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0:00
This is Central Asia. And this region here that I'm highlighting is known as the Forgana Valley. Home to about 17 million people. It's by far the most densely populated part of Central Asia and encompasses about 1 in five people across the whole region. And the borders across it are potentially the most janky borders that you can find anywhere in the world today. The Forgana Valley is divided between three different countries today. Usbekiststan, Kyrgystan, and Tajikhstan. and they all
0:26
zigzag twist and intermingle together in what is certainly the worst example of border gore on the planet. There are super weird artificial peninsulas of territory that barely even connect to the rest of their home countries. like this peninsula of Usuzbekiststan around the town of Na that plunges in Akystan and is only connected to the rest of Usbekiststan by an ultra narrow 360 m wide chicken's neck or these even weirder borders of Usuzbekistan in the far east of the country that are
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theoretically contiguous around this body of water but in practice are actually a series of multiple tiny Usuzbck exclaves on the wrong side of the water surrounded by Kyrgyzstan there's these weird large arms or branches of all three countries that twist and knot together in the center of the valley. And then to make things even stranger, there were no fewer than eight exclaves of territory of these countries that are completely isolated from the mainlands and geographically surrounded
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by the other countries. Six of these exclaves are all located within Kyrgyzstan and are found within Kyrgystan's southwestern arm that's known as the Batkin region. One of the most visually complicated border regions on the planet. Two of these exclaves belong to Tajjikhstan and four of them belong to Usuzbekiststan. Some of them are so small that they're nearly irrelevant, such as this little exclave at Tajjikstan surrounded by Kyrgystan that's mostly just a segment of a road
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in a creek and a single farm. While others are major and hotly contentious population centers home to tens of thousands of people like this larger exclave of Tajjikstan that's surrounded by Kyrgystan that's known as Veroo. This exclave is densely populated at home to around 45,000 people and it's probably the single most contentious piece of territory in Central Asia. With no access to the mainland of Tajjikhstan, the 45,000 residents trapped within Veruk have been marginalized, isolated,
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and impoverished surrounded by Kyrgystan for decades. While Tajjinkistan has historically rejected that it should even be an exclave in the first place, claiming a narrow land corridor for itself from the mainland to it across the internationally recognized territory of Kyrgystan that Kyrgystan has fiercely rejected, leading to multiple modern conflicts between them. Meanwhile, Usuzbekiststan has four of their own exclaves in the Bkin region surrounded by Kyrgystan as well. Two of them, Chon
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Carara and Jania are relatively small and located nearby to the Usuzbekiststan mainland, while the two others are very large and a lot stranger. Shohimdon is deeper within the Kyrgyzstan mainland and is home to around 5,000 people, while the So District is probably the strangest border example in the whole region. It's a large exclave of Usuzbekiststan that's entirely surrounded by Kyrgystan and home to around 80,000 people. And yet nearly all of those 80,000 people are ethnic to
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Jets who are neither Usuzbck, the country that they belong to, nor curious, the country they're surrounded by. Complicating things further still, there's one more exclave of Kystans around the village of Barack that's completely surrounded by Usbekiststan. And there's another long narrow exclave of Tajjikstans with a small village inside that's also completely surrounded by Usuzbekiststan. And then to add on even more complexity, there's a very high degree of the ethnic borders here
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overlapping with the political borders. There are very large numbers of Tajjiks who live across the political border in Usuzbekiststan. [music] And then there are very large numbers of Usuzbcks who live across the political borders in both Tajjikhstan and Kystan. These confusing and intermingled borders have produced multiple conflicts in Central Asia between all three of these countries. They were originally drawn up by the Soviet Union when the whole region was under their control across
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most of the 20th century, but they probably weren't drawn this way by them for the reason that you might already think. To understand why this border gore exists in Central Asia today and why it's been so problematic for decades since the Soviet Union's collapse, it helps to begin with an understanding of some of this region's history before the Soviet Union took it over. Geographically, the Fragana Valley is a large green oasis that's about the size of New Jersey, located smack dab in the
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center of otherwise dry, arid grasslands and steps. Encompassed within mountain ranges surrounding it on all sides, save for the west, [music] the valley is lush and ideal for agriculture because it's fed by two rivers that originate from glacial runoff and snow melt higher up in the mountains around it. The Seiria and the Keradaria. At the crossroads of multiple civilizations and located directly along the historical Silk Road trade route, the valley has been considered prime real estate for
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thousands of years and has been variously controlled and influenced at different times by the Greeks, Persians, Turks, Chinese, Mongols, Russians, and a whole bunch of others. By the early 19th century, however, the Fana Valley was broadly unified under the control of the Ko and Connet and contained an extremely diverse population. There were Persian and Turkish speaking senitary communities who practiced agriculture and were highly intermingled that lived
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in the valley who were collectively both referred to as sarts. [music] And then there were nomadic Turko Mongol tribes around the valley's edges and mountains who often invaded and settled among the Sarts and intermingled with them as well. Throughout this time frame before the later arrival of the Russians and the eventual establishment of the Soviet Union, there was really no modern concept of ethnicity or nationalism that was present within the Forgana Valley.
