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abujamajem.com
Sam Heller | سام هيلر
@abujamajem.com
4.8K followers 400 following 3.1K posts
Researcher and analyst looking at Lebanon, Syria and the wider neighborhood. Century International Fellow. Former Crisis Group. "Jamajem" means ☠️.

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Sam Heller | سام هيلر @abujamajem.com · Nov 20
My latest for @centuryintl.bsky.social @tcfdotorg.bsky.social: On why it's difficult for Lebanon and Syria to strike a deal to repatriate Syrians held in Lebanese prisons, and what that says about the two countries' relationship going forward: tcf.org/content/comm...
Lebanon and Syria’s Detainee Dilemma
The fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad last December was “like being released from prison,” Khalid said. Khalid, a young father from the town of
tcf.org
Reposted by Sam Heller | سام هيلر
erinmcunningham.bsky.social
Israel killed three Palestinian journalists in Gaza on Wednesday, including a freelance cameraman who contributed to CBS News. The network's president, Tom Cibrowski, let staff know at a meeting this morning, noting that Abdul Raouf Shaat had just been married. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/0...
Israel kills 3 journalists in Gaza, including CBS News contributor
The journalists were killed Wednesday in a strike on their car in central Gaza. Israel’s military said it struck “several suspects” who were operating a drone.
www.washingtonpost.com
January 21, 2026 at 9:40 PM
abujamajem.com
@thenationalnews.com's Nada Maucourant Atallah reports from now-empty prison for IS detainees in eastern Syria town of Shaddadi: www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/20... (via @akmckeever.bsky.social)
Orange uniforms, empty cells and bullets: Inside Syria’s Shaddadi prison after the ISIS breakout | The National
The National, one of the first media outlets to visit the empty facility, speaks to security personnel and local residents to reconstruct the escape
www.thenationalnews.com
January 21, 2026 at 11:58 AM
abujamajem.com
Zeina Shahla for @aljumhuriya.bsky.social on the General Secretariat for Political Affairs' interventions in Syrian civic life: aljumhuriya.net/ar/2026/01/1...
aljumhuriya.net
January 21, 2026 at 9:31 AM
abujamajem.com
Legion of Doom
January 21, 2026 at 7:21 AM
abujamajem.com
“Tenet’s” forwards-backwards time mechanic understandably gets most of the attention when people discuss that movie, but the idea of an antagonist who wants the whole world – past and present – to die with him seems like something that’s pulpy but also real.
stelhami.bsky.social Shibley Telhami @stelhami.bsky.social · 2d
As Trump's health declines and he comes to fully grasp his own mortality, will he start feeling the world doesn't deserve to live without him?
January 19, 2026 at 4:16 PM
Reposted by Sam Heller | سام هيلر
akmckeever.bsky.social
A map of control published 3 hours ago by an MoD spokesman

www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1...
January 19, 2026 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by Sam Heller | سام هيلر
akmckeever.bsky.social
Kobani area north of the M4 much more homogenous...

I presume the govt wants the SDF to withdraw to clearly Kurdish majority areas while SDF's interpretation will be that it gets to hold onto pre-ceasefire areas. another dangerously vague agreement
January 19, 2026 at 1:10 PM
Reposted by Sam Heller | سام هيلر
akmckeever.bsky.social
A fairly accurate map of ethnic distribution in Hasakah: yellow = Kurdish, green = Arab, magenta = Assyrian/Syriac. unmarked southern half of the province entirely Arab, sparsely populated apart from the Khabour valley.

Unclear how this shakes out

unihornbv.maps.arcgis.com/apps/mapview...
January 19, 2026 at 1:08 PM
Reposted by Sam Heller | سام هيلر
youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com
oh it's going to be a Recession recession
January 18, 2026 at 10:56 PM
Reposted by Sam Heller | سام هيلر
gregk.co.uk
I hope it’s clear that this is happening at least in part because he pulled the same unhinged belligerence against Iran last year and then Venezuela, and Europe was happy to let him get away with it because they arrogantly assumed that shit was for the browns and could surely never happen to them.
January 18, 2026 at 8:27 PM
abujamajem.com
Notably, served in an administration that did not reverse its predecessor’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the Golan and Moroccan sovereignty in Western Sahara.
diplomatofnight.com Emissary Of Night | ليلى @diplomatofnight.com · 3d
At base this self soothing rhetoric is already pathetic but it's made all the more unbelievable when it comes from a guy like Dan Shapiro, who loves Trump's policies on Palestine and Iran and thinks Biden should have mirrored them even more than he did
Let's focus on preventing Trump from forcibly acquire Greenland, with all the global damage it will cause. But let's also be clear that if he succeeds, the position of a Democratic administration in 2029 will be to return it to Denmark. And our Danish friends should know that.
January 18, 2026 at 8:07 PM
abujamajem.com
The Caesar Act had a different policy rationale, but there is E.O. 13894 (2019) – the basis for the "Syria-Related Sanctions" regime, and now "Promoting Accountability for Assad and Regional Stabilization Sanctions (PAARSS)" – which was a response to almost exactly this scenario.
January 18, 2026 at 8:09 AM
Reposted by Sam Heller | سام هيلر
akmckeever.bsky.social
Question now is whether they’ll actually attempt to defend Raqqa despite defections and an unfriendly populace or just withdrawal further north
January 18, 2026 at 5:50 AM
Reposted by Sam Heller | سام هيلر
akmckeever.bsky.social
SDF is in the process of losing all of Deir ez-Zour, seemingly withdrawing from large portions (if not all) of the river bank in the face of large tribal insurgency, with reports now of the Syrian army crossing the river to fill the vacuum. reported number of key mil/pol defections in DeZ and Raqqa
January 18, 2026 at 5:44 AM
abujamajem.com
In foreign relations terms, probably makes sense for Damascus to move on SDF now, with Barrack in charge of U.S. Syria policy.

