How Syria’s war of disinformation reshaped the world

It is possible to trace a line between Assad’s chemical weapons attacks and the hordes who stormed the US Capitol in January, writes Borzou Daragahi

Anti-Syrian government protesters in Idlib mark 10 years since the start of a popular uprising against Assad (AP)

Ten years ago, ordinary Syrians took to the streets. They peacefully and honourably protested against the brutal, decades-long dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez.

They paid an unimaginable price. Over the last decade, their country has been destroyed. Their cherished communities have been obliterated by war. They have lost loved ones in extraordinarily high numbers – perhaps as many as 594,000 killed, including thousands of children. Fully half of the nation of 21 million has been displaced, with six million now living as refugees abroad.

But the world, too, has paid a price for allowing the Syria conflict to unfold as it did. The machinery of lies that fuelled the conflict, and the carte blanche handed to Assad, his foreign patrons, and their western enablers, have reshaped the world. In fact, one can trace a line between the barrage of Assad’s chemical weapons that struck the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta in 2013 and the hordes of American fascists who stormed the United States Capitol on 6 January.

Syrians continue to cherish and remember the precious longing for democratic change that prompted the uprising against Assad. In the southern city of Deraa this past week, hundreds of protesters braved the potential brutality of the regime to stage peaceful anti-government protests, even waving the pre-Baathist Syrian independence flag, which is a symbol of their revolution. “Death over humiliation,” they chanted. “Damn your soul, Abu Hafez,” in reference to Assad.

It was in the city of Deraa in 2011 that a group of children were abducted and tortured for writing anti-government graffiti inspired by Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. The children had their nails pulled out, and at one point their parents were urged to forget about them and consider giving birth to other children instead.

But their violent treatment prompted street protests in Deraa that spread across the country. The demonstrators were Syrians of all walks of life – middle class and poor, educated and working class, Sunni, Christians and even members of Assad’s Alawite minority community – peacefully calling for change.

The regime’s response was unrelenting brutality. The ferocity of its machine gun fire turned on protesters was matched only by the intensity of arrests targeting anyone suspected of harbouring opposition sentiments. The detainees were held in torture chambers, and the photos of their badly mutilated bodies, which would eventually make their way to international human rights monitors, document the worst crimes against humanity of this century.

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But unlike those revolutions against pro-western governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain, the uprising in Syria garnered little sympathy across the world. In fact, the supporters of the Middle East’s so-called “resistance” – those who oppose American militarism and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands – scorned it. They became eager allies of the Assad regime, spewing out lies about the nature of the opposition and the actions of his security forces. They were joined in their efforts to reshape reality by Iran and Hezbollah, who needed the Assad regime as a conduit to get weapons to the Levant and bolster their strategic posture.

Opposition fighters eventually took up arms, and were joined by jihadis, some of whom were unleashed by Assad from his prisons. The manufactured confusion about right and wrong in Syria added to Assad’s sense of impunity. His violence escalated. He targeted hospitals, schools and residential apartment blocks with artillery and barrel bombs dropped from helicopters. He famously crossed President Barack Obama’s red line in August 2013, using chemical weapons against his own people in one of the most well-documented war crimes in recent history.

The United States and United Kingdom were poised to act, but ultimately stepped back. Russia, the Assad regime’s most powerful patron, managed to secure Damascus a pass. The world, drenched in two years of misinformation about the nature and origins of the Syria conflict, was more than willing to comply.

There would be consequences – and not just for Syrians. Finding an open door, the Russians pushed. The effective propaganda effectively allowed the regime and its allies to ignore the rules of warfare and allow Russian MiGs and Iranian militias to ultimately crush the Syrian uprising. But the Syrian war and its concomitant disinformation campaign was but a harbinger of the intensification of the post-truth era that was to come.

In 2014, a year after the chemical weapons attack in eastern Ghouta which killed 1,729 people, the Kremlin used the same combination of transgressive violence and social media disinformation to successfully invade and mutilate Ukraine, eventually annexing a chunk of the country.

The playbook was used again. The same melding of inauthentic far-right disinformation inflamed by Russia and naive left-wing “scepticism” inspired by the Kremlin fed the forces that led Britain to narrowly vote for Brexit in 2015.

By then millions of Syrians fleeing Russian and regime airstrikes and death squads were trying to make their way abroad. But even then they were trashed through a series of lies and bigotry aggressively propagated by the Kremlin and some far-right and far-left corners of the internet, depicting traumatised refugees fleeing a horrific near-genocidal onslaught by a mass murderer as vampires descending on Europe. The anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim lies propagated by Russia and regurgitated by its allies fuelled far-right movements across the world.

The domino effect of the Syria war would not end there. The same toxic brew of Russian-backed right-wing disinformation and pseudo edgy scepticsm by the left encouraged enough voters to stay home or vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in key American states, allowing Donald Trump to win the 2016 elections.

The Russians and their implicit allies never let up. The US Directorate of National Intelligence has assessed that Russia tried to interfere in the 2020 elections as well.

In fact, if you trace the purveyors of disinformation, you’ll find that the same voices which falsely claimed the Assad regime never used chemical weapons became those obsessing about Hillary Clinton’s emails and harping on about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

By the time Joe Biden won the 2020 elections, the post-truth netherspace shaped by Russia and its willing dupes in the west had taken on a life of its own. The deluded insurgents believed that Biden had somehow stolen one of the most transparent elections in the world, and that Trump was the hero in an epic battle against a cabal of vampiric paedophiles.

There’s no evidence yet that either the lie that Biden stole the election or QAnon, the unhinged conspiracy theory alleging the world is run by a globalist paedophile ring, are direct products of the Russian-backed disinformation campaigns that allowed Assad to get away with mass murder and Trump to narrowly win an election.

But there’s little doubt the far-right lunatics who stormed Capitol Hill on 6 January were forged in the same cauldrons of disinformation that are rooted in the Syria war.