marshall.lewis's blog

Syria Update: After an accidental airstrike on a refugee camp north of Manbij, the Kurds opened a corridor to allow ISIS to evacuate. I'm not sure how many militants took them up on it, but a lot of civilians have evacuated. Fighting continues in the city's center.

SYRIA UPDATE: The last rebel supply route to Aleppo (the green line on the map) has been cut. The rebels are gathering for a massive offensive to establish a new supply line in the south by punching through the regime's supply line. I'm skeptical that this will work, but you never know. It also sounds like the Kurds are going to be launching an offensive to establish a supply line between Afrin and Aleppo. Two important regime villages lie along that road, so I'm not sure what that would look like in practice.

SYRIA UPDATE: Other than that weird Russian airstrike on Tanf, the big news continues to be Manbij. The Kurds have taken a huge amount of countryside around the city, and are currently assaulting the city itself. This will be ISIS's biggest defeat since they lost Palmyra.

People sometimes say that I focus on second and third-order causes, but I'm really more interested in first-order causes of unexpected correlations and parallels, such as the fact that women are significantly more likely to participate in the Resistance than men, or that one of the strongest predictors for a state supporting Bernie Sanders in the primary was lack of ethnic diversity, or the strong tendency of serial killers, mass shooters, and terrorists to be male, or the intense gender divisions in my industry.