User talk:SaintPaulOfTarsus

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Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. An automated process has detected that when you recently edited 110th Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Battle of Donetsk Airport. Such links are usually incorrect, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of unrelated topics with similar titles. (Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.)

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Note to any interested people who happen to be browsing my talk page – in this case, it was not possible to distinguish which of the two battles of the Donetsk Airport the existing source was referring to. SaintPaulOfTarsus (talk) 13:07, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

For future reference...

Your statement that the "US statement did not mention "Shia militias," rather "Iran-affiliated militias" was wrong. They did mention it being Shia militias. Review the article used in the source before fabricating false statements. RamHez (talk) 12:42, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

User:RamHez, thanks for your concern. "Shia militias" is the language used by the website Atlas News. The U.S. government itself made no mention of any religious terminology in its statement.

Kindly remember to assume good faith and review the article yourself before leaving such fabrications on my talk page.

My very best wishes

SaintPaulOfTarsus (talk) 21:50, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

from user:irtapil

I came here to talk about #The Siege of Gaza City Belligerents but i spotted some interesting things on ypur user page on the way. Irtapil (talk) 17:40, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

what do the flags indicate on your list?

Battle of Zikim

Battle of Sufa

Are they just the location? or the winner?

Though i suppose for war battles, those are usually the same after the battle.

Irtapil (talk) 17:41, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

I suppose they indicate the location, though I didn't put much thought into it. SaintPaulOfTarsus (talk) 04:51, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

They edit protected a TALK PAGE?

This user opposes the extended-confirmed protection of the 2023 Israel-Hamas war talk page.

Irtapil (talk) 17:41, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

They really did! You can read about the decision here. SaintPaulOfTarsus (talk) 04:49, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

It sounds awful but might actually be a good idea, or at least better than the alternatives. Some of the talk pages are having stuff archived WAY too fast. Or people just are deleting posts, which seems VERY wrong? Edit protecting it is probably much less bad than that? People don't spend time writing comments that just get deleted, and they might look for somewhere better to communicate where it will get seen?

Maybe there needs to be a notice directing people towards the talk pages of the more specific pages? If there is a problem on the main page, it is likely to be replicated on the more detailed pages? and the discussion there is less noisy.

Is there an article "List of pages about the 2023 Israel Hamas war"? There's the List of engagements during the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, but that's not intended to list every page, it had a different purpose. Unless you want to count Bearing Witness (2023 film) as a major military offensive… which actually kind of works? But in getting the proper page name for that i found what i was looking for … Outline of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war… I'll add that above.

Can we include that in the info box for the 2023 Israel-Hamas war talk page? Somewhere as close as possible to where it says the talk page is edit locked?

Irtapil (talk) 15:01, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

The Siege of Gaza City Belligerents

Regarding what you said on the Siege of Gaza City talk page. I am messaging here partly because things often get archived to quickly on talk pages.

My Comment from Inclusion of al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades and National Resistance Brigades as belligerents

I agree it should include all the groups involved, but that needs citations?

al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades are only in the West Bank, as far as i know? Do you have a reference for them being involved in Gaza? They might be doing something in the West Bank in support, but that doesn't really count as belligerents in the siege itself. Do you have a citation for them doing the attack in al Nasr?

Kita2b Abu Ali PFLP are definitely involved. They are constantly announcing that they are shelling the neighboring settlements in retaliation, a bizarre thing to claim if they are not? and one of the refugee camp airstrikes even seemed to be aimed at one of them

I think the national resistance brigades DFLP were in 7 October attacks so probably are too.

Irtapil (talk) 17:03, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

I definitely agree the other groups should be included, but it needs citations, can you help find some?

I think the citations on the other articles refer to PFLP and DFLP involvement in 7 October?

I found a possible reference for the airstrike aimed at a PFLP leader, but it's in one of my literally hundreds of open tabs… somewhere.

Pretty much every battle or other endangerment says just Hamas too. Currently Kita2b Abu Ali seem to be just shooting from a distance, no idea what anyone else is or was doing? But everything just being Hamas seems unlikely and unrealistic.