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And there was no clear way to make scientific distinctions between the peoples in the valley. The people were very often multilingual and had numerous intermingled ancestries. And so most people's identities were more based around the sedentary nomadic divide, their tribe or clan or their religion, which in most but not all cases was Islam. It was a highly convoluted and intermingled stew of languages, lifestyle class ancestry laws and religion in the valley. And then
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gradually between the 1850s and 1870s, it was all invaded, conquered, and annexed into the Tsarist Russian Empire. Now, after they conquered Central Asia, the Tsarist Russian authorities divided the whole area into just two large administrative regions that were effectively governed as colonies. the governor of the step that broadly encompassed most of modern-day Kazakhstan and the governor of Turkstan that encompassed most of the rest of Central Asia but with two major
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exceptions wedged in between its two different halves the conet of Ka and the emirate of Bkhara which were each granted internal autonomy and were theoretically independent protectorates of the Russian Empire complete with their own con and amir though Russia still ultimately controlled their foreign and military policies broadly thesarist authority Authorities allowed a high degree of autonomy in Central Asia and generally left their people to manage their own affairs until
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the First World War arrived. [music] In 1916, the Tsarist regime, facing manpower shortages on the front lines, expanded military conscription to the empire's Muslim inhabitants for the first time, which triggered a massive revolt amongst the Muslims in Central Asia that began within the Forgana Valley and which came to be known as the Basmachi movement. The revolt quickly adopted a panuric Islamist and secessionist character as local elites in the Fragana Valley had a tendency at
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the time to identify at least partially with Turk identity in an attempt to copy the Turkish nationalism that was also thriving at the time in the dying Ottoman Empire. After the October Revolution came in 1917 and the Bolevik seized power in Russia, they inherited this revolt that was already raging in Central Asia and the Fragana Valley. And so they moved in to restore order and put it down. After the Red Army took over the city of Kokand in early 1918, one of the largest cities in the Forgana
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Valley, they perpetrated a massacre that killed as many as 25,000 of the city's inhabitants, which only served to rally the support for the Basmachi revolt in the valley even further. A brutal yearslong guerilla and conventional war ensued in the Forgana Valley between the Red Army and the Basmachi rebels that ultimately resulted in the confirmed deaths of more than 9,000 Red Army soldiers and probably tens of thousands of the valley's local inhabitants. After more than 6 years of fighting, the
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Bolevixs would eventually manage to largely suppress the revolt in the Forgana Valley by 1923. And meanwhile, the year previously in 1922, they would also proclaim the establishment of the Soviet Union. Initially, the previously autonomous connet of Ka and Emirate of Bkhara saw the regimes overthrown by locals who aligned themselves with the Bolsheviks and voluntarily entered into the Soviet Union as people Soviet republics or PSRs. While the former governorate of
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the step and governorate of Turkystan were both initially incorporated into the new Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic or RSFSR as autonomous regions known as ASSRS. The Tyrustan ASSR and the Kyrgystan ASSR which confusingly was the old name that the Russians used to refer to the Kazaks that would later extend to the Kier who were both largely nomadic groups. Now almost immediately the Soviets wanted to redraw these internal administrative borders that they inherited in Central
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Asia. The Soviets viewed these internal borders as a sort of nonsensical hodgepodge mix of various peoples and laws that required and cobbled together through previous colonial conquests which they wanted to redraw using what they considered to be a more rational and scientific approach based on ethnographic and demographic data. The Marxist Leninist ideology of the Soviet Union had this idea that the former sprawling Russian Empire should be rebuilt and developed as a brotherly
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union of nations collectively working together towards a true stateless communist society in harmony. A union of Soviet socialist republics, if you will. The general idea they had was to divide the country between a series of Soviet socialist republics or SSRs. Each one based largely around one of the country's largest ethnic groups. With each SSR designed to be as ethnically homogeneous as possible. So in 1924, shortly after the Basmachi revolt had been largely pacified, the Soviets began
