As we went to press, Negotiations to try and end the War in Ukraine have gathered pace, yet again--as Russia continues its' relentless attack on Ukrainian Cities. The Wall Street Journal reported on the basic takeaway of the Trump 28-Point Plan that was negotiated directly with the Russians with no input from the Ukrainians. There is a Ukrainian Delegation slated to visit Washington to discuss the 19-point plan they have come up with in response to Mr. Trump's plan.
We present a snapshot of discourse in the afterrmath of the leak of the Trump Plan:
As we go dark through the end of the Thanksgiving Weekend here in the United States, we wanted to express our profound appreciation for the privilege of serving, as we look forward to our ongoing commitment to live up to our mission to help change the conversation about our World.
"Cartel de los Soles" is a figure of speech, not an organization
Venezuelan Special Forces Preparing for Another American “Cakewalk”
November 20, 2025 By Marc Cooper
It would hardly be the first time the U.S. goes to war under false pretenses, predicated by a lie, if the attack on Venezuela goes ahead. We backed a war against Nicaragua when Ronald Reagan claimed the new Sandinista leadership — with no money and a small army — could bring armed conflict right up to the border of Texas. Little could he guess that 40 years later the same Sandinistas would still be in power running one of the most reactionary regimes in the hemisphere. The old Gipper also manufactured the Salvadoran insurgency at the same time as being a threat to U.S. national security. A laughable notion, but a lie that cost us a couple of billion dollars and almost 100,000 dead Salvadorans. Again, nobody in the Reagan claque imagined that after the war was negotiated to a draw in the early, the insurgent FMLN (our sworn enemy inte 80’s) would be peacefully elected to power, twice, with both administrations having done nothing revolutionary and marred by corruption. Nothing more than a hiccup in Salvadoran history.
And then there was the granddaddy of them all: the multi-billion-dollar train wreck in Iraq predicated on imaginary weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. That stupidity cost several thousand American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and the end result? Instead of the Jeffersonian Democracy promised by Bush/Cheney, we turned Iraq into a staunch ally of our arch-enemy, Iran.
Currently, the U.S. is building up a massive armada of heavy war ships and troops off the coast of Venezuela. It’s an effort led and championed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio (probably because Donald Trump couldn’t as much find Venezuela on a map). Indeed, when asked a few days ago if he knew what he was going to do in or to Venezuela, Trump’s jaw-dropping answer was “sorta.”
Rubio, on the other hand, is thirsting for blood. Last week he announced our principal goal in Venezuela was to annihilate something called El Cartel de los Soles. He declared it a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), a brand that formally takes effect three days from now. Naming an enemy an FTO loosens the U.S. military’s rules of engagement, lowering them to a point competitive with a Turkey Shoot. Just kill and let God sort them out.
There’s one little problem with naming Los Soles as a demonic drug-smuggling organization worthy of destruction by the most lethal military force on earth: the Cartel de Los Soles simply does not exist. Instead, it is a figure of speech, ambiguous street slang for any and all military officers involved in the drug trade. It refers in no manner to any organization.
It has no structure, no central command, no affiliates, no specific membership, no nothing. It’s a term that arose in the early 1990s birthed by a few Venezuelan journalists broadly referring to the corruption of military officers who, indeed, had a hand in the drug business.
Targeting this imaginary cartel is like seeking to identify the Beltway Swamp as a centralized organization that has planted crocs and alligators in the D.C. National Mall and all corseted with a mammoth cordon that holds it together.
The Venezuelan military suffers from deep corruption, as does much of the entire state now founded on a patronage system that predates the pseudo-revolutionary regimes of Hugo Chávez and President Nicolás Maduro but has further rotted under their rule.
There’s certainly fragmentary evidence that Maduro and his family profit from drug trafficking, but the U.S. propaganda painting Maduro as some great mastermind of a gigantic operation a la Pablo Escobar is not to be trusted in the least. It’s also a fact that numerous Venezuelan military commanders also continue a sideline in drug trafficking — rather a natural pastime for a deeply corrupted institution.
But they do NOT constitute anything near a cartel. Phil Gunson, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group and who lives in Venezuela, told The New York Times: “There is no such thing as a board meeting of the ‘Cartel de los Soles.’ There is no such animal. The organization simply does not exist as such.”
