Syrian Dirty War's Secret Origins
Kit Klarenberg | That foreign actors are involved in sowing the current chaos in Syria couldn’t be more unambiguous, or writ larger. But there’s more. | On November 27th, ultra-extremist militants Hayat Tahrir al-Sham launched a vast offensive in Syria. Within days, the Turkey-backed faction seized significant swaths of Aleppo, the country’s second-largest city, and advances elsewhere continue. While disinformation on the scale and success of HTS’ incursions abounds on social media, establishment news outlets remain a redoubtable source of manipulation and deceit. No context to the current upsurge of violence is provided, although reference has been widely made to supposedly “peaceful” protests in 2011 that produced the decade-long Syrian civil war. ■ According to this narrative, righteous pro-democracy demonstrators were brutally attacked by Syrian authorities for taking a public stand against dictatorship. Yet, the reality of what happened during that fateful time is very different - and amply revealed by the Syrian government’s own internal documents. Namely, records of the Central Crisis Management Cell, created in March 2011 by Damascus to manage official responses to mass rioting that began weeks earlier.
■ Syria stops terrorists from infiltrating Hama province, eliminates dozens of militants (12/01/24)