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the process of drawing the borders for these new SSRs out of their holdings in Central Asia. At the time, Joseph Stalin was serving as the people's commasar of nationalities in the country. And so it was largely under his guidance that the new borders of Central Asia's republics would be drawn and sorted out. A fact which has led to a century of mixed opinions on what Stalin's intentions actually were. Critics of Stalin and the Soviet Union at large are repeatedly
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accused him of pursuing a policy during this era of divide and rule. deliberately drawing the borders in the Forgana Valley between the New Republics to be as convoluted and messy as physically possible in order to ensure maximum levels of chaos and competition between them if they ever dared to leave the Soviet Union which would ultimately keep them all over dependent on Moscow for arbitration and disputes and subservient to the Kremlin. While Stalin may very well have had these intentions,
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it's also true that his task of drawing accurate and clean ethnic borders across the complicated matrix of identity that was present in the Forgana Valley was going to be virtually impossible for anybody to actually succeed at, no matter what their intentions were. In order to try and establish a clearer picture of the ethnic demography that was present in the Forgana Valley, the Soviets ordered a census to be conducted in the region. But that was far easier said than done, especially with the
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technology and data that was available during the 1920s. The census takers had to conduct their surveys painstakingly on horseback and doortodoor, which was especially difficult to gain accurate information from the Kiraas and Kazak communities from since up to 60% of their communities at this time were still nomadic and had no doors to knock on. The concept of ethnicity that the Soviet ethnographers and census takers brought with them into the Forgana Valley were still largely foreign
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concepts to the people who lived there in the 1920s as well. Huge numbers of people who lived there spoke multiple different languages, had mixed ancestries, and all lived together in the same cities and regions intermingled together. It was so convoluted that there are several anecdotal examples of the frustrated Soviet ethnographers simply demanding residents in cities to just choose one nationality only for people within the exact same immediate family to choose completely different
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ones. Ethnic identity was highly fluid and didn't always fit neatly into the major nationalities of the region that the Soviets identified and attempted to press on everyone. Persian-speaking sedentary peoples who were grouped together as Tajjiks and Turkish speakaking senary peoples who were grouped together as Usuzbcks and who used to all be classified collectively the same as Sarts and nomadic Turk Mongol people who were grouped together as Kiras despite the fact that most
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people's identities crossed over into various combinations of all three and many others. All of this made drawing accurate borders neatly dividing the region's nationalities into clean cohesive geographic areas effectively impossible. and it's a large part of why the borders look so janky today. The Soviets were also incentivized to encourage the development of local national identities in the valley like Tajik, Usuzbck, and Kygis in order to suppress and divide the unifying
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ideologies of panurkism and Islamism in the region that had spawned the dangerous Basmachi revolt that they had just fought so hard to put down. By encouraging new ideas of regional nationalism that divided the valley, they hoped to suppress another unified revolt like that in the region from ever happening again. At this time, communist authority was also not yet strongly established in Central Asia. So, they needed to rely on the cooperation of locals for the border drawing process,
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which opened it up to abuse through corruption and bribes by local officials who wanted to see their own ancestral villages or towns incorporated into their new republics. even if the local ethnic identity wasn't an exact match. And while the Soviet authorities wanted the SSRs they were designing to be as ethnically homogeneous as possible, they also wanted them to be as economically viable as possible as well, which to the Soviets meant a population of at least 1
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million people, a fair allocation of water resources, and a capital city connected by rail for each of the SSRs. So in many cases these economic considerations were placed ahead of demographic considerations for the final borders. Ultimately by the end of 1924 the Bhar and Chlorism PSRs were both dissolved despite the opposition of their local communist parties while the Tyrustan ASSR was partitioned into two new fullyfledged SSRs. The Turkman SSR and the Usuzbck SSR which also
