A 2011 Syria Revival
Echoes from the past and starting guide for those who were not there
The Syrian rebels launched an attack against the Bachar al Assad regime forces in northern Syria. They reconquered the town of Aleppo, which was lost in 2016. The offensive could happen because Assad’s allies are engulfed and weakened, Putin in Ukraine, Hezbollah after the war with Israel.
The liberation of Aleppo from Assad’s regime revived some buried hopes and old memories from 13 years ago, when it all started with a bunch of kids writing “your turn is coming, ya Doctor” on a street wall in Deraa...
In so many ways, the revolution in Syria was the entry point for shaping modern OSINT, and the fight against Assad and Putin’s propaganda was instrumental in understanding modern disinformation.
So here is a bunch of member berries from the beginning of the Syrian revolution. From a time when Twitter was a useful social network, Obama was president, Daesh was not even existing, and Russia was only occupying parts of Georgia and not yet Ukraine, before even the white helmets…
For those of you who were there, reporting and researching on the event in Syria, this will feel nostalgic memories sending you back to that time. For those of you who were not there, these are little breadcrumbs that may help you understand the present.
A guy reporting from his couch
There was a guy on his couch who was able to better report on Syria than big newspaper. He was using information available Open Source and double checked his information using his network on Twitter to reach local witnesses or citizen journalists. He became an expert on weapons and was able; by tracking the type of weapon he was seeing on the videos, to know who was involved in the conflict and who was arming what brigade. His name was “Brown Moses” he later created a little thing called Bellingcat. 2011 twitter on Syria revolution was where he elaborated his early methodologies.
A gay girl in Damascus
Amina was a young lesbian girl from Sunni origin, living the revolution in Syria from Damascus, and reporting on her blog. She became quite a phenomenon among media desperately struggling to have access to the ground. When she was abducted by armed men, she triggered international support and reaction for her release.
Amina real name was Tom Mac Master, he was a white heterosexual male living in Edinburgh and the whole blog, stories and characters were pure fiction. Andy Carvin who was instrumental into revealing the Hoax.
This story also revealed a cleavage between old and new journalism, “old” journalists and media were a bit lost with Syrian revolution, the impossibility to access the ground via traditional means, distrust with citizen journalist on social media, but paradoxical trust in well written “blogs”. “New” journalists would work with Open Source and Twitter (at the time very different from our “X”), and with these means gain an exclusive access to the field, and an ability to check and verify stories. The story was also revealing our preconception about Middle East and orientalism, successful hoaxes, working disinformation, fact checking, facts and fictions, and started very interesting debates and thinking on these questions…
“The right to resist is (not) universal”
Max Blumenthal is an American “journalist, author, blogger, and filmmaker” according to his Wikipedia. But everyone knows him as a full-time Putin propagandist. He is one of the famous founders of the disinformation website “the Grayzone”, a name that pretty much anyone working in disinfo field knows or encountered.
What is less known is that Blumenthal, in 2011 and once in his lifetime, stood up against the vindication of Bachar al Assad and opposed Putin’s agenda.
At the time he was writing opinion pieces for Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar (siding leftist – pro-Hezbollah) and, when the Syrian revolution happened, it divided Al Akhbar (and pretty much any other political group of human) in two: you would have to pick a side, the Syrian people or the Syrian dictator.
You could try to do it cunningly or ingeniously (if you would side with the dictator, because siding with the revolution would not require complex explanation and reasoning about geopolitics, complicated middle-east and cynical “realist” diplomacy). Even the Hezbollah was puzzled on how to sell to its fans the fact that it would fight Iran proxy war instead of resisting Israël. And Al Akhbar had to side with Hezbollah coalition, the “8th March”.
Max Blumenthal, with a couple of other people inside Al Akhbar opposed to the apologetic coverage of Syria in favor of Assad, and decided to resign with this famous text: “The Right to Resist is Universal” (now on webarchive).
A few years later in a defunct podcast, Max Blumenthal got his mind back straight, and apologized for this text, saying he was wrong and uttering these words in another burst of honesty: “I was wrong, the right to resist is not universal”…
The secret library
In the suburbs of Damascus, besieged by Assad’s forces, young activists managed to build a secret library. They went out in the bombed building and houses to collect books and bring them to safety. This story shows how books are almost as important as food or sleep and how humans would risk their lives to save and protect knowledge. Hamlet can save lives…
Full story here
The MIT study that proved the Rebels chemical bombed themselves
In august 2013 Bachar al Assad used sarin chemical weapon against his population. This was a “red line” defined by President Obama for military intervention and the intervention almost happened just before Obama finally decided not to go (the decision he is the most proud of).