The phrase itself entered the popular vernacular because military rank in Venezuela is demonstrated not by bars or stars on uniforms but rather by suns — or “soles” in Spanish. And the Venezuelan populace knows very well the level of corruption inside the military, including some connections with the drug trade. And the phrase Cartel de los Soles became popular shorthand for dissing the corrupt Venezuelan state.
Be advised, this is not just a semantic dispute over the dictionary definition of a cartel. It’s deployment now by the U.S. is rather sinister mendacity by Rubio and the Trump administration to give cover to its real objective: the overthrow of the Maduro regime. (Sorry, but I am compelled here to express my disgust with the media’s universal adoption of the threadbare euphemism “regime change.” Regime change means only one thing: overthrowing a government, period).
While he has recently tempered his rhetoric, the barely literate Maduro followed in the footsteps of his mentor Hugo Chávez by roasting the Yankees with red-hot revolutionary condemnation. They claimed to be building “21st Century Socialism” but, in fact, bankrupted the country, suppressed the opposition, rigged elections, set off a dizzying inflationary spiral, and motivated 8 million Venezuelans to leave the country.
So, unlike some of my fellow leftists, I offer no brief for a failed and ugly regime. I equally oppose the United States intervening militarily to “make things better” because it is not only illegal and immoral but also because it never works.
If the U.S. should decide to capture or remove Maduro and parade his head around as a trophy in the miserably failed War on Drugs, who exactly is going to run Venezuela in the aftermath? The drug-dealing military? A corps fiercely loyal to Maduro as they owe their status and power directly to a corrupt patronage machine run from the presidential office? Indeed, the Venezuelan government right down to the provincial level is essentially a military government populated by officers handpicked by Maduro, so beheading Maduro would almost inevitably lead to overt military rule and would do nothing to staunch whatever drug trade there is from Venezuela.
One alternative is the Iraqi Solution. Remember when the geniuses Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld disarmed and disbanded the Iraqi Army after disposing of Saddam and plunged the country into a miasma of chaos, looting, sectarian killing, and spawned a putrid bouquet of sectarian militias honor-bound to kill each other?
The U.S. could, then, simply replace the Venezuelan military with an American Occupation of 20 years or so, for which absolutely nobody has any appetite. Especially, the U.S. military. There is, of course, Venezuela’s rich oil reserves about which Trump has expressed his desire “to just take them over.” I honestly don’t know how much the oil really figures into whatever hare-brained plan the Trump Junta is coming up with. But it’s easier said than done. The U.S. seizure of the Venezuelan oil fields would imply a major war on the scale of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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Alas, there is one scenario currently gaining some traction and one clearly favored by Comandante Trump. How about confronting Venezuela with such an enormous and ominous military threat that Maduro is convinced to surrender without a fight? That would be a big PR win for Trump, but a meaningless one as the core structure of Maduro’s state and military would remain in place, and the imaginary Cartel de los Soles would continue doing whatever it does. The American people might be briefly pleased when shown the iconography of a bound and chained Nicolás Maduro, but I doubt it would have much impact.
Frankly, the U.S. propaganda war against Venezuela has been rather anemic and greatly overshadowed by a half dozen other Trump fiascos, from ICE raids to Epstein, to health care costs, to splits in MAGA, and so on. Selling Venezuela to the American people as some sort of pending and dire threat just has not happened, and public opinion most likely doesn’t give one flying fug about Maduro, let alone even know who he is.
The one thing we can be sure of is that Trump and Little Marco are incapable of backing down. They cannot deploy 25% of the U.S. Navy and tens of thousands of troops off the coast of Venezuela without doing something, whether or not a sufficient blast of propaganda has been previously established. Americans today care more about the release of the Epstein files than the composition of the ruling cabinet in Caracas.
Problem is, whatever our wise leaders wind up doing will generate needless catastrophe and at best will give MAGA a 2 percent temporary bump in the polls at a very high cost only to watch our engagement n Venezuela turn into a net negative for Trump.
You’d think the twin debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention Vietnam) would sink in as cautionary warnings to our masters of war, but you would be dead wrong. Especially when those masters are brain dead. +++
Kabul is running out of water. If present trends continue, the capital of Afghanistan could run completely dry by 2030. There are several reasons for this. The first is climate change: there is less snowmelt to feed the city’s aquifers. The second is aging infrastructure: pipelines are decrepit or, in some cases, non-existent. The third is management: in a city reeling from water shortages, people are drilling their own wells in yards and basements, with no regulation from the de facto Taliban government. The fourth is population pressure: the city has grown sixfold in the last twenty years. And over the last year alone, millions of Afghans who had fled to neighboring Iran and Pakistan have been forcibly returned, adding to already substantial resource pressures.
