{"id":132563,"date":"2019-04-29T12:00:34","date_gmt":"2019-04-29T11:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=132563"},"modified":"2024-09-23T14:44:14","modified_gmt":"2024-09-23T13:44:14","slug":"reporter-sharmine-narwani-on-the-secret-history-of-americas-defeat-in-syria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/04\/reporter-sharmine-narwani-on-the-secret-history-of-americas-defeat-in-syria\/","title":{"rendered":"Reporter Sharmine Narwani on the Secret History of America’s Defeat in Syria"},"content":{"rendered":"

21 Apr 2019 – After years covering the “main battlefield in World War III,” Narwani says everything you think you know is wrong.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy leader of Iraq’s Hashd al-Shaabi or Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs), Iraqi paramilitary forces created to defeat ISIS. The US describes Muhandis as “an advisor to (IRGC Quds Force Commander) Qassem Suleimani.” Photo taken in Baghdad, Iraq in December 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n

When the war in Syria was recently declared decisively over, there were few correspondents or witnesses to turn to for a credible look at exactly what happened during eight years of conflict. The questions were many, but I could count on one hand those worth putting them to. Among these was Sharmine Narwani, whose work I have long counted distinctly thorough and honest amid coverage that \u2014 in her view as well as mine \u2014 hit a new low by way of collapsed professional standards and abandoned ethics. Narwani\u2019s pieces, written for a variety of publications, consistently reflect her hard work on the ground \u2014 work nearly no one else did. She is eyes wide open and beholden to no national interest or media slant.<\/p>\n

Narwani brings impressive credentials to the craft. After earning a masters in journalism from Columbia, she was for four years (2010\u201314) a senior associate at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. It was during those years that she began to make her mark covering the Middle East from her bureau-of-one in Beirut. Her accounts of the war as it truly unfolded have opened many eyes over the years, mine included.<\/p>\n

Having witnessed the Syrian war from start to finish, she now casts it in a usefully broad context. \u201cThe Syrian conflict constitutes the main battlefield in a kind of World War III,\u201d she said during our lengthy exchange. \u201cThe world wars were, in essence, great-power wars, after which the global order reshuffled a bit and new global institutions were established.\u201d This, in outline, is what Narwani sees out in front of us, now that the Western powers\u2019 latest \u201cregime change\u201d operation has failed.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Narwani and I conducted our exchange via email, Skype and WhatsApp over a period of several weeks in late March and early April. In this, the first of two parts, Narwani dissects the role of various constituencies \u2014 radical jihadists and the nations that backed them, the Western press, the NGOs \u2014 in prolonging a war that, in her view, could have ended far sooner than it did. I have edited the transcript solely for length. Part 2 will follow.<\/p>\n

You returned from Syria just last week \u2014 this after going in several times last year. The intervening months were important, given the war has just ended. What have you been seeing on the ground? <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My trips last year took place in May and June, in the weeks before the battle for the south of Syria began. I visited Daraa, Suweida and Quneitra, the three southern governorates most critical to the upcoming battle. It was fascinating. It dispelled a number of myths about the conflict for me. One of these was the discovery that al\u2013Qaida was smack in the middle of the fight in Daraa, indistinguishable from Western-supported militant groups in all the main theaters. Another shocker was when I interviewed former al\u2013Nusra and FSA [Free Syrian Army] fighters near the Lebanese border: They told me their salaries had been paid by the Israelis for the entire year before they surrendered, around $200,000 per month from Israel to militants in the town of Beit Jinn alone.<\/p>\n

The southern battle was very swift, and since then all focus has moved to the north \u2014 to Idlib, where the most extreme militants have amassed in their final stronghold, and in the northeast, where U.S. troops have begun a slow withdrawal, without having yet ceded those territories back to the Syrian state\u2026. Last week, I visited Idlib to see what I could glean about the timing of the upcoming battle, but nothing much has changed. There has to be a political decision first; some hope this will come after Russia, Iran and Turkey meet in late April. Idlib is different from Daraa because the militancy there is probably around 80 percent al\u2013Qaida, and the rest, its allies. But Turkey and the Western powers \u2014 including the U.S. \u2014 continue to protect it for the moment.<\/p>\n

