The Curious Case of Syria's Civil War and the West's Far-Left Kooks

Destroyed Syrian Arab Army (SAA) T-62s strewn around the ruins of the Mosque of Omar bin Abdul Aziz in A'zaz, 20 miles northwest of Aleppo (2012, courtesy of Christiaan Triebert) [1]

“All bigots and frauds are brothers under the skin” ~ Christopher Hitchens.

When someone’s certainty of their correctness is matched only by their apparent arrogance, you know you’re dealing with something special. And while it is safe to say that the alt-right’s band of propagandists is by far the most visible and the most destructive political force on the internet today – it was after all their crew that stormed the Capitol – the cottage industry that is the mélange of far-left truthers is no less interesting and no less cynical.

It is after all no secret that some of its representatives harbor troubling sympathies for fascists. The breed of far-left truthers is a different animal to be sure, but it too has telling parallels to its more violent far-right cousins.

Some of these so-called “independent journalists” come intrepid bloggers receive paychecks from such reputable news organizations such as Russia Today (your favorite neighborhood Russian state propaganda machine). They also attract a similarly kooky audience from both extremes of the political spectrum, replete with those who believe that all facets of life are tainted with the stench of conspiracy and subterfuge.

As with their far-right brothers in arms, far-left conspiracy theorists love to JAQ themselves off (Mom, I’m Just Asking Questions!), and enjoy conjuring incredibly convoluted tales of subterfuge and deception. Black is white, up is down, and you’re a sheep if you disagree!

It also seems that our “inquisitive” comrades have also developed an unshakable compulsion to defend brutal authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, or Assad’s Syria.

Whether their fealty to brutal late-stage capitalist dictatorships propped up by other brutal late-stage capitalist dictatorships is due to a tragic misalignment of values, brainwashing, or just down to them being fucking stupid, is anyone’s guess.

In this article, we shall dip our toes into the currents of madness and discover the myriad ways that those purporting to be on the progressive side regularly undercut and sabotage progressive political effectiveness and unity. We will focus on how this ecosystem of far-left influencers has covered the Syrian Civil War. But first, let’s have some juicy context.

Who is Jimmy Dore?

Jimmy Dore is a radio show host, standup comedian, and a conspiracy theorist who identifies as a progressive. In the past decade he has become a rather prominent figure in the leftist media ecosystem, first collaborating with The Young Turks network in 2009 before opting to go solo in 2019. His main gig, The Jimmy Dore Show, airs in the Los Angeles area and is also a YouTube channel. In the 2016 presidential election Dore became an avid Bernie Sanders supporter (and by 2020 became a fervent Sanders hater). He gained some notoriety for arguing that a Trump presidency would be “even better for progressives [than a Clinton presidency] in the short-term, meaning in the two-year term, and in four years for sure."

However, the rise of The Jimmy Dore Show to leftist internet fame has also been accompanied by a marked increase in the show’s propagandistic content. Dore regularly parrots a host of outlandish conspiracy theories about anything under the sun, from 9/11 truther theories, to falsified Joe Biden blackface stories, to pro-Assad and pro-Putin material.

Nothing, it seems, in the realm of torrential disinformation is off limits for The Jimmy Dore Show. For all his progressive credentials, Dore didn’t think twice about spending the better part of four years defending the Donald against his allegations of collusion (as if Trump had any shortage of self-serving tools willing to cover his ass). Dore confidently and regularly asserted that all allegations of Russian interference were completely fictitious.

Spend any time watching Dore’s streams on YouTube, and you are immediately struck by the clueless, reactionary, and performative nature of his outrageous rhetoric. This was epitomized in the Force the Vote hullabaloo.

Force the Vote, Dude!

To mark the new year, Jimmy Dore inserted himself into an entirely different controversy, creating a completely unnecessary rift in the already fractured American leftist camp. In an initiative known as #ForceTheVote, Dore called on the fifteen progressive members of congress who campaigned on enacting Medicare for All (or M4A) to withhold their vote for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi until she promised to put M4A to a vote in the lower house of Congress. As a result of the 2020 Elections Democrats currently hold 222 seats to the Republicans 212 in the House. Force the Vote’s rationale therefore was that a slim margin of votes could be withheld as leverage by the progressives in congress, forcing Pelosi to put Medicare for All to a vote. This would allow the progressives to know once and for all which democrats definitively supported or did not support M4A.

This initiative spread like wildfire throughout the Twittersphere, and the accompanying petition for the initiative reached 28,000 signatures. At first glance, the Force the Vote idea seems good in principle. But as members of the squad, progressive strategists, and anyone who bothered to think the idea through soon pointed out, Force the Vote would be a purely performative action, devoid of any real strategic gain. Even if Medicare for All was brought for a vote, it would almost certainly fail, and the net sum of this initiative would be another pointless progressive spectacle. As noted by American journalist David Sirota, Force the Vote would have been far more effective if it had included additional preconditions. For instance, progressive members of congress could have negotiated a commitment from Pelosi to schedule a vote on existing legislation that would enable states to create their own single-payer healthcare systems, or to schedule a vote on a resolution demanding that Biden utilize executive authority to expand Medicare.

Dore’s initiative was rejected by progressives on Capitol Hill. A storm of fury quickly ensued, as comically absurd arguments broke out between leftists throughout the Netscape, mirroring the Twitter arguments between Dore and his former TYT buddies such as Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian, and fellow progressive talk radio host Sam Seder. Dore tore into them with his trademark bellicosity, labelling them all traitors and sellouts who were beholden to the military-industrial complex.

As part of his irrational descent into abject fury, Dore began loudly advocating for a strategy of uniting elements of the progressive left with the fascistic far-right. Dore started promoting the Boogaloo Boys – a rightwing domestic terrorist group implicated in the attempted Jan. 6 putsch – even going so far as to host a softball interview with a prominent member of the terrorist organization immediately prior to an interview with Jerry White, an editor for the World Socialist Web Site. Inexplicably, Briahna Joy Gray, Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign National Press Secretary and darling of Socialist Twitter (you may know her as @briebriejoy) opted to provide cover for Dore even as his left-wing credibility smoldered like burning dogshit.

