In Damascus, as over half a century of iron-fisted dictatorship crumbled to dust, journalist Zeina Shahla described the atmosphere:

• "I have lived in Damascus through all the years of the war, and this week has been like nothing else. The first two days were really violent. Now, though, people are back at work, shops are open, somehow life is becoming normal.  The future is still ambiguous. We got rid of a dictatorship that was ruining the country. We’re waiting, though, for news about the detainees. There are  more than 100,000 disappeared persons in Syria but only a few thousand have been freed. I’m still meeting each day with people who say ‘we’re searching for our loved ones. In prisons and hospitals.’ And there are many things to worry about – the economy, education, freedom of speech, freedom for women. But we have a rare chance to build something that unites all Syrians and to ensure that the Syria we are dreaming of is going to be inclusive.” 

Dialing in from a night bus making its way to Kyiv from Damascus, Oz Katerji, a British-Lebanese war correspondent and documentary filmmaker who is based in the Ukrainian capital, told us that what happened in Syria “really did feel like a slide backwards for autocracy”:

• “The story of the last 10 years has been autocrats in the ascendancy, with the interventions of Russia and Iran. So for all this to be undone in 13 days has sent a shockwave through the international community. What I saw in Damascus was a people free and expressing themselves in public for the first time in their lives. It has struck a hammer blow at Vladimir Putin’s ‘Dictatorship Protection Service’, putting a dent in his projection of both hard and soft power not only in the Middle East but also in Africa where he has been propping up dictatorships and involving himself in civil wars.”

The fall of Bashar al-Assad, as Katerji points out, has implications far beyond Syria's borders. Not least in Tbilisi, where protests have been continuing for over two weeks against the Kremlin-friendly government’s decision to suspend EU integration. According to Batu Kutelia, a former Georgian ambassador to the United States:

• “Georgia is more than Georgia. It’s not only about a tiny nation on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. It’s part of a bigger equation and it is in the pragmatic interests of the democratic world to make democracy inspiring again and not to let authoritarians claim another success story.” 

Kutelia was echoed by the Georgian photojournalist Mariam Nikuradze, a co-founder of the English-language news platform Open Caucasus Media who just days ago discovered that she was on a police wanted list for her coverage of the nightly demonstrations:

• "I don’t see the spirit of protestors dying anytime soon. Being a journalist  in Georgia has never been so dangerous. So many of my friends have been injured. But it just makes people angrier and they are not giving up. It’s very hard to predict what will happen but it’s getting harder and harder for this government to hold onto power.” 

What happened in Syria, Nikuradze told us, “gives hope.” But, as the Ukrainian human rights lawyer and Nobel laureate  Oleksandra Matviichuk pointed out, the path ahead is long and fraught:

• "We are losing freedom. This year, half the population of the Earth had elections. But don’t be naive, 80% of the world lives in non-free or partially free societies. This means that people who have a real right to vote are in the minority. The problem is not just the fact that in authoritarian countries the space for freedom is shrinking to the size of a prison cell, the problem is that even in democracies people start to question the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Freedom is very fragile. We have to support each other in our fight for freedom because we live in an interconnected world and only the spread of freedom makes the world safer.”

Writer Peter Pomerantsev, a contributing editor at Coda, is currently in Kyiv, where he was born though he was educated in Britain and lives in Washington, DC. Picking up on Matviichuk’s remarks about interconnectedness, he argued:

• "If you listen to someone like [U.S. vice president-elect] JD Vance, he says ‘we need to get away from the foreign policy of values, that’s been a disaster. We need to just think about our self-interest and security.’ But these things aren’t necessarily opposed and they don’t need to be opposed. Ukraine’s freedom will make the West more secure. If Georgia can maintain its freedom, it is so important for counterbalancing Russia’s ability and China’s ability to dominate possession of natural resources and dominate the Black Sea therefore undermining America’s security and economy. I wonder if we’re at a point here where we can get beyond this very, very cruel but also stupid idea that you should split apart values and interests, that they’re antithetical.” 

Edward Lucas, a London-based former journalist and prospective parliamentary candidate in the 2024 British election, did, however, strike a note of caution:

• "There’s a kind of wishful magical thinking that it ought to be obvious to everybody that Georgia is at a geopolitical crossroads and therefore it’s in the vital interest of the West to intervene to keep it out of Russia’s clutches and make it the fulcrum of Euro-Atlantic security in the Caucasus. I do worry that we’re in danger of thinking that people like JD Vance will eventually see reason because reason is ultimately reasonable but they’re coming from a different place.”

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Outside powers will try to tug or coax the country in one direction or another. There could be chaos, or stability.

All of that will matter hugely to Syrians on the ground. But strategically, it doesn't much matter: the seismic change is already there. Things will never be the same.

When I arrived in Beirut very nearly 50 years ago, Syria was like a huge, impregnable castle, ruled with an iron fist by Hafez al-Assad. He relied on a raft of competing Mukhabarat intelligence agencies, each more ruthless than the next, and backed by a powerful military.

In 1980, he did the unthinkable. He stretched a hand out to revolutionary, non-Arab Iran and struck an alliance with Tehran in its eight-year war with Arab Iraq, because they both hated their mutual neighbour Saddam Hussein.

For decades that Tehran-Damascus axis was the only fixed element in the region's shifting political sands. It was crucial to the creation of Hezbollah to hit back at Israel and the U.S. after the invasion of Lebanon and siege of Beirut in 1982.

When the Syrian castle began to crack after 2011 and Hafez's son Bashar was in imminent danger, it was Iran and Hezbollah - and the Russians - who sprang to his rescue.

It worked for a while, up to a point. But ultimately the axis failed. After Gaza, Hezbollah was decapitated and filleted by the Israelis in Lebanon, Iran cowed and isolated, while Russia was being bled white in Ukraine. It only needed a kick from the rebels to bring Assad’s flimsy cardboard citadel tumbling down.

Now the Israelis are systematically destroying any chance that Syria will again be a military power. Its navy, air force and any serious military assets have been taken out by the most intensive airstrikes Israel has ever mounted. Syria is thoroughly defanged.

And so Syria, the dawlat al-mumana'a - the State of Resistance, or defiance of Israel - is forever gone. Even if that resistance was largely fictional. Also broken is the Axis of Resistance that linked Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as distant Yemen, in a ‘Shia Crescent’ made possible because the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 removed the major obstacle to its formation – Saddam Hussein.

Iran will no longer be able to pump arms and money through Syria to Hezbollah, which survives in Lebanon as a shadow of its former self.

"This collapse is the direct result of our forceful action against Hezbollah and Iran, Assad's main supporters," crowed Israeli PM Netanyahu. With full U.S. support for this restructuring of the region's architecture (with probably more to come when Trump is back in the White House), the Israelis roam the skies unchallenged. Only Iran and Yemen remain. And for how long?

While most Syrians celebrate the demise of the hated, bloodstained dictator, the Palestinians are left even more alone, at the mercy of the region's masters, and their American enabler, as never before.