What is the latest you have on reconstruction efforts, plans for a new constitution, and a political settlement? Russia, Iran and Turkey are said to be trying to establish a constitutional mechanism of some kind at the U.N. Russia and Turkey have summited with Germany and France on reconstruction plans \u2014 not that we\u2019ve seen a word about it in the American press. Where is all this headed, in your estimation?<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We need to put what is commonly called\u00a0the Syrian \u201cpolitical process\u201d into perspective. Syria, Russia and Iran won. Turkey is crippled by its Syria losses and is desperately seeking a new geopolitical equilibrium. France and Germany are very worried about more refugees \u2014 and extremists \u2014 flooding their borders, and they are willing to break with the U.S.\u2019 goals in Syria over this issue.<\/p>\n

In short, the \u201cpolitical process\u201d is whatever Syria, Russia and Iran want it to be. Their meetings in Astana [the Kazakh capital, where a series of peace talks have taken place] demilitarized the\u00a0hotspots in Syria and placed them back under government control. And their meetings in Sochi [the Russian resort city] managed to get Syrians of all walks together, in a room talking.\u00a0So these three countries will figure out the constitutional process. Just expect it to be mostly under the victor\u2019s terms. Major concessions to Western interests \u2014 in exchange for reconstruction funds \u2014 will be unlikely because the whole Middle East now knows the U.S. doesn\u2019t stick to its agreements. Syria isn\u2019t betting on Western funds anyway, contrary to what media reports suggest.<\/p>\n

I predict that the endgame will take Syria back to where it was in 2011, right after Assad passed unprecedented reforms that the international community decided to ignore.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a very interesting observation. In your writing, you previously suggested that the 2016 peace talks in Geneva would lead to the same thing. Very few people in the West know that Assad proposed numerous reforms in response to the initial unrest in 2011. Some of them are strikingly liberal by any standard. Please tell us about these, and why you think Assad\u2019s 2011 proposals are where things will finish up now.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When the Syrian government introduced reforms in 2011 and 2012, the only thing we ever really heard about them was \u201cit\u2019s too late\u201d and \u201cthey\u2019re window-dressing.\u201d But these reforms were far-reaching and significant. So much carnage could have been avoided had they been given the time and space to take hold.<\/p>\n

Starting in 2011, Assad issued decrees suspending almost five decades of emergency law that prohibited public gatherings. This was a big deal, as other Arab leaders were doing the opposite in response to their \u201cuprisings.\u201d Other decrees included the establishment of a multi-party political system, term limits for the presidency, the suspension of state security courts, prisoner releases, amnesty agreements, decentralizing down to local authorities, sacking controversial political figures, introducing new media laws that prohibited the arrest of journalists and provided for more freedom of expression, investment in infrastructure, housing, pension funds, establishing direct dialogue between populations and governing authorities, setting up a committee to dialogue with the opposition \u2014 many of whom turned down the offer.<\/p>\n

You could feel these reforms unfolding in Damascus by early 2012. I would drive into the city from Beirut, call up opposition figures on their mobile phones, go to their homes, talk to regular folks about politics. I could even access Twitter and Facebook in Syria \u2014 platforms that had been banned for years.<\/p>\n

What was the reaction among Syrians? Mixed, I gather. You\u2019ve written that some Syrian dissidents were also critical of these reforms. \u00a0<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Many people were skeptical about reforms initially. The narratives against the Syrian state were very pervasive, and\u00a0folks were confused with all the competing information. Most domestic opposition figures were certain that Assad was going to be gone\u00a0within a few weeks, so\u00a0that\u00a0impacted their readiness\u00a0to dialogue with his government or support reforms publicly. At the same time, these figures \u2014 many of whom had languished in Syrian prisons for years \u2014 rejected foreign intervention, the imposition of sanctions, and the militarization of the conflict. In early 2012, the dissidents I met mostly scoffed at reforms, but when massive bombs tore apart Damascus that summer, I saw a marked shift in their positions.<\/p>\n