This is causing extreme stress on the people of Kabul, who, according to my guest today Marianna von Zahn, are now spending about 30% of their income on water. Marianna von Zahn is the Afghanistan Country Representative and Director of Programs for Mercy Corps, which recently released a report on the dire water crisis in Kabul and will soon release a similar report on water shortages in other parts of the country.
We kick off by discussing the scale and impact of the crisis in Kabul before having a longer conversation about what can be done to mitigate it. This includes exploring ways the international community can work with Taliban authorities to stave off an impending humanitarian catastrophe.
As November draws to a close, our team has been continually assessing our World as it has been quite a week.
The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad Bin Salman (incorrectly referred to as the King by President Trump during recent remarks), visited the United States, and moves were made for Warner Bros. Discovery. There was also a new Peace Proposal by the President of the United States, which essentially gave Ukraine until Thanksgiving to accept or else. As we also went to press, Marjorie Taylor Green, the MAGA firebrand, has decided to resign from Congress effective January 6, 2025--and US Supreme Court Justice Alito granted Texas a Temporary Reprieve to continue with its' redistricting efforts.
The Chinese have an admonition: May we live in interesting times.
Marjorie Taylor Greene just announced that she is resigning from the House of Representatives. We don’t know what is in her heart or in her head, whether she is planning on retiring from public life or running for some other, higher office.
But something she said struck me, which is part of a larger thematic. She cited, “nonstop never ending personal attacks, death threats, lawfare, ridiculous slander and lies about me.”
And then she added the kicker:
“I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.”
This is not about Greene. It is about something much more — something that the media seems to have missed in its breathless coverage of her resignation. ...
We present a Grid of deliberations (including headlines with thoughts from the Politico's Matt Wuerker & Others) along with thoughts courtesy Dropsite News from the past week in America, including thoughts on the Department of War, foreclosures, Kash Patel and the FBI, on Education in America, and Kristi Noem's role and thoughts courtesy the team at the Intercept:
Some Education Department employees were deemed essential, so colleges and universities will see little change once the government reopens. Policy experts are less confident that laid-off employees will be able to return to work.
For years, Chinese universities have been gaining on — and surpassing — Western institutions.
A Palestinian man holds a scorched fragment of a Koran page inside the Hajja Hamida Mosque after it was reportedly set on fire and vandalized by Israeli settlers in the West Bank village of Deir Istiya on November 13, 2025 (Photo by Zain JAAFAR / AFP) (Photo by ZAIN JAAFAR/AFP via Getty Images).
The Genocide in Gaza
The Israeli military said on Wednesday it killed four Palestinians in southern Gaza, including one in Khan Younis and three in Rafah where it said troops were in the area destroying underground tunnels. Israeli troops also fatally shot one person in Jabaliya, according to Al Jazeera.
The Israeli military carried out air strikes on Gaza on Thursday, including in Beit Lahiya; eastern areas of Gaza City; and the city of Khan Younis, where artillery shelling was also reported; according to Al Jazeera. The Israeli military also blew up several buildings in the Al-Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City overnight, according to the Palestinian Information Center.
The bodies of two Palestinians arrived at hospitals in Gaza over the past 24 hours, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, including one killed in new Israeli attacks and one recovered from under the rubble. At least five Palestinians were wounded. The total recorded death toll since October 7, 2023 is now 69,187 killed, with 170,703 injured.
Since October 11, the first full day of the ceasefire, Israel has killed at least 260 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 632, while 533 bodies have been recovered from under the rubble, according to the Ministry of Health.
Hamas announced in a statement on Thursday that its armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, and the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the al-Quds Brigades, will hand over one more Israeli captive’s body today at 8pm Gaza time. Hamas said the body was found today in the Moraj area north of Khan Younis. This is the 25th Israeli captive’s body to be returned to Israel since the ceasefire went into effect on October 10. After today’s handover, the bodies of three more Israeli captives need to be returned as part of the agreement. Under the deal, Israel agreed to exchange 360 Palestinian fighters’ bodies for the 28 Israeli captives’ remains. Israel has so far returned 315 Palestinian bodies. All of them were unidentified and many bore signs of torture, abuse, and summary execution. Only 91 have been identified so far and over 180 who remained unidentified have been buried in mass graves, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Israel plans to deport roughly 90 Palestinian patients—including infants, elderly people, and those in active treatment—from East Jerusalem hospitals back to Gaza next week, according to CNN. Over 94% of Gaza’s hospitals are damaged or destroyed, and doctors and rights groups warn that many deportees will die without care, with Physicians for Human Rights Israel calling the move “unacceptable” and illegal under international law. One patient with kidney failure told CNN that returning to Gaza would mean, “I will die there in two days.”
