saddam Hussein was responsible for far more deaths without a war, in peacetime.

Iraqis were put on our television sets saying, “We need to overthrow this regime.” When the government was overthrown, there were Iraqis who celebrated. We were shown Iraqi people riding the statue of Saddam Hussein through Baghdad and told they were liberated. Some Iraqis believed they were liberated. “We’ve been liberated,” they said.

In Syria, they rode statues of Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad in Aleppo. Every critique you offer of what the new, pro-U.S. regime is doing gets the answer, “Bashar, Bashar.”

No, it’s not about Bashar. It never was about Bashar. For you, it was about Bashar as an individual.

I can understand Iraqis today who remain adamant that Saddam Hussein being killed and overthrown was a good thing. They will never change because of their subjective experience and suffering at his hands.

The same thing applies to Syria, except that in Iraq there were individuals with personal grievances who felt that way. In Syria, they exported that experience through the media to a broader population worldwide.

We looked on the last show at a clip of the former head of the Israeli Shin Bet talking in 2012 about creating the Sunni alliance that was key to allowing Israel to complete its mission in the region.

Israel was actively working on a strategy of backing Syrian opposition groups, al-Qaeda-linked groups, some collaborating openly with ISIS at the time, to achieve this.

Going back to the Druze in southern Syria and Suwayda—I know I’m jumping around—the Druze initially wanted to stay out of the war, not join either side. What convinced them to join were massacres carried out by Nusra Front and ISIS against the Druze community.

Nusra Front is Golani’s guys. Who was backing them and helping Golani’s forces? Israel. Israel helped them and these factions, some allied with ISIS. ISIS and Nusra were committing massacres against the Druze. That flipped the Druze onto Bashar al-Assad’s side, and they began aligning with him in the war.

After regime change, Israel is backing the Druze, having previously backed the people who massacred them. That’s how Israel works. The United States works the same way in attempting to achieve its [wording unclear in supplied text].

Al-Qaeda-linked militants fighting for regime change in Libya suddenly popped up fighting in Syria. Some get transported to Yemen. These al-Qaeda guys end up on different battlefields, fighting different wars for the United States.

There were even Syrian fighters sent to Ukraine to fight. In return, the Ukrainians taught them to operate drones. They had FPV drone units. It is very likely that the FPV drone operators trained by the Ukrainians are now the guys in Yemen.

You see how this works, this big conspiracy put together. Amid all of it, we now have this escalation.

Iran’s command structure and the regional balance of power

The big question is this: The Israelis are working on a project in southern Syria that could explode at any moment. They have raised their level of alert. We’ve heard of military movement inside Iran and an increase in its military alert level.

There have been reports that Iran triggered its mosaic military system, where individual regions are disconnected. That’s one reason assassinations don’t work if we see another round of them in Iran.

I’ll put this graphic up again. I showed it earlier to demonstrate. It’s just a rough visualization, not an accurate representation. These regional commanders across the country operate separately, with semiautonomous status that allows them to conduct their own operations. Then you have the army, the Basij and all these other groups.

The IRGC can operate independently like that. Assassinating a few generals—the publicly known ones, mainly figureheads—doesn’t take down the country.

They can carry out assassinations, strikes and attacks on a few launchers. The United States claims—sorry, it didn’t publicly claim it, but there have been reports—that it attacked a launcher, possibly two, in [place name unclear in supplied text], in sovereign Iran. We’re waiting for details on that.

They can do these things, but it won’t make a fundamental difference.

The big question is what becomes of all these governments that have bowed to the Greater Israel project, sacrificed themselves on the altar of the United States and done the dirty work of the U.S. and Israel, if Israel is defeated and the U.S. is forced out of the region as a result of this war.

If you believe there is a Sunni alliance and the Shia are the real enemy—the people fighting Israel are the enemy, but Israel and the U.S. are also somehow the enemy, and you need to work with the enemy against their enemies—the mental gymnastics.

If you believe there is a free, liberated Syria and a free Syrian leader who speaks with Netanyahu, whose defense minister meets the head of the Mossad, and you believe in that sovereignty—because the Iraqi leadership, [names unclear in supplied text], Nawaf Salam and others across the region talk about sovereignty—it is always sovereignty from Iran.