In terms of the general population, I think sentiments were split \u2014 not so much on the reforms themselves, but on whether they\u00a0would actually be implemented. One way to\u00a0gauge public support would be to look at how many Syrians turned out for the constitutional referendum. Many boycotted it, but the participation rate was just under 60 percent, so I would argue that a modest majority of Syrians were willing to put their trust in the reforms.<\/p>\n

What is your assessment of the U.S. plan to withdraw from Syria? I think you suggested in one piece you wrote some time ago that the U.S. effectively ceded Syria to Russia as far back as the first Russian air sorties in September 2015.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, in September 2015 the U.S. lost the conflict to Russia and its allies. The reason is very simple. The Russian intervention\u00a0provided the Syrian army and its ground allies with the necessary cover to do their jobs effectively.\u00a0He who dominates the air and<\/em> the ground wins the war.<\/p>\n

To be fair, it also seemed highly unlikely that Obama was prepared to turn this into a full-on U.S. air war. He was happy to do \u201cregime change\u201d in that passive-aggressive way Democrats do it: all \u201chumanitarian intervention\u201d and marketing spin and tragic soundbites. But the Nobel Peace Prize winner was not going to put U.S.\u2013piloted planes in Russian-dominated airspace over Syria in\u00a0any significant way \u2014 not after Iraq and Afghanistan, certainly, and not after the Russians and Chinese blocked Obama\u2019s U.N. Security Council route to war by vetoing all resolutions that might legitimize intervention.<\/p>\n

To what extent do you think Syria changed the U.S. position in the Middle East as a whole? It seems as if we are coming out of an important passage in the long story of American involvement in the region.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The U.S. was already exiting the Middle East before the so-called \u201cArab uprisings\u201d kicked off. Whoever in the U.S. national security apparatus made the decision to stick around and redirect these uprisings against regional adversaries made a colossal mistake. I want to write about this one day because it\u2019s important. I\u00a0believe the Syrian conflict constitutes the main battlefield in a kind of World War III. The world wars were, in essence, great-power wars, after which the global order reshuffled a bit and new global institutions were established.<\/p>\n

Look around you now. We have had a reshuffle in the balance of power in recent years, with Russia, China, Iran in ascendance and Europe and North America in decline. That\u2019s not to say that Washington, London or Paris don\u2019t have levers left to pull: They do. But it is on the back of the Syrian conflict that a great-power battle was fought, and in its wake, new international institutions for finance, defense and policymaking have been born or transformed.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not just talking about the\u00a0strengthening of the BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa], the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Eurasian Union, etc. I mean the world\u2019s networks are shifting hands, too. What will happen to Western-controlled shipping routes now that Asia has started to build faster, cheaper land routes? Will the SWIFT [bank\u00a0messaging] system survive when an alternative is agreed upon to bypass U.S. sanctions everywhere? There are so many examples of these shifts. It\u2019s not to say that they are due to events in Syria, but rather that Syria triggered the great-power battle that unleashed the potential of this new order\u00a0much more quickly and efficiently.<\/p>\n

Keep in mind that World War III was never going to be like the other two conventionally fought wars\u2026. It was always going to be an irregular war that would escalate on multiple fronts \u2014 not just regime change events, but financial pressures, sanctions, propaganda, political subversion activities, destabilization, increased terrorism, proxy fights and so on. The battle for global hegemony really began to unfold over Syria, though, when the Russians, Iranians and Chinese decided to draw a line and put up a fight. The world changed after that.<\/p>\n

As you\u2019ve just suggested, Syria has long seemed to be a different kind of war, a new kind \u2014 a war fought with images, information and disinformation, true and false portrayals of events, people, organizations, and so on. Based on what you\u2019ve written over many years \u2014 and from inside Syria, on the ground \u2014 I would think you agree with this.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In some ways, Syria wasn\u2019t that different. All modern Western wars have been fought with manipulated imagery and disinformation. We call it propaganda and accuse the Nazis and Soviets of doing it, but the U.S. does it better than anyone. It\u2019s literally the main tool in America’s military kit: Otherwise, Americans would never accept the never-ending wars. There used to be laws forbidding the U.S. government from propagandizing the American people. The Obama administration undid many of those legal barriers. If you ever have a chance to read the U.S.\u00a0Special Forces\u2019 Unconventional Warfare manual, you will see how fundamental propaganda is to U.S. efforts to maintain hegemony. Everything starts and ends with \u201cscene-setting\u201d and \u201cswaying perceptions\u201d to prepare a population to support invasion, occupation, drone wars, \u201chumanitarian interventions,\u201d rebellion, regime change.<\/p>\n