Israeli soldiers described the routine use of Palestinian civilians—including teenagers—as “mosquitoes,” when the soldiers forced them to walk ahead of troops with phones transmitting GPS data through tunnels and neighborhoods, according to an ITV investigation. Multiple soldiers said the practice became widespread within a week of its introduction, with one commander telling those who objected that they need not worry about international law, only about the “IDF spirit.”
Six Palestinian boys—with ages ranging from 13 to 17—have recently disappeared in Gaza, according to Defense for Children–Palestine. All six vanished after Israeli fire, drone strikes, or attempts to cross Israeli checkpoints, with some families later hearing the boys’ names inside Israeli prisons. These cases follow five confirmed disappearances this summer near the Zikim aid crossing, including 16-year-old Zain Dahman, whose mother searched hospitals and morgues for weeks.
West Bank and Israel
Israeli forces arrested around 40 Palestinians, including several former prisoners, in raids across the occupied West Bank overnight, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society. The arrests took place in the areas of Hebron, Nablus, Tulkarem, and Ramallah. Israel has made about 20,500 arrests during near-daily raids in the occupied West Bank since October 7, 2023, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said. Over 9,000 Palestinians are currently imprisoned in Israeli detention centers.
Israeli settlers torched and defaced a mosque in the Palestinian village in Deir Istiya in the central West Bank overnight. Settlers graffitied messages on the mosque, including “we are not afraid,” “we will revenge again,” and “keep on condemning,” according to the AP. The attack came one day after some Israeli leaders issued rare condemnations of another attack by dozens of settlers in the Palestinian villages of Beit Lid and Deir Sharaf, where four Palestinians were wounded and four Israelis arrested.
Israeli forces were captured in a video published by Quds News Network forcibly sealing and welding shut the main doors of Palestinian homes in the Jaber neighborhood of Hebron
Clashes erupted between local residents and Israeli settlers during an attack on the Bedouin community of Al-Rashaida, east of Bethlehem. A video can be seen here.
Residents of the Nur Shams refugee camp held a rally east of Tulkarem on Wednesday, demanding to return home after more than ten months of forced displacement, with protesters calling the expulsions a crime and insisting on their right to return, the Palestinian Information Center reported.
In its latest update on the West Bank, the United Nations humanitarian agency UN OCHA found:
At least 29 Israeli settler attacks in the West Bank between between November 4 and 10
More than 1,500 Palestinians have been displaced by lack-of-permit demolitions so far in 2025, including about 1,000 in Area C and 500 in East Jerusalem.
Satellite imagery indicates about 1,460 structures were destroyed or severely or moderately damaged in the Jenin, Nur Shams and Tulkarm refugee camps in the northern West Bank.
Since January 2025, Israeli forces’ operations in three refugee camps in the northern West Bank has generated what has become the longest and largest displacement crisis in the West Bank since 1967. Data verified by UNRWA indicates that at least 31,919 Palestine refugees have been displaced from the Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams refugee camps and surrounding areas as of September 2025.
U.S. News
President Trump signed legislation on Wednesday evening to fund the government through the end of January, ending a 43-day government shutdown—the longest in U.S. history. Trump signed the bill hours after a spending package was approved by the House. Earlier this week, eight Democrats in the Senate joined Republicans to approve the bill, even though it did not include an extension of health care subsidies that had been a key Democratic demand. The shutdown put hundreds of thousands of government workers on furlough, caused thousands of flights to be cancelled, and froze Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for tens of millions of people.
House lawmakers released more than 20,000 pages of Jeffrey Epstein-related documents on Wednesday, revealing his extensive communications with figures in politics, media, business and foreign affairs, including exchanges referencing President Donald Trump. The files show Epstein corresponding with Larry Summers, Michael Wolff, Kathryn Ruemmler, Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon, and others, often discussing Trump, foreign policy, and efforts to manage public fallout from Epstein’s crimes.