I wish I could explain why a distinguished political commentator and accomplished Harvard Law alum would willingly sink to the perilously low depths of a snake oil salesman like Dore, but that one’s beyond me.

Suffice it to say that if your actions end up making an organization called The Young Turks Network look good, you’ve fucked up somewhere.

Cooperation Between the leftists and Fascists?

Helpfully for Dore, the Boogaloo controversy allowed him to incite yet more division in an already fractured progressive electorate. Scores of Twitter accounts with the distinctive red rose next to their handles have flocked to Dore’s defense, tweeting that “neoliberals such as Madeline Albright are responsible for far more deaths than alt-rights Nazis”. Thus, the discussion around this issue – as with so many leftist “controversies” – has descended into performative semantics.

In other words, it’s become yet another opportunity for the moralist crowd to flex their “wokeness” (their malformed understanding of wokeness in any case). Of course, the foreign policy of the Clinton administration – along with the foreign policy of nearly every post-WWII American presidency – has been unimaginably deleterious, and deadly. The consequences of American imperialist policy have visited horrific cruelty upon millions, if not billions of people, and this veritable legacy of ashes stands as a testament to the inherent brutality of America’s status quo.

It pays however to remember just how truly ignorant, idiotic, and short-sighted Dore’s proposition of leftist alt-right cooperation is from the perspective of anyone who legitimately wants to advance the leftist cause.

As pointed out by White in his heated exchange with Dore following his Boogaloo interview; “[right-wing elements such as the Boogaloo boys] are the people who stormed the US Capitol on January 6—they were being pulled around by the nose by very powerful political and corporate forces.” The far-right elements of America’s political landscape grow, prosper, and inflict death and destruction thanks to America’s mainstream political consensus, not despite of it. In practice, these groups are not anti-establishment. Whether consciously or not, they defend and enable the corporatist, militarist, and imperialist tendencies of mainstream American politics, both in the foreign and domestic spheres.

These people are not our friends, and the contention that they are not as deadly as their more domesticated neoliberal and neoconservative counterparts is naïve, especially if you know anything about America’s bloodstained history. A brief examination of the Ku Klux Klan’s terrorist attacks during the reconstruction period and civil rights movement reveals that these extremists would give ISIS a run for their money. Alternatively, you can also go read about what happened to visionary communist leaders such as Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht.

When Germany’s political establishment brutally crushed their attempted revolution, it employed the services of the Freikorps, the Nazi parties’ spiritual predecessor. Luxembourg was extrajudicially executed and thrown into Berlin’s Landwehr canal by the Freikorps, who apparently had very little interest in cooperating with her to overthrow the status quo.

I should also just point out that once the Nazis took power in the 1930s - gradually eradicating German leftism in the process - their body count increased significantly.

But please, do go on about how these are just reasonable people with differing opinions that we can find common ground with.

Why suggest such a stupid idea?

It is hardly surprising that a proposition for collaboration between leftists and neocon-backed far-right elements would come from the likes of Dore. Dore is representative of an entire circuit of commentators and media personalities that regularly pay fealty to ultra-conservative nationalist regimes such as Putin's Russia. As we shall see, many of America’s far-left conspiracy theorists have a similar arrangement with Assad’s government.

They believe that a comparable compromise with America’s fascistic elements would go just as swimmingly. And for them at least, that’s probably true since it would allow them a much wider audience that is freer still from the constrictions of PC culture. Courting a far-right audience would therefore extend their own reach and give them a much wider berth when it comes to making new content. But Dore isn't the only grifter in the far-left ecosystem. In fact, his younger British counterpart across the Atlantic is rather more interesting in most respects.

Richie, the Independent Journalist?

The riddle of Richard Medhurst, a Syrian-British “independent journalist”, failed rapper, mediocre comedian, and Linkin park enthusiast is a momentarily intriguing one. Sporting a generic American accent despite his apparent Englishness (English father, Syrian mother, according to his bio), Medhurst delivers content that is much in the same kooky vein as Dore’s show (it will not surprise you to hear that Medhurst and Dore are buddies) though his content is more internationally oriented.

Even so, Medhurst knows his audience, and his videos focus heavily on domestic policy issues in the United States, including Force the Vote, the 2020 presidential election, wealth inequality, Covid stimulus checks, etc. Richie also makes sure to devote time to bashing the squad, as most far-left cranks do. Like Dore, he harbors some bizarre fixation for AOC (misogyny much?)

…Back to the Riddle

EXCLUSIVE FOOTAGE: Future Richie (now with better hair) SCHOOLS past Richie on the Syrian Opposition.

I say that Medhurst is a riddle, for how can someone call themselves an independent journalist and yet produce no readily apparent piece of original journalistic work whatsoever?

This may sound impossible, but Medhurst makes it look easy.

His YouTube channel’s rather erratic posting schedule includes a full repertoire of video “analyses” that can all be described thusly: a sonorous, long-winded op-ed vlog.

The only other video content that comes close to approximating journalism comes in the form of equally long-winded interviews, mostly with people who have about as much legitimacy in journalism as Medhurst does. Invariably these so-called interviews are more accurately characterized as “a video of an echo-chamber in action”. Medhurst does appear to occasionally write articles, but these elusive works are found almost exclusively on his own website(s), and don’t appear to be syndicated anywhere.

The only written work that Medhurst regularly produces is confined to the 140 characters Twitter give him, usually to promote his videos.

Though he does not seem to possess any credentials you would typically associate with an actual journalist, Medhurst certainly looks the part. He regularly sports the “Western journalist who just stepped off the Syrian battlefield” look, complete with a striped desert-colored scarf and his trademark “LA” hat. You’d almost think Idlib province is just outside his poster-laden streaming room.