Irtapil (talk) 17:50, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Dear user @Irtapil:

Appreciate your comments on my talk page. Was pleasantly surprised that all those notifications in my inbox weren't a result of me angering somebody but quite the opposite really. As for your concerns regarding Gaza militant groups:

Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades: It is a common misconception that this organization is only present in the West Bank. On the contrary, they are alive and well in the Gaza Strip. You can read here to learn more about how they are now operating independently of Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas as of 2023. As for my sources that they are in Gaza fighting against the IDF, I've mainly been citing the reports of the Institute for the Study of War, including on the talk page comment that you noticed (this is where my knowledge of the Al Nasr incident originates). I'd reference the group's own Telegram channel if I could, where they regularly claim attacks within Gaza, but that would fail WP:RS. I've been on something of a crusade throughout talk pages to have this group's participation in Gaza recognized, with varying levels of success. Most often my requests get ignored. See: 1 2 3

Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine's National Resistance Brigades: In the comment you responded to, I also reference the Institute for the Study of War, who confirms the groups activities in combat in Gaza.

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades: I am aware of the PFLP's continuing strikes on targets outside the Gaza Strip, but surprisingly after an extensive search I couldn't find any evidence that they had directly participated in combat operations within the Strip against the IDF unlike the other groups, who regularly claim ambushes and anti-tank strikes against Israeli vehicles and similar attacks. This may have changed since, as I've been less active since around mid-November.

Agree with you that most reporting, including here on Wikipedia, is oversimplified in terms of Hamas not fighting alone by any means. This undercoverage is what sparked my interest in the minor players. SaintPaulOfTarsus (talk) 05:16, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Are you on Mastodon? Irtapil (talk) 05:08, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Not currently on Mastodon but I hope to be at some point during the next year. SaintPaulOfTarsus (talk) 15:04, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

What's the delay? I'd offer an invite but i think the servers are currently mostly open to new members. Irtapil (talk) 05:32, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

WP:BUSYLIFE.SaintPaulOfTarsus (talk) 05:46, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

exams? Irtapil (talk) 03:12, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

The weirdest bit THE PFLP KILLED BIBI's BROTHER when he thwarted one of their plane hijackings… it now seems implausibly bizarre that Bibi is just over simplifying? He's doing more like Jacinda Ardern does with the Christchurch shooter. But already it seems like not mention them is because a group of Marxists founded by a Christian clashes badly with "Hamas are ISIS". They're a small pay off the resistance, but it's still bizarre to ignore them completely. Irtapil (talk) 05:14, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Do you have a link for the specific ISW paper or article? Irtapil (talk) 05:56, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I'll repost the articles I linked in the comment on the talk page. They're pretty lengthy articles so you can Ctrl-F "Martyrs" and "Democratic" to find the relevant sections.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-november-5-2023

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-november-9-2023

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-november-11-2023 SaintPaulOfTarsus (talk) 15:06, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Sorry i was half asleep and didn't spot the numbered links. I copied this conversation to a topic-specific user-space page, since i seemed to be monopolizing your talk page here a bit, are you able to see notifications for tags on there? or should i link here? Irtapil (talk) 03:15, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

I really don't know what to think about Al-Aqsa Martyrs and Fateh. There are contradictory claims and both sides of it have motives to distort it. To me it looks like an "arms-reach" / "plausible deniability" arrangement? Like the USA and (until a particular private jet crashed) Russia did with private military contractors? Or like Ukraine did with the pre-Wagner incident of Russians invading Russia, the RVC and the white-blue-white guys invaded Belgorod, and Ukrainian officials just said "they're Russian citizens" and such.

But WHERE they are is much more definitive than that.

Telegram channels don't just fail at RS, I think they'd probably count as "originally research"? I got told earlier today that an Arabic-English dictionary would count as such. But a lot of the telegram channels get quoted pretty much verbatim by TV stations and news sites, and those count as reliable secondary sources.

e.g. Today, after two months of them seemingly yelling into the telegram void, Kitaeb Abu Ali rocket attack videos got republished by Al Jazeera - I think only their Egyptian channel - and a somewhat dubious-looking Qatar-based TV station whose content is full of 🔻 icons.

The somewhat dubious looking channel is https://www.youtube.com/@AlarabyTv_News It seems to be a proper news network rather than just a YouTube channel https://www.alaraby.com/ but my impression is it would not be very reliable. It gives me the same vibe as Fox News in the USA, or Republic TV in India (if you're not famished with Republic

I'm only seeing West Bank stuff for Kitā2b Al-Aqsa Matyrs? clashes in Jenin, obituary from Qalandia Camp, a battalion in Jalazone. They're in the war, but not in Gaza? But I've not looked that far.