Rep. Ro Khanna said Wednesday that newly released Epstein emails show President Donald Trump knew about the abuse and spent hours with one of the victims, arguing that powerful figures “swept it under the rug.” He told Breaking Points that the House obtained the emails only after subpoenaing the Epstein estate and is pressing the Justice Department to release the full files, while warning that Speaker Mike Johnson may try to stall a discharge vote. He says he is planning a bipartisan press conference with survivors next week to keep the issue on the docket.
The White House summoned Representative Lauren Boebert to the Situation Room and leaned on other GOP petition signers as part of a pressure campaign to block further releases of the files on Epstein, according to the New York Times. None withdrew, however, and Speaker Mike Johnson, who had opposed the measure, said he would bring it to a vote next week.
Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva was finally sworn into the House on Wednesday, more than seven weeks after her special election win, ending Speaker Mike Johnson’s refusal to seat her during the record shutdown and immediately shrinking the GOP majority to 219–214. Democrats had accused Johnson of blocking her installation to prevent her from becoming the pivotal 218th signature on the bipartisan petition forcing a vote to release the Justice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein files, a step she took as her first official act.
The Trump administration is preparing a sweeping overhaul of homelessness policy that would cut permanent housing aid by roughly two-thirds next year, a shift critics warn could force as many as 170,000 disabled, formerly homeless people back onto the streets. A confidential 100-page Department of Housing and Urban Development grant plan is expected to redirect billions toward short-term programs with work rules and treatment mandates, as well as to make explicit federal government support for the police enforcing camping bans, according to the New York Times. If pushed through, it would effectively dismantle the “Housing First” model that has guided federal policy since 2009.
Dozens of congressional Democrats sent letters on Wednesday to 19 Democratic governors urging them to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from accessing state driver-data systems, warning that ICE currently enjoys “frictionless, self-service access” to residents’ personal information, according to The Hill. The lawmakers—including Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley and Representatives Adriano Espaillat, Sara Jacobs, and Zoe Lofgren—noted that all 50 states and Washington, D.C., have allowed roughly 18,000 law-enforcement agencies to search DMV databases in real time without state oversight for two decades. They pointed to states such as Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts that have already restricted access and pressed others to follow suit.
A new joint report from Human Rights Watch and Cristosal finds that more than 252 Venezuelans expelled to El Salvador under President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation policy were subjected to systematic torture, sexual assault, and prolonged detention without communication inside President Nayib Bukele’s CECOT mega-prison, according to The Guardian. The groups say the Trump administration was fully aware that the deportees—many of them asylum seekers with no criminal record—would face life-threatening abuse. Washington regularly sent officials to visit CECOT, including Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
International News
The Israeli military bombed a vehicle in the town of Toul in southern Lebanon on Thursday injuring at least one person, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Israeli airstrikes also hit Lebanon’s Tyre district overnight.
Foreign ministers from the G7 and several invited countries met in Canada on Tuesday and Wednesday amid rising friction with the U.S. over tariffs, defense spending, and uncertainty surrounding President Donald Trump’s Gaza ceasefire plan. Canada’s Foreign Minister Anita Anand said the “peace plan must be upheld,” while U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio focused on Gaza, Ukraine, and broader security issues as divisions persist over NATO’s spending targets and approaches to both the Middle East and Russia’s war on Ukraine.
U.S. Central Command said its forces assisted and enabled more than 22 operations against the Islamic State in Syria, in which five members of the group were killed and 19 captured, according to Reuters. The reported operations took place from October 1 to November 6.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday issued a denunciation of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), accusing the militia of violating ceasefires and committing large-scale atrocities. He remarked on the organization’s reliance on foreign patrons for weapons and financing, and he warned that Washington would pressure the states arming the RSF.
U.S. and Saudi officials are racing to finalize a package of agreements, including a U.S. Security guarantee, ahead of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s White House visit next week. Negotiations intensified after Jared Kushner’s trip to Riyadh over the weekend, according to a report from Axios. The planned Oval Office meeting with President Donald Trump, bin Salman’s first since the 2018 Khashoggi killing, comes as both sides discuss a Qatar-style security pledge, a massive Saudi weapons package including F-35s, and steps to revive Israel-Saudi normalization.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—India’s largest far-right Hindu organization—hired Squire Patton Boggs to lobby Congress for the first time in its 100-year history, paying the firm $330,000 in 2025, an investigation by Drop Site contributors Meghnad Bose and Biplob Kumar Das found. Foreign influence experts say the work should be registered under the stricter Foreign Agents Registration Act rather than the Lobbying Disclosure Act, warning that the arrangement obscures who lobbyists meet and what they promote.