In line with his brand of polemic semi-journalistic rants, Medhurst skillfully combines a cynical blend of superficial moralism and righteous indignation. When his videos reach their cathartic crescendo, you will often find Medhurst shouting into his microphone, his face contorted in fury, his venomous words decrying the outrageous human rights violations and other indignities visited upon the natives of faraway lands such as Syria and Iraq at the hands of Western imperialists.

In his own trademark way, Medhurst does fulfill a niche demand. There is a need for outspoken figures to acerbically and unabashedly decry the toxic cynicism, imperialism, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty that Western liberal democracy normalizes and propagates. Against the renewed flood of calls for a “return to normal” (i.e., a return to neoliberal manufactured consensus), even a tiny drop of dissent can make huge waves in the small pond of American leftism. It is therefore no surprise that someone like Medhurst continues to play a growing (albeit marginal) role in the leftist dialogue of the United States.

Medhurst can be reliably counted on to regularly bash America’s catastrophic foreign policy decisions in the Middle East and beyond, and to call out American imperialism and white supremacy (at least until the Boogaloo controversy, when he sided with Daddy Dore) in his expletive-laced tirades. These explosive clips often go viral on the socialist Twittersphere.

Outside of these clips however, Medhurst is somewhat awkward, as he frequently falters, stumbling for the right words to deliver his talking points. Like a man who drinks thirty cups of coffee per day Medhurst gets to his main point either ponderously slowly or stupendously quickly. The strange pacing of the show nicely complements Medhurst’s unshakeable inconsistency when it comes to telling the truth.

The prevailing sentiment you feel when watching a Richard Medhurst video is how devilishly hard he tries to be edgy. Medhurst wants to be controversial, you can just feel it. You can sense the neediness jumping out from his darting eyes, desperately pleading “pay attention to me!”

In his fervid quest to gain minor league internet fame, Medhurst has made many injudicious statements, dubious claims, and several outright lies. Unfortunately, Medhurst's insecurities seem to have led him to some rather dark places. But to set the stage for this lunacy, we must briefly talk about Syria’s decade-long civil war.

War Never Changes...

Over the course of the Syrian Civil War – a ten-year conflict that has claimed nearly 120,000 lives, displaced over 11 million people, and led to the brutal destruction of the Syrian Arab Republic – there have been countless untold horrors. It is no understatement to say that the conflict has been an unabated onslaught of human suffering on an unimaginable scale. The long term economic and demographic effects of the conflict are colossal, and the industrialized nation has been torn apart by the cyclonic forces of internal strife, imperial interference, Ba’athist brutality, and jihadism.

Many horrific atrocities have taken place in Syria in the past ten years. Chief among them is the Assad regime’s campaign of chemical warfare against Syrian civilians.

Chemical Weapons Attacks in Syria as of March 12, 2019 (courtesy of UNHRC)

Throughout the conflict, there have been multiple recorded instances of chemical warfare. According to the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, 37 of these attacks have been definitively proven, and all but five of proven attacks have been linked to Syrian government forces, which regularly carry out attacks via aerially dropped canisters of chlorine gas. There are likely to be many more attacks than this official count suggests, but these have been harder to verify and determining the number of total casualties from chemical attacks over the course of the war has remained a difficult task.

Thanks to the diligent and exhaustive documentation on the part of Syrian activists, foreign journalists, inspectors with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), open intelligence gathering groups such as Bellingcat, and human rights defenders, we now have a mountain of evidence that strongly suggests a concerted campaign of chemical warfare on the part of the Syrian government.

This campaign intentionally and systematically targets civilian population centers, with the bulk of chemical attacks taking place near major metropolitan centers such as Damascus, Aleppo, and Idlib. The intention of these attacks is to deliver communal punishment against locals for resisting, and to pressure rebel militants into surrender sooner rather than later. It goes without saying that the use of chemical weapons against civilians is the textual definition of a war crime and goes directly against the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which bans chemical weapons and calls for the immediate destruction of chemical weapons stockpiles. Syria became a signatory of the CWC in 2013 but it has to this day failed to eradicate its chemical weapons stockpiles.

Despite the gigantic pile of irrefutable evidence that conclusively documents that Assad’s regime both used and continues to use chemical weapons to break stubborn strongholds of resistance, our kooky leftist “friends” like Medhurst et al. insist that all these attacks are nothing but the fabrication of Western propagandists. Curiously, the empathy of these emotive polemicists for the plight of Syrian civilians runs rather short when those civilians are the victims of Assad’s crimes rather than those of the West.

In fact, Medhurst seems shockingly unfazed when he shrugs off the deaths of Assad’s victims, and usually retroactively labels them terrorists (Oh Richie, you'd make Cheney proud!).

Predictably, there just happens to be a massive network of internet media outlets run by the Syrian and Russian governments that echo and amplify the egregious misinformation parroted by our kooky fellow leftists. The goal, it seems, of this communal effort is not to deliver a coherent counter-narrative, but rather to manufacture one that is designed to be incoherent, with many offshoots of contradictory information and scenarios. By circulating several alternative “theories” for chemical attacks perpetrated by Syrian government forces, this subversive network has succeeded in muddying the waters.

The uncanny rate of coincidence between official Syrian and Russian narratives of these attacks, the reports of “independent journalists” such as Medhurst and Eva Bartlett, and leaks of ostensibly pro-transparency organizations such as WikiLeaks is extraordinary to behold. In fact, you could say that it is a model of internet media synergy, albeit in the worst possible way.

Case in point is the 2018 chemical attack on Douma.

Chemical Bombs Over Douma

Douma under siege in 2018

Around six miles northeast of the city of Damascus lies Douma, a municipality which had a population of around 110,000 prior to the Syrian Civil War. Douma is in the Ghouta region, a collection of rural settlements and urbanized communities that comprise the suburbs southeast of Damascus. With the onset of civil war Douma became a hotspot for violence, and its populace was the victim of a string of atrocities.