It was no different in Syria. The U.S. government imposed key narratives from day one \u2014 that Assad was indiscriminately killing civilians in a popular, peaceful revolution. Was this true? Not particularly. Eighty-eight soldiers were killed across Syria in the first month of protests. You never heard that in the Western media. That information would have altered your perception of the conflict, wouldn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

The Syrian opposition used to burn tires on the tops of buildings to simulate shelling for TV cameras. Did you see that footage here? The only reason Syria seems like a \u201cdifferent kind of war\u201d is because we had Twitter and Facebook and alternative media punching holes in Washington\u2019s storyline every day \u2014 and because Syrians had the audacity to\u00a0resist for eight years. You can\u2019t keep up an act for eight years. People catch on.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s focus on a few topics that you\u2019ve argued very effectively were key factors in prolonging and, as you say, \u201cweaponizing\u201d the conflict. The first of these is the question of casualty counts \u2014 \u201cthe casualty count circus,\u201d I think you called it in one of your pieces. Can you summarize what you found and how you came to be so at odds with mainstream reporting?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I first investigated the Syrian death toll 10 months into the conflict. In that month, January 2012, the U.N.\u2019s figure for casualties in Syria was around 5,000 dead. The U.N.\u2019s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria issued its first report two months later, in March, stating that 2,569 Syrian security forces had been killed in the first year. Right there we know that half of the dead were neither civilians nor with the opposition. Half of the Syrian dead were security forces, which also informed us that the opposition was, in fact, armed, organized, and very, very lethal.<\/p>\n

How about the other half of the death toll \u2014 the remaining 2,431 casualties? I found that they were a mixture of pro-government civilians, pro-opposition civilians, and opposition gunmen in civilian clothing. The \u201crebels\u201d were not wearing military gear, so they were indistinguishable from civilians. Mainstream media just didn\u2019t want to know this obvious stuff. They asked no questions, they investigated nothing.<\/p>\n

A year later, one of the main opposition casualty counters, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which the Western media quote all the time, told me it was hard to differentiate rebels from civilians because \u201ceverybody hides it.\u201d By then, in year two, the Syrian death toll had increased tenfold and the U.N. released a casualty analysis that included the information that 92.5 percent of the dead were male. That is not a death toll representative of a \u201ccivilian population.\u201d<\/p>\n

The point is, why wasn\u2019t there a single other journalist out there asking the question, \u201cWho is killing and who is dying?\u201d If they had asked that elementary question, the way we view this conflict would have been very, very different. There was, at the very least, parity in the killing, which also means the Syrian government\u2019s response to\u00a0opponents\u00a0was not at all disproportionate.<\/p>\n

Another area of interest is the question of when and how the opposition \u2014 supposedly unarmed at the start \u2014 came to be armed. The question of proportionate responses to violence comes into this, as you\u2019ve just suggested. \u00a0<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Elements of the opposition were armed from the very start of the conflict. We have visual and anecdotal evidence of weapons caches, armed gunmen infiltrating the Lebanese border, and \u201cforeign\u201d gunmen appearing in Daraa, the city [in southern Syria] where protests\u00a0first manifested. In the early days, it was hard to prove this because efforts were made to hide evidence that the opposition had weapons \u2014 and anyone claiming so was instantly marginalized. But then the Arab League (which had suspended Syria and was therefore viewed as an impartial body) sent in an observer team that produced a stunning report \u2014 one you did not read about in the Western press. The observer mission detailed the opposition\u2019s bombings and terrorism\u00a0and attacks on infrastructure and civilians.<\/p>\n

