A "small force" of US troops will remain at Iraq's Ain al-Asad air base in order to fight ISIS, the Baghdad government announced Oct. 20. The decision reverses plans for a full withdrawal of US forces from the base. Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said that a force of up to 350 Pentagon advisors and support personnel would stay at the base in western Iraq, as well as al-Harir base in Iraqi Kurdistan. Other bases are seeing are seeing "gradual reductions" in US troops, according to the Associated Press.

The recent political reversal in Bolivia raises the question of whether the advances of nearly 20 years of rule by the indigenist left will survive—including a constitution that refounded the state as a "plurinational" republic. In Episode 299 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg explores how the lessons of the Bolivian experience can be applied to Syria, where the new revolutionary government faces a challenge in Kurdish and Druze demands for regional autonomy.

Fighting broke out Sept. 20 in the village of Um Tineh, in Deir Hafer district of Syria's Aleppo province, between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and forces aligned with the Damascus regime, leaving at least seven civilians dead. The SDF said the clashes began with a drone attack on the village, followed by artillery bombardment, damaging local homes. The statement blamed the assault on forces loyal to Turkey, implying they were fighters of the Syrian National Army (SNA), which has apparently not yet been thoroughly integrated into the central government's newly constituted Syrian Armed Forces.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Sept. 3 condemned the ongoing crackdown on civil opposition by the Iranian authorities following the conflict with Israel. According to the rights groups, the Iranian government is using national security as an excuse to target dissidents and minorities.

The investigation by the Syrian transition government into the March violence against the Alawites in Latakia province has been submitted—but the full findings have not been made public, and it apparently exonerates the government of involvement. Meanwhile southern Suwayda province has seen a perhaps even deadlier eruption of violence—this time pitting Druze against Bedouin, with the role of the government similarly the source of much contestation (and fodder for Internet partisans). And a Damascus protest against the violence and for co-existence was attacked by goons. Amid all this, Israel is militarily intervening, the government looks to Turkey for military aid, and both the US and Russia still have forces on the ground—treating the country as a Great Power chessboard. In Episode 288 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg argues that the Syrian Revolution is poised on a razor's edge, ready to descend into ethno-sectarian war and authoritarianism unless political space can be kept open for the secular-democratic civil resistance that began the revolution 14 years ago.

As a dictatorship consolidates in Turkey, aspiring strongman Recep Tayip Erdogan is launching a special attack on municipalities, arresting the mayor of Istanbul and removing elected governments in hundreds of cities and towns across the country—mostly in the restive Kurdish east. In the United States, aspiring strongman Donald Trump is now threatening to similarly remove Zohran Mamdani if he becomes mayor of New York, and order a federal take-over of the city government. Border czar Tom Homan says he will "flood the zone" with ICE agents in "sanctuary cities" such as New York and Los Angeles. In Episode 287 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg argues that Trump forcing the issue could accelerate the breaking point in which localities coast-to-coast assert their autonomous powers in repudiation of the fascist-coopted federal leviathan—vindicating Murray Bookchin's theories of radical municipalism.

Three days of drone attacks on oil-fields in Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region have brought operations at several facilities to a halt and slashed crude output. The targeted sites include fields at Zakho, operated by Norway's DNO; the Sarsang field, operated by US-based HKN Energy; and the Ain Sifni field, operated by Hunt Oil, all in Dohuk governorate. Kurdistan authorities also said a drone was downed near Erbil airport, which hosts US troops. Nobody has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but Kurdish authorities blamed the Hashd al-Shaabi, or Popular Mobilization Units, a paramilitary network aligned with the Baghdad government and backed by Iran. The attacks come amid renewed dispute between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government over whether the KRG may enter into hydrocarbon contracts with foreign firms. In May, the central government filed a complaint against the KRG for signing gas contracts with two US companies, including HKN Energy, asserting that all oil and gas deals must go through Baghdad. (Daily Sabah, Arab Weekly)

Presumed ISIS militants attacked a police station of the Kurdish autonomous administration at al-Sabha in Syria's eastern Deir ez-Zor province June 8. The attack with grenades and small arms was repulsed by the local Asayish police force without loss of life. But this was only the latest in a spate of new ISIS attacks in Syria. In a first attack on central government forces since the ouster the Assad dictatorship last December, ISIS boasted in a communique May 31 that its fighters had killed several soldiers of the "the apostate Syrian regime" at a road checkpoint in Talul al-Safa, in southern Suwayda province. That same day, one member of the Free Syrian Army was killed in an ambush by ISIS militants on an FSA patrol in al-Tanf Deconfliction Zone, a US military outpost near the Jordan border. (Rudaw, Kurdistan4, CNN)