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#SYrian backed military
sayruq · 5 months
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There has been major developments in the region in the past few days that indicates regional war is imminent. Again the tweets and articles will be in chronological order.
American war ships are in the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Russia responded to that by sending planes to the Black Sea and China by sending warships to Kuwait.
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We got our usual back and forth on the ground operation in Gaza
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The American media is not really reporting these recent attacks on their military bases. In fact, the military is downplaying the strength of the responses by Yemeni and Syrian groups to the Gaza genocide. This is either because they want to avoid regional war or because they want to be better prepared for regional war.
This statement below seems to indicate that Iran is coming to the conclusion that open warfare is the only thing that will deter America and Israel
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As for Yemen, they've declared Israeli ships will be targeted if the attack on Gaza continues (you'll see later that this is no empty threat)
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By the way, Israel bombed an Egyptian military site along the border and claimed it was an accident. The Egyptian people have been calling for their government to intervene militarily and I don't think this will ease the pressure.
On the 22nd, Israel sent a small team to infiltrate Gaza. They didn't get very far
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They're also struggling against Hezbollah
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This meeting by the Russian foreign minister is a big deal as you'll see later
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America responds to the escalating tension by deploying 'defensive systems' all over West Asia. It risks stretching itself too thin as multiple countries are already involved in the Palestian resistance with countries like Egypt and Jordan facing internal pressure to do something about the Gazan genocide
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Republican Mitch McConnell has recently called Iran, Russia and China 'the new axis of evil'. It seems this is the new angle that the West has chosen because Rishi Sunak has also been comparing Hamas to Russia. This can only lead to Russia getting close to Iran which would ultimately help Hamas.
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The situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate as America evacuates its embassy and warns its citizens not to use the Baghdad International Airport due to attacks by Iraqi military groups.
Here we have an Israeli commander admitting that Israel is largely on the defensive against Hezbollah and their soldiers are both traumatised and disheartened. Remember, Hezbollah has yet to officially enter the war
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Blinken said that the US 'will be prepared' if Iran escalates its attacks which gives weight to that idea that the US is only trying to deescalate because its not ready yet.
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A few hours ago, American bases in Syria were targeted. It's becoming clear that a major goal in the plan to defeat Israel is removing America from the picture in the region
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The White House then blames Iran for the attack
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More military bases targeted in Iraq
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Meanwhile IDF is trying to infiltrate Gaza again. Reminder that a ground operation means that Hezbollah will officially enter the war and begun using its vast numbers of missiles and rockets. They're also attacking the West Bank, the resistance fighters have ambushed them
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Yemen follows through on the threats it made by attacking a US warship with drones
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Ansarullah claims there was a direct hit but the US Navy says that all drones were intercepted (using days old pictures).
So what now? First, do not expect a ceasefire. Tbh the Palestinian resistance hasn't even called for ceasefire, just an exchange of hostages.
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Second of all, America itself does not believe that Israel can win this war so let's all stop acting like Palestine has already lost
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Thirdly, regional war is looking more and more like reality
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bfpnola · 6 months
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ID: Instagram post by @/letstalkpalestine. The slide reads: "Let's Talk: 8 things to know about what's happening in Palestine." End ID.
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ID: "#1 This is possibly the largest ever Palestinian liberation operation in modern history. Never before have Palestinians succeeded in taking back so much of their land and breaking out of the segregated ghettoes in which Israel has concentrated them." End ID.
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ID: "#2 This was an 'attack' [the word attack is striked through] response. Anyone would fight back after a decades-long process of colonization, after they have been turned into stateless refugees, expelled and concentrated in tiny ghettoes, imprisoned, or killed for daring to resist. For 15 years Israel has besieged Gaza with snipers stationed all around it, drones occupying its skies 24/7, and navy patrols shooting at any fishermen who venture too deep. If this happened to your city, wouldn't you fight back?" End ID.
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ID: "#3 Palestinians didn't 'infiltrate israel." Most Gazans are not actually from Gaza. 70% of them are from the same surrounding lands they liberated yesterday morning." A map is shown of the area, overflowing with orange pins, with only a few red pins near the Mediterranean Sea. "Each orange pin is a Palestinian village that israel wiped out and ethnically cleansed. Most Gazans are from these places, fighting to return home." End ID.
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ID: "#4 Hamas has enough israeli prisoners to free every single Palestinian hostage held by israel. Typically, israeli-held Palestinian hostages are only released through a swap with israeli prisoners. The last Hamas-israel prisoner swap was 1 israeli soldier for 1,027 Palestinians. Hamas has more than enough israeli prisoners for a deal that would free every imprisoned Palestinian based on past ratios." Two boxes are shown on each side of the slide, one that reads, "36+ estimated israeli prisoners," and another that reads, "5,200 estimated Palestinian hostages." End ID.
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ID: "#5 The Fall of the Gaza Wall In a historic moment already reshared millions of times online, Palestinian bulldozers have brought down parts of the israeli wall and fence that surrounds Gaza and traps in its residents. This comes as Palestinians have finally regained control of parts of the border, including the crossing in & out of Gaza. This is a historic achievement."
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ID: #6 israel has never made concessions to Palestinians without pressure. Palestine can only be liberated by both violent and peaceful resistance, like any colonized nation in history. The only time in history israel gave up land was when it returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. This was only achieved after the 1973 War when the Egyptian-Syrian attack showed israel that it couldn't sustain its occupation of the territory, contrary to its prior belief." End ID.
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ID: #7 This marks a new phase in Palestine. Palestine will not be freed overnight. Liberation is a long-term process. But the resistance's unprecedented achievements and strength have proven that even if Israel temporarily beats it back, the Siege on Gaza is coming to an end sooner rather than later. This does not mean that Gaza will be fully liberated and independent, but that Palestinians will likely gain more control and that israel can no longer treat Gaza as it has for the last 15 years." End ID.
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ID: #7 Continued. Beyond Gaza, israel will be deterred from escalating its occupation against Palestinians in places like Jerusalem. Hamas has conclusively proven the effectiveness of fight back against the occupation, in contrast to the diplomatic means of resistance which -- while still important -- on their own have proven to be futile in the face of israeli rejectionism. This will likely shake up the Palestinian political scene, as the Palestinian Authority, which collaborates with the israeli military and refuses to defend its people, will now face even more challenges to its rule." End ID.
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ID: “#8 What will happen now? Palestinians have never responded to israel with such a large operation. israel's actions will be more violent and intense than anything we've ever seen before. The Palestinian death toll is climbing faster than expected -- at 320 at the time of this publication. israel is considering a full-scale land invasion of Gaza, which guarantees higher death tolls. We need to keep sharing, educating and protesting in solidarity in order to pressure our governments to end their support for the israeli regime." End ID.
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marxistcomedy · 6 months
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Anyone working in counter-propaganda can testify to a curious experience: we’ll put in hours of careful research collecting an impeccable set of resources that undermines some warmongering narrative, and we’ll eagerly share it with someone who claims to despise racism in all its forms — say, an outspoken opponent of the West’s so-called “War on Terror.” Unexpectedly, we are met with a response that is somewhere between chilly reticence and downright hostility. What’s going on?
From our perspective, we’re offering water to a person who’s self-identified as thirsty, and yet they react as if we were trying to poison them! They turn on a dime to defend the same institutions whose lies they were denouncing just moments before. At this point the sense of pride and accomplishment that comes from seeing through propaganda and putting puzzle pieces together into a satisfying historical account gets brutally transformed into its exact opposite: a sense of crushing defeat. In response to this bitter experience, many researchers — serious people, with plenty of experience reading and writing, and sometimes even of being published! — lash out. They decide that people have been “brainwashed” beyond the point where they can be reached by words or rational appeal. They “realize” that the masters of propaganda have been far more successful than we first imagined: it turns out we’re not David fighting Goliath, we’re more like an ant facing an asteroid.
The same inquisitive nature that first led them to unravel war propaganda narratives begins to feed an even larger psycho-historical narrative, and nihilism takes hold. The tragic cycle begins to appear eternal: innocent, well-meaning, hard-working folks are, time and again, viciously tricked by the scapegoating of a new rogue in the gallery — Indigenous, Black, Spanish, Jewish, Soviet, Vietnamese, Cuban, Serbian, Muslim, Libyan, Syrian, Korean, Venezuelan, Russian, Chinese. Due to the sheer power of propaganda and mass-media, the masses helplessly fall for hatred and volunteer for war, even though it comes at a very high cost to ourselves, our loved ones, and our ideals (religion, environmentalism, etc.). Sadly, the innate human propensity to “hate the Other” seals our fate as a society… or something along those lines.
I am going to argue that this narrative is nonsense. It tries to pass off as universal and eternal something that in reality is particular and ephemeral. In short: Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style; they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on. This is because it fundamentally makes them feel better about who they are and how they live. The psychic and material costs are rationally worth the benefits. As for those anti-imperialists who don’t participate in this festival of xenophobia — and here I include myself — we have our own elitist consolation: we accept the tragedy of masses of gullible sheeple falling for cunning propaganda because having overcome it flatters our own intelligence. The more we condemn society’s stupidity, the smarter we feel in comparison.
But am I not just worsening the problem, aggravating our hopelessness, by criticizing the critics in a way that suggests that no one escapes ideological self-flattery? I don’t think so. Paradoxically, it brings us all back to a more even and possibility-rich playing field.
The prevailing populist narrative grants the People (of the West) moral innocence by attributing to them utter stupidity and naivety; I invert the equation and demand a Marxist narrative instead: Westerners are willingly complicit in crimes because they instinctively and correctly understand that they benefit as a class (as a global bourgeois proletariat) from the exploitation enabled by their military and their propaganda (in Gramscian: organs of coercion and consent). We’re not as stupid as we’re made out to be. This means that we can be reasoned with, that there is a way out.
[emphasis mine]
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bullet-prooflove · 3 months
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Syria!Series Part One: Syria: Beau 'Cyclone' Simpson x Reader
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Tagging: @crazy4chickennuggets @kmc1989 @withakindheartx @chickensrule @iwannabeinthesequalmrghostface @justameresimp @handsupforamiracle @lxaah11 @librarian1002 @littlebadariell @imaginecrushes @luckyladycreator2 @flrboyd @nani-kenobi @areamir @b-bradshaw @adaydreamaway08 @crimeshowjunkie @shepgurl @ashcosmo @inkandarsenic @caffeinatedwoman @tortilla-maria1 @lemmons1998 @dr-alan-grantler @dizzybee03 @watashiwasun @burningpeachpuppy @penguin876 @haley-hotchner @deliriousfangirl61 @agentorange9595
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You’ve been married to Beau three years when he’s deployed to Syria. You’re situated in San Diego, working with the Victim’s Support Service. The two of you have talked about settling down here, you both love the area and Beau’s up for promotion soon which will give him more stability and better choice of assignments. It feels like the right time to put down roots.
The first indication you get that something is wrong is when Commander Larson steps into your office. You’re too enthralled in the casefile you’re reading to register his presence until you hear the door click shut behind him.