I also know the opposition was armed from the start [March 2011] because of my own investigation and discovery that 88 Syrian soldiers were ambushed and killed across Syria in the first month of the conflict\u2026. I have their names, ages, ranks, birthplaces \u2014 everything. Then in June 2011, over 100 Syrian soldiers were murdered in Jisr Shughour, in Idlib Province, many with their heads cut off, and nobody could dispute this anymore. Yet we continued to hear \u201cthe opposition is unarmed and peaceful\u201d in the media for a good long while.<\/p>\n

But you asked about proportionality, and to that I would simply ask: What if there were armed men in Washington who killed a few cops in the last week of December? In January, these unknown shooters began a campaign of ambushing American servicemen coming and going from their bases in Fairfax, Newport News, Arlington, killing 88 in total. Then, in March, over 100 U.S. soldiers are killed in a single day, half with their heads cut off. What is a \u201cproportionate\u201d response for you\u2026? That answer about proportionality will be different for different people, I can assure you.<\/p>\n

The next question is obvious. Who armed the opposition? Are we able to say? <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We know today the U.S., U.K., France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Turkey are the main countries that armed, trained, financed and equipped the militants, and\u00a0that\u00a0they found intricate ways to avoid detection, especially at the beginning. Weapons came into Syria from all five border countries at\u00a0different parts of this conflict \u2014 Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Israel \u2014 but I would say the most weapons probably arrived via Turkey, arms transfers that were very much coordinated with its NATO partners.<\/p>\n

When, why, and how did groups such as al\u2013Nusra become involved? What were or are their relations with the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian Democratic Forces?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Nusra Front is the Syrian franchise of al\u2013Qaida. Bombings in Damascus in December 2011 and January 2012 were the first actions\u00a0publicly attributed to al\u2013Qaida, and these were shortly followed by a viral video of AQ chief Ayman al\u2013Zawahiri urging fellow jihadists to flood into the Syrian theater. I don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve heard of the declassified 2012\u00a0Defense Intelligence Agency document on AQ? This paper shows that the U.S. and its allies had identified AQ as the strongest, most capable fighting force in Syria against the Assad government, that these extremists had intent to create a \u201cSalafist principality\u201d on the Syrian\u2013Iraqi border, and that the U.S. and its allies basically supported this. Many tried to play down this document, but then Obama sacked Michael Flynn as head of the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], and Flynn came out and said the document was correct,\u00a0that the U.S. had \u201cwillfully\u201d supported this whole mess.<\/p>\n

The FSA was a\u00a0shitshow from the start \u2014 no central authority, no chain of command, no cohesion, etc. \u201cFSA\u201d became the whitewashed moniker for any militant fighting the Syrian army. Many FSA fighters joined AQ and ISIS during this conflict. The FSA often gave or sold its U.S.\u2013provided weapons to al\u2013Qaida \u2014 and the Pentagon knew about this all along. When I asked a CENTCOM [U.S. Central Command] spokesman in 2015 why so many U.S. weapons supplied to their trainee fighters were showing up in al\u2013Qaida\u2019s hands, he actually said: \u201cWe don\u2019t \u2018command and control\u2019 these forces. We just \u2018train and equip\u2019 them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the bottom line. During my trip to Daraa last year, just before the battle to oust militants from Syria\u2019s south, I discovered that al\u2013Qaida was in every major strategic area alongside the 54 Western-backed militant factions preparing to fight the Syrian army. If you looked at any U.S. think tank map before the big battle for the south, you would have seen three colors: red for the Syrian army, green for the \u201crebels,\u201d and black for ISIS. So where was al\u2013Qaeda? They were smack right alongside the green \u201crebels.\u201d That\u2019s how indistinguishable AQ has been from U.S.\u2013backed forces in this conflict.<\/p>\n

You made an effort at one point to get the State Department to name even a single \u201cmoderate rebel\u201d group. They couldn\u2019t or wouldn\u2019t, as you reported it. Please tell us about that episode.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I used to ask the State Department to name the so-called \u201cmoderate rebels\u201d they supported in the Syrian conflict. They always refused to answer, claiming that info could compromise the security of rebel groups.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s my takeaway: The reason the U.S. won\u2019t name the militant groups they funded and armed is because the moment they do, we will find atrocity videos and snuff films made by that group. The liability issues are huge. But mostly the issue is that the U.S. basically armed extremist groups in the Syrian conflict, and they don\u2019t need the public knowing who these people are.<\/p>\n