A new International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report says the agency has been unable to verify Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium since Israel and the U.S. struck major nuclear sites in June, with inspectors still barred from seven targeted locations, including Fordo and Natanz. Iran’s near-weapons-grade stockpile is “a matter of serious concern,” the agency said, and it notes that inspectors will visit Isfahan on Wednesday.
India formally designated this week’s deadly car explosion near Delhi’s 17th-century Red Fort as a terrorist attack, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet saying the “heinous” blast that killed at least 13 people was being investigated under a stringent anti-terrorism law. Kashmir police have since carried out hundreds of raids across the Himalayan region and detained roughly 500 people, while investigators are examining whether seven men arrested in a separate probe, including two doctors, are linked to Pakistan-based groups Jaish-e-Muhammad and Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind, according to Al Jazeera.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro stated the country was preparing for the prospect of guerrilla warfare as a fallback defense against a potential U.S. invasion, following the arrival of the U.S. aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford near the Caribbean. Maduro urged civilians and militias to prepare for an “insurrectionary general strike”, and citing Vietnam’s “people’s war” model, he said the country should be defended through small, mobile resistance units designed to offset Venezuela’s military weaknesses. Maduro said that the government has begun studying protracted warfare tactics and expanding militia training as tensions rise amid an expanded U.S. naval presence, which Washington says targets narcotics trafficking but which Caracas views as a prelude to escalation.
The Ukrainian military conducted long-range overnight strikes against infrastructure in Crimea, Zaporizhzhia, and inside Russia using a new domestically produced “Flamingo” long-range missile. The operation reportedly hit “several dozen” targets—including oil depots, command posts, air-defense sites, and drone storage areas—according to Ukrainian officials. The Morskoy Neftyanoy Terminal and Kirovske airfield in Crimea were damaged, as well as facilities near Berdyansk in Zaporizhzhia.
More From Drop Site
“Rescue Teams Dig Up Over 50 Bodies Buried in Shallow Graves in Courtyard of Gaza City Clinic”: Civil Defense teams in Gaza dug up over 50 bodies buried in shallow graves in the courtyard of the Sheikh Radwan clinic in Gaza City this week. The bodies were taken to Al-Shifa hospital for the difficult and often unsuccessful work of identifying them. Drop Site contributor Abdel Qader Sabbah reported from the scene, speaking to emergency workers and family members looking for their missing loved ones. Read the full report here.
Ryan Grim on The Majority Report: Grim discussed the effect of mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s election on Republican morale, the right’s Nick Fuentes problem, and the BBC’s lawsuit against Owen Jones for an article he published with Drop Site. You can watch his appearance in full here.
Members of the Syrian government security forces diving into the Euphrates. Photo: Anagha Subhash Nair
DAMASCUS—On a late October evening in Syria’s eastern city of Deir Ez-Zour, a group of men clad in camouflage military uniforms rushed, yelling, into the waters of the Euphrates river. From the river bank, a masked sergeant holding a Kalashnikov rifle shouted, “Come back! Let’s go again!” This was a training exercise, the officer from the new Syrian government’s Ministry of Defense explained, though what they were training for was left unsaid.
Next to them, a group of young students laughed as they observed the scene. Fathers swam nearby with their children, while a lone man fished from a small wooden boat.
Further down the rivera series of iconic bridges crossing the Euphrates were destroyed during the grinding decade-long war; only a few rickety pontoon bridges now connect the two banks.
The Euphrates, which runs for 700 miles across Syria, has become a physical dividing line between two forces now contesting the future of the fragile country. The near bank is the limit of control by the Syrian government led from Damascus, while on the far bank are the positions of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The SDF, a Kurdish-led force that emerged during Syria’s civil war in opposition to the Bashar al-Assad regime, played a key role in the fight against the Islamic State. During the conflict, they captured large expanses of territory predominantly populated by Arabs on the far bank of the Euphrates.
While the new Damascus-based government has asserted control over most Syrian territory, the SDF still controls the country’s northeast, as well as Kurdish neighborhoods of Aleppo, and is seeking greaterautonomy inside a future Syrian state.
