For fourteen years you lied to us about Syria - how the brave Syrian people rose up in protest against a despotic regime and were hit with bullets and bombs. How their calls for help from Western governments were ignored or met with hand-wringing, even when the regime used chemical weapons against them. You told us stories about the people’s resistance, the brave volunteer rescuers who dug with their bare hands in the rubble of buildings destroyed with barrel bombs, saving thousands of innocent lives. How their fame spread around the world – but the killing and gas attacks went on, despite international help and intervention to destroy the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons stocks.
For fourteen years you lied to us about the West’s war on Syria. You lied about the “Free Syrian Army” and its extremist Sunni friends in Al Qaeda, calling them ‘rebels’ who were fighting a ‘civil war’ against a sectarian elitist Alawite regime – the ‘Hafez al Assad dynasty’, renowned for its brutality and repression of the poor Sunni majority population. You lied by omission – never telling us about the thousands of Syrian soldiers killed defending their towns and cities, or who was killing them. You willingly spread the lies of hostile foreign organisations who counted all the dead as civilians killed by the regime, including even its own soldiers.
For fourteen years you lied by omission and fabrication – failing to tell us how a river of weapons and jihadist mercenaries were brought to Syria from Libya and Tunisia through Turkey; you even made up stories about what happened in Benghazi where the CIA safe house was attacked and the US Ambassador killed by rival jihadist militias. You lied about the killing of Muammar Qadhafi and NATO’s collaboration with the Muslim Brotherhood to take over his country and steal its resources. And you lied to us about the CIA’s training of thousands of foreign mercenaries for the insurgency in Syria, claiming the money was supporting Syrian ‘rebels’.
For ten years you lied to us about Russia’s military intervention, failing to tell us how Russian cruise missiles destroyed columns of hundreds of road tankers ferrying Syrian oil into Iraq and Turkey with US assistance, in a trade that ‘Islamic State’ used to pay for millions of dollars’ worth of weapons. For ten years you failed to tell us the truth about the US collaboration with IS to steal Syria’s oil and wheat to sell to Europe through Israel, and now you lie again about it, claiming Syria’s desperate shortage is due to sanctions against the Syrian government.
For ten years you lied to us about Russia’s help for the Syrian Arab Army, and the role of its military police and aerospace forces in fighting the takfiri insurgents – whether in liberating Palmyra from Da’esh or Aleppo from Al Nusra. With the assistance of Western agents like HRW and Amnesty, you invented stories about Russia bombing hospitals and schools, while these were being used as bases by the insurgents. At the same time you lied by omission, never reporting on the thousands of gas canister bombs that rained down indiscriminately on civilians in government-held areas, alongside sniper fire and mortar attacks from ‘rebel’ held areas.
You never told us how these violent Islamist militias invaded, terrorized and besieged Aleppo, cutting off water and electricity supplies, while Western agencies and the UN called for ‘humanitarian intervention’ against the Syrian Government. And now you tell us that these very same violent extremist militias have ‘liberated’ Aleppo from the very people who were finally helping the city get back on its feet. The Old Souk that was invaded and burnt by the insurgents in 2012 was only recently re-opened for shoppers and tourists, and local merchants desperate for some income. You lied about this too, back in the early days of the terrorists’ invasion, claiming the 1000 year old Ummayad mosque minaret was hit and demolished by a Syrian army tank shell – when it was blown up by the Islamist mercenaries, showing no respect for the religion they claimed to follow.
Your lies – a vast tapestry of intersecting false stories – seeped through everything. Every broadcast news bulletin, every special report, every expert commentator. Those lies twisted your audience’s minds into knots too hard to decipher, but made simple with childlike symbols – the brutal dictator who crushes innocents beneath his boots – the air force that drops bombs full of nails on school playgrounds. And the selfless humanitarian agencies and workers, targeted despite their identification, or even because of it, as Israel does.
Then as now, you hid the truth – the horrific truth of what ideologically driven men can do to the ‘untermenschen’ and 'infidels' when told it is ‘authorised’ ; thousands of barbaric acts and mass killings concealed or passed off as ‘regime atrocities’ without question or evidence. And when the crimes of the insurgents were almost impossible to hide you simply ignored them.
Thanks to the rotten legacy of your lies, the conspiracy engineered by Syria’s worst enemies – Israel and France, Turkiye and Qatar, the US and UK – has finally achieved in a month what fourteen years of lies, bullets and missiles had failed to do. With smoke and mirrors you have created the 'Salafist Principality' in Syria that your agencies dreampt about, transforming the stinking corpse of ISIS into a socially acceptable young man.
It is an act of unprecedented treachery, your game of regime change in Syria, defined by years of subterfuge, scheming and trickery, a Nobel Prize winning achievement any fascist leader could be proud of. In just a month you have sacrificed the honour and valour of two hundred thousand men, and spat upon the grief of a million wives and mothers, lovers and friends. Just one of these men is worth a thousand of your mercenaries.
And now you - the European collaborators with the Zionist occupiers of Palestine, the smug little princes of Arabia, the twisted Ottomans and their Turkmen - play at 'Presidents' and 'dialogue' on the eve of Ramadan, putting on a splendid show for your barbarian sponsors across the Golan, while muttering disapproval at their hypocrisy and trickery.
But it won't work for long, as the true patriots of Syria wait for the moment that ignites them into a rage that cannot be contained, the moment of glorious martyrdom that will end your terrible tyranny they no longer fear.
DM 26 February 2025