It’s the expression in his face that stops you in your tracks. You’ve seen Commander Larson deliver bad news a handful of times throughout your career and he has the exact same look in his eyes now.
“Beau’s been captured.” He tells you.
You don’t hear anything else after that, just the roaring of blood in your ears as selective words filter through. You learn that it had happened during a navy training exercise, that a Syrian officer he had been working with was also taken.  
You fall apart, for two whole days you’re a complete mess because the love of your life is missing and there’s fuck all you can do about it.
It’s Soloman that calls you from a military hospital in Damascus, that tells you the unofficial story. Three hours ago Beau had turned up at a military checkpoint gravely injured, dragging Captain Zadir Abadi, along with him. The two of them had been barely alive when they’d been airlifted.
“It’s bad Ally, they tortured him.” Soloman tells you, you can see the gravity of the situation in his features as he rubs his palm over his weary features. “He’s been stabbed multiple times, they’re not sure he’s going to make it through the night.”
You go to church that evening, for the first time since you left Idaho. You light a candle, and you say a prayer because there’s nothing else that you can do and the reality of that devastates you. You don’t sleep, you don’t eat, instead you lie on the couch with a pillow clasped to your chest watching reruns of Friends and waiting for your phone to ring.
Solomon calls again in the afternoon; he looks as exhausted as you feel. His jaw line is peppered with five o’clock shadow and his eyes bloodshot.
“They’ve taken him back into surgery.” He tells you, shaking his head. “He started bleeding again this morning, if they can’t get it under control…”
He looks away from the screen, swallowing hard before he opens his mouth to speak.
“Zahir passed away this morning.” Solomon tells you. “His injuries were too great, infection set in. There was nothing the doctors could do.”
You close your eyes for a second, inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth because you hear the undercurrent of what he’s saying.
Prepare yourself.
You don’t sleep again that night.
***
Beau survives the surgery. He spends days drifting in and out of consciousness, in a haze of agony and numbness. The painkillers they give him are strong, they mess with his head, twisting his dreams and reality into one long nightmare.
The only consistent thought he has is you. He wants you; he thinks he tells Solomon that when he’s semi lucid. The next time he’s awake Solomon hands him his tablet and there you are on the screen, looking as pretty as the day he met you.
“Ally,” He drawls as he settles back into the pillows.
It’s the first time he’s laid eyes on you since this whole ordeal started and he feels so fucking relieved to see you. You were the only thing he thought about during his time in that bunker, the thing that kept him going. Everytime they cut into his flesh, stabbed him, humiliated him, he thought about you, that smile, that laugh, the way you look at him like he was the only man in the entire world.
“Beau.” You whisper and he smiles, tears searing at his eyes because just hearing the sound of your voice soothes something deep inside his soul.
“Talk to me.” He requests, his head coming to rest against the pillows. “I just need to hear your voice.”
Love Beau? Don’t miss any of his stories by joining the taglist here.
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morbidology · 3 months
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Hamza Ali Al-Khateeb was a 13-year-old boy living with his parents in the village of al-Jeezah in Daraa Governorate, Syria. He used to love when the rain came to his small corner of southern Syria as that meant that the farmers’ irrigation channels would fill up with water and he and his friends could jump in and swim. However, the drought meant that Hamza could enjoy his favourite pass time even less and less. Those who knew him commented on his generosity: he often asked his parents for money which he would then give to the poor.
On the 29th of April, 2011, Hamza and his family attended a rally to break the siege of the city of Daraa. Numerous people attended the rally and walked 12km along the road from al-Jeezah north-west to Saida. However, as soon as protesters reached Saida, firing began. During the chaos, Hamza got separated from his family and was arrested alongside 51 others by Air Force Intelligence. It wouldn’t be until a month later that Hamza’s family would finally find out what happened to him: he had been tortured and then killed.
Syrian security finally sent Hamza’s body back to his family and it bore signs of prolonged torture and abuse. His face was swollen and purple, he had lacerations from cables and burns from electric shock devices to his feet, face, ches tand knees, his kneecaps had been shattered, his neck was broken, his penis had been severed and he was shot through both arms with the bullets tearing a hole in his sides and lodging in his stomach. It was believed that Hamza had been alive for up to a month.
Syrian State TV reported that Hamza was killed by three bullets outside the military complex where the protesters were walking towards. They claimed there was a delay in returning his body as they couldn’t identify him. However, photos and videos of Hamza’s body were soon circulated and sparked international condemnation. Hamza swiftly became a symbol of the violent suppression of protesters by Syrian president Basher Assad’s regime.
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girlactionfigure · 2 months
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Israel Realtime
▪️NORTH - LEBANON PRESSURE.. Syria declares that it is ready to support Lebanon in the event of an Israeli invasion of the country.  Egypt warns Hezbollah ; "Israel is preparing to enter southern Lebanon, you must consider stopping escalation.”
▪️AID - PROTESTORS get a copy of the transit papers for the aid to Gaza:  Shipper: UNWRA, Product: Flour, Port: Ashdod.  Israel is now stocking UNWRA with its left hand while complaining they are Hamas and demanding countries defund UNWRA with its right hand.  Smack - why are you hitting yourself?  Smack - why are you hitting yourself?  
▪️JUDEA-SAMARIA - Counter-terror operations:  Beit Kahil, Hebron.  Beit Rima (near Beit Aryeh). Qalqilya.
▪️GAZA - Heavy fighting continues to be reported from Khan Yunis, with enemy reports stating hundreds of enemy killed.
▪️NORTH - Heavy bombing continues to be reported across southern Lebanon, the IDF is pushing back hard today.
▪️COLD ALERT… homeless and those in need of a warm space can call Ministry of Welfare hotline - 118.
▪️UNWRA.. a huge number of Palestinian and Hamas statements condemning the pausing of aid to UNWRA, after Israel provided evidence many UNWRA workers participated in the Oct. 7 massacre and subsequent holding of some hostages.  They are shocked, SHOCKED I TELL YOU, that the world could defund their organization and cut off the free flow of stuff.  Estonia has joined the funding pause.
▪️US TROOPS KILLED - US CENTRAL COMMAND.. 3 US soldiers killed and 34 wounded in today’s suicide drone attacks on the US based near the Jordan-Syria border.  The base that was attacked is El Tanaf.  It's a military base where the Americans train commando forces from the Syrian opposition, at the base of an airstrip, from the base American drones go out for intelligence activities in the area.  An American source told Reuters: the number of soldiers injured in the drone attack has risen to 34. 
▪️LIES OF THE DAY.. photos of Gazan children in the mud and puddles in a tent — are FAKE via AI, but are being redistributed everywhere on social networks. On those sites, many believe that these are real photos and wonder how the photographer had the heart to photograph children like this and not help them.  (( that’s not the question, posing children for fake photos is a Palestinian industry, just google “Pallywood”.  People believe these because they seem ‘plausible’ - nobody bothers to count the billions in support, tens of thousands of tents and hundreds of daily trucks - just sees whatever manipulated pictures are distributed. And doesn’t contrast that to yesterday’s propaganda pictures, which were dry Gaza children wearing hospital isolation units as outer wear - because its fun - wasting them from use as medical supplies, that were distributed on the same networks.  An anti-truth age. ))
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luminalunii97 · 1 year
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What we, Iranians mean by "help iran" and what we don't
Do we want military intervention? Absolutely not. If USA is smart enough they wouldn't even think of that as an option. We've defended our lands in an unfair war once, we'll do it again. There's a patriot mindset in iranian culture, that's why no foreign interference or colonizing attempt has lasted here. Plus west is currently in a financial crisis, I don't think they have money to fund a war. But you know who's doing that? Aiding islamic republic with tropes and equipment? islamic republic supporters in the region.
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Do we want to be taken advantage of? Robbed? Being denied our wealth and resources by foreign powers? No, but do you think only west can do that? Have you ever heard about Russia and China being best pals with islamic republic? You don't think that's "friendship", do you? What do you think this is?
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(if you're interested to know more, search 25 year long iran-china agreement)
Don't think we're only fighting islamic Republic. But one economic giant and one warmongering power are standing behind islamic republic! Eastern powers are just as big and bad as western ones.
What do we want and need? We need to to be on the news so that the non-iranians would know what's going on here. People, citizens and civilians have the power to push and hold back their governments if public opinion is set.
How would that help? Iran's regime holds back the massacre when the world is watching, it's been their way, they mass murder us in darkness. Western politicians will be forced to break the silence. Our regime wouldn't be able to convince west to lift the sanctions (yes, sanctions are good. It puts our regime under pressure. Without sanctions islamic republic would have been rich enough to occupy the entirety of the middle east and establish Chinese-style oppression in iran. People would still be poor.)
What are our demands from western politicians and governments? One, don't help our regime in any capacity. Don't sell them weapons, don't send them money, don't strike contracts with them, Don't do any sort of business with them. Believe it or not west have done these before. Two, don't give them credibility. We Iranians are shouting and crying out that this regime doesn't have legitimacy, that we don't know them as our representatives. By inviting them to international meetings, you're offending our people. Islamic Republic having a sit in women's rights councils at the same time they're killing women for wanting their basic rights is a fuckin insult to us people.
There are international organizations out there that exist to support and help humanity, they don't actually do it but they exist so we should force them to do their jobs. There are international unions that can put our regime at disadvantage by simply not negotiating or working with them.
In 2009, Obama helped Iran's regime "indirectly" to suppress protesters by releasing part of iran's blocked money. That is iranian people's money, by giving them to our government not only it won't help people, but it will also be used against us.
So, help iran by not helping islamic republic.
I also want to remind y'all that islamic republic has a history of meddling with other countries' businesses. The most known one is their direct involvement in killing Syrian protesters. They also do terroristic attacks on whoever puts their reign in danger, here are some examples:
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When I say islamic republic is not just dangerous for iran I mean this. And when I say international action I'm not only talking about USA.
PS, I forgot to mention iran is currently commiting international crimes such as mass executing protesters (crimes against humanity), kill rape and torture teenagers (crimes against children) and use ambulances and firefighting vehicles to arrest people or move anti riot forces and weapons (war crimes). Therefore it's international organizations business!
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zvaigzdelasas · 7 months
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The junta have explicitly justified their coup as a response to the “continuous deterioration of the security situation” plaguing Niger and complained that it and other countries in the Sahel “have been dealing for over 10 years with the negative socioeconomic, security, political and humanitarian consequences of NATO’s hazardous adventure in Libya.” Even ordinary Nigeriens backing the junta have done the same.[...]
Only years [after enacting regime change] would a UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee report publicly determine, echoing the conclusions of other post-mortems, that charges of an impending civilian massacre were “not supported by the available evidence” and that “the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element” that carried out numerous atrocities of its own.
Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and John Kerry (D-Mass.) all called for a no-fly zone. “I love the military ... but they always seem to find reasons why you can’t do something rather than why you can,” complained McCain. The American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka said it would be “an important humanitarian step.” The now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) think tank gathered a who’s who of neoconservatives to repeatedly urge the same. In a letter to then-President Barack Obama, they quoted back Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech in which he argued that “inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.”
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reportedly instrumental in persuading Obama to act, was herself swayed by similar arguments. Friend and unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal assured her that, once Gaddafi fell, “limited but targeted military support from the West combined with an identifiable rebellion” could become a new model for toppling Middle Eastern dictators. Pointing to the similar, deteriorating situation in Syria, Blumenthal claimed that “the most important event that could alter the Syrian equation would be the fall of Gaddafi, providing an example of a successful rebellion.”[...]
Despite grave and often-stated reservations, Obama and NATO got UN authorization for a no-fly zone. Clinton was privately showered with email congratulations, not just from Blumenthal and Slaughter (“bravo!”; “No-fly! Brava! You did it!”), but even from then-Bloomberg View Executive Editor James Rubin (“your efforts ... will be long remembered”). Pro-war voices like Pletka and Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz immediately began moving the goalposts by discussing Gaddafi’s ouster, suggesting escalation to prevent a U.S. “defeat,” and criticizing those saying Libya wasn’t a vital U.S. interest. NATO’s undefined war aims quickly shifted, and officials spoke out of both sides of their mouths. Some insisted the goal wasn’t regime change, while others said Gaddafi “needs to go.” It took less than three weeks for FPI Executive Director Jamie Fly, the organizer of the neocons’ letter to Obama, to go from insisting it would be a “limited intervention” that wouldn’t involve regime change, to professing “I don’t see how we can get ourselves out of this without Gaddafi going.”
After only a month, Obama and NATO allies publicly pronounced they would stay the course until Gaddafi was gone, rejecting the negotiated exit put forward by the African Union. “There is no mission creep,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted two months later. Four months after that, Gaddafi was dead — captured, tortured and killed thanks in large part to a NATO airstrike on the convoy he was traveling in.
The episode was considered a triumph. “We came, we saw, he died,” Clinton joked to a reporter upon hearing the news. Analysts talked about the credit owed to Obama for the “success.” [...] [In October 2011], Clinton traveled to Tripoli and declared “Libya’s victory” as she flashed a peace sign.
“It was the right thing to do,” Obama told the UN, presenting the operation as a model that the United States was “proud to play a decisive role” in. Soon discussion moved to exporting this model elsewhere, like Syria. Hailing the UN for having “at last lived up to its duty to prevent mass atrocities,” then-Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth called to “extend the human rights principles embraced for Libya to other people in need,” citing other parts of the Middle East, the Ivory Coast, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.[...]
Gaddafi’s toppling not only led hundreds of Tuareg mercenaries under his employ to return to nearby Mali but also caused an exodus of weapons from the country, leading Tuareg separatists to team up with jihadist groups and launch an armed rebellion in the country. Soon, that violence triggered its own coup and a separate French military intervention in Mali, which quickly became a sprawling Sahel-wide mission that only ended nine years later with the situation, by some accounts, worse than it started. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the majority of the more than 400,000 refugees in the Central Sahel were there because of the violence in Mali.
Mali was far from alone. Thanks to its plentiful and unsecured weapons depots, Libya became what UK intelligence labeled the “Tesco” of illegal arms trafficking, referring to the British supermarket chain. Gaddafi’s ouster “opened the floodgates for widespread extremist mayhem” across the Sahel region, retired Senior Foreign Service officer Mark Wentling wrote in 2020, with Libyan arms traced to criminals and terrorists in Niger, Tunisia, Syria, Algeria and Gaza, including not just firearms but also heavy weaponry like antiaircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles. By last year, extremism and violence was rife throughout the region, thousands of civilians had been killed and 2.5 million people had been displaced.
Things are scarcely better in “liberated” Libya today. The resulting power vacuum produced exactly what Iraq War critics predicted: a protracted (and forever close-to-reigniting) civil war involving rival governments, neighboring states using them as proxies, hundreds of militias and violent jihadists. Those included the Islamic State, one of several extremist groups that made real Clinton’s pre-intervention fear of Libya “becoming a giant Somalia.” By the 2020 ceasefire, hundreds of civilians had been killed in Libya, nearly 900,000 needed humanitarian assistance, half of them women and children, and the country had become a lucrative hotspot for slave trading. Today, Libyans are unambiguously worse off than before NATO intervention. Ranked 53rd in the world and first in Africa by the 2010 UN Human Development Index, the country had dropped fifty places by 2019. Everything from GDP per capita and the number of fully functioning health care facilities to access to clean water and electricity sharply declined. Far from improving U.S. standing in the Middle East, most of the Arab world opposed the NATO operation by early 2012.
8 Sep 23
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marximoff · 2 years
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to grow old in | w. maximoff
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summary: after getting hurt on a mission, you're back home, into your wife's arms. but it's time to think about the future, and what will become of your family if you and Wanda continue down this path.
warnings: heavy make out, mommy kink (but not really??), graphic description of injury, canon typical violece, but just pure fluffiness as a whole (and me simping for Wanda ofc)
pairing: Wanda x fem!reader
word count: 5k
A/N: this one shot takes place in the universe of the main series, i wanne be somebody (somebody to you), but can be read separately. it's just very, very gay
enjoy!
|series masterlist|
《《《《《《《ᱬ》》》》》》》
You were fully aware that you had spent more days away than initially agreed. And you knew Wanda Maximoff well enough to hold some certainty that your fidgety wife would be waiting for you for far more seconds and minutes than she initially expected to have to pass away from the caresses of your arms.
But two days (two days and one night) can easily take an entire week's worth of sleep when you're only sleeping four hours a night, with your spine outrageously toughened poorly against the door can of a military jeep and a rationalized amount of food and water that was just (sparsely) enough so that there would be no collective hallucination that could compromise the mission's development – or, to a greater extent, lead to some type of collapse provoked after some serious condition of starvation.
Steve said he'd only seen it happen a couple of times in the fields of the war he fought in (young chicken-skinned lads swooning from weakness, their scrawny muscles barely able to lift their heavy iron rifles above shoulder height), and then you decided you wanted to go home soon.
Wherever home was now.
Perhaps in the extensive fjords surrounded by ranges of the sharp mountains of Sweden, or in the tracks of the enormous castles of Denmark that referred to a distant medieval memory. Wherever your wife was with your children at that moment, there would be your home.
And dear God, how you missed them.
Every time your jaded vision ended up capturing the image of your left hand with something missing to adorn your ring finger (no wedding rings allowed during the mission), you'd remember Wanda, her sweet smile with her scrunched nose, and something in you wished she was there, as she had been so many times before that (two young teenage girls in love taking time out of the woodwork to make out in a few snoozes that went beyond the limits of common sense, kissing sounds echoing behind a thicket or a sunny tree).
But it had barely been a month since Wanda had given birth to two children at once, between thunderous screams and glimmering lights and shattering mirrors. And you wouldn't let your very young boys away from the mainstay and zeal of a mother's gaze, or your recovery-time wife soaking up in hours and hours of blistering scorching sun on top of her pretty red head.
No, no.
The most you could keep from them, in those desert miles of dust and sand, was a crumpled and folded photograph tucked into the back pocket of your army-cloth pants (Wanda tenderly nursing Tommy by stroking her partially exposed right breast, with Billy placidly asleep like a teddy bear on her thighs).
But when you've been ambushed for so long among the hard dunes of the arid and remote Syrian desert, already feeling like a new part of the sandy gravel that haunted in small flat and uncomfortable mounds inside your military-sized boots, with the sweat assorted with the sunburned tediousness corroding your brain so much that the act of counting and cataloging grains of sand had become your new hobby, time and space merged into a single dreamlike figure, and there was no more how to keep any sense of how many days have passed since you last asked what day it was.
(Sam said it was actually only two hours and twenty-three minutes, and then you grumbled and huffed, slapping your open palm into a small pile of sand like a frustrated child, sending a cloud of dust flying everywhere)
And there were many and many miles of pure nothingness around you, miles in diameter spanned by vast expanses of downcast sand dunes and dry, mountainous canyons. As far as the eye could see, as far as your eyes squinted to perceive with redundant effort. Sky and sand meeting on the horizon as if it were the endlessness of the blue sea.
You wanted to run back to kiss Wanda and never stop again (even when your lungs burned for air and your jaw was too stiff to move properly, like you were chewing on a lead ball).
A sandy, inhospitable soil – and, in a way, even unruly – that could well compile into factors that are unattractive to the external eye in the face of the sandy environment, at any moment of rest in its intermittence. A long steppe that ran south towards the Arabian Peninsula and dried the face of your tongue.
You knew that there was, by the vast constitutive magnitude of the universe, no soul that liked (or even prized for) sand. You didn't like it at all, at least. But the mission was to be somewhat simple; or at least as simple as it could be, given its nothing less than treacherous nature.
Natasha had first been the courageous paladin to infiltrate the guerrillas of a band of terrorists in the heart of Al Hamad, because a former contact from the apex of her occupation as an transnational spy had leaked information that the bandits were receiving shipments of American weapons loaded with Chitauri material, and you and your remaining teammates were called upon to intervene in the shipment before the repercussions were such that it fueled an (already old) religious conflict that had been going on for centuries in the region.
For you, it was the task of purely waiting blankly for Steve's signal (a specific hand movement made by Captain America, an opening and closing of the fingers in a vigorous fist) for you to set sail on bent knees towards some well-armed men, raise your own primed fists clasped like a steel plate, and punch some stomachs and ribs in a dance already familiar to you, when the time was right.
Easy, simple, clean, fair.
And then the damn word echoed in the air, even before you or Steve or Sam or Nat could intercede.
The word that was bequeathed so much meaning, encumbered with such relevance, that it was even outlandish to your ears to hear it being instituted on you and your teammates yet again, after so long shuffling through the darkness, away from any value related to your split up old group.
That same word that would always be distinguished by your ears, regardless of the language by which it would be articulated.
“Avengers!”
It was a half-shrieked cry, like a siren's warning, and droplets of saliva sprang up from the back of the mouth which was covered by a dirty, worn rag.
The index finger of the guy's left hand, sitting snugly on the trigger of a funny looking pistol with an odd outside compartment that pulsed bright violet, like a glue gun loaded with some radioactive material.
And then a streak of whitish-purple light lit, for half a second, the gloom of the cement-and-stone terrorist hideout.
A masked man glanced his way, blinked a few times, and glanced at a companion beside him, before swinging his arm through ninety angles and pointing the barrel of the gun towards you, which flashed a ray of silver as it reflected light from a flickering light bulb hanging in a cone shape above your head.
The same man uttered a guttural roar, before collapsing to the ground not to get up again.
A still-smoking pistol, leaking thick lilac ectoplasm from its partially melted barrel like a fountain of glittery howl juice, still hovering its puffs of thick smoke through the air, lay next to his left hand. The hand clasped in a firm fist of Natasha's was still standing in midair, at the height of where the man's back had been.
