According to a Haaretz article published last Tuesday, on December 11th Russian television showed footage of Russian special forces fighting on the ground in Syria. Russia first acknowledged the presence of special forces in Syria last March during the recapture of Palmyra from ISIS fighters but have declined to say how many are deployed..

Special forces are the psychotic units of the military who engage in assassinations, sniper attacks, “inspecting” the bodies of “rebel corpses,” coordinating airstrikes & robotic tanks.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal, citing two Russian military analysts, reported that retaking east Aleppo was not just the result of Syrian & Russian bombing operations but that for two months hundreds of Russian special forces have engaged in covert operations in Aleppo.

The Assadist take on this is that Syria, as a sovereign nation, has the right to invite foreign militaries to engage in operations on its soil. Some of them get so caught between their exegesis of Lenin, their paranoidal libertarian conspiracy theories, primitive supremacist ideas about Arabs, profound Islamophobic hysteria, & simple-minded views of US policy that they can’t acknowledge Assad is a dictator with a massive gulag system who is fighting a popular uprising against him.

Some people who hold these theories just fell off the turnip truck & are regrettably attracted to intrigues & conspiracy; some have been political, if not exactly activists, for a long time & have become intellectually lazy or politically bankrupt. It happens. Just keep in mind that many people have gone to their graves thinking Joseph Stalin was a hero, a man of the people unfairly vilified & not the mass murderer that he was. Some people just live & die nuts.