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encompassed most of the former Bkhara and Horism PSRs. Initially the USB SSR included its own new ASSR for the Tajjik but a few years later in 1929 the Tajjik ASSR was split off and morphed into its own fullyfledged SSR as well. At about the same time in 1929 the Kier's autonomous oblast was created within the Russian SFSR. And then more than a decade after this process began in 1936, it too was finally separated into its own fullyfledged SSR along with Kazakhstan. And with that, the region of
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Central Asia under Soviet control was administratively divided into five new national SSRs with the Forgana Valley divided between three of them. the borders of which were never intended at the time to eventually become international borders because nobody who was drawing them back then ever foresaw that one day the Soviet Union might simply cease existing. There were of course many many controversies and anomalies related to the drawing of these national borders by the Soviets
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where no borders had previously existed. The cities of Bhara and Sauand were primarily inhabited by Tajjik speakers. But since they were surrounded by Turkspeaking countryside, they were placed within Usbekistan to make it all continuous, which still inflames passions within Tajjikstan to this day. Meanwhile, the cities of Tashkent and Shiment both had a large intermingled population of Usuzbcks and Europeans, but were surrounded by a countryside populated by Kazaks. So Tashkint went to
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Usbekiststan while Shimkint went to Kazakhstan. More confusingly, since the Kiris people were mostly nomadic, they made up only tiny percentages of the urban population within their own republic. The cities of Osh and Jalalaban within Kyrgystan, but nearby to Usbekiststan were both primarily inhabited by Usuzbcks and Europeans at the time instead. But the Soviets were concerned that if they gave the cities to the Usuzbck SSR, they would lose their economic hinterlands stretching
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out towards the mountains that were primarily inhabited by the Kiras. While southern Kyrgystan would also be left with no significant cities. So the Soviets gave them both to Kyrgyzstan in order to avoid any of that from happening. A decision that would eventually contribute to large-scale interethnic violence here many decades later during our own time in 2010 when tensions between the Usuzbck and curious communities in southern Kyrgystan would flare. For the next 60 plus years, the
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Soviets pursued a policy of nation building within each of these new Central Asian SSRs that they created, promoting the distinct ethnic and national identities within each of them that they were assigned. The convoluted process of drawing their borders also continued on for decades after Stalin's own death as well. The largest and most infamous of the exclaves that exist today, the silk district of Usuzbekiststan that's surrounded by Kyrgystan and inhabited almost entirely
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by Tajjik wasn't created until 1955, 2 years after Stalin's death. The reasoning for doing so has never become entirely clear, at least in English language sources. As far as I can tell, there are legends that sulk was lost by Akira's communist party official during a card game with his Usuzbck counterpart and other theories that it was decided to be given to Usbekiststan because the main roads in the region connected with Usbekiststan along the river instead of
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with more rugged curious territory to the east and the west. It's ultimately never been entirely clear. Many other revisions to the borders were made as late as the 1980s, but their convoluted and intermingled nature never really mattered much to the Soviets because it was all part of the same country and system. These were always designed and intended by the Soviets to serve as internal boundaries on paper rather than as hard international borders in practice. meaning that all of the weird
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little exclaves and enclaves and twisting borders didn't really matter since the people of the SSRS could all freely travel back and forth across them at will. But then, of course, all of a sudden, the Soviet Union fell apart and collapsed in 1991. All of the SSRs in Central Asia that the Soviets had created unexpectedly became independent sovereign nations, and the convoluted internal borders that were never intended to be international borders suddenly became them. For the first time
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in probably centuries, the Forgotta Valley was suddenly left as a politically divided geographic area without a strong centralized authority and instead became home to three brand new competing states who had to reckon with the previous decades of nation building and differing ethnic identities that had been promoted in each of them by the Soviets. All three countries initially cited different maps produced by the Soviets between the 1920s and 1980s to use for claiming their borders.