And you, as solid and compact as your eccentric active mutant gene allowed your physique to be, had a new hole opened in your body when you fell flat on your back, onto the sandy floor, with a hard thud.
“F-fuck! Fuck!”
A gaping hole that took skin and flesh and clothing with it; a scorching, corrosive hole slashed into your left bicep, the muscle between your shoulder and elbow hollowed out by a quick jet of boiling alien plasma shot out – not bleeding from the suture, though, as an instantaneous outcome of cauterization burning against the open blood vessels.
A sharp, acidic pain that made your stomach feel like ice and pierced your nervous system as if a pin had been stuck in your brain stem, the message coursing through your body to make you realize that yes, it was hurting, and it was hurting like hell.
Your arm wasn't actually ripped off, but from the feeling of torn muscle and throbbing open wound, it might as well have been.
Someone came to your aid (Natasha's dyed whitish hair looking silver in the hiding light and then gold in the sunlight) when someone led the way (in the open blue desert sky Sam looked like a real falcon seen from afar, slicing through the oxygen molecules with his long metal wings) and someone led as far as it was safe (Steve threw a beveled metal plate like a square Frisbee that hit a man in the forehead), and then someone closed the hot, gaping wound on your arm (a thin, gold-colored twirl derailed from the Mind Stone embedded in Vision's metallic forehead, creating fresh new skin tissue to join the opening of muscle and mass in the structure of your biceps).
“It will add another cool scar for the collection” Natasha said from behind you, as you looked down at the freshly healed wound on your skin reflected in a small wall mirror, “Girls dig a scar, I can tell you that”
“I don't know about girls, but my wife is particularly going to be very worried when she sees this here” you sighed, lifting your open shirt sleeve to fit the fabric back to the outline of your shoulder, “Damn…”
And it was as if nothing had happened. You were brand new, good to go.
At least, that's how you felt when you walked into your modest rented apartment in a tiny hamlet of Danish territory two days into a quick quinjet ride later, your partially healed wound long forgotten in the confines of your memory – all that was left was a funny story to tell among friends and a likely ugly scar located in an easy spot to hide from the eyes of other people.
You slipped your sneakers off your feet with the help of the bent index finger of your right hand, tucking them into the gap between your shoe and your heel, and then you hung your thick coat by the collar on the brass rack near the door. A throbbing twinge gripped your shoulder, but you didn't care all that much.
As you held the coat up to your eye length, the wedding ring back where it always belonged in shimmered in the light of a lamp, in a thin golden spark. It was a slender band, pretty and reserved, but it still carried with it some elegant charm of bright simplicity.
Like your marriage to Wanda, you always liked to think with a smile on your face. Simple and commonplace, but no less special or prestigious.
Your wife had always been a person to wear a considerable amount of rings on the extensions of her slender, delicate fingers, but the wedding ring was an extra touch, jubilantly jutting out from her other circular ornaments.
From the wandering silence on the walls of the dwelling, you knew the twins were asleep; It was late and children so young are not able to sleep for a whole night, so you decided not to announce your arrival noisily or even do some very booming sounds.
Wandering quietly into the apartment, you didn't take long to find Wanda, and something in your gut reverberated with craving to see her there, your wife, sprawled and huddled in the right corner of the linen sofa set right in the center of the living room of short walls and ghostly curtains. She looked lenient and peaceful, her chest rising and falling deliberately as she snored delicately to the rhythm dictated by sleep.
Her long hair dyed a light copper color was like a blanket of fire that encompassed her luscious body, and you didn't have to look more than once to see that Wanda was wearing an old rock band t-shirt around her thin torso (the same one that you had bought on Hot Topic when you were sixteen years old).
The blouse was already worn out and battered, but it fit Wanda effortlessly – she, who had her pink lips half-opened and leaked narrow streams of oxygen between them.
You might as well kiss her and never let her go.
But you just approached with lethargic steps, without making any noise, and lowered your right hand so that the tenderness of your fingers deferred caresses to the bare leg (for Wanda was wearing cotton pajama shorts) along the soft skin next to her heel, the affectionate touch, rising towards her thigh, causing a brief thrill in your wife's body.
Her hips were wider after nine months of pregnancy, and her figure was lyrical and stoic, so beautiful to see with your eyes.
“Wands?” you called to her in a low, cordial voice, flanked by an affectionate tenderness that was reflected in the tiny, domestic smile distended by the pulp of your lips.
“Hmm...?” it was the murmur in return, more of a crisscrossing sigh of sleep expelled through her nose than an actual answer.
You were crouched down next to the sofa, your bent knee touching the face of a soft linen pillow. Wanda shifted a little, her lips parted, her warm hair swishing as she did; and you felt the red heat emanating from her, through her soft, sleep-warmed arms and legs.
You instantly realized that you could kiss a crack of skin on her neck or the corner of her mouth.
“Wands”
“Y/N...?”
“Hi there, little witch” you smiled smally.
But then your wife opened her eyes, and from between her long eyelashes an emerald -green shrouded in a dense fog of drowsiness.
The eyes that scrutinized through the features of your face analyzed you with a certain glint of misunderstanding, but then a flash of identification shone in the irises adorned with esteem and affection, and it was that an exultant smile appeared on Wanda's lips; a smile that meant that even after a long and tiring mission, after all you were home, where you belonged.
The smug smile gleamed with the two vaguely larger front teeth that marred Wanda's pretty features, as she pressed her eyes gleaming in love into two good-natured lines, exuding scarlet bliss through her pores, scrunching a beam of skin of her nose as she did, making her look like a cute little rabbit.
"You're back" Wanda announced, still a little waved by the drunkenness of sleep, her voice a little groggy from the slumber, supporting her head weight by the neck so that you were at eye level, "You're back, zaichik "
"I'm back indeed, my love"
Something affable reverberated through your heartstrings at the little affectionate nickname uttered in her native tongue, in innocent simplicity when she was plunged into a haze of sleep.
She raised her arms like a child crying out to be lifted, and curled the outline of them around the back of your neck, pulling you lazily as close to her as possible, and you stuck your nose into a beam of bare skin from her exposed neck, between a fluff of silky auburn hair as she did the same, tucking her face into the hollow where your neck connected with your collarbone, both of you letting out a pleasant sigh as you did.
There it smelled like strawberries with a mix of mild cinnamon and vegetable soap and just the whole red color. It smelled like home; like Wanda, like your children. You touched the warm skin of her back beneath the fabric of her shirt, caressing her flesh in careful circles laid down the length of her spine by the tips of your articulate fingers, pulling her closer to your body.
She snorted into a silly giggle as you took advantage of your exuberant strength to grab her around the waist and then sit her on your lap as you turned around with your knees bent and sat on the couch, where seconds before Wanda was the one lying there; the ends of her sleep-rumpled red hair brushing against the material of your blouse, the cotton fabric of her short shorts pulled up in folds down the insides of her thighs.
It was such a casual, everyday sight, so domestic, that Wanda couldn't be more beautiful than she was there in your lap, wearing only some pajamas and your t-shirt on her slender, good-looking body.
“I missed you” she whispered in a breathed voice, the tips of your noses almost touching due to your close proximity, your smiles sliding against each other, “I really missed you, malyshka”
The fingers of her left hand curled around the back of your neck, the coolness of the wedding ring contrasting against Wanda's warm palm touching your skin, caressing there with the tips of her clipped nails, lacquered with a sober black nail polish.
“I missed you so much too, baby. God, Wanda, I missed you so, so much..." and you sunk your forehead into the valley between her breasts, exhaling her scent there from the fabric of your shirt, "I hate being away from you and the boys. I swear, I could hardly wait to get home”
"But you're back now, sweetheart" without showing her teeth, Wanda smiled with just a line of lips, never stopping with the caress on the skin of your neck, "You came back to me"
“I will always come back to you, Wanda. Always. To you and the boys”
“They really missed mommy, you know” she mussed, trying to hide a smile from blooming on her mouth.
You, on the other hand, felt something primal awakening inside you.
“Is that so?” you arched an eyebrow full of meaning, your hands squeezing with pleasure the inside of her thighs, “Just them?”
"Well," Wanda whispered, rather mischievously, "I missed mommy too"
However, Wanda's smile frayed at the edge of her throat like the echo of a desire, as you saw your wife's dark gaze magnetized toward the pulp of your lips, and nothing else could be what she craved, in a color of shadier and darker moss green sparking thorough her eyes, with such pleasure and delight aimed towards your gapped mouth.
And in just a simple act, Wanda did what was the right thing to do – reached forward and took you to her, flattening the commission of your lips against her hibiscus-cinnamon-flavored mouth.
Soon, through an aggregation of lips, a tongue became evident, and with it you took for yourself all the flavor of tea that encompassed your wife's mouth. Not allowing herself to be outdone, however, Wanda unleashed her own tongue, and that one tangled with the one you wet your lips with in the first place.
A lingering kiss dissolved, but you held your breath and again sought out more of your wife's taste, being eagerly returned by an affectionate Wanda.
And then, a strong, powerful touch, palms spread wide and pressed to the curve of her ass, prompted an ambrosial moan that crept from the inside of her throat to pulse against the alignment of her teeth; a certain familiar sensation taking hold between your legs as you did.
But the next groan came from you, when Wanda's left palm touched and then lasciviously enfolded your injured biceps through your blouse, inferring an immediate, instinctive recoil on your part along with a lame grunt of sharp pain. It was painful like accidentally hitting an arm that had recently received a vaccine against the wall.
You grumbled under your breath at the sensation, wrinkling your nose and pinching your brows together.
“Ugh!”
You leaned your spine against the back of the sofa and Wanda leaned back a little too, panting, chest heavy and quite confused, lust and misunderstanding glowing in her irises lit by the dim yellow light of a nearby lamp.
"Baby? What happened? What's wrong?”
"N-nothing" was a whispered lie, "Nothing, don't worry"
And you started to drink from her lips again, but a steady hand kept on your breastbone retained you stagnant against the back of the sofa.
“Y/N” Wanda frowned her eyebrows in an air of concern, showing seriousness in her measured tone of voice, coercing you into sincerity, “Please tell me what's wrong”
And then, a lame sigh.
You opened and closed your mouth like a goldfish, not quite knowing what to say, and then you chewed poorly on your lower lip between your upper teeth. But all it took was one steady look from Wanda for you to finally give up, shrugging both your shoulders in surrender.
"Just promise me you won't get mad"
"I won't be mad if you just tell me what happened, Y/N"
And then, a moment's hesitation; Wanda's red hair like tongues of fire around her sharp jaw as the locks were lit by the yellow lamp as she sits there, snuggled in your palpitating lap as she was.
“I… got hurt on the mission. Nothing too serious or dangerous, and Vision has taken care of at least ninety percent of that” you shrug, “It just hurt a little when you squeezed it, babe, that's all, it's okay”
And then, a silence went by.
"Let me see"
"What?"