The river that divides the SDF statelet from government-led Syria has now become the last front line of the Syrian war. Although a tense ceasefire holds for the moment, over the last year the Euphrates has been the site of sniper fire and periodic armed clashes. The violence has continued intermittently up until the present. Alongside this confrontation, a separate threat from Islamic State cells also haunts the region. In late October, a roadside bomb exploded on the road between Deir Ez-Zour and Al-Mayadin killing five members of the security services, in an attack that was blamed on the group.
An SDF position seen from across the Euphrates Photo: Anagha Subhash Nair
On a recent Saturday, in the village of Mahkan, located on the government held side of the river, fighting also broke out following what the government described as an “infiltration attempt” by armed men associated with the SDF. Days after the attack, at a local water treatment plant in Mahkan, a group of workers sheltered from the sun on a set of low cushions. The walls of the plant were riddled with bullet holes from the recent fighting. The workers pointed to SDF positions directly across the river, warning that it is dangerous to spend too long out in the open.
“It was just a provocation,” said Daher Ibrahim, 55, the head of the plant who had been at the site when fighting erupted around him. “They fire randomly to terrorize the women and children.”
“We are used to it. We have lived through war for a long time.”
According to Ibrahim, the Syrian army returned fire as soon as the shooting started. Government forces are positioned along the river, although we were prohibited from approaching or photographing any of their positions.
What triggered the clash in Mahkan is unclear. But sporadic violence has taken a growing toll on civilians who live on both sides of the river.
A hundred meters further along the Euphrates is the home of Khadija, 55. In August, she had been collecting firewood outside her front door when she was struck in the head by a bullet fired from the direction of SDF territory. Her husband, Mohammed Abd Al-Rizk, 66, rushed her to a hospital in the nearby city of Al-Mayadin, where she was pronounced dead.
Abd Al-Rizk stands in front of his house, next to where his wife was killed. Photo: Anagha Subhash Nair
“It was a particularly tense time and there were periodic clashes,” he told Drop Site in an interview at his home. “They have sniper positions over there so it can be dangerous here.” At the time of his wife’s death there was no active fighting. Abd Al-Rizk couldn’t say for sure whether she had been struck by a stray bullet, or killed in a targeted attack.
“This frontline is still hot, [during the most recent clash] bullets hit our home.” Abd Al-Rizk fumed, pointing to bullet holes scattered across the wall of his home. He said that the war “is not over yet. In fact we consider the revolution to only be beginning.”
Despite the division in political control, communities on both sides of the river are still bound by strong tribal bonds. Abd Al-Rizk is a member of the Ougeidat tribe that stretches into SDF-held territory. Tribal groups capable of mobilizing large groups of armed fighters were a major factor during Syria’s civil war and continue to play a role in postwar Syria.
In the wake of recent clashes, several tribes called for a general mobilization against the SDF. The call was not endorsed by the Syrian government and did not trigger a larger conflict, but it raised the prospect that tribal groups hostile to the SDF may initiate a war that forces Damascus to become involved.
“If there were a call to arms our people would cross the river to fight,” Abd Al-Rizk asserted, “just like we did in 2023.” In 2023, the Arab tribes in the SDF-controlled territory launched an uprising that drew in tribes from across the country, before it was violently suppressed by the SDF over the space of two weeks.
An ongoing mediation process involving U.S. officials, the SDF, and the Syrian government aimed at finding a permanent political solution to the conflict has continued since March. Turkey, which backs the Syrian government, has given the group until the end of the year as a deadline to give up power and integrate into the new Syrian Ministry of Defense. Absent an agreement, Turkey, which views the Kurdish-led autonomous zone in Syria as a threat to its own security, has threatened to launch a cross-border offensive against the group.
There have been moments in recent months where it appeared that the tense ceasefire between the government and the SDF would simply collapse. In October, deadly clashes erupted in Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, between government security services and the SDF. Though hasty mediation restored the truce, it was the most serious confrontation between the SDF and government forces since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024.
The Ougeidat tribe also mobilized in July, when the Syrian tribes flooded into the southern region of Sweida to support local Bedouin groups in a sectarian conflict against the Druze. That clash saw numerous human rights abuses, including torture and summary executions, before a mediated solution with the government was created.
Despite threats from tribal leaders that they may pull the trigger on a new war against the SDF on their own, some analysts are skeptical that they have the ability to draw the involvement of government forces.