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After the February earthquakes that destroyed so much of the region, Syrian refugees became the targets of resentment, hate speech and violence. Politicians were quick to seize upon the public mood. Exploiting the anger directed at refugees became a key tactic for candidates in tense, often ugly campaigns. Turkey will vote in the first round of the presidential election on May 14, and, for the first time in two decades, it appears that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan could lose his hold on power. 

In Antakya, three months after the earthquakes, hollowed-out homes with cracked walls hang precariously over a sea of rubble, trinkets and clothing. In Hatay province alone, over 23,000 people died in the earthquakes. Many in the area still live in camps. The luckier ones live in homes made out of shipping containers provided by the state. As Turkey faces repair bills totaling tens of billions of dollars, container homes — indeed, whole container cities — will be required as construction gets underway.  

Across the region most affected by the earthquakes, Syrian refugees are still living in makeshift tent colonies. NGO workers and Syrians I spoke to said they had been pushed out of official, state-run campsites by Turkish citizens and even the local authorities.

In April, Amnesty International accused the Turkish police of beating and torturing alleged looters in Antakya and reported that Syrians were targets of xenophobic abuse by Turkish officials.

Mouna, a Syrian refugee in Antakya whose home was destroyed in the earthquakes, told me she’d been forced to leave a state-run camp by the Turkish residents. She now lives in a tent she has set up beside the ruins of her former home. Resourcefully, Mouna has built an extension to her tent that contains a kitchen and a toilet. A washing machine and a fridge are powered by electricity rerouted from a nearby power supply. Her neighbors are all Syrian refugees who go in and out of the crumbling buildings around them to retrieve possessions to put in their tents. 

A 46-year-old single mother of two sons, Mouna left Syria in 2012, during the early phase of the Syrian civil war. She has been slowly building a life in Turkey. Her job in a dessert factory paid enough for her to afford rent and keep her family safe. 

After the earthquakes struck in February 2023, Mouna and her sons were housed in an official camp but were soon driven out by Turkish people who resented having to share scarce facilities with refugees. She says Syrians were bullied and told that they could not use the toilets. A little girl, Mouna says, hit her and told her that “Syrians should go home.” The authorities did little to help. Mouna and her neighbors rely on a Syrian NGO for water and food.

Syrian refugees in Turkey are “caught between two earthquakes,” says Murat Erdogan, a professor at Ankara University. “One is the physical earthquake,” Erdogan (no relation to the Turkish president) told me, “and the other is a political earthquake.” Even before the disaster, he adds, “social cohesion was not easy because of the number of the refugees.” There are over 3.5 million registered Syrian refugees in Turkey, and for nearly a decade Turkey has hosted more refugees than any other country in the world. 

Unpublished data Erdogan collected in January 2023 for the “Syrian Barometer,” an annual survey he conducts, showed that 28.5% of Turks see Syrians as the number one problem in Turkey, an increase of 3% from the year before.

But now, Erdogan believes, the earthquakes have cemented in people’s minds the image of Syrians as criminals and a drain on public services.

Throughout Antakya, Syrians living in camps dotted around the city told me stories that echoed Mouna’s experience of discrimination. One woman, heavily pregnant, was hit so hard in the stomach by a group of Turkish men that she lost her baby. Another woman told me her son was beaten by military officers who accused him of stealing. She showed me photos on her phone of a child’s mangled and bruised limbs.

But there are also many stories of Turks and Syrians helping one another to deal with the aftermath of the earthquakes. Mouna told me she knew Turkish people who remained kind and supportive. But the rise in anti-Syrian sentiment is evident and impossible to ignore.

A Turkish man I met in Hatay province boasted that he had shot a looter in the leg. He suspected the man was Syrian. “How could you tell?” I asked. “From his mustache,” the man replied.

The earthquakes have caused a massive spike in anti-Syrian hate speech online, said Dilan Tasmedir, who runs Medya ve Goc Dernegi, an organization that monitors rhetoric about migrants in the Turkish media. Slogans like “We don’t want Syrians” and “No longer welcome” trended on Twitter. The comedian Sahan Gokbakar wrote to his 3.7 million followers on the platform: “Health, shelter and all our material resources should be used only for our own people, not for foreigners.” While some criticized the comment for its divisiveness, the tweet racked up more than 280,000 likes.

When protests against the regime of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria erupted into a civil war in 2011, millions fled the country. Turkey’s tiny refugee population mushroomed as the Turkish president welcomed Syrians into the country as guests. “When a people is persecuted,” Erdogan declared, “especially people that are our relatives, our brothers, and with whom we share a 910 km border, we absolutely cannot pretend nothing is happening and turn our backs.”

When Erdogan allowed Syrians to seek refuge in Turkey, he was breaking with a long nativist tradition in his country of not accepting high numbers of refugees. But he also now had a powerful bargaining chip in negotiations with Europe.

In 2016, a year after Europe faced its largest migrant crisis since World War II, the European Union signed a deal with Turkey in which the country received six billion euros to help with improving conditions for refugees. Turkish nationals were granted visa-free travel to Europe, and, in return, Ankara agreed to prevent refugees from leaving Turkey illegally for Greece and to take back refugees who had left Turkey illegally and been turned away at EU borders. The aim was for the EU to process the asylum requests of Syrian refugees while they awaited a decision in Turkey instead of trying to cross illegally into Greece. But the EU was slow to hold up its end of the bargain, keeping the flow of immigrants granted entry into European countries to a trickle. 

Erdogan temporarily reneged on the deal in 2020, letting migrants pass through Turkey to Greece. He said that the EU was providing inadequate support. By 2021, about 28,000 Syrians had been resettled in Europe, well below the maximum threshold of 72,000 outlined in the original agreement.

The EU deal prompted a shift in attitudes inside Turkey, as it dawned on many Turks that their Syrian “guests” were in fact not there temporarily, but permanently, said Tasmedir of Medya ve Goc Dernegi. More than 200,000 Syrians have been granted citizenship in Turkey since 2011. And many will vote for the first time during the May 14 general election. Opposition groups claim that Erdogan granted these Syrians citizenship in an attempt to expand his own electoral base.

Erdogan could use all the extra votes he can get. Public frustration over Turkey’s economic crisis, botched earthquake relief efforts and endemic corruption have all weakened Erdogan’s appeal to the point that defeat in the first round seems like a distinct possibility. The pressure of the election on both the government and opposition parties is extremely high, and the hot button topic of much of the campaigning has been the nationwide hostility toward Syrian refugees.

Regardless of political ideology, Turkish political parties are now promising to send refugees back to Syria. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, a 74-year-old economist and social democratic politician, is Erdogan’s main contender for the presidency. He’s promised to “fulfill people’s longing for democracy,” repair strained relations with the West and unseat Erdogan. He’s also said that returning Syrians to Syria within two years is one of his top goals. Kilicdaroglu’s party,​​ the Republican People’s Party, is the largest in a coalition of opposition parties called the National Alliance. While Kilicdaroglu has a lead on Erdogan in most polls, the results of the first round of voting are expected to be close.

Then there’s the Victory Party, a far-right, anti-immigrant party formed in 2021, with only one representative currently in the Turkish parliament. But, Ankara University professor Murat Erdogan told me, it has had a “profound effect” on political discourse.