“Let me see your bruise, Y/N”
And it wouldn't be worth resisting; you just took the long sleeve of your thick blouse by the fingers of your left hand and rolled it the entire length of your arm, passing from wrist to elbow and then finally to shoulder, like unfolding a gift wrap on Christmas morning.
The action was all scrutinized assiduously by the young witch, who let out a yelp of exclamation as the bandage tightly wrapped around the contour of your deltoid muscle was disclosed, white bands wrapping the entire length of your biceps.
“I promise it looks worse than it really is,” you tried, but nothing would stop the smoldering worry from shuddering into Wanda on a wave of anxiety that washed over her.
“Y/N, your superpower is being impenetrable” your wife muttered, in an apprehensive thread of voice, her eyes never leaving the bandage enfolded on your arm.
“You're not supposed to be able to get hurt! I was less worried about you going on missions with Steve alone because I knew that nothing or no one could hurt you, but now..."
You heard as she swallowed hard, shaking her head in denial (straws of silky fire hair rustling close to her chin), muttering whimpers to herself that all sounded the same guilty tone in your wife's comely voice.
“I should have been there, I should have been there to protect you, I-”
“No, honey, no,” you call out to her, as the anxiety became too much for her to handle and the ghosts of her past came back to haunt her like a constant shadow she always carried around.
You then took Wanda's face between your hands, by the sides of her jawbones, coercing her into making eye contact with you.
“Baby, it hasn't even been two months since the boys were born, you know you still need to recover before getting back into action. And on top of everything else, they need you here for them. It's just a silly bruise, my love, that's all. I can take care of myself. You remember our deal when we found out you were pregnant, right? I would go to the missions, you would stay with the boys. When you recovered, you could go and then I would take care of them. You remember that, right?”
"I just don't want there to be any more missions at all, Y/N" she muttered in a small voice, curling a hand around your forearm that held the sides of her oval face.
"I don't want to have to think that every time you leave through that door could be the last time I'll ever see you. I don't want the boys to grow up not knowing who their mother is"
You tried to say something, but there was really nothing to say.
Not when you knew your wife was all plastered by reason. Not when you knew you had a family to raise, and that it certainly wouldn't be worth dying alone, forgotten in some ditch after an unsuccessful run-in with some bad guy a little stronger than you were used to.
No, you knew the heroic days were in the past to remember.
That soon this life would come to an end, and you and Wanda would be a couple of housewives raising your children with lots of love and affection and, honestly, this idea didn't seem so bad after all.
But there erupted into the air, before you could even open your mouth or she could intervene, a piercing sound that alerted both of you to the maternal senses, dissipating the thin layer of distress that still hovered around the small living room.
In tears, Billy had woken up, and in cries, he needed attention – psychic energy emanating from him, but too weak for Wanda to properly know it.
“Damn, I nursed them before bed, I-”
Perhaps the waves of unease emanating from his parents were picked up by his senses still blooming at such an early age, magical vigor gradually growing in his little body like the bricks that eventually come to form a complete house, but the point is that after a twin waking up doesn't take long for the other to do the same, and then it was that two children cried morosely with their little yells piercing the veil of darkness of the night.
Wanda threatened to get to her feet, already on full alert, but you held her in a deferred firm grip against her waist bone, keeping her sitting on your lap.
“I’ll go,” you said solemnly, when it was that she looked at you, “You handled this all by yourself for a week, honey. Let me go”
“But you just got back from the mission-”
“And you took care of two newborns by yourself for a whole week. Trust me, I know which of these things is the hardest, and it sure as hell isn't fighting some terrorists in the desert"
You then carefully set Wanda aside, draping her legs over yours so you could sit her upright back to the couch.
“And besides everything” you smiled, and already standing, placed a warm kiss against the commission of her lips, “I miss my little dudes”
And you took a few steps away from the couch, towards the whimper, but stopped before you reached the crying babies in the bedroom. Turning with your chin over your shoulder, you aimed your gaze towards Wanda.
“Wands?”
Greenish eyes flickered toward you through the air, watered with anticipation. Once again, you smiled.
“I love you, little witch”
It was a few days later, however, after you'd finished changing a very energetic Tommy's diaper (the baby kicking with his chubby little legs, pressing his own little fist against his pink gums), that you approached Wanda, who nursed little Billy so lovingly against the mainstay of her right breast, humming a Sokovian lullaby in low tones so that only her precious little boy would hear and know, from an early age, what his roots were.
The little newborn who, in turn, was thus sheltered by Wanda's tender and delectable embrace, with her pure breast hidden by his small pearly mouth.
Sucking noises escaped from this exciting union created, then, between mother and son, consolidated by the small cheeky little left hand well screwed on the slender index finger of your wife's right hand.
Tommy, meanwhile, was one step away from kicking you in the ribs with his smart wriggly little legs.
Your watchful gaze skimmed over her for a few minutes, until Billy stopped sucking at Wanda's breast as he fell into a blissful infant sleep, into a breast-milk-induced coma.
Wanda gratified the baby with a warm kiss, deposited the crown of his head in a tuft of light brown hair (as a young Pietro Maximoff had once been), and handed your sleeping son into your embrace, whereupon the child rotation then left her with the other baby to nurse.
“Is anyone hungry, huh, my sweet Tommy?”
The older twin was fierce against her breast, and you noticed the times when Wanda kind of sighed in pain, but tiredness got the better of him after a while; he, too small to fight what was wearing him out, with sleep fluttered in his ebony lashes as his childish eyes blinked.
Both energetic pupils, reluctant before the benevolence of drowsiness squinted to the horizon of his large doll eyes, were obscured by the brutish small lids.
And then, he was soon snoozing like his brother, dispersed in his own reality – his little chest swelling and deflating because he was there, and he was real, and he was alive, and he was fine.
You looked from Billy to Tommy and then to Wanda. Your family. Your greatest asset. There was a lull inside of you.
“What do you think of New Jersey, honey? I lived there during my childhood, with my parents. You know, before the accident, of course. I don't think it's to everyone's taste, but… I've always particularly liked the weather. It’s... nice there, in spring”
Wanda gave you a confused smile; her hand was still cradling Tommy's little head in her arms.
“What do I think of New Jersey for what exactly, dorogoya?”
And then you blinked once, and smiled towards her.
“To grow old in”
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taglist: @diaryoflife, @iliketozoneout, @raqelacevedo, @wizardofstories, @wlwfanfictionss, @wandsmxmff
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loving-n0t-heyting · 2 months
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The US military said 85 targets at seven separate facilities were hit, including those associated with the guards’ Quds Force as well as Iranian-backed militia in the region. It was the first of what US President Joe Biden said would be a series of retaliatory strikes for the drone attack on a base on the Jordan-Syrian border that killed three American servicemen last month.
“Our response began today,” Biden said after the strikes were carried out. “It will continue at times and places of our choosing.” [...]
The Iraqi government also condemned the strikes, which it said killed 16 people, including civilians.
the famous tit-tit-tit-tit-tit-tit-tit-tit-tit for tat strategy
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beardedmrbean · 5 months
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Nunya I feel like I’m losing my mind. Horrible acts that have been caught on tape, BY HAMAS, uploaded to the internet, once again, BY HAMAS. Syrians desperately trying to show the world that most of the videos in “Gaza” are actually videos of Syrians. Jew haters openly using slurs and hateful rhetoric about how Jews are evil and they all need to die, stated openly on social media. Evidence Jewish presence in the Middle East for centuries, corroborated by multiple countries. Non Israeli Jews being targeted, with video evidence in other countries. And yet???? I can’t even hide myself away in my usual fandom spaces to take my mind off things because apparently I share spaces with people who state that even thinking of showing sympathy for Israelis makes you evil and you should just die. Just the sheer vitriol I’ve been seeing pales to any I’ve seen before. They’re bloodthirsty and can’t even see it.
Ya this one is far more extreme than even the last one a couple years back where a family was finally evicted from a home that had been purchased by a Jewish family back when the area was still part of the Ottoman Empire, even had the old pre WW1 receipts for that one, still got a bunch of rockets fired at Israel and lots o hate crimes against Jews not in Israel.
This one though, this absolutely boggles my mind how it's gone. Sneak attack during a Jewish holiday isn't unheard of Yom Kippur war being a thing, but that was a organized attack that went after military targets, this was more like if instead of attacking the naval yard Japan just went on a bombing and shooting spree across all the Hawaiian islands they could specifically targeting civilian areas.
Then to cap it all off the international community coming round and telling the US to make a measured response to that kind of thing.
As mask off moments go, I didn't think the massacre of innocents who have zero military value, the rape, murder, and desecration of civilians that's occurred and been broadcast by the people perpetrating it could ever be met with anything other than revulsion from anyone, but instead we're getting what we've gotten.
There's the people that have been waiting in the wings for this to happen so they could go and fan the flames of the hate they've been hanging on to and watch them spread which is going to explain why some things have gone as far as they have.
Folks that may have been on the fence or fairly ignorant about the goings on there other than every once in a while they start shooting at each other for a while getting a healthy dose of lies fed to them, like the esteemed congresswoman omar retweeting that picture from the syrian gas attack on their own people and saying it's palesteinan children.
AFAIK she hasn't acknowledged the fact that she did that either.
Those girls sobbing at their school because people are chanting a chant that is a literal call to the genocide of the whole of the Jewish people (Zionists or not they want you dead) and people laughing at them.
found myself in a Catholic subreddit, where I managed to be fairly disgusted at my fellow Christians making cracks about going in and doing another military crusade to reclaim the holy land and kick out the unbelievers
Deus Vult joke is one thing, going into detail after making it is another.
Old guy that stabbed the 6 year old palestenian migrant here in the US 26 times killing him, that's been roundly condemned and is being rightly investigated as a hate crime, why no similar outrage over the infants who were murdered in Israel from these people?
What people are giving a pass to is insane,
I'm on record many times saying that criticism of Israel and its government is not inherently Antisemitic, it gets there when you apply a different stricter set of rules on them than you do other governments.
Never expected to see a 180 on that with palestine and war crimes, where people would excuse them because of who they were war criming.
Then we get people mad that Israel isn't providing electricity and water to the people that are trying to kill them, how dare they not make killing Jews easier on hamass.
It's lunacy
I'm gonna keep praying for you, and everyone really because even some of the people in gaza don't want this I imagine, gonna keep trying to push out as much verifiable information as I can and moral support I don't know, I'll just be here doin what I can from my little keyboard, whatever that is, trying to see if I can put a little balm on the wounds in the form of a smile or I don't know.
I want all the hate to stop.
I will say there's a certain irony in having the support for the Jewish state be seen as a right wing position, afaik most Jewish Americans have voted blue for a long long time, even the Zionists.
There's a few of the Jewish subreddits that have gone private, most of them by now I'd wager actually if you're over there too that might be a good refuge for you and others, this is all so pervasive I can't think of too many places that aren't going to be hit by it.
I'm sorry I can't be more help, I wish I could.
