Alex MacDonald

Families of prisoners in Iran tell me theyre increasingly worried as Israeli-US strikes damage prisons and cut off access. "[Our biggest fear is that] the regime will use the war as an opportunity to carry out executions without letting families know" middleeasteye.net/news/families-…

🇶🇦 Qatar has arrested two Al Jazeera analysts, Fatima Al-Samadi and Saeed Ziad, on charges described as supporting Iran during the current war. Al-Samadi is a senior researcher at the Al Jazeera Studies Center specializing in Iranian affairs, holding a doctorate from Allameh Tabataba'i University in Tehran. Her X account has been suspended. The reported trigger was a post praising the late Ali Larijani. Also arrested is Mona Hawa, a Palestinian journalist previously fired by Al Jazeera for criticizing the Al-Jolani government in Syria.

@MaleHumanPerso1 @Alonso_GD @Sargon_of_Akkad @ZoeJardiniere Why? What does being an "indigenous Brit" mean? Practically, day-to-day, in terms of your life and experience? What does it actually mean?

@Alonso_GD @Sargon_of_Akkad @ZoeJardiniere His name doesn't determine his ethnicity. He could rename himself Hiroto Suzuki or Juan Lopez and he would still be an indigenous Brit.

The English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish are indigenous to the British Isles.

The Syrian President said yesterday that the country’s GDP grew by 30-35% last year. I am not sure who provides him with these numbers, and there is no functioning statistical body on which we could rely. But all proxy data indicate that this number is largely disconnected from reality. Let's try to untangle this. As of now, the World Bank is the only local, regional or international institution to have provided any estimate for GDP growth last year (+1%). But that was in the middle of 2025, and they did not provide any recent update. An official at the Ministry of Finance told @TheSyriaReport in February that the Ministry estimated last year's GDP growth at 5%. Other than that, nothing. The only solution we have is to use any data that could serve as a proxy. Let’s look at Syria's main business sectors: agriculture, industry, and wholesale and retail trade. I will add to this construction. The agricultural sector witnessed a catastrophic performance in 2025 due to very low raining levels, and this was confirmed to us by the Ministry of Agriculture (we are publishing an interview with him in the next edition of @TheSyriaReport). There is no single number for the agricultural sector, but we know that wheat production for example declined by around 50 percent. (agriculture represented around 40 percent of GDP in 2022, a very inflated share compared with 2010, due to the faster collapse of other sectors and likely poor data collection methodology from the Central Bureau of Statistics). With regards to the industrial sector the numbers are mixed. In Syria, under the heading "industries" we include mining (oil, gas, phosphate, etc), electricity production and manufacturing. (Manufacturing per se is a small contributor to GDP contrary to what most Syrians think). When it comes to oil and gas, production does not seem to have changed much, while electricity production increased a bit towards the end of the year. The performance of the manufacturing sector is not very clear, but it likely declined in view of the flow of imports (there are some investments in the sector, but many have yet to start production). As to wholesale and retail trade, activity appears to have increased markedly. However, this was largely driven by a surge in imports (they more than doubled). And imports are deducted from GDP (the more a country imports, the more the impact on GDP is negative). The construction sector had a good year. Many people have started rebuilding their homes across the country. This week @TheSyriaReport published an article about the cement sector, which is a good proxy to estimate the performance of the construction sector. Syria's only private sector cement company, Al-Badia, said that its sales of cement last year almost tripled. Of course, it doesn't mean that the construction sector as a whole performed that well (state-owned cement companies which have a much bigger market share did not perform that well) and we don't know what the status of imports of cement is yet. As you can note I mostly talk of the "increases" and "decreases" in the production of different sectors, I do not provide numbers because they simply do not exist. In other words, it is very difficult to provide any clear estimates based on this, but what we can say for sure is that the picture is mixed enough to know that the grow rate of 30-35% is totally unrealistic and that we are probably looking at modest growth in the single digit numbers. One thing that misleads many analysts, and possibly the Syrian President, is the level of activity in Damascus: the number of cars on the streets, the strong increase in rent prices, the many companies being established. But production, which GDP measures, is something else. On top of this, Damascus is very far from being representative of Syria as a whole. When it comes to 2026, the prospects are much better. The very good raining season so far suggests a surge from the very low numbers of last year, which automatically translate into positive contribution to GDP growth. The industrial and construction sectors should also perform very well. The only negative point is the regional war which will likely postpone or even delete some major investments from the Gulf. The large dependency on investment from these countries, particularly for the energy sector and infrastructure, is a major weakness. In the next edition of @TheSyriaReport we will try to provide more details on all that.