Last month, Umit Ozdag, the leader of the Victory Party and its sole representative, tweeted a video of a group of people he implied were Syrians. He depicted them as Arab invaders who, he said, would transport the “Middle East's understanding of religion, culture of violence, humiliation of women, rape of children, rape of boys, drugs” to Turkey. Ozdag’s central policy proposal is to expel all Syrians from Turkey within one year.

In January, the Victory Party began its “Bus to Damascus” fundraising campaign, in which it asked supporters to name people they wanted returned to Syria and to provide donations for bus tickets. As people across the region sought shelter just days after the earthquakes hit in February, Ozdag began accusing Syrians of looting and called for the police and soldiers to shoot looters on sight. In one instance, he shared a video on Twitter of a live news broadcast which he claimed showed a Syrian man stealing a phone during rescue operations. 

Ozdag later admitted he was wrong but refused to apologize, even after it emerged that the man was a Turkish volunteer helping with the search-and-rescue operations. One Turkish rescue worker became so frustrated with Ozdag’s divisive rhetoric that he confronted him on camera. “We, whether Muslim or Christian, are fed up with hearing this sort of talk,” the man told Ozdag.

In Europe and the United States, the question of how to deal with refugees has been highly polarizing, with voters’ views on migration often correlating with where they might be placed on the political spectrum. In the U.K., for example, voters on the left tend to be less hardline on immigration than voters on the right. But in Turkey, the desire to send Syrians back is now the status quo, receiving widespread support from an estimated 85% of voters. In some cases, I found that voters on the left express even more hostility toward refugees than those on the right.

At a May 6 rally held by Kilicdaroglu’s party, I spoke with several younger supporters of the social democratic candidate who saw Arab migrants as an existential threat to liberal secular values. Nida Koksaldi, a 21-year-old architecture student, told me she supports the Republican People’s Party because she supports women's rights, animal rights and LGBTQ rights. Had I met Koksaldi in California, I might have expected her to have included refugees in that list. But she agrees with Kilicdaroglu’s proposed policy of expelling Syrians. They are violent, she said of migrants generally, bad for Turkish society and bad for women’s rights. “They even rape us,” she told me. 

Friedrich Puttmann, a doctoral researcher at the London School of Economics, believes that much of the resentment toward Syrians is rooted in Turkey’s own struggle for its identity. The Republican People’s Party was the party of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic who espoused a philosophy of secularism and encouraged Turks to look to the West as a model. Kemalists, who support Ataturk’s sweeping reforms, tend to be more liberal and firmly support women’s rights. Historically, voters who support the party have feared cultural influence from the Arab world, which is often painted by Kemalist politicians as uniformly conservative and patriarchal. 

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party is more aligned with religiously conservative voters, and therefore, according to Puttmann, has historically been more closely linked with Arab culture. Prior to the Syrian civil war, in the early years of Erdogan’s leadership, the country had already become more economically tied to Arab states. So when hundreds of thousands of Syrians entered Turkey as refugees, supporters of the Republican People’s Party were already angry at what they saw as the “Arabization'' of Turkey.

Over time, as more Syrians have come to the country, voters in both blocks have become increasingly hostile toward Syrians. Supporters of Erdogan’s party, torn between their duty toward fellow Muslims and their resentment over cultural differences and the economic impact of migration, have begun reframing Syrians as bad Muslims. 

More secular Turkish people see the presence of Syrian refugees in Turkey as evidence of a cultural shift that has occurred under the Justice and Development Party, with Turkey becoming a more conservative, religious and Arabicized country. They see Syrians as part of a system that has eroded Turkey’s secular, liberal identity, Puttmann says. This perception seems to ignore the fact that many Syrians are also secular and liberal.

In an attempt to match the opposition’s rhetoric on returning Syrian refugees to Syria and in the face of mounting public pressure, Erdogan’s government has shifted its policies. Last year, Erdogan announced a plan to send up to a million refugees back to Syria, though the country is still at war. There have been reports that the Assad regime has tortured and disappeared refugees who returned to the country. Reports also emerged last year of Syrians being arrested and forced into northern Syria at gunpoint by Turkish officials. More recently, Erdogan has begun trying to negotiate with the Assad regime to reach a deal that would facilitate the return of Syrian refugees. Assad’s precondition for any settlement is that Turkey withdraw its troops from the parts of northern Syria that it has controlled since 2016 following successive military operations aimed at limiting Kurdish control of the region.

Kilicdaroglu says he will negotiate with Assad and is widely seen as a more appealing negotiating partner for the isolated dictator. Kilicdaroglu has also said he will withdraw Turkish troops from northern Syria, secure his country's border and repatriate Syrians — as long as Turkey’s security requirements in northern Syria are met.

Back in Antakya, the election feels like a battle fought in a distant land. Political posters with gleaming candidates are the only new and shiny objects in an empty, dust-covered city. Most Syrians living in the camps are too focused on surviving from one day to the next to concern themselves with elections they can do little to influence.

More than a decade after the first Syrians fled the civil war and arrived in Turkey, it is hard to find hope among the refugees in Antakya. What future they might have had, they say, has disappeared with the earthquakes.

Mouna told me she brought her kids to Turkey so that they could have a better future than in Syria. Now she fears they have none in a country that doesn’t want them. But Mouna also recalled that when she first arrived in Turkey, people were hospitable and she was able to make friends. “And I think this will happen again,” she said, “because not all the people are bad.”

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He recalls a particular protest on the first Friday of October 2011, in Maarat al-Numan, a city in rural Idlib, his hometown. He joined swaths of protesters marching towards the city’s state buildings. Above them, Syrian military helicopters followed. The protesters, al-Mahlool insists, were peaceful. But right as they reached the row of state buildings, the helicopters above began to fire, obliterating the buildings in a cloud of smoke. 

The next morning, the Assad regime blamed the protesters for the destruction. Headlines, he said, in compliant newspapers declared that the protesters had lost control and burned the buildings down. “It was then I learned this is what I had to do,” he said. “I had to tell the truth.”

Now a journalist and researcher, al-Mahlool lives and works in a country that is among the most dangerous in the world for reporters. The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that 711 journalists have been murdered since the revolution began in 2011. In 2022 alone, a spokesperson from Reporters Without Borders told me, at least one Syrian journalist has been murdered, ten have been imprisoned, and four taken hostage. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Syria is behind only Somalia as a country in which journalists are killed with impunity.

“Syria is a country at war,” the independent journalist Doja Daoud said. “So you’re not safe naturally. You don’t have your basic needs and you have to beg for them.” 

More than a decade of civil war has destroyed Syria’s media sector. Though the months following the civil war’s onset brought about a brief resurgence in journalism across the country — nearly 119 new publications emerged — that renaissance was short-lived. The Syrian regime quickly began to use oppressive tactics to silence those who challenged them: murdering, imprisoning, censoring and discrediting journalists they regarded as inconvenient. The only news outlets that survive within the country are closely tied to the government. Reporters Without Borders ranks Syria at 171 out of 180 countries in this year’s Press Freedom Index.

The only journalists who thrive in Syria today are those who serve as mouthpieces for the Syrian and Russian regimes. Many of these mouthpieces include American-based, far-left websites such as The Grayzone and MintPress News. Idrees Ahmed, an editor at global affairs magazine New Lines, says such friendly foreign media, even if obscure and dismissed by the mainstream, has “made the job of propaganda easier for [authoritarians].” 