What degree of support for the Assad government did you find? And from which sectors of the Syrian population?<\/strong><\/p>\n

First of all, let me say that Syria is not Tunisia or Egypt \u2014 those populations had pretty much zero connection to their leaders, not on the domestic front, not in terms of worldview. The Syrian state is not wealthy, yet it provided basic services, plus education, health care, food staples for its population. And it very much shared a worldview with its population \u2014 anti-imperialist, anti\u2013Zionist, resistance against interventionist powers, independence, etc.<\/p>\n

In a nutshell, Assad always maintained support from some very key constituencies. These are the major urban hubs of Aleppo and Damascus, the business class and elites, the armed forces (very significant), the minority groups (Alawites, Christians, Druze, Shia, etc.), and the secular Sunnis. The [governing] Baath Party has around 3 million members, and they\u2019re mostly Sunni. That\u2019s a big chunk of core support right there. And then, as living conditions deteriorated and political violence escalated, many opponents fled to government-controlled areas and gave up on the fight.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Let\u2019s stay with Syria a little longer before dilating the lens. There were two factors in the war that played decisive roles in constructing and maintaining the narrative, as you say. At a certain point they intersected, but let\u2019s take them one at a time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

First, please describe your impressions of how the Western media performed. You\u2019ve called them \u201cridiculously sycophantic\u201d in one of your pieces. I\u2019d like to hear from you on this. Were they, for example, purposely complicit in \u201cperception management,\u201d as they say, or simply dupes? Maybe professional standards have just plain collapsed since my years in the field. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Mainstream Western media were absolutely complicit in disseminating disinformation about the Syrian conflict to serve the political agendas of their respective governments\u2026. We are living through an era of full-on information warfare, and what is interesting is that populations recognize this at some gut level, because people are turning off their media and searching for alternative sources of information.<\/p>\n

Journalists were not<\/em> dupes in this conflict. Western journalists covering Syria were, for the most part, believers in the liberal order, U.S. exceptionalism, interventionism \u2014 these people are hired<\/em> because they think that way. They quote their governments\u2019 statements unquestioningly,\u00a0despite the lies of Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, etc. They are fundamentally uninterested in the legalities of warfare \u2014 the U.S. and U.K. bombardment of Syria, the establishment of military bases there, the funding and arming of terrorist groups \u2014 all of it illegal under international law.<\/p>\n

A number of Western journalists who dared to probe deeper were sacked, silenced or smeared. I know a couple of journalists who lost their jobs. The Huffington Post stopped publishing my work once I started reporting from inside Syria \u2014 and then a year or so later, they quietly removed my entire archive from their site. Other mainstream journalists who questioned the Syria narratives were badly smeared \u2014 by their colleagues, quite shockingly \u2014 which made more than a few of them back down, write less, tweet differently. The intimidation tactics by our peers have been relentless in the coverage of Syria.<\/p>\n

In short,\u00a0Western media helped to stage and grow this conflict. I no longer think journalists should be treated with a special kind of immunity when they get a story this wrong, repeatedly, and people die in the process. I prefer to call them \u201cmedia combatants,\u201d and I think that is a fair and accurate description of the part they play in wars today.<\/p>\n

Now let\u2019s go to the Western NGOs \u2014 Human Rights Watch and the like \u2014 or the Syrian Observatory, for that matter. What was their role? Was it principled, as most Westerners assume? They were primary sources for the Western press while, as Patrick Cockburn pointed out [in The London Review of Books], they were staffed by anti\u2013Assad activists. Not exactly \u201creliable sources,\u201d I\u2019d say. <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s actually quite interesting the role NGOs played in the spinning of this conflict. You\u2019re right, they were entirely one-sided and pro-opposition. They would put out statements and reports based on the loosest definition of sourcing I\u2019ve ever seen, their Western journalist pals would then bullhorn this rubbish across the world media, and then governments would react in outrage and cite the NGO and press reports as fact.<\/p>\n