Huzzah! I think I found Al Nadi? … but I think it's a suburb in Jalazone, in the West Bank, not the more well-mapped neighbourhood in Gaza City, there's also an Al-Nadi neighbourhood in Cairo, it seems to be a common name. "A military report issued by Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades - Jalazoun Camp … our fighters were able to target the occupation forces storming our camp land with a heavy barrage of bullets in the Al-Nadi neighborhood at 4:53, causing serious injuries among the soldiers." signed Template:Lang-ar which the robot reckons is "Al-Jalazoun Battalion", I can tell that says "(something) of Jalazone" but I've never seen that word for battalion before. I should probably not trust the robot too much, and I cannot find a map of Jalazoun that shows neighbourhoods, but that sounds very much like the localised Camp Battalions in the West Bank.

Al-Aqsa Matrys have quite flamboyantly religious rhetoric? Compared to them Al-Qassam sound like Richard Dawkins.

Irtapil (talk) 05:56, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

As for the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades' operations in Gaza, in addition to the links in my previous comment above, please see these excerpts from more recent articles by the Institute for the Study of War:

Iran Update, November 13: Palestinian media reported that the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades—the self-claimed militant wing of Fatah— fired mortars at the Israeli army in an unspecified location in the southern Gaza city axis.

Iran Update, November 13: An IDF combat team continued raids on the outskirts of al Shati Refugee Camp, focusing on destroying military infrastructure in the heart of the civilian population including schools, universities, mosques, and homes. The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades artillery unit launched mortars at the Israeli army operating in the vicinity of the camp.

Iran Update, November 15: The Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade fired 60mm mortars at IDF armor and infantry near the al Maqousi area, west of Sheikh Radwan on November 15.

Iran Update, November 20: The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades—the self-proclaimed militant wing of Fatah—and al Quds Brigades conducted a combined operation attacking three Israeli armored vehicles and soldiers in the Sheikh Radwan area southwest of Jabalia refugee camp.

Iran Update, November 22: The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade—a self-affiliated militant wing of Fatah—has conducted attacks on Israeli ground forces in the Gaza Strip and fired rockets into Israel.

Iran Update, December 6: The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade—a self-affiliated militant wing of Fatah—claimed that its fighters targeted an Israeli tank with an anti-tank munition east of Khan Younis.

Perhaps it is problematic for you that I'm only citing ISW articles. That would be fair, but I am not really sure what other reliable source is reporting on this level of detail on the Palestinian factions. As we've discussed, oversimplification to Hamas is prevalent. At least in English-language sources, that is. There would certainly be more evidence of the group's operations in Gaza from Arabic-language texts, but as a non-native I do not have the free time to try to look for that at the moment, though this will be in my near future, as I plan to significantly expand the Wikipedia article for the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades after becoming extended-confirmed. For some reason, the article lists no meaningful activities after 2007.

As for [ Katibat / كتيبة ] :

Though not an Arabic speaker by any means, I can confirm to you that the machine's translation of [ كتيبة ] as "battalion" is correct here. My vast prior experience observing and researching the war in Syria, which bordered on the obsessive-compulsive, has made me intimately familiar with this word as it was very commonly used among militant organizations there. The word you're familiar with, [ kitā2b ] should be the plural form of this word, [ katibat ]. Why the singular form typically gets translated as "battalion" but the plural typically gets translated as "brigades" is beyond my knowledge. SaintPaulOfTarsus (talk) 15:52, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

sorry, i got interrupted / side tracked. Irtapil (talk) 21:09, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

This time I'll try to respond a bit at a time, instead of leaving a messy draft. I think the only thing I was planning to add was a proof read and some extra links.

I really don't know any English military terminology. I'm usually more interested in the politics than I am in the violent parts of international conflict. I still haven't got around to doing the homework I assigned myself of reading the pages for brigades and battalion in English.

I have a very small and topical Arabic vocabulary, mainly location names, political terms, religious terms, and military terms. Which increasingly doesn't overlap with my English vocabulary.

From the Romanisations I've seen them use, it's كَتائب Kata2b not كِتائب Kita2b in Palestinian Arabic, but it's fairly likely that Syrian Arabic is different. (But, on the third hand, I keep accidentally pronouncing it with a كِ anyway because it is very similar to the word for Book in Urdu and Hindi, Kitab. I know a tiny amount of nearly a dozen languages, but not a useful amount of anything except English.)

As far as I can gather كتيبة seems to mean "camp guard", usually connected to a specific city / refugee camp, and كتائب Kata2b / Kataeb is a multi regional milirary wing of a party. And if كتائب is the plural of كتيبة that makes a lot of sense, each Kitaeb has multiple local Kteebah constituents.