In September for example, a Grayzone article claimed that the White Helmets, a civil defense group responsible for significant reporting on Syrian atrocities and the saving of hundreds of thousands of lives, corrupted the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ (OPCW) investigation into the 2018 Douma chemical attack. 

Among those who shared the article on Twitter was the Russian Embassy in Sweden. In a report by human rights organization The Syria Campaign, in the seven years since Russia’s intervention in Syria, the White Helmets have been targeted by more than 21,000 tweets designed to discredit them.  

Among the best known peddlers of disinformation about the White Helmets and the Syrian civil war is the US-born Canadian commentator and self-described “independent journalist” Eva Bartlett, who became prominent in 2016 after a video of her claiming, among other things, that the bombing of a hospital by Syrian forces that left 55 people dead was a piece of rebel disinformation. Bartlett, who writes for the Kremlin-funded Russia Today website, accused the White Helmets of transporting children to different sites as propaganda tools.

Despite the claims quickly being debunked, and despite the fact that Bartlett was not working “independently” — in the weeks leading up to that conference she went on a regime-chaperoned trip through Aleppo where she can be seen wearing an “I <3 Bashar” wristband — the video spread like wildfire, fueled mostly by the backing of various Russian-funded media. As recently as March 2022, it's been viewed nearly ten million times across a variety of platforms. In the years since that incident, Bartlett has built a devoted audience through her outlandish pro-Assad claims.

She and a few other marginal Western journalists became Assad boosters, and by extension supporters of Russian and Iranian involvement in Syria, in exchange for a public profile and platform that they had never previously enjoyed. “These are people who are not exactly accustomed to this kind of attention,” Idrees Ahmed told me.

Bartlett currently resides in Russia and has over 124,000 followers on Twitter. The disinformation campaign in which she voluntarily participates has moved on from using foreign journalists to selectively “debunk” the Western mainstream media’s “narrative” about Syria to using foreign influencers to normalize the Assad regime. Since last year, the Syrian government has been giving visas to travelers to make videos that promote the country as essentially stable — a safe, effectively governed tourist destination. Bartlett, naturally, contributed to the effort with a column in RT last year arguing that a “war-torn country becoming a tourist destination is a good thing.”

This past summer, local tour operators reported an uptick in Western tourism and Syria’s Ministry of Tourism has already claimed the year as a grand success, announcing that the country received nearly 700,000 visitors during the first half of 2022, a figure that many analysts say is dubious.

It’s proving to be an effective formula: make life impossible for independent journalists looking to report as truthfully as possible from Syria, and roll out the red carpet for foreigners to trot out the government line. “For the regime, it works,” Ahmed says sardonically, “and for Western governments, these types of things become useful.”

What he means is that Western governments can use the manufactured image of a stable Syria to force refugees to return. The Danish government, for instance, having accepted tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, has started to reassess and revoke the status of refugees on the grounds that Damascus and its environs are safe. And just weeks ago, Turkey, which has taken in millions of Syrian refugees, reportedly rounded up refugees, including unaccompanied minors, and forced them to return to Syria at gunpoint. It “now looks like Turkey is trying to make northern Syria a refugee dumping ground,” said a researcher at Human Rights Watch. 

In May, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he planned to resettle a million Syrian refugees in northern Syria. More recently he has suggested that relations with Syria could be normalized, a far cry from his statement, in December 2017, that Assad was “a terrorist who has carried out state terrorism.”

Doja Daoud, the independent journalist from Lebanon, told me that in Jordan, “many Syrian journalists face deportation risks and smear campaigns against them.” She says the Assad regime’s disinformation campaigns are having an effect primarily because “Syria is a blackout country for the media.” She despairs, she says, that “Syrian stories no longer matter in the eyes of the global public.” While influencers and regime-friendly journalists are welcomed into Syria, Daoud says, many of the reporters she knows who cover the war from Lebanon no longer have jobs because most international publications no longer devote space to the now prolonged conflict.  

If the result of a lack of serious coverage of Syria is that refugees are forced to return to a supposedly stable country, Daoud says, the consequences will be disastrous. Switching to Arabic, she told me, “we’re going to see massacres again. We’re going to see our friends disappear.”

For Syrian journalists like al-Mahlool, though, there’s no choice but to persevere. In 2019, his home was bombed by Syrian planes. He remembers dragging his aunt out of the debris, her body wrapped in bedsheets. 

“I’m still afraid my home will be bombed again,” he tells me. “But I must continue to share the truth of my people and the struggles we face.”

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While the process is viewed as a sham by Syrians affected by the decade-long civil war, Assad is confident victory will be delivered by the regime, which is pushing ordinary Syrians in government-held territory to vote for him. State employees and civil servants will also be bussed to voting centers on election day in order to cast their ballot for Assad. 

After a decade of grinding civil war — the United Nations stopped counting casualties in 2014, leaving the official death toll at 400,000 — Assad is attempting to use the ballot to show the world that Syria is a free and functioning democracy. The regime has announced a series of incentives to boost support, including an individual grant, equivalent to $16 for up to three million state employees, and $32 for retirees. Assad has also declared the demobilization of soldiers in the military and reserves who have served for more than five years.

Loyalist media outlets have made sure to heavily publicize Syria’s first election since 2014 — in which 51 individuals nominated themselves as presidential candidates. From that list, Syria's constitutional court selected two government approved candidates to run against Assad. 

Syrian social media is more overt in its support for the president, with pro-regime users spreading the hashtag “Sawa” (Together), which was also used in the 2014 presidential election. Assad launched a new campaign slogan on Facebook: “Hope in Work,” which is widely viewed as an attempt to promote work and business. Accounts run by pro-regime militia and security services are posting pictures and videos of people saying they are going to vote for Assad, while maintaining that the election is a win against outside powers trying to bring down Syria. On Tuesday, Twitter temporarily restricted access to Assad’s election account after activists campaigned for its suspension.

When the nation goes to the polls, voters’ ID cards will be scrutinized against electoral rolls and their thumbs stained with violet ink, to show they have cast their ballot. The 5.6 million Syrians who fled the country following Assad’s murderous crackdown on anti-government protests in 2011 and the ensuing war cannot vote, even if they wanted to — let alone run for office. However, many still have a vision of the future Syria that they, one day, hope to be a part of. 

Dima Moussa was brought up in a political family who fled Hafez al-Assad’s Syria in the mid-1990s. She served two consecutive terms, from 2018 to 2020, as vice-president of the Syrian National Coalition — the first umbrella of Syrian opposition groups formed in November 2012 in Qatar. Moussa was also a spokesperson for the Homs Quarters Union, an activist group working in the western city of Homs until 2014, providing media outreach for opposition groups and gathering evidence of human rights violations in Syria.

Now living in Istanbul, Moussa is a member of the Syrian Constitutional Committee, a body formed in 2015 as part of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254, tasked with negotiating a new constitution for Syria that would then be voted on in a referendum organized by a transitional government. So far, talks for a transitional government and a new constitution have been stalled by disagreements and continuous delays. 

