LargePenis [he/him]

There is a municipal collection service that picks up the blue municipality-issued trash cans from outside the doors of the houses. There is also bigger containers in the end of every street, but my guess is that the municipality is simply struggling to handle the volume. People also love throwing shit out of their cars and stuff like that, which sadly fills the edge of most streets with trash. I feel so bad for the poor municipality trash collectors who have to handle all this shit.

As for the highways and the malls, well yeah, most of “New” Baghdad was built during the 60s where every architect and urban planner thought that suburbs and cars would be the sexy utopian future. Old Baghdad around the Tigris River is pretty nice with old alleyways and things like that. Check out Kadhimiya, Rasheed Street and Mutannabi Street to see more classic city.

That street view in Karbala is from the Arbaeen pilgrimage, you find all kinds of random political and non-political stands there that hand out free food for the pilgrims. I remember commenting here a few months ago about random political stands in last year’s Arbaeen.

Thank you!

Assalamu Aleykum to the good people of Hexbearistan. Finally back from my Iraq trip with my wife and the kid. Absolute top tier travel destination, would recommend for sure if you’re thinking about doing a lil Middle East trip one day. Here are some little notes on the trip:

• Flew from my city to Istanbul, spent a few miserable hours in Istanbul’s expensive ass airport, then flew to Baghdad. My kid was surprisingly chill during almost the whole trip, no extended periods of crying or anything. The plane from Istanbul to Baghdad was filled with non-Arab foreigners, which was quite surprising honestly. Lots of Chinese people for some reason, which usually leads to new schools and ports spawning in any country that the Chinese visit.

• Baghdad Airport is functional but quite rundown. I went in with my Lebanese passport which technically needs a paid visa on arrival, but the guy on the counter waived the fee for me and just said welcome. My wife’s uncle was waiting for us outside and we were on the highways of Baghdad after a few kisses and hugs. The first few kilometers must be a shock for every new visitor to Baghdad, as it is filled with posters of Qassem Soleimani, Yahya Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah. Iraq is still a very anti-imperialist country, you will finds flags of Yemen, Palestine and Lebanon in every corner. I thought it was super cool that one could find posters of the Houthis on billboards and shops selling Hezbollah memorabilia.

• Baghdad as a city has recovered well from the American invasion and occupation. New roads and bridges spawning everywhere, barely any armed military presence, new and shiny malls and restaurants everywhere, massive international schools and it’s just alive in a way that only Beirut can reach. The biggest problem is the traffic congestion, which the new Baghdad Metro project hopefully solves in a few years. The trash situation is also annoying, Baghdad is a quite dirty city, the people are as responsible as the government there honestly.

• The food was fucking amazing, but I’ve gained a few extra kilos from all the fatty foods. Some of the new restaurants are insanely good, and white people will never understand the appeal of a nice proper cafe with hot tea, diabetes-inducing sweets and hookah. Internet was decent, but this website barely loaded without a VPN for some reason. I paid around $10 for a week of unlimited 4G data.

• Made a quick one-day trip to Erbil, capital city of Iraqi Kurdistan. Took a smooth four hour drive there and crossing the inofficial “border” was pretty straightforward. Very beautiful city with great markets and more good food. Lots of new exciting construction projects in Erbil and it’s cleaner than Baghdad, but same traffic issues. It’s a good intro city for someone that wants an authentic Middle Eastern city, but not too “complicated”, nor too artificial like the Gulf cities.

• Finished the trip with a Shia Islam religious pilgrimage megatour with my wife’s family. We started in Baghdad and visited the Shrine of Imam Musa bin Jafar Al Kazim, then we drove around two hours to Karbala and visited the Shrine of Imam Hussain and Imam Abbas, then another hour to Najaf and visited the shrine of the greatest Muslim to ever live, Imam Ali bin Abu Talib. Was a great trip even if I’m not really the strongest believer out there. The shrines were magnificent, definitely something I’d recommend to everyone here.