Most of their interviews of Syrians on the ground were coordinated by liaisons connected with the militant opposition \u2014 many were conducted via Skype. How do you know who you\u2019re speaking to? How do you know if they\u2019re telling the truth? Who introduced you to this \u201csource?\u201d Do they have a motive? NGOs \u2014 local and international \u2014 were the source of most of the information we learned about chemical weapons attacks, cluster munitions, massacres, civilian casualties of air attacks, etc.<\/p>\n

The most ubiquitous of these is, of course, the Western-funded White Helmets \u201crescue team,\u201d who worked only in areas with the most extreme militant groups and played witness to so many of the alleged chemical attacks in Syria. But troll Facebook for a while and you will find photos of dozens of these White Helmets guys flaunting weapons and posing next to al\u2013Qaida and ISIS fighters. Despite this kind of evidence from their own pages and websites, media consistently used this group as a source, and still do.<\/p>\n

In this line, you wrote a piece following the alleged gas attack in Eastern Ghouta \u2014 in the spring of last year, I think \u2014 that was especially fine. I was pleased to cite it at length in one of my Salon columns. You actually found and photographed a jihadist-held farmhouse filled with U.S.\u2013supplied chemical weapons equipment. Nobody else had it. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Can you talk about that experience? How, generally, do you manage to get so much closer to the ground than other correspondents, especially the Beirut-dwelling Westerners? And as that story demonstrates, closer to the truth. <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have no particular advantage over other foreign journalists traveling to Syria. I have to wait just as long to receive a visa, and each visit is limited to four days, though that can be extended in-country with permission from the Ministry of Information.<\/p>\n

When I was in Damascus last March, the ministry put out a call to reporters about a laboratory they\u2019d discovered the day before while liberating some Ghouta farmlands\u2026. \u00a0It turns out the facility was not that secure and we had to duck and weave through some very bumpy fields on foot, with mortars and gunfire going off just meters away. I\u2019m not a war reporter and I have no training whatsoever in that very specialized, madman\u2019s niche, so it wasn\u2019t pleasant in the least. The facility itself was a laboratory of sorts run by a militant, Saudi-backed faction called Jaysh al\u2013Islam. It was clear that something was being produced there that had military applications, but since the lab had only just been discovered, it wasn\u2019t yet clear what that was.<\/p>\n

I never<\/em> wrote that it was a chemical weapons lab, by the way. You could see in the photos the level of sophistication of the equipment, the large compression units, the pipes going from the laboratory upstairs to the heavier devices below. The one thing I did<\/em> conclude from this discovery is that Syrian militants clearly had the means<\/em> to access sanctioned, foreign \u2014 even American \u2014 equipment with dual-use technologies, that they were able to create production lines in the middle of war zones, that they were able to procure toxic substances. Chlorine was found in rows of containers at the front of the facility. Before this, the narrative was that the \u201crebels\u201d couldn\u2019t possibly be responsible for chemical weapons attacks because they couldn\u2019t make or buy them. This facility showed they could make them\u2026.<\/p>\n

Interesting. Your account prompts another question. I take it you were led to the site by Syrian officials. Were you able to conclude with confidence it wasn\u2019t a put-up job on the government\u2019s part?<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, two other media crews \u2014 TV outlets \u2014 and I were taken to the location by Syrian soldiers, with permission from the defense ministry. There are several things that made me fairly confident I wasn\u2019t walking into a set-up. The facility had been shelled fairly extensively \u2014 there was debris and dust covering most of the equipment, so this stuff wasn\u2019t \u201cbrought in\u201d the day before for staging. There was so much gunfire and shelling still going on in the area that I still can\u2019t believe the army had the gall to call this \u201cliberated land.\u201d With war still raging mere meters away, one could not reasonably believe the Syrian army moved in equipment for staging, carried it across the furrowed fields to this lab, then dusted it just-so with realistic looking debris from mortar hits.<\/p>\n