Moussa said that she believes that the prospect of political transition in Syria is impossible if opposition groups refuse to engage with Assad’s regime. “Who am I going to negotiate with? I have to negotiate with this side that’s actually sitting there and refusing to give up power and to allow that transition to happen,” Moussa said. 

Moussa said the upcoming election mirrors the regime’s tactics over the past decade. “I don't think anything the regime is doing now is any different from any of the propaganda or lies it has used over the last 10 years, or even before that.”

Other prominent Syrian opposition figures say this month’s election is being held to create the illusion of democracy. Mouaz al-Khatib, 60, is a former president of the opposition Syrian National Coalition. In 2012, he was forced to leave Damascus, following a campaign of harassment and repeated arrests by the Assad regime. A social activist with 115,000 Twitter followers and the former imam of the city’s revered Umayyad mosque, he is now a member of the Our Mother Syria Movement, an organization that, according to its website, seeks to “topple tyrannical rule” and “save and rebuild” the country.

Khatib, who now lives in Doha, Qatar, believes that the initial slate of more than 50 opposition candidates was designed to present Assad in a favorable light to the wider world. “It’s so nice for the regime. It shows there’s full democracy,” he said. “For sure, the regime’s security asked some of those people to offer their names.”

Syria’s disenfranchised voters

Besides the obvious obstacles to opposition politicians running for office — including security concerns and fear of arrest — anyone who has lived outside of the country for 10 years or more was blocked from nominating themselves. This excludes a large number of educated and highly skilled Syrians who left the country because of their disapproval of the regime. Many people active in the Syrian opposition also refuse to run against Assad, as they believe that doing so would lend both him and the electoral process legitimacy. 

Following a change in election laws in 2014, the regime has increased the number of ways it can disenfranchise voters. For those outside of the country, one voting requirement is to have a valid Syrian passport with an exit stamp issued by one of the official border crossings. Considering that the majority of Syrians left the country following the outbreak of the civil war, very few qualify. Inside Syria, people living in opposition-held territories are also ineligible. 

Middle East experts say the main push factor for civilians to vote for Assad is fear. “The regime is not at all concerned with anyone voting for anyone else,” said Suhail al-Ghazi, a Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy non-resident fellow living in Istanbul. “The regime is just trying to show that this election is a new page and going to be a good thing for the Syrians.” 

“As the regime will win, Iraq, Lebanon, Oman, and probably also the UAE will call the regime or send a message of congratulations for winning,” he added. 

Ghazi sees parallels between the Syrian polls and the 2018 Egyptian elections, in which President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi allowed a moderate person to run against him and used similar social media tactics ahead of the ballot.

The U.N. has clearly stated that the presidential elections are not part of the political process established under resolution 2254. It has also emphasized the importance of a negotiated political solution in Syria before free and fair elections are held. The U.S. and EU have further opposed the elections and labeled them illegitimate. In contrast, countries such as Russia, Lebanon and, more recently, Denmark, have all asserted that Assad’s Syria is a safe and secure place for refugees to return to.

In order for a political transition to take place, Moussa argues that the international community needs to formulate a workable plan. “It requires Russia and the U.S. to come together and have a common vision, some sort of understanding or agreement,” she said.

Moussa sees the elections as pointless and believes that they will do nothing to alter perceptions of Assad on the international stage. To illustrate, she pointed to the 2014 process, which Assad won, claiming 92% of the vote, and the way that Russia and Iran — the regime’s civil war backers — continued to engage in the U.N.-led negotiations to secure a peaceful transition of power within the country. 

“The work of the political process continued regardless of the elections and the result, so to me it’s not going to make a difference,” she said. “I don’t think anyone is going to say we had elections that are legitimate, so we don’t need a political process now.”

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“I can’t go there, it’s impossible,” he said. “You can punish me and send me to another country but you can’t send me back home. I can’t live there. Maybe I’ll lose my life.” 

Mohammad, now 24 years old, asked to be identified by only his first name, owing to safety concerns. He left the countryside of Aleppo, in the west of the country, in 2016. Since then, he has lived in Turkey as a refugee. While he is terrified by the prospect of going back to his village, the Syrian regime, guided by its ally Russia, has declared that it is now time for the 6.6 million people displaced by 10 years of civil war to return to the country.

On November 11, the Russian-organized International Conference on the Return of Syrian Refugees was held in Damascus. It was clear from the invitations sent to allied nations that the main goals of the gathering were to seek money for reconstruction and to show the world that Syria is now stable enough for international sanctions against it to be lifted. 

Despite statements condemning the conference by rights groups and diaspora organizations, 27 countries attended.  

The flags on stage at the opulent Umayyad Conference Palace included those of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — known collectively as the BRICS — and Moscow’s ally Belarus. Neighboring Iraq and Lebanon were also present; the latter being the only attending nation with a significant refugee population. 

Turkey — which hosts more Syrian refugees than anywhere else in the world, with at least 3.6 million registered — was not invited. Ankara backs forces opposed to President Bashar Al-Assad in Syria and has a strong military presence in the northwest of the country. Meanwhile, the U.S. and EU boycotted the event, stressing that, under United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254, there can be no talk of refugee returns without a political settlement to the conflict. UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Syria Imran Riza attended as an observer. 

Mikhail Mezentsev, head of the Russian National Defense Management Center, opened proceedings, claiming that the Syrian government guarantees the safety of returning refugees. He then turned to the international community, demanding that it “stop the sanctions policy against the regime and unfreeze its bank accounts."

Back in Istanbul, Mohammad claimed that the Assad regime and Russia are simply putting on “a show."

“They want to show the world we are OK, and say, ‘Look we ended the war,’ but it’s not true,” he said. “We’re not safe if we go back. Maybe we get arrested, or we’re killed.”

He added that the conference was a Russian initiative to recoup its losses from the conflict. 

“Russia spent millions of dollars in the war, so they want that money back,” he said.

Addressing the conference, Ali Asghar Khaji, a senior assistant to the Iranian foreign minister, directed blame for the “bloodshed, destruction and migration of millions of Syrians” towards “an influx of terrorists backed by a number of countries.” He then announced a proposal to establish an international fund for reconstruction. 

In a statement released prior to the event, The Syrian Association for Citizens’ Dignity, a civil-rights grassroots movement, quoted Dr Marwan Nazhan, a trustee of the organization. “Clearly, the purpose of the conference is to try and secure funds from the West under the guise of reconstruction to secure the gains made through indiscriminate attacks against civilians and their forced displacement.”

Emma Beals, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute, also believes that the conference had a transactional agenda. 

“If some refugees return, it’s a way of increasing the reconstruction or humanitarian funding amount and, secondly, it helps to push a normalization narrative,” she explained. 

Syria is grappling with an acute economic crisis and civilians living in regime-held areas are forced to line up for daily necessities such as food and fuel.

Ahmad, 31, whose name has been changed for security reasons, has lived in Turkey for three-and-a-half years, after fleeing the violence in his hometown of Deir Ezzor. 

He believes the conference was a waste of time, considering there is nothing in Syria to go back to. 