A few months after, in December 2013 a professor from MIT, Theodore Postol and Richard Loyd an expert in warhead design, developed an analysis revealing some inconsistencies with the US government claims about the incident.
This was the beginning of the chemical crime denialism campaign that lasted for more than a decade.
Up till today you can find people denying Assad’s responsibility into gassing his own population. For Postol, it became a full career. He teamed up with an Assad propagandist on Twitter, Maryam Susli (alias “Partisangirl”) and they wrote “reports” and “analysis” and created proofs that maybe the rebel did it, maybe Assad did not do it. They applied their methodology to other chemical crimes in Syria, notably Khan Sheikhoun in 2017 and Douma in 2018.
Immediately after the “MIT study”, in December 2013, the award winning and famous investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote a piece in the London Review of Books. His claim, based on the “MIT study”, was that “we don’t know” who used Sarin gas so it could be possible that the rebel would gas themselves.
The “MIT study” became an argument from authority, and became associated with the “we don’t know who did it”, up to top commentators and journalists (like France 24 director)
Eliott Higgins got himself a new Sisyphus rock, having to debunk Postol over and over for half a decade…
…and the rest of us we learned the difference between the New York review of books and the London Review of Books.
Kafranblel slogans
Kafranbel, or Kafr Nabl was a small (very small) city in Maraat al Numan province in Syria. In the beginning of Syrian revolution, it followed the same path than everybody: peaceful demonstrations, heavy repression and massacres, then protected by deserters from Assad army who later formed Free Syrian Army and liberated the city. Since august 2012, Kafranbel became famous around the globe for its posters, banners and slogans directly calling out the hypocrisy of the democratic west, spreading hopes for democratic future in Syria, and insulting Daesh.
They also made a movie “The Syrian Revolution in Three Minutes”
Kafranbel was a constant reminder that the Syrian revolution was alive and in contradiction with “geopolitical” analysis, “realist” diplomacy (asking for dialogue with Assad) and the “Assad against Islamic terrorism” prism.
Peaceful civil war
In the early times of what would be quickly dubbed “Syria Civil War”, there were peaceful demonstrations. People would go, in the streets, and call for reform (not even Assad’s removal at first). These protests were met with army, tanks, and “mysterious” armed men shooting at the protesters. Assad would justify the presence of army and tanks for chasing the mysterious armed men shooting at the protestors, called “armed gangs”.
Peaceful demonstration yet continued, despite being met with death and fire, and this is when the comments made about “Syria civil war” appeared really strange, as it was only the regime being at war with peaceful protestors.
Karl Remarks jokes
Karl Sharro is a Lebanese architect living in the UK. In these days he was on twitter active as “Karl Remarks” and had a satirical website. He was making fun of orientalism in newspaper trying to cover the Middle East. We ow him some serious burst of laughter. Like this story on how the Hezbollah (who could not openly endorse Assad’s support) was sending its forces inside Syria because of a GPS error, the Onion willing to sue Lebanon for destroying the satire business with reality, or the hilarious Robert Fisk parody
“Un oeil sur la Syrie”
For French people interested in what was happening in Syria, this blog was a beacon in the dark night. Wladimir Glasman, diplomat, researcher, Arab speaker and with intimate knowledge of Syria was regularly updating this blog with invaluable information.
When the revolution started, it quickly became very hard to get reliable information. Experts, journalists, scholars, everybody who had knowledge of the country had to build and to rely on a network of contacts and sources from inside the regime. Suddenly, this network was completely useless (unless you wanted to report on regime propaganda). Also, nobody could access the field because journalists became a target very quickly.
Some people managed to create a new network of reliable sources from inside the opposition (using twitter or social networks). Other, like Wladimir Glasman managed to cover the opposition side with its expertise and knowledge of the language and of the region, and with the intimate conviction that Assad had to fall, and revolution would prevail.
Wladimir Glasman, who was writing under the pseudonym Ignace Leverrier, died in august 2015, leaving many people both orphans and determined to never stop believing in the Syrian revolution.