Apparently, Iran is the biggest problem in the region. But what do you think happens if the U.S. and Israel lose? You’ve put all your eggs in one basket.

What happens if Israel gets blasted and is in a very difficult situation, or even collapses, and the United States is forced to leave after this conflict? What happens to these countries and their sovereignty from Iran?

Iran will be the dominant player in the entire region. It will be the top dog and call the shots because nobody will be there to contest it. That’s how power works.

If you want this imaginary Sunni resistance bloc, which doesn’t exist—but let’s say you believe in it, support the Muslim Brotherhood and want it to have power—what do you think the regional scenario will be with those Shia you hate so much, having put all your eggs in one basket? It’s not going to turn out too well, is it? There will be a new top dog.

That’s why you don’t prostitute yourself to the United States and Israel and leave yourself unable to defend yourself.

Let’s believe the propaganda these people put out about Iran. Let’s believe Iran wants to expand across the region, dominate all Sunnis and force them to convert to Shia Islam. It’s stupid—millions of Sunnis live inside Iran itself—but let’s play this game and live in Narnia for a moment.

If you believe Iran is going to do that, you don’t have armies capable of defending yourselves because you’re allied with the U.S., which won’t allow you to have such an army. The Israelis have you under their thumb. What happens if Israel gets bashed back down to size and the Americans leave?

That doesn’t leave you in a strong position, does it?

That is assuming a position I personally believe is nonsense: that Iran wants to invade the whole region, force everyone to be Shia, control all the countries and pull all the strings.

You’re attributing that to Iran when Israel is actively doing it to you. Israel is pulling the strings. It openly advocates breaking apart your countries and ruling over you. It openly tells you this.

Maybe if we told these forces claiming to be part of a Sunni resistance bloc that the Israelis had converted to Shia Islam, they’d end up fighting them. And tell them the Iranians have become Zionists now.

I’m sorry to laugh at this. We’ve covered and looked at it, and it’s actually very sad. I believe the vast majority of people in these countries, and the people I speak to, want to resist Israel. Some may be misled about the region’s configuration and what’s happening, but they have that genuine desire. They care about their countries and the countries of the region.

They are being subjugated by leaderships that are all normalizers. That’s the state of affairs.

This regional war, with Israel, the United States and its Arab allies on one side, and Iran and its allies on the other, could dramatically change things. That includes how these Persian Gulf states operate. It could create a new power dynamic in which the United States, for once, does not have full domination over the region.

That is what’s at stake. If Iran and its allies—Yemen’s Ansar Allah, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Palestinian factions also in Lebanon and the Palestinian resistance—fail, Israel will achieve Greater Israel. Countries in the region will be divided into little ethnostates fighting each other for stupid, petty reasons.

They’ll argue: “We’re the real resistance. We’re this, we’re that, we’re the best. We have a right to this territory. You killed this person. Your regime’s leader did X, Y and Z. We have these borders because of something said a million years ago, because Israel told us so, and we get to take this territory.”

That will be the region, including portions of Saudi Arabia. If that regional resistance disappears, Israel wins and takes over. That’s what is at stake in reality.

Then there’s the Narnia some people promote, an alternate, nonexistent resistance. You know where the Sunni resistance is? Palestine. The Palestinians are the Sunni resistance.

There’s also a Sunni group in Lebanon, I think, that resists, and individual Sunnis in different countries who are part of resistance groups. The Iranians have Sunnis in their armed forces, for instance. These are the Sunni resistance against Israel and the United States. There’s no one else you can point to. When was one bullet fired in defense of [unfinished thought]? No one fired anything.

Gaza’s blocked aid and warnings of famine

Look at what gets to happen. These are Israelis blocking aid trucks. This is an important point to center: The Israelis have closed all the border crossings into Gaza except one, which comes through their occupied territory. Then their people come onto the streets and block the trucks.

Who’s fighting for them? Where’s this alliance? They’re surrounded by normalizers. The only ones really fighting for them are Ansar Allah in Yemen and Hezbollah. They’re the ones who fought for Gaza. The rest didn’t.

Now in Gaza, we’re heading toward a point where they’re again imposing a situation in which people warn famine could take hold. People can’t get enough food.