For the first three years of fighting, the Ghouta region was the stage for a brutal conflict of attrition between the Free Syrian Army, Jaysh-al-Islam, and the Syrian Army backed by Hezbollah. In 2012 the rebels succeeded in driving out Assad’s forces from the area and even captured a section of the outer ring of Damascus. But by 2013 the tables had turned, and Syrian government forces launched a counterattack that quickly devolved into a massive siege of Eastern Ghouta. This in turn culminated in a large-scale Sarin chemical attack which killed hundreds of civilians in August of 2013.

The region has also seen several massacres committed by both sides.

By 2018, Douma was the last rebel enclave in Eastern Ghouta resisting the Syrian army’s encirclement as Saudi-backed Islamist group Jaysh-al-Islam (lit. Army of Islam) stubbornly clung to it [2]. The city was levelled in the ensuing siege, its apartment blocks gradually obliterated by a deluge of bombs, shells, and bullets. Robert Fisk, who visited the town shortly after the cessation of hostilities, described Douma as “a ravaged, stinking place of smashed apartment blocks”. In a bid to outlast this relentless onslaught, Islamist militants forced prisoners to construct a large network of tunnels under Douma and militants also commandeered other people’s residences. The town’s sole remaining hospital was moved underground. Chaos reigned on the streets of Douma, and civilians who remained took refuge in the basements of their homes. Victory for Syrian government forces seemed inevitable, but Assad’s forces had one last terrible machination in store for the residents of Douma.

On April 7^th, 2018, the Syrian Air Force carried out a final chemical attack in which two chlorine gas canisters modified to be released by aircraft were dropped by helicopters over Douma. One of these cannisters crashed through the roof of a residential building, landing in a bedroom (referred to as location 4 in OPCW reports). The other of these yellow canisters struck the top-floor balcony of a four-story apartment building (referred to as location 2 in OPCW reports), penetrating halfway through the ceiling below before becoming lodged. Because chlorine is heavier than air, the ensuing release of chlorine gas permeated down through both structures. Due to an ongoing bombardment, residents in Douma were taking shelter in their basements.

Many Syrians – particularly those living in conflict hotspots – are well acquainted with chemical attacks and know to get to higher ground and wash themselves with water if they smell chlorine. But when residents of the targeted building began running upstairs to escape the chlorine at location 2, they instead ran into a deathtrap as the suffocating cloud of chlorine descended from the rooftop. 34 men, women, and children died in this one apartment building, with approximately 49 dying in total in the attack.

Hundreds of civilians were injured, and entire families were annihilated.

Volunteers from the White Helmets were the first to respond to the attack, and their cameras captured a gruesome scene at location 2. Corpses were strewn throughout the floors of the apartment building, and some exhibited telltale signs of exposure to chlorine, including frothing at the mouth, reddish-brown stains at the mouth, and whitened burnt corneas. Some had died near water faucets, suggesting that they had attempted to cleanse themselves of the chlorine. [3]

Who are the White Helmets?

The White Helmets in Hamouria, 2017 (courtesy of Getty Images)

As a brief aside, Syrian Civil Defense (SCD, known unofficially as the White Helmets) is a volunteer organization founded by James Le Mesurier, a former British Army officer. As implied by its name, the organization focuses on civil defense, and regularly conducts search and rescue operations, coordinates evacuations, and delivers essential goods. It’s 3,000 volunteers operate in rebel-held parts of Syria and the organization claims to have saved around 114,000 lives. Additionally, the White Helmets have become instrumental in documenting war crimes and human rights abuses committed by Syrian government forces, since they are often the first responders to the scenes of aerial bombardments and chemical weapons attacks.

Consequently, the organization and its founder have become something of a bête noire to the Assad regime and its allies. Though the White Helmets insist they are neutral in the Syrian Civil War, Russian and Syrian media outlets have repeatedly denounced the group as a wolf in sheep’s clothing and branded them as a terrorist group operating in plain sight. The White Helmets have also been accused of various conspiracies, such as staging and/or committing atrocities themselves, and then misrepresenting them as Syrian government atrocities. These claims have also been echoed by pro-Assad tankies and far-left kooks and have been thoroughlyand repeatedly disproven. Alas, the truth seems to have hold very little currency in the internet media ecosystem.

…Back to Douma

Chlorine gas is a vile weapon. At its most benign it causes burns to the skin, but at its highest concentration it can cause irreversible damage to the respiratory system and kill within minutes. The principal way it inflicts damage is by reacting with water to create hypochlorous and hydrochloric acid, and oxygen free radicals. This corrodes metals rapidly, and damages cell walls in living organisms, such as humans. In layman's terms, chlorine will burn your lungs as you inhale it, as well as burn your skin and eyes.

In an open space however, chlorine gas is less effective, because the intended targets can sense it, and get away from it. Chlorine is thus most effective in enclosed spaces, such as buildings.

Chlorine gas has been deployed as a weapon in several wars throughout history, including WWI and the Iran-Iraq war. Before it was used to attack civilians in Syria, Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime utilized it several times, particularly to suppress armed uprisings in the Northern Kurdish-populated parts of the country. Owing to the extensive use of chlorine as a chemical weapon, and thanks to several industrial accidents during peacetime, the effects of lethal exposure to chlorine gas are well-documented in the annals of medicine and military history.

The chemical attacks in Douma were truly sickening, but they were by no means unique, bearing a similar signature to previous chemical attacks carried out by the Syrian government.

This would soon be uncovered in the massive investigation that ensued. The OPCW launched a Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) to uncover what transpired in Douma, but they were repeatedly blocked from accessing the sites of the attack. The FFM obtained access to the attack sites in late April, two weeks after the chemical attack occurred. This allowed for a sizeable window during which Syrian government officials and Russian military police had exclusive access to the site, raising concerns of evidence tampering.