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And so large segments of all three states as mutual border areas remained unclear and non- delineated for decades, especially around the exclaves. Large numbers of Tajjiks, Usuzbcks, and Kiris ended up on the wrong sides of their respective borders or worse became entrapped with an enclave surrounded by rival states as happened with Tajjikstan's exclave of Aruk surrounded by Kyrgystan. Usbekiststan's many ex-claves also surrounded by Kyrgystan and Kyrgystan and Tajjikstan's exclaves
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surrounded by Usuzbekiststan. Initially, all three countries generally allowed each other to access their respective exclaves via roads traversing over their territories and relations began calm enough. But then things started shifting rapidly for the worse in 1999. In February of that year, a militant group that called itself the Islamic Movement of Usbekistsan or the IMEU attempted to assassinate the President of Usbekiststan during a bombing attack, who they wanted to overthrow so they
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could establish their vision of a strict Islamic state in Usbekistsan. The IMU was able to take advantage of the complex and unclear borders in the area by setting up their base of operations in the Soul enclave. And over the summer of 1999, they invaded the surrounding Baptin region of Kyrgystan, which had an ethnically Usuzbck majority local population. They eventually seized control over the Kieris village of Barack and took hostages, which prompted Usuzbekiststan to deploy their own
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soldiers to surround the village and lay siege to it, which is apparently how Barack became a Kir exclave surrounded by Usuzbekiststan. During and after this conflict, Usuzbekiststan began unilaterally demarcating and sealing off its borders with Kyrgystan under the pretext that it was to prevent further incursions by the IMU. The Usuzbcks built barbed wire fences, established checkpoints, and even installed minefields across large sections of their border with Kyrgystan across the
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Fana Valley. In some cases, advancing dozens of meters beyond the international border that was recognized by Kyrgystan. Most controversially, the Omecks expanded their barbed wire fences and minefields around the city of Barack, even after the IMU militants had been cleared out from the village, leaving it behind as a truly entrapped exclave of Kyrgystan, isolated from the rest of the country by very hard borders. They also added in minefields around their own exclaves within
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Kyrgystan like the Silk district where they claimed the IMU was based in which especially outraged the Kyrgystan government after they accused them of planning landmines outside of Sulk within Curious territory. The Batkin conflict in 1999 as it would come to be known ultimately resulted in the deaths of nearly 1,200 people largely due to military combat between the IMU and the Kyrgystan army. Afterwards, the IMU was fully pushed back to alternative bases in Tajjikhstan. After which,
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Usbekiststan decided to unilaterally demarcate their borders with Tajjighstan as well, using the same kinds of barbed wire fences and landmines they had deployed along the Kystan border as well. Usbekiststan's more hostile approach to the borders with their neighbors in the Forgana Valley would generally continue on for years until the country's longtime authoritarian president Islam Karamov would finally die in 2016 which only then opened up the path to a dant and restored
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relations with Kyrgystan and Tajjikhstan and a loosening up of the border policy. Usbekiststan would eventually agree to finally delineate their border with Tajjikstan in 2018 and then with Kyrgystan a few years later in 2022, steadily getting rid of their barbed wire fences and minefields along the borders as well. The agreement between Usbekiststan and Kyrgystan was especially notable because it included a land swap that eliminated the Kyazakslave of Barack that was trapped
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within Usbekistsan. By 2024, the land swap became permanent. Barack was fully absorbed and annexed into Usuzbekiststan, and the vill's 985 residents were transferred and resettled elsewhere in Kyrgyzstan. Despite this, Google Maps continues to still show the Barack exclave existing here as of this video's production more than a year later. So, I think this just hasn't been updated yet by Google for whatever reason. Nonetheless, the Kristan Tajikstan border continued remaining
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largely undefined while other violent incidents caused by these complex borders continued. In 2010, interethnic violence and riots that erupted between the Kiras and Usuzbek communities in the cities of Osh and Jalal Ababad within Kyrgystan resulted in hundreds to potentially thousands of deaths and thousands of destroyed homes. The lasting legacy of the Soviet Union's decision to have incorporated what at the time were the largely Usuzbck populated cities of Osh and Jalalabad
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within Kyrgyzstan nearly a century previously. And all the while hundreds of kilometers throughout the Forgana Valley continued remaining disputed and non-delineated for decades, especially between Kyrgystan and Tajjikhstan and particularly around all the exclaves. While the violence that erupted between the Usuzbck and Curious communities in Osh and Jalalabad in 2010 were large enough to have captured headlines around the world. Hundreds of smaller scale localized skirmishes across the borders,
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usually involving soldiers taking a few pot shots at each other or villagers throwing stones at one another over water access and border crossings continued on for years afterward and were also happening for years beforehand. But then things escalated dramatically between Kystan and Tajjikhstan's disputed borders in 2021. A dispute over an important shared water pumping station on the border near the Veruko exclave that year exploded into multiple armed attacks and
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confrontations all across the border between them in the Batkin region of the Fana Valley with both sides deploying heavy artillery, drones, mortars, and attack helicopters against each other. Particularly heavy fighting took place to the north of Tajjigstan's Vero exclave, where more than 40,000 people remained trapped surrounded by Kystan. Tajjigstan claimed a land corridor from their mainland across Kyrgystan to connect to Veruk which Kyrgystan disputed while further fighting between
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them happened to the west around the southern strip of disputed territory between them south of the Tajjik city of Kujand. 55 people were killed during this 4-day war between them in 2021 and hundreds of others were injured. The borders between the two countries were completely sealed shut afterwards, and sporadic clashes in these two disputed areas between the Tajjik and Kiris armies continued on for another year until they erupted into an even deadlier bout of full-scale fighting again in
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September of 2022. For 6 days, the Tajik and Kiras armies fought against one another in the same disputed area as they had the previous year in 2021, using their full arsenals available to them and both blaming the other for restarting the violence. This time, nearly 150 soldiers were killed in action and more than 100,000 civilians on the Kystan side of the border were forcefully displaced and temporarily evacuated before a ceasefire was finally agreed upon. These bouts of high-profile
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fighting between Kyrgystan and Tajjikhstan in 2021 and 2022 wrecked relations between the two countries. And with the borders between them sealed, the 40,000 plus people living in the Veruk exclave were unable to leave and visit any of their friends and families in the rest of Tajjikhstan for years as a consequence. But after years of contentious talks and negotiations that followed, Kyrgystan and Tajjikhstan eventually announced in early 2025 that their relations would be fully restored.