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workersolidarity · 2 months
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[ 📸 U.S. troops go on patrol at al-Tanf air base in eastern Syria. The Syrian government considers the United States presence in its eastern third as an illegal occupation, and wants U.S. soldiers out of the country.]
🇺🇲⚔️🇸🇾 🪖 🚨
US TO CONSIDER WITHDRAWAL FROM SYRIAN OCCUPATION
The United States is considering a withdrawal of its forces from Syria, according to an article published in Foreign Policy, an online news periodical with ties to the U.S. Defense establishment.
Citing four sources from within the U.S. departments of State and Defense, Foreign Policy claims active internal discussions are ongoing within the Biden administration on a troop withdrawal from Syria, a notoriously illegal occupation of nearly one-third of Syrian territory, which the United States has used to siphon tens of billions of dollars worth of oil out of the country.
The piece was written by senior fellow and director of the Syrian Counterterrorism and Extremism Programs at Middle East Institute, Charles Lister.
The organization itself, the Middle East Institute, is funded by a who's-who of U.S. proxy-governments, Intelligence sources, elite Universities, and giant corporations including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, ExxonMobil, George Soros's Open Societies Foundation, Morgan Stanley, and Princeton University.
The article itself presents the decision on the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria as an impending disaster, warning that the Islamic State is waiting in the wings for an opportunity to take back control over the Levant, with the title of the published article "America is planning to withdraw from Syria- and create a disaster."
Lister warns that the withdrawal should be "cause for significant concern" and that, while no decision has yet been reached by the Biden administration, the White House is "no longer invested in sustaining a mission that it perceives as unnecessary."
"Notwithstanding the catastrophic effect that a withdrawal would have on U.S. and allied influence over the unresolved and acutely volatile crisis in Syria, it would also be a gift to the Islamic State. While significantly weakened, the group is in fact primed for a resurgence in Syria, if given the space to do so," Lister summerized.
Lister claims that the United States's "unprecedented intervention" launched in 2014 by the Obama administration, alongside "80 partner nations," was "remarkably successful," without ever mentioning Iran's intervention to organize a strong resistance to the Islamic State in Iraq, nor the Russian Intervention to strengthen and reinforce Syria's military and air defenses.
Lister claims the situation in Syria is "more complex" than that of Iraq's, adding that "with approximately 900 troops on the ground, the United States is playing an instrumental role in containing and degrading a persistent Islamic State insurgency in northeastern Syria, working alongside its local partners, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)."
Again, Lister ignores the role played by the Russian military in providing air cover and tactical strikes on behalf of the Syrian military, warning that the threat from IS remains a serious cause for concern.
Lister points to a rocket attack launched against a prison maintained by U.S. proxy-forces to warn of the dangers in Syria, elaborating on the heroic defense of the so-called "Syrian Democratic Forces," comprised of a mix of jihadist groups, some with ties to al-Qaeda, that ran amok, sowing chaos and destabilizing Eastern Syria, until the Russian Intervention in September 2015, when U.S. proxy-forces were largely sequestered into the illegally U.S.-occupied territory in the eastern-most third of Syria.
Lister goes on to raise alarms over the security situation in western Syria too, where Syrian government forces, with the help of the Russian military, have since regained control of much of its territory formally under the control of jihadist groups.
"While U.S. troops and their SDF partners have managed to contain the Islamic State’s recovery in Syria’s northeast, the situation is far more concerning to the west—on the other side of the Euphrates River, where the Syrian regime is in control, at least on paper," Lister claims.
Lister, pushing for the U.S. to remain in Syria, says that "In this vast expanse of desert, the Islamic State has been engaged in a slow but methodical recovery, exploiting regime indifference and its inability to challenge a fluid desert-based insurgency."
Lister's alarmism goes on, describing the supposed regrouping of IS in various government-held regions of Syria, even going so far as to claim that the Islamic State has only been quiet in recent months due to employing a strategy of concealing its operations, never pointing to specific examples that might back those claims.
"For the past several years, the Islamic State has purposely concealed its level of operation in Syria, consistently choosing not to claim responsibility for attacks that it was conducting," the article claims, inversely suggesting the absence of activity by the extremist group is actually evidence of their malfeasance.
Lister also claims that the situation in the Gaza Strip is fueling the groups return, stating that the "war in Gaza and a spiraling regional crises are adding fuel to its fire and creating opportunities for the terror group to exploit the situation for its own advantage," without ever giving any concrete examples of how, where and in what way the group is returning, only citing research from his own shadily-funded organization's projects as evidence.
"According to the Counter Extremism Project, in 2023 alone, the Islamic State conducted at least 212 attacks in Syria’s central desert region, killing at least 502 people. As covert threats and overt attacks increase, reports are emerging with increasing frequency of desertions within regime ranks," Lister says.
Lister then claims that the United States is the only thing holding the region together even as he admits there's little the U.S. can do within territories controlled by the Syrian government.
That claim, that the U.S. is the glue holding Syria together, flies in the face of the countless warnings by both the Syrian and Russian governments that say the United States is in fact the source of instability in the region.
"While there is little that U.S. forces can do to alter Islamic State activities within the regime-controlled regions of Syria, U.S. troops are the glue holding together the only meaningful challenge to the Islamic State within a third of Syrian territory. Were that glue to disappear, a significant resurgence in Syria would be all but guaranteed, and a destabilizing spillover into Iraq a certainty."
Interestingly, Lister goes on to point to Iraq as an important player in the future of the Islamic State group, admitting that increased tensions created by the U.S. occupation in Iraq, along with the U.S support for Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, is creating a new push in the country to remove U.S. forces from Iraq by its parliament, creating a supposed opening for extremist groups in the region.
Lister puts the blame squarely on Iran for these openings, and for Iraq's growing impatience with Washington, adding that a troop withdrawal would be a bad idea, even invoking the collapse of U.S. proxy-forces in Afghanistan to warn of the dangers of a troop withdrawal from Syria.
"Ultimately, events since October have placed the U.S. deployment in northeast Syria on a fraying thread—hence recent internal consideration of a Syria withdrawal," Lister says, adding that "Given the disastrous consequences of the hurried exit from Afghanistan in 2021 and the impending U.S. election later this year, it is hard to grasp why the Biden administration would be considering a withdrawal from Syria."
Lister concludes that "no matter how such a withdrawal was conducted, it would trigger chaos and a swift surge in terror threats."
"There can be no denying the clear sense in policy circles that it is being actively considered—and that it has been accepted as an eventual inevitability," Lister claims.
Lister emphasized that anyone considering a collaborative approach with the Syrian government are making a big mistake, because "that would not only be a phenomenal boon to the Islamic State, but simply impossible on its own terms."
Lister explained that "part of the SDF may have periodic contact with Assad’s regime, but they are far from natural allies. The regime would never allow the SDF to sustain itself, and Turkey would do everything possible to kill what remained [of Washington's proxies]."
"The last time that the Islamic State surged in Syria, in 2014, it transformed international security in profoundly negative ways. Should a U.S. withdrawal precipitate a return to Islamic State chaos, we will be relegated to mere observers, unable to return to a region that we will have placed squarely under the control of a pariah regime and its Russian and Iranian allies."
#source
#OnListersOrganizationsFinances
@WorkerSolidarityNews
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flipshitz · 6 days
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Refuting common blood libel about Jews and israel:
gen·o·cide
noun
the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
"a campaign of genocide"
From 1990 to 2022 the population of Palestine increased from 1.98 million to 5.04 million people. This is a growth of 155.0 percent in 32 years. The highest increase in Palestine was recorded in 1991 with 4.58 percent.
Israel is estimated to possess somewhere between 75 and 400 nuclear warheads (one can be used to wipe out all Palestinians if wanted but Israel will not)
What percent of Gaza's population has been killed?
1%
7, 2023. With 23,357 killed in Israel's military operation in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, the Gaza Strip population has now lost 1% of its 2.3 million residents. (There is no reason to believe these numbers are true as hamas is a terrorist organization with no intention of reporting accurate numbers therefore we can estimate less.)
Jews originally trace their ancestry to a confederation of Iron Age Semitic-speaking tribes known as the Israelites that inhabited a part of Canaan during the tribal and monarchic periods. Modern Jews are named after and also descended from the southern Israelite Kingdom of Judah.
With this we know that Jews come from Judea and Arabs come from Arabia.
49 Muslim countries 2 billion Muslims
To 15 million Jews in their one Jewish state the size of New Jersey. 100 to 1 odds.
Zion: the hill in Jerusalem where king David built his kingdom -David (flourished c. 1000 bce) was the second ruler of the united kingdom of ancient Israel and Judah
Israel predates Islam by 1500 years.
ZionISM: the believe that Jews have the right to self determination in their homeland.
Muhammad Amin al-Husayni (189?-1974) was the Mufti (chief Muslim Islamic legal religious authority) of Jerusalem under the political authority of the British Mandate in Palestine from 1921 to 1937. His primary political causes were: -exiling and further blocking from Jews in diaspora from immigration.
-Organizing pogroms against Jews
-meeting with Hitler
-launching a war that would they would again lose & effectively displace thousands of Palestinians back into their neighboring Arab countries where they came from and blaming it all on the Jews.
After three defensive wars in 1949, 1956, and 1967, Israel had expanded its territory, leading to heightened tensions with the Arab states. On October 6, 1973, an Arab coalition of Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur—the Jewish holy day of atonement.
After these victories and acquiring of more land, the Israelis chose to give back their ancestral soil as a land for peace deal which the Palestinians would violate year after year by electing genocidal governments that seek to finish hitlers bidding.
To date; The bilateral agreements between Israel and the Palestinians contain no prohibition against the building or expansion of settlements.
Despite contrary allegations repeated ad nauseam.
2001 Israelis uprooted its citizens who had settled in Gaza already in order to make way for the Arabs to settle in an effort for peace but almost immediately they elect Hamas which is a proxy of Iran much like Hezbollah who’s only political agenda is to kill all Jews.
Oct 7th is a direct result of what happens when you invite terrorists to your front door.
