🏴🇮🇶 On Kurdish Jihadis within HTS ranks: Estimates indicate that the number of Kurdish militants within Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Syria may exceed 3,000, originating from Kurdish populations across the region.
Reports suggest that the largest contingent is likely from Turkey, with a particularly notable concentration from the city of Bingöl, where over 600 individuals reportedly joined Jabhat al-Nusra (the predecessor of HTS) during its early formation.
Other fighters primarily consist of Kurdish militants from Iran and Iraq, while only a smaller fraction are believed to be Syrian Kurds.
One prominent Kurdish militant group active in Idlib province, HTS’s main stronghold during the Syrian conflict, was Ansar al-Islam—an Iraq-based Kurdish Salafi-jihadist organization.
Pictured: Ansar al-Islam fighters during a training session in Idlib in 2019.
🏴🇮🇶 On Kurdish Jihadis within HTS ranks: Estimates indicate that the number of Kurdish militants within Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Syria may exceed 3,000, originating from Kurdish populations across the region.
Reports suggest that the largest contingent is likely from Turkey, with a particularly notable concentration from the city of Bingöl, where over 600 individuals reportedly joined Jabhat al-Nusra (the predecessor of HTS) during its early formation.
Other fighters primarily consist of Kurdish militants from Iran and Iraq, while only a smaller fraction are believed to be Syrian Kurds.
One prominent Kurdish militant group active in Idlib province, HTS’s main stronghold during the Syrian conflict, was Ansar al-Islam—an Iraq-based Kurdish Salafi-jihadist organization.
Pictured: Ansar al-Islam fighters during a training session in Idlib in 2019.
In 2018, Russia banned Telegram although it reversed the prohibition two years later. At the start of 2018, the company attempted to launch an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) which would enable it to enable payments (and earn the cash that comes from doing so). The initial signals were promising, especially given Telegram’s user base is already fairly crypto-savvy. It raised an initial tranche of cash – worth more than a billion dollars – to help develop the coin before opening sales to the public. Unfortunately, third-party sales of coins bought in those initial fundraising rounds raised the ire of the SEC, which brought the hammer down on the whole operation. In 2020, officials ordered Telegram to pay a fine of $18.5 million and hand back much of the cash that it had raised. That hurt tech stocks. For the past few weeks, the 10-year yield has traded between 1.72% and 2%, as traders moved into the bond for safety when Russia headlines were ugly—and out of it when headlines improved. Now, the yield is touching its pandemic-era high. If the yield breaks above that level, that could signal that it’s on a sustainable path higher. Higher long-dated bond yields make future profits less valuable—and many tech companies are valued on the basis of profits forecast for many years in the future. Just days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Durov wrote that Telegram was "increasingly becoming a source of unverified information," and he worried about the app being used to "incite ethnic hatred." This provided opportunity to their linked entities to offload their shares at higher prices and make significant profits at the cost of unsuspecting retail investors.
from ms