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Their borders would be reopened again for the first time in 4 years. And then most spectacularly, they had agreed to resolve all of their outstanding border disputes and to fully delineate their borders with each other. They agreed to a few land swaps with each other and to resolve Tajjikstan's desire for a land bridge to the Veroo exclave. They agreed on establishing a neutral corridor here that neither side would ultimately control, enabling Tajjikhstan access to
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Vook without Kyrgystan having to surrender any territory for it. Then a few weeks later, Usuzbekiststan joined Kystan and Tajjikstan in another momentous conference where they all jointly declared that for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union 34 years previously, they had agreed to fully resolve all of their outstanding border disputes and fully delineate all of their shared borders with one another, dramatically reducing the odds of further interstate violence taking
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place here. While the borders still look really weird and janky across the Forgana Valley. And while they've sparked their fair share of violence and controversy, they've also been remarkably more stable than nearly anybody back in the 1990s ever expected them to be. Despite these messy borders they inherited from their Soviet masters, Central Asia has witnessed significantly less violence overall than other postsviet regions like the Cauasus and Ukraine or post Yugoslav regions
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like Bosnia and Kosovo. And for that, I believe that Central Asia deserves far more credit than many others have given them. And I think that the region should serve as a role model for conflict resolution in the 21st century for everyone. Messy, weirdl looking borders don't have to lead to enormous violence and attempts to redraw them. And I think that Central Asia is the biggest proof for that in the world today. While Central Asia has remained relatively
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stable, other parts of the world haven't been so fortunate. As I was writing this video, the US has quietly launched its largest military operation in the Western Hemisphere in decades. So far, they've targeted smuggling routes in the Caribbean Sea in the Eastern Pacific Ocean and have launched at least 25 known strikes on boats since early September that have killed at least 95 people. What's striking is how little public attention all of this has received and how differently the stories
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being told depending on which outlets you follow. That's where the danger lies. When the media filters out certain stories or frames them through a narrow political lens, we lose the full picture. And in global affairs, not having that context means we misunderstand what's happening and why it matters. And that's exactly why I rely on Ground News, today's sponsor. Ground News is an app and website built to give you a global perspective. It aggregates news from over 50,000 sources
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Nicholas Maduro has framed the operation as a plot to overthrow him. And just a few days ago, another US military strike on a boat accused of drug smuggling in the Eastern Pacific reportedly killed another eight more people. While all of the reporting on this specific story have acknowledged the eight initial deaths, left-leaning coverage of it often frames the military strikes as a controversial campaign, leading to extrajudicial executions while questioning the operation's overall
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legality. By contrast, right-leaning outlets have more often portrayed the actions as decisive lethal kinetic strikes against narco terrorists, even claiming the military obliterates vessels that they often link directly to Venezuela. But I think that the most fascinating feature of ground news is blind spot where you can see the major stories that people on the other side of the political aisle are seeing but you're not. For example, in the context of US politics, the right is currently
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talking about how US oil and gas production has soared to record highs in November led by Texas, [music] while the left is talking about how Jared Kushner has withdrawn a new Trump hotel project in the Serbian capital Bgrade amid corruption charges. two stories you might have otherwise missed out on if you only rely on a few sources for your news. I genuinely believe that ground news is a seriously useful tool in today's increasingly polarized media environment. I use it all the time
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thank you if you sign up. And as always, thank you so much for watching.
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