• Overall summary is that Iraq is worth visiting, especially if you want to give your tourist dollars to a country that 100% doesn’t use them to murder Palestinians or buy American senators. It will be a culture shock for sure, but Baghdad is a nice and historic city, with the added bonus of having top tier food. I’ll upload some pics if I figure out how to do it in a non-doxxing manner.

Hey news nerds, I’m disappearing for a longer period now due to travel and certain life things that need to be addressed. I’ll of course pop in here if something funny or cool happens, but expect a very light posting schedule until spring at least. Before I go, I need help on a few things from you nerds:

1. My kid is starting to be fascinated by screens and I feel that we’re quickly approaching the cartoon age. I don’t want him to watch any brainrot-inducing fascist Cocomelon or make the same mistake that my dad did by accidentally making young kid me watch the American bombing of Iraq on Al Jazeera, so please recommend any communist cartoons for kids.

2. Is there any good books on the Arabs of Latin America and West Africa? I’ve been quite fascinated recently about random Arabs in Latin America and all those Lebanese families in West Africa.

3. Another book-question. Any good books about connections between sports and politics? I recently read Angels with Dirty Faces about Argentinian football and politics which was pretty good. I would love some recommendations of similar books.

As a non-American and self-proclaimed enemy of the United States of America, I’m pro-annexation of Canada and Greenland. I hold this position for one reason only, my map-brain is tired of the post-1991 borders and wants to see some new borders. South Sudan, East Timor and Montenegro are pretty much the only changes, and they’re really not exciting. Give us massive swathes of land changing color on the map.

Supporting HTS is a very unfair accusation, I’ve always been against them despite being very critical of Assad in the past. Assad is of course the lesser evil, but that reality simply doesn’t exist anymore and it’s better to move on and adjust to a new reality instead of clinging on to a dead project. After nearly 14 years of instability and half of the population being displaced because of the war, it’s hard to look at any wider geopolitical implications or anything like that, what happened happened and hope for the best. I’ve been one of the biggest advocates for the Axis of Resistance on this website, but that project is now in terminal decline after the assassination of Nasrallah and the fall of Assad, so I don’t think that it’s bad to point out the shortcomings of the project now that it’s pretty much over. Yeah the current situation is shit, Syria is going through it’s own Iraq post-invasion phase which will inevitably kill a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean that there’s zero optimism about the future. Iraq was destined to be an American colony if you would analyse the situation back in 2003, but 15 years later the country emerged as a strong anti-imperialist state in the end.

Well yeah, the Baathist state was stable until it wasn’t, and considering the past 14 years, it feels insane that anyone could sit in a car from Daraa to Idlib without getting extorted at a military checkpoint by some NDF robbers. I was also just talking from a bureaucratic standpoint, the overall situation is shitty of course. It’s just impressive that simple services such as the streets getting cleaned, border checkpoints working and wages being paid are functioning despite the whole government evaporating in a week.

Eh it’s okay, people don’t even know in which country I live and there are a million Arab dads raging on social media

Back from my self-imposed Hexbear exile, I needed to turn off news (which dramatically failed) and stop reading some of the weird ass tantrums here. Now some unrelated points as usual:

• Situation in Syria is slowly reaching a new chaotic state. Numerous sectarian clashes between HTS and Alawites, and Kurds vs Turkish-backed fighters in the north. The main cities are still calm and in an optimistic mood though, I was in a video call with my cousin on Monday and he filmed some of the markets and main squares in Damascus, it looked pretty calm and people are still in some sort of revolutionary euphoria. Iraq 2003-2007 is still definitely on the cards, sectarian battles and stuff like that will escalate and reach a climax before things settle. The new government from a pure bureaucratic standpoint are doing okay imo though, things are slowly returning to normal and somehow functioning.