“The people in Syria, they can’t live because they have no bread, they have no water, they have no electricity, they have nothing,” he said. “How can Assad bring in refugees, if he can’t take care of people living in Syria?” 

While the Syrian regime may like to see some refugees come back,as long as they have money that can be spent within the country, there is more to gain from pushing for reconstruction on humanitarian grounds. 

Fadi, 33, who also asked to be identified under a pseudonym, is originally from the suburbs of Damascus. He has lived in Lebanon for five years and insists that the Syrian regime cares only about its own interests. 

“They will take the reconstruction money for themselves,” he said, referring to Russia, Iran and the Syrian government. 

“We can describe the country as a company today, it’s like a cooperation between the Russians and Iranians. The regime will benefit the least.”

Mohammad laughed when the topic of reconstruction came up. 

“Reconstruction? That’s totally unreal. Russia lies, the regime lies, and their allies lie. Even their supporters don’t believe it,” he said. 

The area outside Aleppo where Mohammad’s family still live currently lies under opposition control. If the regime retakes it, he believes there is no chance that they will see their home again.

“They’re going to burn that house, they’re going to burn our cars, and they’re going to destroy all the street that I lived on.”

Mohammad is certain that if Russia secures reconstruction funding for Syria, only those loyal to the regime will benefit. 

“Maybe they will fix some villages in their own area, but not in ours,” he said. 

Beals explained that people who have fled bombardment of opposition-held areas by regime forces are deemed part of the opposition and stripped of property rights. Even if their towns and villages are slated for reconstruction, they will remain displaced.

“Some of these projects may mean that refugees will never be able to return home, because the area that they fled during the war has been demolished or turned into some other project that benefits regime supporters,” she said.

Beals also pointed to the obstacles that Russia will face in its attempts to raise international support. 

“It’s a very difficult place to put money into, as a private investor or humanitarian organisation trying to provide reconstruction money, because you don’t know where that money is going to go,” she said. 

She said that contracts granted for infrastructure projects are routinely awarded to individuals with close ties to the government and, therefore, continue to feed the war economy. 

Meanwhile, President Michel Aoun of Lebanon — a nation mired in its own overlapping economic and political crises — continues to push for the return of displaced Syrians. 

Ahead of the conference, Aoun told Russian Special Envoy to Syria Alexander Lavrentiev that he is “looking for a quick solution” to the refugee situation. He added that “the refugees have inflicted great losses on Lebanon.”

Even if the participation of Lebanon in the conference solidified an intent to push for refugee returns, the nation’s government remains divided. Some parties support the Assad regime and its drive to send displaced people back, while others recognize the realities on the ground and maintain that Lebanon has a duty to protect them. 

Fadi, who lives in Beirut, said he doesn’t feel pressured to move back, owing to the strong UN presence in the country and the role displaced Syrians now play in the local economy. 

“I doubt forcible returns will happen from Lebanon, plus Lebanon has become reliant on the Syrian workers,” he explained. 

Like three-quarters of displaced Syrians, Fadi hopes to be able to go back one day. However, he will only consider doing so when he feels it is safe. 

The U.N. continues to push for a political settlement in Syria, within which the welfare of returning refugees is a key consideration, but many do not feel comfortable with Assad being part of any such talks. That sentiment was illustrated by a hashtag circulating on Twitter, in both Arabic and English, prior to the conference: #No_Return_With_Assad. 

Mohammad, for one, believes that no one will trust the guarantees made by the regime and will not return until Assad is arrested and faces justice. 

“Even if peacekeepers came in for protection, they would kill you behind their backs,” he said.

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His son looks after the customer, who wants winter shoes. And then the Russian president appears on screen and Abu Muhammad raises his hands and says: “God bless you Putin!”

Russia’s military intervention in Syria’s grinding civil war — to keep President Bashar al-Assad and his repressive government in power — has had widespread attention. But almost un-noticed beyond Syria has been its parallel media offensive there, led by Kremlin-financed brand names like RT and Sputnik. And the signs are this “soft power” campaign is working, with these channels securing a growing audience in government territory, helping Russia gain a powerful hold on Syrian hearts and minds.

Wael, who runs a clothes store next to Abu Muhammad’s, comes in as the RT newscast continues. The half-hour bulletin typically features a mix of reports from Syria and the wider Middle East, along with a short news segment focusing on “Russian achievements.” It is a must-watch for Wael too. “If you want to know what is happening in Syria, you have to watch RT news,” Wael says. “Not the Syria ones, unfortunately.”

Abu Muhammad has been an avid fan of RT ever since President Vladimir Putin despatched his warplanes and troops to help Assad in 2015, rescuing his regime from collapse. Watching the channel is a way of thanking Russia for its help, he says. “They stood by the Syrian people in their war against terrorism.”

Some Syrians have shown their appreciation more directly, naming newborn sons after the Russian president. It was an “expression of friendship, love and thankfulness” for his assistance, said Nawras Mihoub, the father of one such “Putin” baby, in a carefully staged video earlier this year. The young Vladimir was covered with the Syrian flag. His father — who said he was a soldier — held the boy in front of a giant photograph of the Syrian leader adorned on one side by the Russian tricolor.

Relations between Damascus and Moscow go back to Soviet times, but they had ebbed in recent decades. The Kremlin’s decisive military intervention has given it a chance to cement its influence once more, now using its information machine to talk directly to Syrians. And Assad — indebted as he is to Putin for his support—has been a willing partner.

RT has been able to operate remarkably freely in a country that ranks lower on media freedom indexes even than Russia. The Syrian government helps RT reporters get swift access to frontline locations and other stories they want to cover.

This has all helped RT’s Arabic channel vault ahead with Syrian audiences since Russian forces intervened in the civil war. The channel has actually been going for a decade, and it used to be overshadowed by the regional heavyweights, Qatar-funded Al Jazeera and Saudi-funded Al Arabiya. But now RT has become the go-to station for many Syrians in government-controlled areas.

Since last year, it has been joined by Sputnik, a Kremlin-funded news agency, which produces a daily live one-hour show for Sham FM, one of Syria’s most popular radio stations. Broadcast from Moscow each day at 6 p.m., it features a mix of news and features and studio discussion, as well as a 20-minute “Military Monitor” segment covering the latest frontline developments, with an emphasis on Russian actions.

The aim of the show, according to a Syrian media report, is to transmit “the popular and official Russian position to the Syrian people and global public opinion.”

It is hard to get exact figures, but there is no doubt Sham FM reaches a wide audience in Syria, both on radio and via its Facebook page. Even the broken Arabic of the Russian presenters doesn’t put off Ahmad, a Damascus taxi driver who says he tunes in every day. “I like the power I feel listening to Russia’s standpoint,” he says, noting approvingly the broadcast’s typically anti-Western message.

Sputnik is pushing at an open door here. Syrian people have been fed a diet of anti-Western, anti “imperialist” propaganda by the ruling Ba’ath party for decades. It starts early on, with school-children chanting a Syrian version of the pledge of allegiance before lessons, promising “to confront Imperialism and Zionism.” The Kremlin is leveraging its military intervention to cement its influence, but using its information machine to talk directly to Syrians.

