{"id":88351,"date":"2017-03-13T12:00:25","date_gmt":"2017-03-13T12:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=88351"},"modified":"2017-03-09T13:47:17","modified_gmt":"2017-03-09T13:47:17","slug":"our-sons-of-bitches-western-media-and-the-syrian-rebels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/03\/our-sons-of-bitches-western-media-and-the-syrian-rebels\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Sons-of-Bitches: Western Media and the Syrian \u201cRebels\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

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4 Mar 2017 – \u201cHe may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he\u2019s our son-of-a-bitch\u201d \u2013 this is what U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt is rumoured to have once said about Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. We examine how the western media, always so full of editorials and columns praising western values (whatever those may be), have covered the Syrian opposition during the Syrian war, focusing on three groups in particular. A closer look at the falsehoods that have been peddled, the inconvenient truths that were left unsaid, and the contradictions that emerged due to low journalistic standards, reveal the shameless and spineless support for western imperialism that has become the norm.<\/em><\/p>\n

A war outsourced to al-Qaeda<\/strong><\/p>\n

The coverage of the Syrian war reached deafening tones during the recent government recapture of East Aleppo. Who can forget hearing over and over that the \u201clast hospital<\/a>\u201d in East Aleppo had been destroyed? This entire coverage, orchestrated with a multitude of hidden backers, had the goal of convincing western readers that this had been a collective failure of humanity, that the west had done nothing to prevent it and that it thus needed to do more.<\/p>\n

This myth of western non-intervention has been thoroughly debunked, even if far away from the mainstream press. But nobody put it better than Rania Khalek<\/a>:<\/p>\n

[\u2026] the US government outsourced<\/strong> its war against the Syrian government to Al Qaeda, and Americans have no idea, because corporate media continue to promote lies about Obama\u2019s so-called inaction.<\/p>\n

The way in which al-Qaeda\u2019s Syrian affiliate<\/a>, Jabhat al-Nusra, has been portrayed in the western press will one day be part of journalism courses. It is truly unbelievable that the Syrian branch of) al-Qaeda, a group that was declared public enemy #1, the main target of the open-ended \u201cwar on terror\u201d, the existential threat to western civilisation, would end up spearheading the U.S. regime change operation in Syria.<\/p>\n

Throughout the Syrian conflict we have mainly seen three ways of incorporating al-Qaeda into the mainstream narrative. One is to simply not mention their presence. When the propaganda goes into overdrive we start reading only about \u201crebels\u201d, with no mention whatsoever of their nature. And thus we heard of the plight of the \u201crebels\u201d in East Aleppo over and over again. The contrast<\/a> with the coverage of the operation to retake Mosul, or with previous operations against al-Qaeda in Iraqi cities, could not be starker.<\/p>\n

The second one is to mention that, even though a given operation is led by the Nusra front and their jihadi cousins of Ahrar al-Sham (more on them later), there are also plenty of moderate rebels<\/em> around. The myth of the moderate rebels became ever-present in the western media, David Cameron claimed there were 70.000 of them<\/a>!<\/p>\n

While the Russians and Syrians claimed they were bombing terrorists, western governments cried in outrage that moderate forces, standing side by side with extremists, were being attacked. At this point there is an obvious question to be asked: if they are standing and fighting next to al-Qaeda, how moderate can they really be?1<\/a><\/sup> Additionally, the west has been supplying weapons to these groups via regional proxies. Does this not just simply amount to an indirect supply of weapons to the Nusra front, which is where they naturally ended up<\/a>?<\/p>\n

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Press conference announcing the Nusra front\u2019s rebranding as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham<\/p><\/div>\n

And the final tactic is what is employed by low-cost airlines after a plane crash: changing the name. This has arguably more to do with the regional sponsors of extremism, Saudi Arabia first and foremost, but also Qatar, the UAE, and to some extent Jordan and Turkey2<\/a><\/sup>, in that they need to at least pretend that they are fighting extremism in the region.<\/p>\n

Therefore we have seen multiple rebrandings and regroupings of the Nusra front. There was the umbrella Jaish al Fatah<\/a> (\u201cArmy of Conquest\u201d), there was the official split<\/a> from al-Qaeda with the blessing from al-Qaeda and the renaming as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham. While any serious journalist would remind readers that this was the regrouped\/rebranded al-Qaeda affiliate, it was not uncommon to find cases where we are just presented with the new names<\/a> and no background<\/a>. We also witnessed a situation where, under the cover of these rebrandings, a Saudi official pretty much admitted<\/a> that the Saudis were supplying weapons to the Nusra front. His blushes were spared by the low journalistic standards of the BBC but not by the Intercept<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

All in all, it seems like Bin Laden only needed to survive a few more years, move to Syria and get a new logo, and he would be back working with the Americans just like in the good ol\u2019 80s.<\/p>\n

An islamic state through the ballot box<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another group in Syria3<\/a><\/sup> whose trajectory in the western media is worth analysing is Ahrar al-Sham. It is known that it began forming brigades well before<\/a> the official start of the Syrian \u201cRevolution\u201d in 2011, and this seriously undercuts the theory that the Syrian uprising was entirely secular and progressive from the start, only to be hijacked by jihadists, or forced in that direction by the government response, later on.<\/p>\n

When the group first emerged as a serious player the coverage rule book had yet to crystallise, and western journalists sometimes fell into old habits of doing actual journalism. Reporting facts, verifying stories, that sort of thing. At the time it was plainly said that Ahrar al-Sham were a jihadist group<\/a> full of foreign fighters which fought side-by-side<\/a> with al-Qaeda. When it became clear that these groups were the big players in the Syrian opposition, the tune needed to change, at least in the newsrooms. Intelligence agencies had long known of this risk as weapons and money had been flowing from the west and regional allies. But while al-Qaeda had an unfixable PR problem, there was still hope for Ahrar al-Sham.<\/p>\n

So we witnessed a scramble to merge the \u201cdemocratic, secular forces we said we supported\u201d and the \u201cbin-ladenites<\/em> we actually support\u201d. The BBC needs to be credited with a quite remarkable piece of journalism. When describing Ahrar al-Sham, they wrote<\/a> that they were:<\/p>\n