“I don’t see much chance of these mobilizations forcing the government’s hand, because the government isn’t currently responsive to pressure from below,” said Alexander McKeever, an analyst on Syria and author of the newsletter, This Week in Northern Syria.
This sentiment is shared by Riyad Youssef, 77, a senior member of the Beni Temim tribe. “There wouldn’t be a single young man capable of carrying a weapon who wouldn’t cross the Euphrates in order to liberate it,” he explained. But he added, “For now the government is preventing the tribes from crossing, and we will of course abide by their decrees.”
Riyad Youssef and his wife seated in their home. Photo: Anagha Subhash Nair
Youssef pointed to a recent incident in which two young men who had crossed the river to join a small clash in the nearby village of Al-Kasra were detained by government forces as they returned.
“If we were given permission then you would see a mobilization far more powerful than what happened in Sweida,” he said.
Syrian government officials denied any support for the recent tribal calls to directly confront the SDF. Khaled Ayoub, the government head of Al-Mayadin city, speaking from his office in the governorate’s municipality building, pointed to the recent arrests as evidence that all parts of the state “are strictly following the government’s directives.”
Mckeever suggested that this is “a good sign” that the government doesn’t want its hand to be forced by the tribes. “This means that [the government] is still trying to pursue a solution via talks,” he said.
In reference to the recent fighting in Mahkan, Ayoub suggested that it was related to cross-river smuggling. “A smuggler might create a small skirmish to distract attention while sneaking someone or something across the river,” he explained. Regardless, he said that the blame for such disturbances lies at the feet of the SDF. “Either way, the group that controls the territory bears responsibility for those operating under its authority.”
Men on a pickup truck cross the makeshift bridge across the Euphrates; the old bridges seen in the background. Photo: Anagha Subhash Nair
Deir Ez-Zour was fought over by almost every player in Syria’s kaleidoscopic civil war. Years of bombing and siege have rendered 75% of its infrastructure destroyed according to a 2022 UN report. In the city, after which the region is named, large sections of ruins remain abandoned, the threat of mines and unexploded ordnance still lurking amongst the rubble.
As elsewhere, a fragile calm continues to reign in Deir Ez-Zour. But in post-war Syria, tense local situations have frequently devolved into mass violence. In March, a failed uprising by Assad regime remnants in coastal Syria unleashed days of vicious sectarian bloodletting. Forces aligned with the government were later accused of killing up to 1,400 members of the Alawite minority in revenge attacks, including countless civilians.
“People here are scared, and no one wants more violence,” Ayoub said, adding, “this region has seen more war than any place in Syria - the destruction is almost total.”
Progress on rebuilding is “almost nonexistent,” according to Ayoub. “[We are] mostly reliant on efforts from the local community and some small contributions from international organizations.” However, he noted that these contributions are still largely based on old contracts from 2020 which are no longer sufficient “considering the amount of people who have started to return.”
Another resident, Karam Ashgoul, 43, emerged from the shadows of the destroyed neighbourhood of Rashdiye in Deir Ez-Zour to relate his experience. The former rebel fighter, who has recently returned from Turkey, now lives with his parents. “As you can see,” he said, gesturing to the skeletal buildings around him, “most of our homes have been destroyed, so we are forced to live with our families.”
Karam Ashghoul standing in front of destroyed buildings. Photo: Anagha Subhash Nair
Ashgoul fled Syria after his rebel faction was defeated by Islamic State as it swept through the region in 2014.
Despite a continued insurgency, Ashgoul was confident that ISIS’s days are over. “Our state liberated all of Syria, you really think it can’t defeat a group of fighters hiding in the desert?”
Regarding the SDF, Ashgoul suggested that the government was better off finding a way to compromise with the group rather than fighting.
“We are all tired in this country,” he sighed, exasperated. “If we wanted to take over the SDF territory we could, but we don’t want more war. We should just sit and talk it out.”
Ashgoul took to the streets of Deir Ez-Zour in the heady days of the Arab Spring. Along with many of his generation who sacrificed to overthrow the regime, he expressed hope that a negotiated solution to the conflict, bridging the Euphrates, would allow ordinary Syrians to focus on the monumental task of rebuilding their shattered country.
“The armed revolution is over,” he declared. “Now we demand the revolution of work and the revolution of our freedom. It is our duty to continue this revolution – for the sake of our children.”
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