Nafeez Ahmed - State Propaganda in Syria

Nafeez Ahmed looks into what's happening in Syria.

Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis are left-wing, pro Jeremy Corbyn journalists who I greatly respect. They are both very critical of the anti-war left who support Asssad.

Matt Kennard Tweet:

Syria is one of most heavily propagandised conflicts of all time, on both sides. It's near impossible to work out what is going on. The best thing I've read which tries forge a pathway between the competing narratives is by @NafeezAhmed. Read it here

https://t.co/xXXOmyU1dj

Nafeez Ahmed excerpt from his 146 page book:


On the one hand, critics of Western interventionism in Syria are equated with being deniers of
Assad’s war crimes; on the other, critics of Assad’s war crimes are accused of promoting Western
war and regime change in Syria. The results are palpable. On Syria, parts of the antiwar left
increasingly either deny Russian and Syrian military violence, or justify it; while critics of Assad
increasingly find themselves siding with reactionary Western military responses. But to what
extent are these positions factually and morally tenable?
To answer this question and overcome this impasse, we need a different approach, one that
cultivates collective intelligence. In this investigation, INSURGE intelligence draws on a number of
applied investigative processes to sift through the available data to determine, how can someone
outside of Syria make sense of what is happening?7
 We adopt a holistic approach by navigating
multiple perspectives across the conflict to derive, to the degree possible, validated facts. We
critically interrogate anti-Assad and pro-Assad narratives from a range of journalistic sources to
determine the degree to which they can be verified. We adopt a systemic approach by examining
narratives from a variety of reporting beats – foreign affairs, national security, science, business
and economics, energy and geopolitics: allowing us to begin developing a more integrated vision
of contentious issues: chemical warfare attacks; violence against civilians; the motives of warring
parties; and so on. We ground these approaches in a logic system that helps us, throughout our
analysis, to separate out real insights about the conflict from unfounded assumptions rooted in
questionable bias.
My understanding of the conflict has evolved in many ways as a result of this investigation. Some
of my conclusions were unexpected; in particular, I have learned that the prism through which
I understood the conflict was not only Eurocentric, but over-simplistic and lacking in nuance.
The moral lesson brought home to me is the paramount need for humility and self-reflection in
journalism. Our most unequivocal finding is that no government is telling the full truth about the
war in Syria. Not just a civil war, nor even just a proxy war, Syria is a propaganda war being fought
for competing geopolitical interests. The end-result of this tug of war between pro-interventionist
and anti-interventionist narratives has been the victory of neither, and the entrenchment of
horrendous violence from which the Syrian people on both sides, whether pro- or anti-Assad,
have suffered immeasurably.
As this propaganda escalates, principled journalism has become degraded while observers find
it increasingly difficult to sort fact from fiction. Thus, eclipsed from an increasingly degenerate
public discourse is the reality that both the West and Russia are in the midst of an inter-imperialist
war, of which the Syrian people are victims, and in which their genuine democratic aspirations
are deliberately destroyed.

7 Nafeez Ahmed, ‘Only “collective intelligence” can help us stave off an uninhabitable planet’,