Back in his store in Al Hamra market, Abu Muhammad says RT is “more neutral and truthful” than Syrian channels. He speaks approvingly of the network’s reports on Russia’s humanitarian aid to Syrians fleeing “terrorists,” using the government’s catch-all term for those who have been fighting Assad since 2011. “I remember Russian soldiers giving beautiful gifts to hundreds of children in Aleppo at the beginning of this year,” says Abu Muhammad. “What kindness!”

Wael says he was hooked by the network’s coverage of Russian airstrikes last year which helped Syrian troops recapture the historic city of Palmyra from the self-styled Islamic State, or Daesh. He was impressed by how many reporters RT had in the field. His family are regular viewers too, he says, following RT’s output on Facebook and “contributing regularly to polls on the channel’s website.”

Not all Syrians in government-controlled areas are happy with Russia’s intervention. Some raise questions about its legitimacy, and the long-term price the country will have to pay for becoming so dependent on Moscow for its security. With the Syrian army now regaining territory nationwide with Russia’s help, you hear questions such as: “is Russia ever going to leave Syria?”

In the meantime, Russia’s influence in Syria is spreading. At government-organized rallies in Damascus, the Russian and Syrian flags are regularly flown together. Sometimes posters of Putin appear alongside the ubiquitous portraits of Assad. When the two leaders met recently in the Russian resort of Sochi, it was clear that Putin was the boss in this relationship as he declared the military mission “almost at an end.”

But the Syrian government has made clear it wants deeper ties with Moscow on all fronts.

This May, some Syrians even celebrated Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany, following a campaign by RT and other media outlets. Syrians were given St. George’s ribbons to display, a widely used Russian patriotic and military symbol, as well as flags. Walk the covered alleyways of the old souk in Damascus, and you’ll find a plentiful selection of mugs, magnets and other souvenirs bearing photos of the Russian and Syrian presidents together.

And it is not only “Vladimir Putin” that has been added to the list of possible names for Syrian children. An unknown number of baby girls are now growing up with the name “Elena” — the name of one of the regular spokespeople for Russia’s main military base in Syria. Its Facebook page has returned the favor, publishing photos of Syrian families with their new “Elena” babies.

The Kremlin may be on the defensive elsewhere in the world over its information operations, but in Syria it can already be well satisfied with its investment.

Abu Muhammad and his fellow shop owners are even starting to learn basic Russian. A few Russian customers have been shopping in Damascus markets, and they are hoping their numbers will increase. “Speaking Russian is also a sign of gratitude to Russia,” says Abu Muhammad. “I am encouraging my children to learn it too.”

 All names in this article were changed at the request of the interviewees.

Coda is not naming our reporter in Damascus for security reasons.

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But few journalists have written about how Russian security agencies gather kompromat, or compromising material, on gay men in the region in order to blackmail and recruit them. An exclusive interview with a young gay man Ruslan (his name has been changed to protect his identity) from the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan by the Caucasian Knot sheds light on a practice which dates back to Soviet times and is still used by Russian security services.

It was a winter day in 2014 and 23-year-old Ruslan was on his way to meet a friend in his hometown of Derebent, Dagestan, when a car pulled up blocking his way across a crosswalk. “Get in,” the driver told him.

A devout Muslim in a region where authorities have battled Islamic insurgency for decades, Ruslan said he was used to unannounced summons for questioning by Russian state security services. The men in the car weren’t wearing uniforms, but he could already tell from the way they spoke that the two were likely to have been from the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency.

“Someone’s come from Moscow who wants a word with you,” they told him.

But instead of the local police station where Ruslan had been previously questioned on several occasions, they drove him to a hotel. There, in a room on the second floor, he was interrogated, shown a secret recording of himself with another gay man and given a choice: work as a spy for the Russian government in Syria or everyone on his contact list would see the video. “Someone’s come from Moscow who wants a word with you.”

Homophobic messages are widely circulated on Russian state television and by politicians, however in the predominantly Muslim republics of the Caucasus being gay can be deadly. In Dagestan and Chechnya where honor killings are still practiced, being gay can get a man killed by his own family.

The Novaya Gazeta investigation revealed that local Chechen authorities were systematically encouraging families to carry out honor killings of their gay sons and brothers. Subsequent follow ups to the story revealed that dozens of men, believed to be gay, had been rounded up and held in secret prisons where they were tortured and in some cases killed. The story was reported across front pages around the world thrusting Russia’s LGBTQ rights record into the spotlight.

There are no concrete numbers, but Ruslan says the FSB’s practice of gathering kompromat, compromising material used for coercion, is well known to members of Dagestan’s secretive gay community. By the time he met his recruiters, Ruslan already knew of a gay friend who went to meet a man that he met online and ended up instead in an apartment with officers from security services. After the encounter he turned into a pro-government activist, participating in government-organized events and filming videos praising the government that he would post online.

Ruslan says that he’s not the only gay man to be threatened by the FSB in the region.

Ruslan, a fluent Arabic speaker, was given a different task: to infiltrate and report on Dagestani fighters in the Middle East. According to Russia’s Ministry of Interior close to 1,200 Russians from the Republic of Dagestan fight alongside ISIS troops in Syria; several hundred others fight in Iraq. Islamic extremism fuels a homegrown insurgency in the Caucasus that the Russian government has struggled to crush since the fall of the USSR. Ruslan said that his recruiters wanted him to infiltrate their ranks and help gather intelligence on how people move in and out of Russia to Syria and Iraq.

“They told me that it’s in my interests to work with them, unless I want everyone to find out who I am,” Ruslan told the Caucasian Knot. During his interrogation that lasted for hours in the hotel room in Derbent he was repeatedly shown the video of him and his friend, over and again, if he refused to answer their questions. The agents showed him that they even had access to his social media accounts and messages. “I am the government. I am offering you a chance to work together.”

Ruslan refused to go to Syria. The man questioning him then told him, “I am the government. I am offering you a chance to work together.”

Ruslan told the Caucasian Knot that they “told me to accept the offer. That if the government offers something, you need to accept it. They said it was being done for the people, for the country.”

Ruslan was given five days to make his choice: go to Syria or face the danger of being exposed as a gay man to his family. Several days after his interrogation he fled, first to neighboring Azerbaijan and later to Turkey where he is still in hiding today. He cut all contact with his friends and family, fearing that security services would intercept his messages again. Only six months later did he found out that after he fled, his family home was searched and his relatives were threatened by the authorities.

Three years after leaving Derbent he still fears using his real name in an interview and says he will never be able to return home.

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The video was pushed out across Russian state controlled airwaves and on social media shortly after President Donald J. Trump launched the first direct U.S. military strike on Syrian government forces.

It showed what looks like a makeshift emergency room: doctors working frantically around the small bodies of limp, half-naked children, their eyes rolling back and noses foaming. A girl in pink underwear lies on top of an elderly woman who seems to have already died. One bed over, a doctor injects a long needle deep into a small child’s chest.

The video is almost unwatchable, capturing the brutality of Syria’s six-year war that has decimated the country’s population. But the way the video has been spun shows how Russian disinformation can plant doubt, obscure facts, and manipulate mainstream debate on the Syrian war and its consequences.