Nevertheless, the FFM was able to collect biomedical samples, and collect ballistic data on the two bombs used in the attack, though they were never allowed access to any of the corpses from either location. Unbeknownst to the FFM , a collection of “alternative media” outlets were already tooling up to systematically undermine the credibility of its findings before it could even release its final report.

Alternative Media Counteroffensive

In the Douma war of misinformation, WikiLeaks fired the first shot, leaking a series of documents from the FFM. This leak included a couple of report drafts, the interim report, the final FFM report, minutes, and internally circulated communiques from the FFM.

These leaked documents later became linked with complaints from inspectors A and B, two employees from OPCW. Inspector A was a member of the FFM and was initially known only as “Alex”. He was later identified by Bellingcat as Brendan Whelan, a former inspector at OPCW who left the organization months before the release of the final FFM report. Inspector B refers to Ian Henderson, an inspector who was not part of the FFM. The two whistleblowers raised concerns about the integrity of the conclusions reached by the FFM in its interim report, claiming that the report’s conclusions were “flawed and hugely overstated”. These claims were seemingly substantiated by Wikileaks' documents, especially by leaked minutes and email chains, that demonstrated how some members of the FFM voiced doubts about what could be decisively concluded from the data collected in Douma.

However, because WikiLeaks included the final FFM report in the leak, some elements of the media were quick to associate complaints from the two inspectors with the OPCW’s final report, even though the complaints were directed specifically at the interim report. To make matters worse, WikiLeaks neglected to release email chains and minutes from the six months that separated the release of the interim and final reports, meaning that a huge amount of context remains missing from these rather selective leaks.

Taken in isolation, the Wikileaks documents suggest that a report (draft one) was compiled by Inspector A, heavily redacted by those in charge of the FFM (draft two), and then published as the interim report and later as the final report in ignorance of the voiced concerns and doubts of toxicologists and others in the FFM. Effectively, those in charge of the FFM appear to have obfuscated important information and made claims not substantiated by the evidence collected.

There are many problems with the whistleblower’s claims. Bellingcat goes into extensive detail on the various issues with the whistleblower’s interpretations. You can read their findings here, and here, and here.

If you don’t want to read three lengthy report summaries, you can take a look at this helpful visual guide and video produced by the New York Times, or read on for a brief summary below.

Put simply, Inspectors A and B glossed over a great deal of complexity when forming their arguments, and misrepresented the evidence gathered by the FFM. Their arguments were based on a misunderstanding of the science involved and were hamstringed by their own lack of awareness of later developments in the investigation.

For example, Whelan’s “trace amounts” argument implied that the chlorine-reactive elements found at location 2 could have come from any source, including household bleach, and thus the presence of such elements was not sufficient evidence of chemical weapons. This specific objection was refuted by the FFM in a letter, where the director general of the OPCW explained that the presence of such elements was indeed sufficient evidence because the OPCW now used more precise equipment which could distinguish the "trace amounts" left behind by bleach and those found in the aftermath of a chemical weapons attack.

As Bellingcat further pointed out in their report, Whelan's argument belies the fact that these “trace amounts” were found on every surface and on every floor of the affected structure, even in rubble, embedded in a wooden plank found near the cannister, and on an adjacent street. [4]

The two inspectors also transgressed their own jurisdictions, with Henderson deciding to interfere in the FFM even though he was never officially part of it. In the process, Henderson recklessly mishandled highly classified information concerning the investigation, and this information leaked, falling into the hands of a group of pro-Assad Western academics.

White Helmets False Flag Operation

An in-depth analysis of the two cannisters and bombsites by Forensic Architecture, a research group from the University of London

The more insidious allegation concerning Douma has been that the attack was entirely fabricated, most likely by volunteers from the White Helmets, with perhaps some coordination with local Islamist militants.

This theory has been put forth by both Russian and Syrian sources, with a Russian news crew – the only foreign press allowed to visit the sites of the attack –being among the first to disseminate this claim. The false flag idea was then quickly picked up by cranks like Eva Bartlett, Jimmy Dore, Vanessa Beeley [4.5], and Carla Ortiz, Richard Medhurst, and many more!

For this theory to make any sense, you would have to account for several factors.

For one, you would have to assume that all eyewitness accounts were fabricated. That's the easiest hurdle though, because a false flag theory must also explain how dozens of bodies ended up in the locations where the attacks took place. It seems inevitable that those people would have to have been murdered with chemicals such as chlorine beforehand, otherwise they would not exhibit the signs of exposure to chemical weapons to fool chemical weapons inspectors.

The bodies would then have to be transported to the targeted buildings under heavy shellfire (remember, Douma was under siege when this attack happened) before being strewn around vacant buildings. All of this would be a logistical nightmare, but it’s a walk in the park compared to the next hurdle.

With regards to the canisters, several key details would have to be convincingly fabricated to fool a group of ballistics experts, seasoned chemical weapons inspectors, and toxicology experts.

As noted by Bellingcat's report:

"The fakery, from the manufacturing of the cylinders to the chemical samples, would have had to be carried out to an incredibly high standard, indeed high enough that it could fool not only the FFM, but also multiple witnesses at the site of the attack. The craters and cylinder would have had to be perfectly consistent with two cylinders falling from height and impacting the roofs in order to fool the three independent analyses carried out by the FFM."

The rapid corrosion of the cylinder that landed at location 4 in Douma. The first photo was taken on April 8, 2018, and the last on June 3, 2018.

This would be very difficult to achieve. First, two pristine empty cannisters would have to be located and then brought to the site of the attack. Since there are a multitude of spent chlorine cannisters doting the Syrian landscape, this doesn’t sound inherently difficult, until you realize that the cannisters would have to be uncorroded. This would be practically impossible to find because as a cannister of chlorine is “detonated”, the rapid decompression causes auto-refrigeration, whereby frost forms on the cannister.