The ة suffix is derived from a ت but I never see it transliterated as T, unless that word is weird? And it's usually a suffix for feminine nouns, which might explain why "she" pops up in some bizarre places in machine translations?

Most of the the factions only have one كتائب - except the PFLP seems to have an offshoot? Unless that's a division of another PLO party and I'm just muddled?

Then there's Saraya Al Quds (probably misspelled there?) the word where another editor told me a dictionary was "original research".

I completely gave up on understanding the war in Syria, though I'm somewhat backtracking into it now. All I have got so far is that the Palestinians seem ideologically closest to the Kurdish Marxists, but historically close to the Syrian government, which currently means Assad Jr. … which seems fairly unpleasant, but that war really seems like a "there are no good guys" (even more than most wars are like that). Except possibly the Kurdish Marxists, but they're friends with the USA, but… as I say, last time I gave up.

Side track, there is a word which seems to mean female fighter that I'm wondering if you know anything about… but I'll get back to that later, on this device if I change tabs I lose what I'm writing.

Irtapil (talk) 08:06, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

• Allow me to preface everything I'm about to say with a disclaimer that I have no formal background in Arabic or linguistics whatsoever, and all my responses on those topics have no basis in anything except patterns I've observed over the span of approximately 6-7 years of on-and-off study of the Syrian and Iraqi wars. My Arabic vocabulary is likely even smaller than yours.
• I am fairly certain you are correct regarding the first "vowel" - it's كَتائب Kata2b rather than كِتائب Kita2b - and this is likely the case in Iraqi (Kata'ib Hezbollah), Lebanese (Kataeb Party), and Syrian dialects of Arabic. My use of Kita2b was based on your earlier use of Kita2b, meaning I was just too rusty to catch the subtle mistake.
• Fun fact: Kitab is also the word for book in Arabic. See ahl al-kitab, the people of the book: a religious term collectively referring all followers of the Abrahamic religions: Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
• As for the ة suffix, I have seen it romanized as -at infrequently, and I've always preferred -ah, but in the case of كتيبة I think katibat is probably a more common romanization than katibah, which for some reason "just looks wrong." See the Syrian-Uzbek radical organizations Katibat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad and Katibat al-Imam al-Bukhari.
• As for battalions and brigades, there's not much I have to say other that in my experience, a brigade typically consists of multiple battalions and never the other way around.
• In the Syrian context, سرايا saraya, in a technical sense, would refer to "companies," with its singular form being سرية sarayah. A company would typically be a quite small unit and multiple such units would form a battalion. A company would sometimes be associated with a particular weapon: for example, Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham would frequently ascribe the sniper operations on the front line to the "sniper company," anti-tank operations would have been attributed to the "anti-tank company," and so on. However, in other cases, the word would not have the traditional military implication of small, specialized sub-units and could refer to much larger groups; consider the Defense Companies (Syria), which used the word سرايا but whose manpower was estimated at over 50,000. An acquaintance in Aleppo told me to disregard the battalion/company/brigade paradigm in cases like these.
• Additionally, especially earlier in the insurgency stage of the war, I found that katibat كتيبة was used simply to refer to "a group of armed men," typically of a rather small size not comparable to the Western definition of battalion, which usually number at least several hundreds.
• Parts of rebel-held northern Syria are now under the control of Turkish-backed criminal organizations branding themselves as لواء, liwa meaning brigade, and فرقة firqa(h) or furqat meaning division, terms I have not seen in Palestine. The لواء are made up of كَتائب, many of which are basically the armed gangs loyal to the warlords, who are also rotated to perform front-line duties every now and then, and their sizes are variable. In some cases the word كتيبة has been applied to incredibly small groups of under ten men.

SaintPaulOfTarsus (talk) 08:44, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

I think I sometimes see ar: فرقة which is also used for musicians. But not often. Sorry I am way behind on catching up with this. Irtapil (talk) 03:44, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

Al-Ahli suspects…

…and Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion kinda buries the lead, but i think i screwed up my attempt to fix that. Irtapil (talk) 17:50, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Massacre of soldiers at Kerem Shalom crossing

Can you help me fund some reliable references for a Massacre of soldiers at Kerem Shalom crossing on 7 October 2023? is there a wiki article for it? Irtapil (talk) 03:42, 17 December 2023 (UTC)