Unlikely to get another U.S. administration – either a new factional balance inside Trump admin or a post-Trump presidency – as permissive and acquiescent to targeting SDF.
January 17, 2026 at 6:13 PM
Reposted by Sam Heller | سام هيلر
gianmarcosoresi.bsky.social
This makes me feel more patriotic than the national anthem ever could
January 16, 2026 at 5:28 PM
Reposted by Sam Heller | سام هيلر
seamas.bsky.social
pretty sure he meant the other thing, grok, but very cool that those are your two things
Tweet exchange in which a photo of Anne Hathaway is posted by @TheRoyalSerf, to which user @VvSchweetz24 replies "@grok...do your thing. @Grok replies: Anne Hathaway isn't Jewish; she was raised Catholic but left the church. She married Adam Shulman (who is Jewish) in 2012 and celebrates Jewish holidays with their kids. SHe's played Jewish roles, like in "Armageddon Time."
January 16, 2026 at 4:55 PM
Reposted by Sam Heller | سام هيلر
tgpeterson.bsky.social
Lol. Lmao.
ositanwanevu.com Osita Nwanevu @ositanwanevu.com · 5d
Apropos of nothing, let's check in with how things are going at Bari Weiss's free speech university. www.politico.com/news/magazin...
Most people didn’t think much of it when the university dean, Ben Crocker, called a student named Dan into his office on Monday, Sept. 9, the first day of classes. But at 7:44 in the evening, they received an email from three administrators saying that Dan had been removed from campus, “transported to his home out of state,” and barred from further access to the university. The nature of the allegations concerned, at their core, a pair of charged statements Dan allegedly made that would be familiar to any Title IX officer. The first was a general statement implying that UATX girls carried themselves physically in a way that invited sexual assault. The second was a suggestion to a specific female student that she had carried herself in a way that invited sexual assault. Dan had already been the subject of some negative attention on campus because of provocative statements he’d made in a UATX-based Discord “introductions” chat. These included a challenge — “If I catch any of you guys in my stuff, I’ll kill you” — which was a reference to the 1981 movie “Stripes” and likely misunderstood by fellow students. In another exchange, a discussion of transgender issues, Dan expressed reservations about hormone treatment and said that he couldn’t wait “to play devil’s advocate for legalizing pedophilia.” Between 8:30 and 9:00 p.m., Crocker visited the dorms, where he hosted a meeting on the roof to discuss the issue with students. Crocker’s message was that Dan’s conduct had been evaluated to be a “credible threat” — a phrase that would be repeated by the administration many times over the following days. Crocker then faced what one student attendee recalled as a “firing squad” of questions. Some students said that Dan had seemed off, but others saw his hasty removal as an example of the very cancel culture to which UATX was supposed to be the antithesis. Several students noted a lack of diversity. Consistent with its emphasis on “merit-based admissions,” UATX doesn’t publish demographic data. The students with whom I spoke said their classmates — and the college’s leadership — were overwhelmingly white, disproportionately came from wealthy families and had an overrepresentation of apparent neurodivergence. They found ideological diversity to be particularly lacking. “I didn’t realize exactly how conservative it would be,” one current student told me. “You know, when I hear free speech and open debate and all that jazz, I assumed that there was going to be a more equal amount of political views, and there wasn’t.” Classes weren’t as innovative as most students expected. “Year one was exceptionally boring,” the student said. “They did great books, they just didn’t do it in a great way,” said another student, who lamented the amount of memorization required. “I thought we were going to be intensely debating,” he said. Several students shared course syllabi with me. Most are easy enough to imagine being offered on any campus — with the notable exception of math and science. “The math classes go over algebra you learned in ninth grade,” a student told me. “There was just nothing there.” He described the offering as “schizophrenic” and described a class he’d taken at University of Texas at Austin as “exponentially more important.” Indeed, the syllabus I reviewed for a class called “Intellectual Foundations of Science II” covered a range of topics unusual for a science class including “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.” A student who’d taken the course shared a slide with me on “ensoulment” — the principally religious question of when a soul enters the human body — and said that the class had been told that IVF but not abortion could be consistent with the Catholic belief about ensoulment. The poor quality of the science offerings had bothered Heying and Pinker. “Others thought I was the token liberal,” Heying told me, “but I came to understand myself as the