This frost – water – then reacts with chlorine, creating acid, causing rapid corrosion. The only way the White Helmets or rebels could achieve this would be to find two recently spent cannisters somewhere in Syria, quickly transport them to the location of the false flag attack, and somehow make it through the thousands of Syrian soldiers besieging Douma. If the rebels somehow overcame all these colossal hurdles, their problems would be far from over. (video is an example of auto-refrigeration from a chlorine cannister in Damascus, courtesy of Bellingcat)

The damage inflicted by the cannisters as they struck the rooftops of buildings would have to be fabricated with laser precision so that the damage irrefutably suggests that the cannisters fell from the sky in a manner consistent with being dropped from the air. The cannisters would necessarily have to be damaged in a very precise way as well to recreate the damage consistent with the bomb striking nose first, with the mounts that attached it to helicopters becoming destroyed. This would almost certainly necessitate dropping the cannisters from a significant height. Because of the immense forces required to damage the cannisters in this way, dropping the cannisters from an aircraft would almost certainly be the only way to recreate this damage [5]. Jaysh-al-Islam did not have any warplanes at this point, and Syria maintained complete aerial superiority throughout the entirety of the campaign in Ghouta.

Finally, you would somehow have to get these spent cannisters to precisely recreate the effects of a cannister that has just released chlorine gas. This means you would have to somehow simulate the auto-refrigeration captured on film by the White Helmets, then the brief period in which the cannister is still bright yellow, and finally its quick corrosion.

Left: auto-refrigeration of cannister at location 2, from White Helmets video taken in immediate aftermath of the attack. Right: the corroded remains of the same cannister, taken at later date.

Rebel Aircraft? (an aside)

There are no recorded instances of any rebel groups, whether from the opposition, ISIS, or any nonstate entity in Syria carrying out aerial attacks of any kind over the course of the Syrian Civil War. In terms of aerial warfare, militant groups have focused on the acquisition of anti-aircraft weapons, since these are far cheaper, easier to obtain, and simpler to maintain. Several rebel groups in Syria now have access to some of the most advanced Russian and Chinese MANPADS, which can be easily used by any able-bodied militant. Aircraft by contrast require trained aviators to fly them. They also necessitate a secure airport and extensive logistical and technical support. Syria's rebel groups do not possess the financial, technical, and strategic resources required to fulfill those requirements.

Even the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which receives significant external support from the United States opts to execute airstrikes using the U.S. Air Force, rather than establishing its own.

For the record, Islamist groups have captured aircraft over the course of the war. Jirah Airbase was briefly taken by Jaysh-al-Islam in 2013, but the Islamist militants were forced to abandon their effort to establish an “air force” (consisting of two airplanes) when one of its enemies, ISIS, took over the same base in 2014. Having said that, Jirah is in the north of Syria, and ISIS lost the airbase in 2017 when the Syrian government recaptured it. The status of these aircraft is unknown, and while there is evidence that ISIS restored the airworthiness of some of their captured warplanes, and was even training pilots with them, there is no recorded instance of any of them being used in any aerial attacks against civilian targets, or any attacks for that matter.

ISIS fighters posing with captured MiG-21 in picture posted to Twitter (courtesy of Business Insider)

A closer look of some of the planes reportedly captured by ISIS. As can be seen, they appear to be in rather bad condition.

There are of course, many recorded instances of the Syrian Arab Air Force carrying out attacks against civilian targets using both conventional and chemical munitions. Based on the evidence at hand these aircraft were either destroyed in flight by Syrian government forces or lost when ISIS was forced out of the airbase.

Again, there is no concrete evidence whatsoever that rebels in Syria are operating warplanes in any consistent or strategically significant manner. Several airbases were overrun in 2013 and 2014, but the Syrian government has managed to reclaim and hold on to most airbases in government territories since then. The Syrian Air Force and its Russian counterparts have enjoyed mostly unchallenged aerial superiority throughout the conflict, except in instances of clashes with enemy air forces such as those of Turkey, the United States, Israel, etc.

What if rebels stole/made unspent cannisters?

The OPCW investigated a site in Douma suspected by Syrian authorities of being a chemical weapons factory and found no evidence to suggest that Jaysh-al-Islam had the capability to manufacture such weapons. The only militant group that has been proven to both manufacture and use chemical weapons is ISIS, and as previously mentioned, ISIS is one of Jaysh-al-Islam’s main enemies. [6]

Additionally, the Syrian government insists that none of the chemical weapons stockpiles nearest to Douma were missing any bombs, ruling out the improbable suggestion that the cannisters were stolen. Even if the rebels somehow did manage to steal and smuggle in two unspent chlorine cannisters, again somehow evading the entire Syrian Army, they would still be unable to drop them from the required height or at the precise angle to recreate the damage seen on the cannister and the craters in the targeted buildings. They would also have to somehow carry these heavy bombs through a deadly bombardment, into private residences, set them up, and then detonate them. It’s all very convoluted, and virtually impossible.

Still My Small Violin Gently Weeps…

Nevertheless, the kooks persist. For them, the true Douma tragedy was that a chemical attack that never happened (or was a false flag operation, or was done by rebels, or was really just a dust storm, or maybe Hillary’s noxious lies…) is being utilized to slander the Assad regime. According to them, allegations against Syria of chemical weapons attacks are akin to the false claims of WMD pushed by the Bush administration in the leadup to the Iraq war. In other words, this is all just Western imperialist propaganda being used as a cudgel by Western propagandists to hurt poor Assad...

Yes, poor Assad, who collaborated with George W. Bush in the neocon effort to set up black sites throughout the world to torture people, whose father was cozy with literal Nazis such as Alois Brunner (henchman of Adolf Eichmann, who was number 3 in the Nazi hierarchy), and who now systematically starves, bombs, gasses, and terrorizes the men, women and children who stand between him and total domination of a state born of European colonial map-drawing.

This, it appears, is the hill that our kooky leftist friends have decided to die on.

