While it’s true that Syrians are limited in their capacity to criticize the government, it doesn’t justify ignoring them. And the situation on the ground isn’t so black and white. Behind closed doors and in private conversations, many Syrians were sharply critical of the Assad regime. Yet they still supported the government, largely out of even stronger opposition to the religious fundamentalism and brutality of the armed groups, whom they view as foreign-backed religious fanatics who have invaded their country and terrorized them and their families.
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Underneath all the grief and calls for revenge was exhaustion. After five years of war, these people were tired. I didn’t meet a single Syrian in the government areas I visited who hadn’t lost friends and family since the war started. But their suffering, with a few minor exceptions, has been largely disappeared from Western media, probably because the people most responsible for it are supported by the West.
Even those who expressed disapproval of Russia’s involvement in their country told me they hold the US and its regional allies—Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey—most responsible for the disintegration of their country.
These sentiments totally contradict one of US media’s most pernicious lies—that US inaction allowed the bloodshed in Syria to continue with impunity.
“Many thousands of people have been killed in Aleppo…but Washington shrugs,” lamented the New York Times (12/14/16). “The United States’ inaction in Syria has transformed our country into nothing other than a bystander to the greatest atrocity of our time,” complained Leon Wieseltier in the Washington Post (12/15/16).
But Washington has intervened (FAIR.org, 10/1/15)—and by doing so, it prolonged the bloodshed and empowered Al Qaeda.
Despite being warned about the extremist and violently sectarian ideology that dominated the opposition as early as November 2011, the Obama administration spent, according to the Washington Post (6/12/15), a colossal $1 billion-a-year training and funneling weapons to Al Qaeda–linked extremists in order to weaken the Syrian government.
In written testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June 2016, Brett McGurk, the US special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter IS, warned that “Nusra is now Al Qaeda’s largest formal affiliate in history.” According to US intelligence officials, Nusra is starting to plot attacks against the US.
In other words, the US government outsourced its war against the Syrian government to Al Qaeda, and Americans have no idea, because corporate media continue to promote lies about Obama’s so-called inaction.
Many US media consumers might be shocked to learn that the Syrian uprising was never particularly popular in Aleppo. The rebels, with help from their American benefactors, invaded and captured Aleppo’s eastern neighborhoods by force in 2012. At times they laid siege to Aleppo’s government-held areas, cutting off access to drinking water, electricity and food. American politicians cheered the territorial gains. Hillary Clinton, then secretary of State, expressed hope that the rebels taking East Aleppo would “provide a base for further actions by the opposition.”
With its ground forces already overstretched fighting an insurgency across the country, the Syrian government responded, as it often has, with overwhelming and devastating air power, which Western leaders routinely denounced. But the criminal conduct of the rebels failed to provoke similar outrage.
Many whose neighborhoods were occupied by rebel forces fled early on to government areas or neighboring countries. Their homes were looted in their absence and turned into operating bases. Those who stayed were subjected to strict interpretations of Islamic law that closely resembled the brutal practices imposed by ISIS.
Corporate media’s own accounts periodically reflected these realities, back when Western journalists still ventured into rebel areas.
“We waited and waited for Aleppo to rise, and it didn’t. We couldn’t rely on them to do it for themselves so we had to bring the revolution to them,” a rebel commander told Reuters in July 2012. The article went on to note that the fighters were “lounging inside a school taken over by the rebels as a temporary base” in an area that “appeared to be completely deserted by residents. Fighters were using houses as bases to sleep in.”
“Around 70 percent of Aleppo city is with the regime. It has always been that way. The countryside is with us and the city is with them,” confessed another rebel commander to the Guardian in August 2012.
“In Aleppo, I heard Salafi jihadists talk of slaying the minority Alawites, and call for both the immediate support of America, and its immediate demise,” reported the New York Times in October 2012.
Indeed, schools, medical facilities and residential buildings were transformed into military bases and sharia courts. The Children’s Hospital in Aleppo became a notorious prison and torture facility where several Western hostages, including journalist James Foley, who was later beheaded by the Islamic State, were held.
By late 2013, rebel kidnappings of journalists were so rampant that major Western media outlets collectively urged the Syrian opposition to put a stop to the abductions.
At the same time, Western governments poured millions of dollars into rebel propaganda made up of authentic-looking rebel media outlets and NGOs, like the White Helmets, to glorify the armed groups and agitate for more forceful Western military intervention against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
No longer able to travel to rebel areas for fear of being kidnapped or worse, journalists were relegated to covering the war from Beirut and Istanbul, becoming entirely dependent on Western-funded propaganda to fill the information vacuum.
Falling in line behind the geopolitical interests of their governments, Western media went about whitewashing and romanticizing jihadist groups as liberators and protectors adored by the Syrians living under them, even as their own reporters were being kidnapped, ransomed and even shot by Western-backed rebels.
In the Syrian city of Manjib, not far from Aleppo, US-backed ground forces imposed a crippling siege that left tens of thousands of civilians hungry as US airstrikes pounded the city, killing up to 125 civilians in a single attack. In Iraq, the US also used airstrikes to drive ISIS out of Ramadi and Fallujah, leaving behind flattened neighborhoods that resemble the ruins of East Aleppo. In Fallujah, 140 people reportedly died from lack of food and medicine during the siege.
After ISIS was ejected from Fallujah, NBC News (6/17/16) ran the headline: “Iraqi Forces Enter Central Fallujah, Liberate Key Areas from ISIS.” In striking contrast, during Al Qaeda’s removal from East Aleppo, NBC (12/14/16) declared: “Aleppo Is Falling. What Does This Mean For Assad, ISIS and Russia?”
Since 9/11, US corporate media have portrayed Al Qaeda as a monstrous organization whose existence justifies a global war without end. Who could have predicted that by 2016, these same media outlets would become Al Qaeda’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders?
(From Rania Khalek, FAIR, 1/4/17)