That doesn’t mean everyone in Gaza is going to starve. Israeli propaganda says, “I saw somebody in Gaza cooking chicken.” That doesn’t mean every human being in Gaza, or every part of it, is starving. But people in different areas start starving, famine takes hold, and the Israelis can block food aid.

This is why I’m so sarcastic about the idea of Sunni resistance, and about Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Mecca agreement and all these Sunni countries. You know why I mock it so much?

There is the so-called Gaza Board of Peace, which monitors the situation in Gaza, and there’s the Civil-Military Coordination Center. Do you want to guess some of the countries involved?

Turkey is part of it. Egypt is part of it. Saudi Arabia is part of it. Qatar is part of it. Do you want me to go on?

These countries supposedly forming an axis against Israel are involved in the CMCC, the Civil-Military Coordination Center, based in Israeli territory, monitoring the situation in Gaza.

The CMCC is supposed to monitor ceasefire violations and enable aid to go in. These countries are directly complicit in genocide in Gaza. Every single one of them.

You know why? Because they watch, and they know everything before we even get it on social media. They know the whole situation. They know when Israel is shooting children. They know the Israelis are training al-Qaeda-linked and ISIS-linked militants in Gaza to kidnap people in areas de facto under Hamas control. They know aid is being limited.

They see the daily massacres of civilians, with Israel dropping bombs on civilians and killing about 1,500 people. More Palestinians have been killed during the ceasefire than in the “worst massacre against the Jews since the Holocaust,” October 7, when about 700 Israeli noncombatants were killed.

On many days in Gaza, more civilians were killed than that, just in single days. During that period, more people have died than the total toll on October 7. All these countries have just watched.

They haven’t punished Israel. They haven’t even withdrawn from the CMCC in protest. They’ve watched.

Then what do they say? “We gave them aid.” The United States and the U.K. gave aid to Yemen while providing logistical support to the Saudis bombing Yemen and openly endorsing the blockade starving people to death.

Your aid means nothing when your hands are soaked in blood. It is utterly criminal.

That is the worst thing about these countries and their leaderships: They’re hypocrites. There is more respect for those who openly say they are pro-Israel and side with it, because at least they take a position. These countries are worse.

These Wahhabi scholars advocating all this nonsense claim to be the real resistance, standing up for Islamic values, Arab values or, in Turkey’s case, Turkish values. They claim to stand up for their people, religion and the Palestinians.

They publicly advocate, yap and yap, and brag about their charity, which is disgusting. You don’t brag about your charity.

Like the UAE: “We sent a bunch of tents. Sure, we helped the al-Qaeda- and ISIS-linked criminal militias in Gaza that were stealing some of the aid and selling it on the black market, but we also sent tents and body bags so you could bury your people.”

The Sunni coalition.

I understand I’m ranting, but that’s the logic and reasoning behind why people are frustrated and why these arguments made by regimes are so ridiculous. It’s regime propaganda. That’s it. Nothing else, nothing less.

They’re complicit in a genocide. I believe that if you watch a genocide happen from the CMCC, watch aid being stopped and Palestinians being killed, and don’t even protest—if you have a delegation participating in a center inside Israeli territory that is basically ruled over by the Israelis—then you’re complicit.

When they didn’t want Spain there because it was pissing them off, they kicked Spain out. They rule over it. CENTCOM is nothing. “Copcom,” right? [Speaker appears to use a mocking name for CENTCOM.] It’s Israeli territory. Under the Trump administration, they don’t even have sovereignty over their own military at this point.

It’s supposed to be under CENTCOM’s control. But if you’re a member of the CMCC, still at that table and engaging with the Board of Peace, you’re involved. You’re complicit in genocide, and your hands are stained with blood.

Whatever rhetoric you use, you can’t get out of that. That’s the situation. You should never be forgiven.

When arguments like this are presented to people like me, yes, I will confront them, because I don’t like nonsense or hypocrites. I don’t like these hypocritical arguments.

These people use Palestinians and Palestinian suffering, often with no actual personal connection to it. They use their blood and suffering for their own endeavors. That is sick and twisted. It’s completely wrong.

Closing remarks

Anyway, I’ve been on here for a bit. We’re going to continue monitoring things as they develop and bringing you footage from the ground.

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