Never mind that the attack in Douma was suspiciously like helicopter-borne chlorine bomb attacks that have been recorded throughout the conflict in Aleppo (2016), Al-Lataminah (2016), Saraqib (2018) and many, many others. Never mind that the cannisters found in Douma are analogues of cannisters which have turned up throughout Syria and that are known to be employed by Assad’s armed forces.

Never mind that two helicopters were recorded leaving a Syrian Air Force airbase near Douma and were spotted flying around the besieged city at the exact time the attack happened.

These inconvenient facts are either complete fabrication or mere coincidence to our unswayable tankie comrades. Given the massive pile of evidence, matched only by the apparent lack of a conscience in those that knowingly continue to parrot lies about this and other attacks, it is safe to say that it isn’t compassion or altruism that fuels the tirades of this revolting circuit of alternative media.

Tracking the Insanity

It wasn't just the kooks though who bought into the Douma false flag theory. Several notable journalists lent their credibility to the false flag story, including Peter Hitchens, Aaron Mate, and Robert Fisk. As a result, the false flag theory gained a great deal of credibility, and conspiracy theorists were quick to capitalize on this.

Over the course of October 2020, Medhurst mentioned Douma nine times in various tweets, including this particularly pungent thread of bullshit, echoing many of his snake oil salesman counterparts. He attempted to explain away the attack as a piece of staged Western propaganda. Special attention was paid to the efforts of the OPCW to investigate the attack, and on the Wikileaks file dumps. Medhurst also retweeted Eva Bartlett, a blogger who is on the Russia Today payroll and who openly advocates for the Assad regime.

Investigative Journalism?

Much like Medhurst, Bartlett is a self-proclaimed independent journalist who lacks any credentials in journalism. She has been one of the most vocal critics of the White Helmets, and insists they are a terrorist organization. She has spread several conspiracy theories on the group, claiming that they have staged search and rescue operations, and that groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders all turn a blind eye to their participation in terrorist activities such.

Though Bartlett styles herself as a veteran field reporter, she has never transgressed the boundaries of the “Assad approved” tours she has been taken on. In fact, Bartlett has never visited a single part of Syria that wasn’t under regime control. Instead, the intrepid blogger extraordinaire opts to label all those in rebel-held territory as “terrorists” and leave it at that.

Need I explain how incredibly racist it is for a white woman to insist that any mass movement led by Syrians must necessarily be the product of either imperialist subterfuge or Islamic terrorism? (Would you be able to make that argument about BLM for instance and not be rightly seen as a racist asshole?) Basking in unwarranted self-importance, Bartlett visibly delights in regularly denigrating the work of actual journalists, denouncing them all as unthinking sheep beholden to a broken system where ideological purity takes precedence over truth. [7]

Bartlett is passionate about elevating the voices of “average Syrians”. As proof of the magnanimity of the Assadists, she once quoted a Syrian Army general (you know, an average Syrian) who declared that he would not attack a neighborhood if there are “too many civilians”. Bartlett was happy to take the kindly general at his word.

Clearly this is demonstrative of Bartlett's unparalleled journalistic integrity and her willingness to pursue the truth wherever it may lead.

Curiously, Bartlett never seems to wonder why almost every civilian she interviews in brutally recaptured Syrian cities are reluctant to talk about war crime allegations and abuse committed by the army that now patrols their streets. Of course, she is always willing to doubt the testimony of any of the “terrorists” residing in rebel-held Syria.

Bartlett gets much circulation on Syrian and Russian news outlets. Additionally, she has been interviewed multiple times on the Jimmy Dore Show, and once on Medhurst’s show [8]. As if to complete the circle of ideological tools and bigots, Bartlett has also sat for interviews with Ryan Dawson, a podcast host and holocaust denier.

Outside of her regular haunt as a distinguished Russia Today tool (erm, I mean, “freelance op-ed writer”), she regularly pens articles for the Centre for Research on Globalization, a Canadian conspiracy theory website that hosts alt-right and white nationalist content alongside Bartlett’s “journalism”.

Bartlett’s articles are a prima facie example of the confirmation bias of these “anti-imperialist” leftists. Her articles make their way onto a variety of online media channels, from far-left anti-imperialists to conspiracy theorists, where they are then packaged as proof of “what is really happening in the Syrian Civil War”.

Bartlett’s fellow “journalists” have been similarly complacent when it comes to properly investigating and sourcing their stories. They repeatedly fail to follow the most basic conventions of journalism required to ensure factuality and impartiality. And since most people do not have the time to sift through an ocean of information to discern what is really true, the end result of their "stellar reporting" is a great deal of disinformation. The same applies to their coverage of Douma, which always seems to mirror the official line taken by Syrian and Russian state broadcasters.

In Sum

It would be wrong to say that there is no value in the ideological dialectic of the sheep who fervently wish to be shepherds. The quasi-journalists of the far-left are, after all, rabidly opposed to imperialism – provided it comes draped in a NATO flag – and are passionate advocates of human rights (unless it’s the rights of some random Syrians in Douma we’re talking about, in which case who cares?!!).

An anti-imperialist stance is something virtually any leftist can appreciate. And when it comes to Syria, there is much that America has done to exacerbate the untold suffering of Syrian civilians, from the systemic destruction of the Syrian economy via sanctions, and relentless bombing campaigns against critical infrastructures. In other words, if your argument is that America has no right nor moral prerogative to intervene in the affairs of Syria, or any other sovereign state for that matter, you will hear no argument from me.

There is much that America – and the West generally – must be held to account for with regards to the sins of its colonialist past and crucially the sins of its neo-colonialist present. I have already painstakingly explored the destabilizing effects of Western imperialism in the Middle East in this article here. In short, it would be facetious bordering on immoral to say that the current instability that predominates the Middle East isn’t at all connected to Western imperialism.

But those that shield Assad’s regime from criticism are not anti-imperialist despite their insistence to the contrary.