token scientist.” In an email, Pinker wrote, “They should have hired a widely esteemed scientist and proven program builder to set up their science division.” Another surprising similarity with other colleges stemmed directly from Dan’s expulsion: The students feared cancellation. “At any moment a frivolous Title IX complaint could be filed against you,” a former student told me. “I’ve never felt my speech was so chilled as it was in the classroom at UATX.” During the many conversations I had reporting this story, two questions came up more than any other. The first: Where was Bari Weiss? Many of the people I interviewed told me about internal conversations and shared internal emails. Weiss, who remains on the board of trustees, was almost never present in the conversations as they were related to me, and while I saw many emails on which Kanelos and Ferguson were copied, I never saw any including Weiss. speaks onstage during an event in New York City, on Nov. 19, 2024. | Noam Galai/Getty Images for The Free Press One person I spoke to, who was present during the early planning stages, told me that Weiss was “very elusive” and almost never present in person. This was ironic since UATX was closely associated with Weiss — a bust of whom now resides in the school library. Weiss, meanwhile, has only risen further during the Trump 2.0 era and is now editor-in-chief of CBS News, where she has been criticized as genuflecting to the Trump administration. A spokesperson for CBS News did not respond to a request for comment from Weiss. One former member of the development team told me that they would routinely ask prospective donors how they got to know UATX. “Eighty percent of the time, the answer was Bari Weiss,” they said. “It was very often referred to as Bari Weiss’ University, or Bari Weiss’ University Project, or Bari Weiss’ University of Austin.” For several people, this was a source of resentment. “I don’t care whether she wants to pretend this is all gone now — she is the reason that this place exists. She was huge, she was held in such high regard, she had such an enormous impact,” the former staffer said. “I want her to be held to account,” she added. “I’m pissed.”
January 17, 2026 at 7:22 AM
Reposted by Sam Heller | سام هيلر
omarkadkoy.bsky.social
Syria signed a $190 million (30-year BOT) investment agreement with the Turkish company Kuzey Star to establish and operate an integrated shipyard at the port of Tartus, which is operated by the UAE's DP World.
The investment guarantees 1,700 direct job opportunities.
alikhbariah.com/%D8%A7%D9%84...
الرئيس الشرع يلتقي ممثلي الشركة التركية الموقعة على اتفاقية الاستثمار في صناعة السفن
التقى السيد الرئيس أحمد الشرع مع ممثلين عن شركة تركية لتعزيز صناعة السفن في مرفأ طرطوس.
alikhbariah.com
January 16, 2026 at 10:33 AM
abujamajem.com
@tcfdotorg.bsky.social launches United States Democracy Meter, which turns Freedom House-style framework on America to measure how its already-flawed democracy backslid (substantially) in 2025: tcf.org/content/repo... @centuryintl.bsky.social @nateschenkkan.bsky.social @tcambanis.bsky.social
Century’s New Democracy Meter Shows America Took an Authoritarian Turn in 2025
At a time when experts are warning of unprecedented democratic backsliding in the United States under the second Trump administration, how should people
tcf.org
January 16, 2026 at 9:34 AM
Reposted by Sam Heller | سام هيلر
notalawyer.bsky.social
if you try to focus on Trump’s authoritarianism, Schumer will deflect and say people want us to focus on affordability. but when Zohran Mamdani made affordability the heart of his campaign Schumer refused to endorse him because they disagree about Israel. it’s all mealy mouthed bullshit.
Aaron Rupar post: Schumer as a major American metro is being brutally occupied by Trump goons: "The affordability crisis will be our focus throughout 2026 because that's what the American people are demanding"
January 15, 2026 at 6:50 PM
Reposted by Sam Heller | سام هيلر
akmckeever.bsky.social
Presidential Palace as seen yesterday from an al-Qas’a balcony
January 15, 2026 at 8:57 PM
Reposted by Sam Heller | سام هيلر
wesleymorgan.bsky.social
Rachel Cohen: “Greg, I hope you fucking eat shit, I hope this keeps you up at night for the rest of your life, and no one fucking wants you here”

Greg Bovino: “Oh, fantastic language”

Cohen: “ ‘Oh, fantastic language’—there’s children in here? In your fucking vehicles, assholes?”
notlikewe.bsky.social egg16z 🥚 @notlikewe.bsky.social · 8d
what a legend lmao
January 15, 2026 at 9:07 PM
Reposted by Sam Heller | سام هيلر
wesleymorgan.bsky.social
Another very good one featured here: Greg Bovino, the roving commander of the administration’s immigration crackdowns, yelling at protesters on Sunday in Minneapolis.

Bovino is going to be with us for a long time; he’s clearly trying to make himself the paramilitary version of a celebrity general.
January 15, 2026 at 7:40 PM
abujamajem.com
Every time Graham’s faction loses an intra-Trump administration policy fight, an angel gets its wings 👼🏻
January 15, 2026 at 9:07 PM