For more copy and paste link:
SATURDAY-OCTOBER-SEVEN.COM
For the “UN” excuse;
Islamic Countries in the UN (46): Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Sudan, Algeria, Afghanistan, Morocco, Iraq, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Syria, Kazakhstan, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Tunisia, Guinea, Azerbaijan, Somalia, Tajikistan, Sierra Leone, Libya, Jordan, UAE, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Chad, Lebanon, Kuwait, Albania, Mauritania, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Gambia, Comoros, Djibouti, Maldives, Brunei, Lebanon. All of which are under the influence of IRAN which guess what? Owns Hezbollah and Hamas as its proxies. All of these nations have genocided or exiled all of its Jews. It’s no wonder they all take a majority vote over israel while simultaneously burying their crimes against humanity - but no mention of that from the peanut gallery on ur end right? Doesn’t fit your shill narrative. And to make matters worse; Iran's appointment to chair UN yes that’s right IRAN was appointed as chair for human rights - which drew rightful criticism at least thank god. Oh and 450 terror operatives in Gaza, mostly Hamas members, are also employed by UNRWA
Attacks on Israel: (still on going)
Shlomo Zalman Zoref 1851
Battle of Tel Hai 1920
Jaffa riots 1921
Meora’ot Tarpat 1929
Hebron Massacre 1929
The great revolt 1936-1939
*in the years 1937-1939 was funded by nazi germany*
War of independence 1948
Scorpions pass massacre 1954
Palestinian fedayeen
Jerusalem bombings 1969
Lord Airport massacre 1972
Munich massacre 1972
Yom Kippur Surprise attack 1973
Ma’alot Massacre 1974
Coastal road massacre 1978
Lanarca yacht killings 1985
1st intifada 1987-1993
Tel Aviv Jerusalem bus 405 attack 1989
Night of the pitchforks 1992
Western wall tunnel riots 1996
2nd intifada 2000-2008
Dolphinarium Discoteque massacre 2001
Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing 2001
Haifa bus bombing (16 suicide bombs) 2001
Passover massacre 2002
Yeshiva beit Yisrael bombing 2002
Cafe moment moment bombing 2002
Matza restaurant suicide bombing 2002
Yagur junction bombing 2002
Rishon lezion bombing 2002
Meggido junction bus bombing 2002
Patt junction bus bombing 2002
Karkur junction bombing 2002
Kiryat Menachem bus bombing 2002
Tel Aviv central bus station massacre 2003
Beersheba bus bombing 2004
2nd rosh ha’ir Restaraunt bombing 2006
Kedumim bombing 2006
Eilat bombing 2007
Jerusalem bus stop bombing 20011
Itamar massacre 2011
Tel Aviv truck attack 2011
Shaar ha negev school bus attack 2011
Tel Aviv bus bombing 2012
Gush Etzion kidnapping and murder 2014
Jerusalem synagogue attack 2014
Stabbing intifada 2015-2016
Tel Aviv shooting 2016
Temple Mount shooting 2017
Ariel stabbing 2018
Samaria combined attack 2019
Wave of terror 2022
Jerusalem bombings 2022
Bizengoff shooting 2023
Ramot junction attack 2023
October 7th massacre 2023
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All Along the Watchtower (Chapter 3)
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Pairing: Captain John Price x Fem!OC (3rd person POV)
Word count: 3K+
Warnings: mentions of violence, human trafficking, morally gray characters, CIA Black missions = shady shit, swearing
Summary: The first flashback chapter for Rory regarding her time in Iraq working operations for the CIA (will tie into the overall story fyi, no ship stuff this chapter)
A/N: Rory Sinclair is a dual citizen (both Canada and the UK) who's been living in the UK since she was 14. She is 28 at the time of this fic, Price is 32. This series is set in 2017 before the events of the first MW game. Rory's thoughts are bold and italicized, other italics are used for emphasis. Will also be available to read on AO3.
2016 - Anbar Province, Iraq / Syrian Border 
“All right, people, you have your orders. This ain’t gonna be pretty. So get your shit on right.”
Rory tried her hardest to ignore the droning voice of Officer Walker, the CIA operative assigned to the squad sitting in the front passenger seat, giving his best military impersonation for the crowd of soldiers jammed together in the armored vehicle. Crammed so tight her shoulders barely had room to bump against her fellow passengers as they drove along the rocky road. They were sardines in a tin can being boiled together on a hot stove – a pressure cooker – and the situation they were about to find themselves in only made it worse. 
“We are fifteen minutes out from the Syrian border. I repeat one - five minutes. This is known home turf for ISIS. We’re expecting heavy resistance. I will remind you all that this is unsanctioned. We are heading into the Black. There will be no questions. There will be no reports. There will be no crying to your mamas on the phone when you get back to base, ‘cause believe me, we’ll be tracking it. That goes for you limey fucks too,” he said with a smirk, looking up into the rearview mirror with his amber eyes. “ God Bless Homeland Security. ”
Walker’s wry smile was enough to turn Rory’s stomach, but she didn’t get to choose her bosses in the middle of warfare. She had to nod her head with a ‘yes, sir’ and a ‘no, sir’ to make her way through this. He might have been American, he might have been CIA, but right now, he was in charge. 
“We are dealing with a serious piece of shit in one Abdullah Al Ghulam, he is our target. I want him kept alive at all costs. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
She said nothing while the other soldiers around her offered their oath of fealty to the man. Instead, Rory kept her head down and her mind focused on the mission. Her mind always had to be on the mission. In situations like these, knowing she was about to see some shit, she did her best to block out the conscience her mother had instilled in her – doing good things for the right people . Out here there was just getting your hands dirty and hoping that it would be for the best, that it paid off in the long run and wouldn’t come back to haunt. The end justifying the means when things went dark like this, Machiavellianism at its very peak. There were no heroes out here, no matter who was patted on the back and awarded medals. 
Across from her Lt. Andrew Owen kept his eyes on her, his blue stare darkened by the brim of his helmet. The corner of his lip curled as he noticed her looking back at him with a ‘can you believe this guy’ flick of her brow, his head shaking slightly in return. He was the second in command of her unit, they seemed to never be too far away from one another, having fought in enough foxholes together to trust that the other had their six, and despite what the mission was expecting to serve them, seeing him there in the vehicle with her did add a certain sense of relative calm to the situation. There was a face in the crowd of strangers that wouldn’t just see her as some waste of space. Andrew knew what she was capable of. All too well . 
As the stream of armored vehicles came to a stop, the soldiers completed their final weapons check as the sun began to fade down into the horizon, streaking the sky in deep orange and red like the hellfire they were about to rain down. Readying their thermal scopes and night vision, making sure their tac gear was strapped on tight, the doors opened, and shadows crept out into the evening. 
Rory swung the strap of her rifle over her head and across her shoulder, looking out at the sky turned purple, the sun nearly completely gone down except for one lingering sliver of light along the horizon line. Pulling down on the goggles that would help lead her into the dark, seeing only in green and black as she marched forward, she followed her Lieutenant into battle. He was quick to give her a bump to the shoulder, that last little bit of comfort from a friend before hitting any possible SNAFUs. 
“You good, Sinclair?” he whispered into the comm.
“Yeah. Same old, same old. Right, Andy?”
Chuckling at the nickname, a smile cracked his otherwise serious face, “Fuck you.”
Tensions were relieved for only a moment, building right back up as boots crunched slowly through the sand and small bits of gravel towards the munitions bunker American intelligence had confirmed the existence of several klicks across the border with the use of drones. It was up to her and the rest of the squad to clear out the guard of enemy combatants, neutralize the weapons, and then collect the intel that would lead to who had actually shipped them in. Weapons didn’t come from nowhere, there was always a trail that led back. 
Silently stalking into the night, radio chatter was kept to an absolute minimum, hand signals being used instead. They’d crossed the border into enemy territory, they were no longer within the boundaries they were meant to maintain, they were in a country they weren’t at war with – not yet anyway. The squad broke up into two units, flanking the building in a pincer movement that would leave the resistance fighting from two opposing directions. Rory was split off with Walker and Lt. Owen, coming in from the rear of the bunker along with several other NATO soldiers of different rank and file, while the others stormed the front with charges to the doors. 
Shock and awe . 
Explosions rang out into the night, flashes of white light sparking from the corner of Rory’s night vision, the heat blurring her view for just a moment. She gripped her rifle a little tighter as they moved forward, heading down towards the opposite entrance of the complex. The heavy doors were locked tight, so C4 was strapped on in order to breach. Flying open along with a blast of sand, the doors were left to creak on their hinges as the soldiers entered before the ringing in their ears could quiet. 
Black figures stormed through the halls lined with flickering fluorescent lights, the sounds of gunshots and yelling echoing as the B squad moved to meet them in the middle. Bullets ripped through the air, bodies falling. This wasn’t a precise operation, a striking opposite from the way Rory usually worked. Shifting from shock to all out bedlam for the enemy, the dead littered the bunker as the force pushed through the halls. They weren’t taking prisoners here, no hostages, this was meant to be a clean sweep except for the target, clearing all rooms of anyone armed or considered dangerous.
Room after room, corridor after corridor, this place seemed to go on forever. Some passages ran tighter than others but would lead into expansive rooms and from them more men would appear, gun spray missing the soldiers as they fired haphazardly. There would only be casualties on one side tonight as the enemy seemed to swarm like insects, wave after wave, protecting what lay at the heart of the labyrinth of tunnels. Cut down as the soldiers expected more to rise from their place. 
Heading down one of the tunnels, it steadily grew darker as Rory’s squad moved away from the main hall. The lamps above glowed with warm, golden light, yet shadows still bloomed against the walls of the corridor. Another heavy steel door blocked their path at the end, and Walker was sure that was the entrance to Abdullah’s private area, sectioned off from everyone else like the queen in a nest. 
Taking point at the door, Walker motioned for one of the other soldiers to come forward with the charges to breach, and the blood in Rory’s ears began to thunder with each pump of her heart, the sweat starting to form on her brow. It didn’t matter how many times she was in a situation like this, how practiced of a routine it had become, she still had that frantic moment just before hell was about to break loose. When the anxious prey animal in her head was set free before the chomping jaws of the wolf would clamp back down again and she’d return to calm. Battle readiness swept over her as the adrenaline spread through her body, keeping her head on a swivel. 
With a massive bang and a gust of rushing air, the door was breached and once more they dove headfirst into the unknown. The darkness dissipated and the lights of sconces on the walls lit their way to Al Ghulam who threw himself down on to his knees without an order, wasting no time in placing his hands behind his head, as if he already knew he wouldn’t be sacrificed despite his crimes. 
Rory’s hawklike gaze travelled over their newly acquired prisoner, surprised to find a man who was still clean cut and wearing a well-tailored shirt and pants and smooth leather boots, despite having been in a bunker for apparently some time, using this as his headquarters. He was a man who still held onto his ties to the West, despite working with terrorist organizations that actively despised the nations that made up its colonial powers. 
Stalking up to the man, Walker grabbed the zip ties from his vest and slapped them around Abdullah’s wrists. “Well shit, you went down easy, huh?”
“Allaenat ealayk." <Arabic: Fuck you.>
“You gonna call me an American pig while you’re at it?” He looked down at the prisoner, his brow raised waiting for an answer, but he was met with only silence. “That’s what I thought. So, Mr. Al Ghulam I think you already know why we’re down here, so why don’t you save us nice people some trouble and lead us to your stash, ‘kay?”
Dark eyes rose to look at the American through a furrowed brow. “There are no weapons here,” he said confidently. 
“You can fuck right off with that bullshit; I know for a fact –”
“You know nothing, fucking CIA.” Abdullah’s eyes scoured the officer with a glare. “You are led by your masters, but you don’t know anything at all.”
Grabbing Abdullah by the collar of his shirt, Walker lifted him to his feet and looked him in the eyes. “I know what I need to. And right now, you’re gonna play your role and lead me to the containers I know you have kept here.”
“Containers yes, but there are no weapons.”