For one, siding with Assad means siding with Russian imperialist policies as well, but its more than that, because pro-Assad lackeys in the West also enable a different type of imperialism. The Ba’athist government is after all a deeply imperialist affair, ruling its ethnically disparate subjects with strong arm tactics and intimidation. It is a government based on minority rule, in which the Assad family – composed of Alawites – dominates the major political and military positions of power throughout the country and maintains its grip on Syria with heavy handed policies reminiscent of colonial occupation. Much like the French colonial rule that preceded it, the current Syrian Arab Republic derives its legitimacy from its willingness to brutalize and intimidate its detractors.

Furthermore, by framing the Syrian Civil War as one of imperialism versus anti-imperialism (of imperialist NATO and its allies vs. “anti-imperialist” Syria and Russia), Western Assadists gloss over the multi-faceted nature of the conflict. In recent years, Salafist groups such as Saudi-backed Jaysh-al-Islam have become the more prominent militant groups resisting the Syrian government. But this was not always the case, as the Syrian opposition is populated by a plethora of anarchist, antiauthoritarian, pro-democratic, socialist, and secularist political organizations. In other words, retroactively labelling civilians, and militants in rebel territories as terrorists is not only immoral, but it is also factually inaccurate. There have always been more than two sides to the Syrian Civil War.

This was put best in a letter to the editor published in Freedom, a British anarchist publication:

“The ‘anti-imperialists’ would retort that there is no room for nuance, that not picking sides is playing into the imperialist plan: one is either with Assad or with empire. But if they were listening, they’d know that we have always picked a side: in solidarity with the Syrian anarchists, antiauthoritarians, and thousands of other rebels who managed to organize neighborhood councils and mutual aid networks while up against insurmountable odds and the attacks of a bloodthirsty dictator’s regime.”

In sum, we must call out the self-serving grifters that attempt to divide leftist politics, and pollute it with fascist pro-Assad drivel. These people are very much our enemies as they hold us back and reduce American leftism to a futile parade of performative arrogance.

As leftists, we should unapologetically call out these tools, and stand in international solidarity with those that struggle against authoritarianism.

Thoughts? Comments? Email your thoughts to contrarypedant@gmail.com! Click subscribe to get email notifications!

Footnotes:

[1] A'zaz is currently the capital of the Syrian Interim Government. The small city of around 31,000 residents is a location of strategic value owing to its proximity to the Syria-Turkey border. It has seen fierce fighting, and has been intermittently occupied by various factions including ISIS, the Al-Nusra front, and the Free Syrian Army. Since 2017 the city remains under Turkish occupation and was one of the first to be occupied as part of Turkey's Operation Euphrates Shiled.

Based on pre-civil war pictures, the mosque had two free-standing minarets located roughly where the ruined tanks are in the top picture, and it appears that both were destroyed and have not been rebuilt (the absense of the minarets was also recorded by a commenter on Google Maps as recently as June of 2021). Although some reconstruction appears to have taken place, battle damage is still apparent in more recent pictures of the mosque.

[2] Over the course of the civil war, the unsteady alliance between Islamist groups such as Jaysh-al-Islam and secular groups such as the Free Syrian Army broke down as Islamists gained more power and sway in the opposition camp. This is reflected in Ghouta as in the rest of Syria. Additionally, the Free Syrian Army has weakened considerably since its 2012-2013 peak, and this explains why we are left with an Sunni militant group as the sole source of resistance in Eastern Ghouta by 2018.

[3] The footage of the attack's aftermath, along with photos, can be found online both in the Bellingcat reports on Douma, and on YouTube, although the video is titled in Arabic. Because the video and photo evidence is extremely graphic, I chose not to include it here. Consider this your trigger warning if you intend to watch them.

[4] It is also pertinent to add that it is rather odd, not to mention unlikely, that a group of civilians in a besieged city facing constant bombardment would devote inordinate time to constantly scrubbing every single surface of their homes with bleach, to say nothing of the fact that this assumes that all the affected residents had access to a seemingly limitless supply of bleach in a city that was running out of everything from food to diabetes medicine.

[4.5] In her most outspoken moments, she has called for the volunteers of the Syrian Civil Defense organization to be bombed.

If you’re curious, that would be a war crime. It’s also worth noting that approximately 207 Syrian Civil Defense volunteers have given their lives in pursuit of the organization’s humanitarian aspirations, which makes this type of rhetoric especially vile.

[5] Absent the use of an airplane, you're left arguing that the militants created a very high platform which dwarfed the tallest buildings of Douma by several hundred meters in elevation from which they then dropped the cannisters. Presumably they quickly disassembled the tower afterwards since such a distinctive structure was never found. Those Jihadists sure are crafty.

[6] The two groups have repeatedly fought in deadly clashes, despite both being Sunni Islamist militant factions. So intense is the enmity between the two that Jaysh-al-Islam, which was infamous for beheading "Assadist collaborators" in the basement of its prison in Douma, denounced ISIS essentially for being too extreme, basically because ISIS enforces the death penalty for apostasy.

[7] If there is one thing that Bartlett is more deficient in than journalism, it must surely be irony.

[8] This interview comprises one of a grand total of two articles supposedly penned by Medhurst.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI5wRrv__rI

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/18/syria-white-helmets-conspiracy-theories

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/21/frontroom-blogger-analyses-weapons-syria-frontline

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Jimmy_Dore

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2020/01/15/the-opcw-douma-leaks-part-1-we-need-to-talk-about-alex/

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2020/01/23/the-opcw-douma-leaks-part-3-we-need-to-talk-about-a-false-flag-attack/

https://www.snopes.com/news/2018/04/20/critics-slam-viral-stories-claiming-douma-chemical-attack-victims-died-dust/

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/01/29/dore-j29.html

https://www.opindia.com/2020/12/jimmy-dore-vs-cenk-uygur-democrats-progressives-force-the-vote-medicare-for-all-nancy-pelosi-aoc/