• Russian crossing of the Oskol was strangely uneventful, they just crossed from 2-3 points and established a pretty solid bridgehead on the other side of the river. I expected some grand battle when they would inevitably cross the river one day, but it was pretty anticlimactic and Ukrainian troops on the west bank of the river seem to be unprepared and outnumbered even by some Russian troops without heavy equipment. Kurakhove, Velika Novosilka and Toretsk seem to be wrapping up by the end of January, next step is probably Pokrovsk until some bigger Russian movements by summer 2025. The war in the current pace still doesn’t reach any final stage until summer 2026.

• Visiting Iraq with the wife and the kid in around a month, you’ll get a trip report and some non-doxxing pics if things permit.

• I don’t like how things are going in Iran, the country seems to be entering a hard period of decline and they’ll be Syria’d by Trump and Israel if they don’t get their shit together soon.

• This website has some of the dumbest drama I’ve ever seen lmao, grow up

My heart still breaks into a million pieces whenever I see a clip of Nasrallah on twitter or anywhere else. I can’t believe he’s really gone, I still can’t fully accept it. I kept watching a beautiful clip of a Lebanese man in Iraq reading a little poem to mourn him on repeat today. The lyrics were this:

أين نصرالله أين - Where is Nasrallah, where

ليته في الحاضرين - I wish he was present

نحن اقسمنا يمينا - We took an oath

للشهادة سائرين - Towards martyrdom we march

It sounds better in Arabic I promise

Looks very fake

Some interesting tidbits from Arab social media since the fall of the Syrian state:

• The euphoria is pretty much over, the discussion is slowly shifting to “what’s next?”.

• Revanchism towards Shias or whatever on social media is also shifting towards a more reconciliatory tone. HTS behaving well towards the Shia shrines has been the main catalyst for that shift imo.

• Lots of criticism towards how freeing the prisoners turned into some type of social media clout treasure hunt, many felt that it was dehumanising and distasteful.

• Girls are thirsting for Jolani

• Lots of Egyptians and Bahrainis are basically saying “God I wish that was us”, they’re dreaming about changing their shitty regimes and opening the prisons

Lastly, I spoke with my aunt who lives in Aleppo and my cousin who has a farm outside of Damascus. They’re both kinda content with the current situation. They mostly feel happy that the pressure of living under Assad is gone and that they can freely insult him now. Services and stuff like that haven’t been interrupted and shops are functioning normally. Currency confusion remains mostly in Aleppo though, where people alternate between Syrian Liras, Turkish Liras and USD.

Some pretty credible reports in Iraqi media about Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Al Sistani’s health rapidly deteriorating. He’s considered the Grand Marja of the Shia Muslim faith, which makes him pretty much the Shia Pope. Shia Marja politics are incredibly interesting, and his death might actually trigger a pretty massive upheaval in the upper echelons of the political side of Shia Islam. This might be the topic of my next effortpost, something about the evolution of the Shia Marja since colonialism and then Sistani’s interpretation of the role which made him the modern Marja (but actually not, more on that later). The fight about succession will be interesting with many clashing dynamics (Persian vs Arab, Qom vs Najaf, Sistani family vs Islamic Republic of Iran, Political vs Apolitical, Old vs Young), and the looming Sadrist cult threat is even more interesting.

cuck n chad ranking: 14 years of Syrian meltdown

Note: temporary removal of the first RUS vs UKR row, this edition is fully dedicated to Syria and related conflicts

Lmao okay

Honestly kiss my ass, we all know that HTS is fucking trash, but one can still be moderately happy about Assad and his murderous government eating shit.

Chud-cuck ranking is being written right now, it’s a full breakdown of all 14 years of the war. Thank you for the well wishes my friend.

Gotta give myself and @MarmiteLover123@hexbear.net a big pat on the back for correctly dooming from the start, we were the only megaheads that got the Afghanistan-scenario prediction correctly.

I’m still in a state of shock, it feels weird that the Assads are gone when they’ve been such a constant in every Syrian’s life for decades. I teared up today imagining that God might bless us one day with sights of Arab fighters storming Israeli prisons and freeing prisoners like we saw in Syria today.

It will be the greatest day of my life if we see these scenes in Cairo and Amman one day