“Sure there aren’t.” Walker shoved the man forward, causing him to stumble as he was pushed past the soldiers. 
Rory’s stare followed him out of the room, focused on Walker and Al Ghulam. Containers, but no weapons – what was that supposed to mean? She looked to her Lieutenant, the question caught on her tongue, but it came through in her furrowed brow. Andrew gave her no answer, he didn’t have any more to go on than she did, but his jaw sat clenched. 
They followed the CIA operative down, further down into the bunker. Metal stairs clanging as the boots of a dozen soldiers stomped upon them. Finally entering a massive room with a large roll up bay door at the end of it. Storage space, a delivery system, this base was well-established. Placed in the middle of the room were six large metal shipping containers and Walker’s eyes went wide at the sight. 
“Alright, people, I want those doors opened. We’re taking inventory and then sweeping for intel.”
Using large bolt cutters, the locks on the containers were removed by the soldiers, but upon opening the doors it brought no peace. There weren’t any weapons as was promised, just as Al Ghulam had said, there was something else. Something that made Rory’s stomach drop and her eyes go wide with horror. 
Inside each container sat women and children. Weeping and starving, treated like cattle. Their clothes dirty, the smell of body odor near unbearable as it wafted throughout the room.
“ Jesus Christ… ” Rory could only speak in a whisper, eyes glued to the sight before her. 
Bolt cutters fell to the cement floor with a heavy bang. Soldiers stood, shocked so quiet they could hear a pin drop. The flashlights of a dozen rifles travelled over the tear-streaked faces of innocent people caught in the crossfire of a war that had been going on for too long. Herded into pens, treated like property, to be sent off to God only knew where. 
She seethed, a deep-seated anger in her making her blood run cold. Violence she’d seen and dealt with, able to manage it and push it down to where it no longer kept her up at night. Such abhorrent behavior towards human lives however, that was something she couldn’t shut out. Her gut twisted, the stoic exterior breaking as her mouth hung open and her eyes began to sting. 
Children and women reached out towards the soldiers, seeing their captor pushed to his knees and a gag shoved in his mouth. They thought the forces were there to save them and it broke Rory’s heart. They weren’t heroes, they weren’t here to save the day, if Walker had his way these civilians would likely be left here for some clean-up crew to deal with. Lives didn’t matter, just having the upper hand in the fight did. 
Walker stood, his hand pressed to Al Ghulam’s shoulder as he forced the man to stay on his knees, but his face never seemed to change. Even as his amber eyes travelled over the countless faces that sat before him, the sickening sight had little effect on the man who had filled his life with secrets, lies, and deception, all to keep the power imbalance for the empire of America going strong. 
“What the fuck is this?” Rory looked to Walker, her lips drawn back in a snarl. “What the fuck is this, Walker? I thought we were coming down here for weapons.”
“Yeah, we were. Intel was wrong,” he said with a shrug.
“How did no one know about this?” She tossed her arm out towards the half dozen steel cargo containers filled with women and children. 
“Calm down, soldier. You think in an active war zone we got the time to be looking for missing persons? You think that’s what we’re here for? You think we give a shit about that? We are fighting terrorists, we are not the fucking UN,” Walker snapped.
Rory took off her helmet and held onto it by the straps, stabbing her tongue into her cheek if only to compose herself. “I think that whatever the fuck this asshole has going on –” Her attention turned to the man on his knees currently bound and gagged before her eyes darted back to Walker. “It’s a lot worse than whatever you or anyone else has been led to believe.”
The CIA officer stared her down, his face growing harder as he glared at her from under his brow. Unmoved by her compassion for humanity, he had a job to do and she was hindering those efforts. 
“Don’t go pulling any heroics, Sinclair,” Andrew hissed, grabbing her arm and pulling her closer to him until he could talk low enough for only her to hear. “We don’t need to go any deeper than this. This is above our paygrade already. We’re just here to shoot, remember ?” His glare stabbed into her as if to caution her next move. “I'd like to keep it that way.”
Her brow knit together, her jaw tightening ever still. It was like she was the only one who could see what was happening, the only one with clarity of mind to know that something monstrous was going on here and it sunk deep into the bowels of things. There was an unseen side to war, and she had yet to have gotten a stomach for it. “There are women and children locked up in steel boxes like cargo. I don’t care if this isn’t the weapon shipment we were sent in for. You think I'm going to turn a blind eye to that?”
“I think we shouldn’t push our CIA friend.”
It was a warning. Andrew had been around this block more times than she, he knew how bad things could get, but still she couldn’t understand how he wouldn’t object to what was happening here. “ Andy ?” She was taken aback by her Lieutenant’s sudden willful withdrawal of his conscience. They were at war, weapons were something she expected, a human trafficking ring was not on her list of things to discover in a bunker.
“Listen to me, Rory. We let Officer Walker do what he needs to with our target, and you and I stay quiet. Do you understand me, Sergeant?” Rory’s eyes drifted away from Andrew and back over to Walker, still holding onto Abdullah like a hostage before Lieutenant Owen grabbed her arm and brought her attention back to him as her superior. “There’s a reason the CIA wants him kept alive when it would be so easy to just put a bullet in his head. I’d prefer not to be privy to all that. Clear?”
“Rog’,” she said sullenly.
“Good. Now then let’s say we help Officer Walker here find a private room where he can hold a discussion with Mr. Al Ghulam. The sooner we can get out of here, the better.”
Rory nodded, her face sunken into a scowl. She hated being beholden to a law that didn’t even truly exist, a shadow of the rule of justice that was meant to be carried out, where war crimes and human rights violations were swept under the rug so long as the right hands were greased and information could be swapped between hands. It was dirty, stained in red, and going into the black meant it would never come to light. 
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naturalrights-retard · 6 months
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by Brian Shilhavy Editor, Health Impact News
Tensions in the Middle East escalated this week, and it appears that a full-blown war has now started with the attacks in Israel earlier today.
Attacks that have killed hundreds of people started before the attacks in Israel today, however.
Earlier this week, at least 100 people in Syria were reportedly killed in a deadly attack at a military college in Syria’s Homs province. The Syrian Government said it was a terrorist attack by “known international forces,” which implies they were funded by the U.S. who has had a military presence in Syria for over a decade now opposing the current Syrian Government.
A drone attack on a military college in Syria’s Homs province during a graduation ceremony has killed at least 100 people and wounded 240 more, a war monitor and the Syrian health minister have said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said more than 100 people were killed and 125 injured. An official in the alliance backing Syria’s government said the toll was about 100. Syria’s military earlier said drones laden with explosives targeted the ceremony on Thursday as it came to an end. In a statement, the military accused fighters “backed by known international forces” for the attack. Syria’s defence minister attended the graduation ceremony but left minutes before the attack, the Reuters news agency reported, citing a Syrian security source and a source in the regional alliance backing the Damascus government against opposition groups. “After the ceremony, people went down to the courtyard and the explosives hit. We don’t know where it came from, and corpses littered the ground,” said a Syrian man who had helped set up decorations at the ceremony. Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, who has reported extensively on Syria, said that that attack represents “a major security breach, a blow to the Syrian regime”. “It has been years since the forces of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have been targeted in such an operation in the heart of government-controlled territory,” she said. (Full article.)
This news was barely mentioned in the U.S. media, which instead focused on another attack that happened at the same time in the northern part of Syria, where Turkish forces attacked Kurdish military installations in retaliation for a suicide bombing in Ankara, Turkey.
The U.S. actually shot down a drone that was reportedly operated by Turkey, a NATO ally, and this is what was headline news in the U.S. media that day.
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usafphantom2 · 6 months
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In 1973, the SR 71 Crewmembers and flew dangerous and complicated missions over Israel and Egypt during the Yom Kippur war. (Colonel Jim Sheldon he will be at Mobile, Alabama next weekend. You could meet him in person.) one of the SR 71 pilots and family friend of the Sheffield‘s sent me his own recollections of that dangerous time, so similar to today.
Upon arrival at Mildenhall to set up recovery operations, Colonel Patrick Halloran, 9th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing Commander, was informed that the British Government was having second thoughts about allowing the SR-71 to land in England. They could not land at Mildenhall.
On Oct. 13 Oct, 1973, Pilot Jim Shelton and RSO Gary Coleman in SR-71 Blackbird #979, departed Griffiss AFB, NY on the first of a series of flights to the Middle East. After 11.13 hours of flight time involving 6 refuelings and more than five hours of flight above Mach 3.0, Jim Shelton landed #979 back at Griffiss. The “Photo Take” was highly successful and provided Defense Analysts and the President of the United States with information about the actual Syrian military situation.
The Yom Kippur War SR-71 operation provided a series of 11.4 hour round-robin sorties to the Middle East. Plans were originally made to fly these flights from Beale AFB to the Middle East and recover at Mildenhall, United Kingdom. Upon arrival at Mildenhall to set up recovery operations, Colonel Patrick Halloran, 9th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing Commander, was informed that the British Government was having second thoughts about allowing the SR-71 to land in England. Great Britain head denied us access to Mildenhall
During the “Yom Kippur” war in 1973, the SR 71 #979 flew directly into a war zone. Jim Shelton recalls “Once we reached the Nile River, we were at Mach 3.15, the Egyptian SAM sites started tracking us for a short distance. I also saw some aircraft condensation trails far below but lost them and the tracking just before it was time to make my 270-degree right turn around Cairo. When I straightened out, the SAM site started tracking us again, and as I headed N.E., I saw more contrails below me. I don’t know if they were Egyptian or Israel or BOTH.”
LTC. Gary Coleman (my RSO) and I (LTC James Shelton) were in the Standardization Office at Beale AFB, CA (we were the senior crew) and received a phone call from Col. Pat Halloran (the wing commander) to come to his office. When we arrived there he said, we were selected for a very important mission. Our State Department needed to know how the Yom Kippur War was going. We could not move a Spy Satellite out of the Russian orbit to cover the War area, so the SR-71 got the call.
The next day I went into operation and found out the reason the mission was canceled, was that when Col. Halloran and the maintenance recovery team landed at Mildenhall AB the British said, “the SR-71 could not land there, because they relied on Middle East Oil that they wanted no part in helping us with the mission”. I was told that we would fly to Griffiss AFB that evening and would fly our mission out of Griffiss and return to Griffiss. Now instead of an 8 ½ hour mission to just went to 11 hours.
Once we reached the river we were at Mach 3.15, the Egyptian SAM sites started tracking us for a short distance. I also saw some aircraft condensation trails far below but lost them and the tracking just before it was time to make my 270 degrees right turn around Cairo, when I straighten out the SAM site started tracking us again and as I headed N.E., I saw more contrails below me. I don’t know if they were Egyptian or Israel.) Needless to say Gary and I were tired when we landed but adrenalin keep us going during the mission and it took me a while to unwind before I could take a nap. Within 4 days Admiral Moore (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) invited Gary and me to the Pentagon to say, “Thank you for a job well done”. Written by .Jim Shelton & Linda Sheffield
@Habubrats71 via X
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