Finally, the militant group that occupied this lab, the Saudi-backed Jaysh al-Islam: Not only didn\u2019t they deny they ran this lab; they have previously admitted to using toxic agents in the Syrian conflict \u2014 against Kurds in the Sheikh Maqsood neighborhood of Aleppo.<\/p>\n

To me the episode in Ghouta, which ended in U.S., British and French missile bombardments of Damascus, was the second-clumsiest of them all. First place goes to the August 2013 incident, when U.N. chemical weapons inspectors had just settled in their Damascus hotels \u2014 at Assad\u2019s invitation \u2014 and there\u2019s a gas attack in, once again, Ghouta. On cue, the U.S. instantly blamed Assad. Preposterous. False-flag and \u201cpsy-ops\u201d just aren\u2019t what they used to be. Or maybe in our media-saturated age, we can simply see more.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Were all these incidents in Syria faked or staged? Are you in a position to judge this conclusively? <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I am not in a position to judge anything conclusively, but based on my experience I do have some opinions on this subject. In the early days, it seemed that on the eve of every U.N. Security Council meeting on Syria \u2014 or before an \u201cinternational team\u201d was about to arrive in the country \u2014 something violent and horrific would happen. You could almost time these massacres and chemical weapons attacks according to the politically significant event that was about to take place in a Western capital. It was hard not to notice this pattern and even harder not to get cynical about \u201cmassacres.\u201d …<\/p>\n

I did some early deep dives on the chemical weapons attacks, including the 2013 Ghouta incident. I can\u2019t tell you exactly what happened, but here\u2019s what I do know about that incident. A Jordanian journalist was on the ground in Ghouta the next day and he interviewed residents, militants and their families. He wrote a piece with an AP reporter explaining that militants had taken shipment of some new and unknown container weapons from the Saudis that they had mishandled and which caused the deaths. Then, we had one of the most senior U.N. officials on Syria tell us, off the record:\u00a0\u201cSaudi intelligence was behind the attacks and unfortunately nobody will dare say that.\u201d This official, we know, gave the same information to at least two other Western reporters \u2014 who did not report it\u2026.<\/p>\n

This is a pattern you see in most of the other attacks \u2014 evidence manipulated, unknown chain of custody, controlled and limited access for investigators. Most of the attacks happen in militant-controlled areas, so the opposition is in complete control over access and flow of information. I do not believe you could prosecute the Syrian government in an impartial court and win convictions in any of these cases. Logically, the Syrian state is the entity that least<\/em> benefits from any of these CW or massacre incidents. It had no motive to launch these attacks.\u00a0Why use highly controversial chemical munitions when you can do more damage with conventional ones \u2014 and escape censure?<\/p>\n

As I hinted a moment ago, your reporting is very distinctive for its granular detail. In Syria you\u2019re more or less in a class by yourself in this respect. One of your sources especially intrigued me, Father Frans van der Lugt, the Dutch priest who lived many years in Homs. Tell us about him. I should mention for readers\u2019 sake, he was killed in Homs in the spring of 2014.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I never interviewed Father Frans, though I did go to his church gravesite during a visit to Homs shortly after he was killed. Through his writings, this Dutch priest gave us some rare, objective insights into what took place in the early days of the crisis \u2014 events he witnessed first-hand.<\/p>\n

In September 2011 he wrote:\u00a0\u201cFrom the start there has been the problem of the armed groups, which are also part of the opposition\u2026 The opposition of the street is much stronger than any other opposition. And this opposition is armed and frequently employs brutality and violence, only in order then to blame the government.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then in January 2012 he expanded:\u00a0\u201cFrom the start, the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 75-year-old Father Frans was shot at point-blank range by a gunman while sitting in a church garden in the rebel-occupied part of Homs\u2026.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Patrick Lawrence is<\/em> Salon\u2019s<\/em> foreign affairs columnist. A longtime correspondent abroad, chiefly for the <\/em>International Herald Tribune and<\/em> The New Yorker, he is an essayist, critic, editor and contributing writer at <\/em>The Nation. His most recent book is<\/em> Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His web site is patricklawrence.us<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 salon.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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