@BeanstalkerJake @NotShelled @AaronBastani @ZohranKMamdani Might want to do a bit more research, champ

@AlexJayMac @NotShelled @AaronBastani @ZohranKMamdani No he said Iranic and Persianate aka Balkans and Indian celebrators of Nawroz. Including his own Indian Shia community lol

My culture is not your costume @ZohranKMamdani

One party that fascinates me is the Pan-Iranist Party, an ultra-nationalist party that is banned but tolerated inside Iran. Their flag is literally a scored-out equals sign - epitomises far-right politics so eloquently that I'm surprised its not been adopted by others:

@NotShelled @AaronBastani @ZohranKMamdani Well, a few Kurds actually did criticise Mamdani for referring to it as Iranian without acknowledging that Kurds and others celebrate so I think Aaron is being fairly inclusive there. Do you think it's purely a "Persian" thing?

@AaronBastani @ZohranKMamdani No one uses “Iranic and Persianate” u pretentious akhound-be-koon-esque prique

@PriyamvadaGopal Well true.

@AlexJayMac Yeah, though I think this kind of panicked claptrap is also enabled in turn by the charming belief that you can 'decolonise' such things. Misuse of verb.

Maybe...if something seems "crazy, absurd, unbelievable!" then maybe you shouldn't automatically believe it.

New policy - auto-block for any anonymous accounts who try and interact with me if there isn't a good reason why you're anonymous. Life's too short.

How do you say ‘Eid Mubarak’ in your language or dialect?

A boy raises a hammer during the strike of miners in the Zonguldak coal fields, Turkey, 1990 | Birol Üzmez

@NoJusticeMTG Didn't realise "Trump" was a Jewish name either....

Huh, I didn't realise 'Ahmed bin Sulayem' was a Jewish name

@hobokenword @AaronRegunberg @ThirdWayTweet Have a think about who the most famous people associated with the Epstein files are, apart from Epstein himself. Are they Jewish?

@AaronRegunberg @ThirdWayTweet C'mon man what the actual fuck! The phrase the "Epstein class is not very subtle code for "rich Jews." Pretending you don't know that is not believable.

So @ThirdWayTweet is now trying to say that to criticize the Epstein class to to criticize Jews? Are you freaking kidding me?! You know what endangers Jews -- declaring that "Epstein class" is synonymous with "Jewish." I mean, what the actual fuck?

"It's now the longest sustained nation-scale internet blackout we've tracked in a highly-connected society" - @netblocks middleeasteye.net/news/iran-inte…

Iran's parliament speaker (a former IRGC commander)

As for the idea of Christian "values" as a bedrock of social attitudes in the UK (therefore by-passing the fact most people aren't Christians), it's funny that none of these guys ever want to say what those values actually are.

Leaving aside the UK expelled its Jews in 1290 and didn't grant them (relative) equality until 1858 - the fact is that the majority of people in the UK aren't Christian. So forcing a greater observance of Christianity in public life is an imposition for the majority of us.

@si_rubinstein The thing is, it doesn't matter anyway - Christianity is a minority religion in the UK now. People need to accept reality as it is.

'Christian values' is as much a fudge as 'Judeo-Christian values'. Britain is a country built on Protestantism.

@ExtremeFootbal4 "Obscene language"? Have you ever been to Scotland?

A Celtic fan holds up a scarf with obscene language during the CIS Insurance Cup fourth-round match between Celtic and Rangers at Ibrox in Glasgow, Scotland (2004).

"Faced with what both Israel and America described as a war designed to terminate the Islamic Republic, this was probably the only rational option available to the Iranian leadership." middleeasteye.net/news/omani-for…