Russian officials and state-media went into overdrive after the April 4 chemical attack in northern Syria and the U.S. military response, circulating contradictory theories about the attack, the most cited version being that the attack never happened and was staged. The video from the makeshift emergency room was used as key evidence that the attack was in fact fake news.

All of the Russian reports omitted a crucial fact: the video was two years old. Russian media created a confused picture where only one message was clear: Russia had proof that rebels in Syria and the West were lying about the chemical attacks.

It was originally uploaded by a local division of the White Helmets, a volunteer emergency rescue worker group that operates in rebel-held Syria, after a chemical attack in the Idlib province that killed at least six people in March 2015. But now, Russian and Syrian officials said that an NGO called the “Swedish Professors and Doctors for Human Rights” (SWEDHR) have evidence that the White Helmets video was staged, discrediting both the authenticity of the gas attack and of the White Helmets. The omission of a time references by the Russian media and by government officials created the impression that the video showed the “staged” aftermath of the more recent chemical attack this April, rather than one that took place in 2015.

“Have you read the report by Swedish Doctors for Human Rights that showed the duplicity of the so-called White Helmets?” Syria’s representative to the UN asked during a charged Security Council meeting on April 12, 2017. By that time, many in Russia had. RT, Sputnik, Rossiskaya Gazeta, Pravda, Zvezda TV, Ren TV and dozens of other Kremlin-controlled media outlets republished SWEDHR’s conclusions in a storm of coverage after Trump’s retaliatory airstrike on April 6. Searching “White Helmets” in Russian on Google brings up several pages that one after the other cite SWEDHR in the article title. Nearly all of them omit that SWEDHR’s findings apply to a video from 2015.

SWEDHR’s findings were first published in an article on the group’s online blog “The Indicter” on March 6, 2017 — nearly a month before the alleged chemical attack in Syria that prompted Trump’s strike. In it, the Swedish doctors questioned the authenticity of the two-year-old video, making several claims: the video shows “life-threatening” or “simply fake” medical procedures; the cause of the children’s death more likely could be from opiate drug overdose than from a chemical attack; the White Helmets made a propaganda video with already dead children; and that the injection given to the small boy was staged and likely “would have killed the child!”

Amnesty International in Sweden, Human Rights Watch in Sweden, the Swedish Society of Medicine and the Swedish Medical Association all say they never heard of SWEDHR, which describes itself as an “alternative NGO.”

But SWEDHR was noticed by Russia’s foreign ministry. On March 16, 2017 the ministry’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova spoke at length about the White Helmets, a group celebrated in the West (especially after Netflix’ Oscar-winning documentary about the organization) but considered a terrorist organization in Russia. Without mentioning when the original White Helmets’ video was filmed, Zakharova cited the Swedish doctors’ findings which she said proved that the White Helmets are “talented directors and actors” and that the video even shows a child being “literally murdered under surgical lamps.”

And then after the April 4 chemical attack and the subsequent diplomatic fallout, Zakharova’s statement and the Swedish research proliferated on airwaves and social media in Russia. That SWEDHR’s key evidence was a two-year-old video was simply never mentioned. By omitting any time references, Russian media created a confused picture where only one message was clear: Russia had proof that rebels in Syria and the West were lying about the chemical attacks.

The Swedish organization which enabled Russia’s efforts is made up of “Swedish professors, PhDs, medical doctors and university researchers,” according to its website. The head of SWEDHR is Professor Marcello Ferrada de Noli, a frequent contributor to the Kremlin’s RT network where he comments on the war in Ukraine and Syria. Professor Noli declined to comment for this article.

According to reports from Swedish Radio, Dr. Leif Elinder, an expert cited in SWEDHR’s findings alleging that the White Helmets video was staged, is a retired pediatrician who was fired from the Sweden’s Social Insurance Agency for making non-factual medical assessments.

Dr. Elinder explained that he joined SWEDHR two years ago because of his interest in human rights and because one of his life goals, he said, was to “prevent World War III.” He sounded surprised by the reach of his comments about the White Helmets video and said that Professor Noli asked him to comment specifically on a scene in the video where a Syrian boy is given an injection in the chest. “I saw the pictures. I commented on the pictures. And my assessment was that this was not done in a professional way and I explained why,” Elinder said.

The White Helmets video was shown to five doctors by Coda, including a US-based pediatric specialist who has worked in Afghanistan, Sudan, Lebanon and Israel; a pediatric specialist and member of the UK’s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health; an intensive care specialist at Royal Berkshire Hospital, a general practitioner based in London with experience working in developing countries; and a pediatrics specialist at NYU Langone medical center.

All of the specialists agreed that the individuals in the video did not appear to be carrying out a resuscitation attempt according to accepted guidelines and that the footage where the Syrian boy was given an injection was not a usual resuscitation method. All of them, however, said it would be impossible to conclude from the brief video that the scene was staged.

“There is nothing to indicate this is clearly a ‘faked’ procedure, it seems to be more of a desperate or a poorly executed one,” said Dr. Melissa Hersh from NYU Langone. “Especially after the Iraq War, if you’re not confident in the truth, no one wants to act. So even when the truth is obvious, Russia has a way of making it not obvious anymore,” Miller said. “That’s their whole strategy — as long as no one acts, they can do what they want. It’s working perfectly.”

The accusation that the April 4, 2017 chemical attack was staged was just one version of events that the Kremlin floated. Copying a disinformation strategy that was used when Flight MH-17 was shot down by Russian-backed forces in Eastern Ukraine, different Russian ministries released contradictory accounts of events that day. The Russian defense ministry announced that an airstrike had been carried out by the Syrian Army on a rebel chemical weapons factory. The Russian foreign ministry said both that rebel groups were responsible for gassing Syrian civilians and that the attack was actually fake. Neither ministry mentioned what chemical weapons experts in the West were quick to point out: the nerve agent Sarin that was found in victims of the attack is not effective if immolated in an explosion, ruling out the plausibility of Russian defense ministry’s version that a Syrian air strike caused the gas to spread.

“Some people latch on to theory one. Some people latch on to theory two. And some people latch on to theory three. At the end of the day, there are enough people who say I don’t know what really happened. And so nothing gets done,” said James Miller, an expert on Russian and Middle Eastern affairs.

Much of Russian disinformation about real events and violence is built on reports and comments by obscure groups or fringe politicians that ultimately succeed in simply confusing what actually occurred.

“Especially after the Iraq War, if you’re not confident in the truth, no one wants to act. So even when the truth is obvious, Russia has a way of making it not obvious anymore,” Miller said. “That’s their whole strategy — as long as no one acts, they can do what they want. It’s working perfectly.”

SWEDHR’s research continues to be circulated by Russian media and government officials. In the United States, conspiracy theories spread across far-right and -left “alternative” news sites about the attack, some of them also citing the Swedish research. Within hours of the U.S. retaliatory strike on April 6, #SyriaHoax was the top trending twitter topic in the United States, according to Trends24, a company that tracks Twitter data.

More recently, the Swedish doctors published updated “evidence” confirming their findings. They even uploaded a video summary of their research to Youtube which, strangely enough, is set to a violin score called “From Russia with Love.”

Additional reporting by Mariam Kiparoidze and Giorgi Tskhakaia.

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