The « Islamic Winter » propaganda
Because the wave of democratic revolutions in the middle east in 2011 were named “the Arab Spring”, it gave birth to a wave of commentators predicting “an Islamic Winter”. The idea was that the hopes for democracy in the Arab world were completely unreasonable (because of cultural, political, historical, sometime even nearly racial factors) and that any attempt to remove authoritarian regime in the hope of getting democracy would end up in “Islamist” regimes taking over.
These predictions, even if not completely lacking self-fulfilling prophecy, would play directly into Assad and other “secular” dictator propaganda who would claim to fight “Islamism” and “terrorism”.
It was also a constant flow of complex geopolitical analysis and clichés about “Sunni versus Shias”, “Assad protects the minorities”, “Assad will not fall because he has the support from the Sunni business elite”; “revolutionaries do not have leaders”; “the Alawi solidarity” etc. Obviously these geopolitical clichés would play directly into the hands of some pro-Assad experts and propagandists.
The debate over militarization
At the beginning the protests were peaceful. Assad regime sent tanks, snipers and soldiers after the classic beating and intimidation by Shabiha would not work. Some soldiers started to refuse to obey the orders of shooting peaceful protesters and became deserters, with their weapons. (Eliott Higgins was there again instrumental into confirming this version of the story, showing that the weapons used from the early Free Syrian Army brigade were really coming from Assad’s army stocks and not from outside).
The debate over militarisation started there, with some armed deserters willing to protect the peaceful demonstration from being butchered. Half of Syrians were in favor of militarisation, half were against. Their argument was that it would play into Assad’s game and help him turn the revolution into a civil war he could crush with brute force.
Traces of this crucial debate can be found here, with the statement from the Local Coordination Committee standing against militarisation
Thomas L Friedman explaining why the Arab Spring started (no pun intended)
The famous New York Times columnist surpassed himself in March 2011 with this masterpiece about the Arab Spring. Among the factors which would explain the Arab Spring he thought of Google Maps showing Shia men who want to get married the unequal distribution of land; Obama’s dark skin and middle name “Hussein”; or the new form of government (that no one knows or remembers) invented by Salem Fayyad and dubbed (by Friedman) Fayyadism.
Julian Assange got a TV Show
Julian Assange started a show on Russia Today (that was not yet called “RT”). “The World Tomorrow”. He interviewed Hassan Nasrallah (as his very first interview) and Noam Chomsky among others.
The Paris-Damascus air France flight
In 2012, because of a small unrest in Beirut and people burning tires on the highway to the airport, a Paris-Beirut Air France Flight decided to avoid landing. But because of lack of kerosene, the plane could not go far from Beirut and had to quickly pick a secure place in middle east to land. So, they chose Damascus airport.
Inside this plane were sitting the French ambassador, and some political opponents to the Assad’s regime. The crew negotiated to prevent the Assad security forces from entering the plane and everybody was stuck there for 20 hours. Finally, the crew asked for some cash to the passenger “to pay for refuel” to the Syrian authorities.
"As a precaution and in anticipation, the crew asked how much money the passengers had in cash to pay to fill up with fuel," the airline spokeswoman said.
She said the airline was eventually able to pay the bill without taking money from passengers, but she declined to say how it had paid or how much the fuel stop cost.
Banksy epic fail
In autumn 2013, just after Assad’s chemical attacks, the mega renown street artist Banksy published an artistic video about Syria, as his very first artistic take on the conflict.
The video depicts Syrian rebels, dirty, with sandals, and only shouting “Allah Ouakbar” shooting down a plane with a rocket launcher. But instead of a plane, it is the Disney character Dumbo that falls on the ground, and the “Islamists” climb on him cheering and shouting “Allah Ouakbar”.
Banksy was quickly reminded on social media and op-eds that the skies in Syria are filled not with Dumbo but with Assad helicopters and Putin’s planes dropping barrel bombs and chemical weapons, that depicting rebels as scary Islamists who can only shout “Allah Ouakbar” is somewhere between post-Reagan Chuck Norrisian philosophy and classic Orientalism, and that the overall thing would play directly into Assad’s propaganda against the “islamist terrorists rebels”. (And also no, the rebels did not have access to anti-aircraft weaponry, sadly)
After this epic fail, Banksy redeemed himself by joining the campaign #WithSyria in 2014 and dedicating one of his iconic character, the girl with the red balloon.
Want more?
you can find a serious database of archives over the Syrian revolution, arts, caricatures, sculptures, paintings, slogans…