Russian Insider

The Liberation of Aleppo didn't stop the Opposition juggernaut and its propaganda machine - now its '100,000 civilians under siege' on the outskirts of the capital, and four million hostages in Damascus... Article first published on Russian InsiderJanuary 6, 2016. Republished here with author's permission.

The 'liberation of Aleppo' didn't just free tens of thousands of people from oppression and intimidation by violent militants and mercenaries; it also freed hundreds of thousands in Western Aleppo from a four-year long regime of terror. As the citizens of European countries become increasingly paralysed by the terrorist attacks on public gatherings in some cities, they might spare a thought for the millions of Syrians who have been living with this threat every day since the US and its allies launched the 'War OF Terror' on Syria in 2011.

But there may be another welcome change brought by Aleppo's liberation; that the Syrian Opposition and its supporters are now living on borrowed time. The propaganda juggernaut that was unleashed against the Syrian Army and its allies - Russia, Iran and Hezbollah - had gained so much momentum that it simply kept going, despite being mortally wounded. And even as the last militants were forced from their hold out in Aleppo's old city, a literal juggernaut of aid was being dispatched from Europe to help them stay there.

Barely pausing to acknowledge that Aleppo had indeed 'fallen' - as they described it - a new narrative was rapidly developed to sustain the 'Syrian Revolution' both in its supporters' minds and on the ground. As the real Syrian civilians in need of food and medical care streamed into reception centres set up by the Russian and Syrian governments in West Aleppo, the mythical 'quarter of a million civilians besieged by Assad's and Putin's bombs' in East Aleppo were urgently relocated to Idlib province, where they could again be used as human shields to protect the dwindling insurgent army.

They weren't actually relocated of course, as the evacuations showed quite dramatically that these masses of anti-Assad Syrian civilians had never been there in the first place. Even some of the fighters in the East deserted the fake revolution, bravely accepting the government's amnesty and re-joining their liberated fellow Syrians.

Adding insult to the injury of watching Syrians across the country celebrate the dramatic new gains in Syria's War on Terror, Russian and Turkish diplomats had talks with representatives of some Syrian armed groups and negotiated a nationwide ceasefire with them, later ratified by the UN Security Council. The jihadists who had just been bussed out of East Aleppo with their families into the remaining 'rebel-held' territory around Idlib evidently weren't party to the ceasefire agreement, having refused to cease firing in East Aleppo. But for the insistence of the UN, and the necessity to force an agreement to end the 'rebel' siege, those recalcitrant extremists would have been imprisoned or executed. Such punishment was certainly deemed reasonable by most Syrians, many of whom had lost relatives from their violent criminal attacks.

So what to do? How to sustain the fake 'revolution' when the revolutionaries have been so comprehensively exposed, not just as violent terrorists no different from those involved in attacks in European cities, but as mercenaries being assisted by the coalition of Syria's enemies in the West. For not only did the clearance of the last jihadists from East Aleppo allow people to go back and see what remained of their dear city - they also discovered what had really being going on there, particularly in the last few months.

Hospitals and schools had become military bases and weapons factories, and basements were used to torture prisoners and hostages and to store weapons and ammunition. Most extraordinarily, the 'rebels' had been forced to leave behind an arsenal of weapons that filled seven warehouses, as well as betraying the sponsors of the 'democratic revolution'. Truckloads of missiles and ammunition, and even tanks, all shipped in from the West via Turkey were brought out for display to the World's media...

And the 'World's' media? They lost interest a few days before the siege was ended. In a collective act of diversion, reminiscent of 'displacement activity', all those Western media organisations who had been so recently hysterical about 'saving Aleppo's children' suddenly found other urgent or trivial events to focus on. Having been prepared to support a full-scale military attack on Syrian Defence forces and their allies, if only leaders could be persuaded to launch one, the many foreign false 'Friends of Syria' could barely even admit to themselves what had just happened.

Not only had their concocted false narrative been exposed as criminally fraudulent, but their endless attacks on Russia, Syria and their allies for 'brutal carelessness' and 'war crimes' had also been betrayed by events on the ground. Unlike examples from recent history, where the breaking of sieges was accompanied by huge 'collateral damage' - one thinks of Fallujah in 2004 or Sirte in 2012 - the death toll of civilians sustained in the Syrian Army's operation in East Aleppo appears to have been minimal. Indeed the greatest number of casualties that could be claimed by supporters of the insurgency was less than 100, and most of those appear to have been prisoners or civilians trying to escape who were killed by the militants.

The widely broadcast warnings from the likes of Samantha Power, that this was going to be another 'Guernica' or 'Sbrenica', were revealed as merely desperate and grotesque attempts to save the West's fast-collapsing regime-change project.

But sadly that is not the end of it.

Even before the siege was over Al Jazeera was preparing to continue its daily 'Aleppo Onslaught' news broadcast with an 'Idlib Onslaught' one. We may remember how in the last days opposition armed groups refused to accept the agreed liberation of villages Foua and Kefraya, setting fire to 25 buses sent to bring out residents and holding the drivers hostage. This was an indication of the nature of the armed groups holding power west of Aleppo and around Idlib, and even Western commentators acknowledged they were dominated by Jabhat al Nusra. But Al Jazeera continued to provide global media support to their terrorist 'brothers under siege' in East Aleppo, and intended to follow them as they were finally expelled from their to Idlib province.

While Al Jazeera and its partner organisations have continued with this unconvincing theme - that 'civilians' and 'moderate rebels' in Idlib will be endangered by Syrian and Russian airstrikes against Al Qaeda linked militants not covered by the ceasefire agreement - support groups in the UK, and proabably elsewhere seem to have come up with a better scheme.

A group calling itself 'Syria Solidarity UK' claims to have received a statement from 'local community organisations' in Wadi Barada, which is a valley extending north-west from Damascus that contains the ancient spring of Ain al Fijeh that supplies 70% of the city's water.

Reliable Syrian sources reported that militants occupying the valley had poured diesel into the water, forcing authorities to cut off the supply to Damascus about ten days ago. The Syrian Army and Hezbollah allies ( the area is close to the Lebanese border) are now trying to kill the armed jihadists - Jabhat al Nusra - in the villages close to the spring, following the evacuation of remaining civilians in the area. Along with the nearby 'rebel' hold-outs of Madaya and Zabadani, Wadi Barada has been under opposition control since 2012, and attempts to negotiate ceasefire settlements in this area have so far failed. The success of such negotiations in many other towns and cities, including suburbs of Damascus, Homs and now Aleppo, mostly hinged upon an 'escape clause' for the Islamist extremist groups and their families, and it is imporant to understand how this bizarre policy could work and why it was necessary.

Most of the fighters in these liberated areas were prepared to accept the Government amnesty, which guaranteed that no punitive action would be taken against those who surrendered their arms. The determined jihadists who refused were given safe passage, with their families and even their weapons to Idlib province, which was and remains under 'rebel' control. This was a very hard pill to swallow for loyal Syrians, and particularly for Syrian soldiers who had seen their comrades slaughtered by suicide bombers and IEDs, or tortured and executed while trying to defend the community from the mostly foreign and foreign-armed terrorists.

But in Madaya, which became well-known in the West as a place 'under siege' where residents were alleged to be dying of starvation, no such evacuation agreement was reached, thanks mostly to the massive propaganda campaign supporting the extremist groups who controlled the town - Ahrar al Sham and Jabhat al Nusra. As in Aleppo, these militants were actually the ones responsible for the siege, taking control of UN-provided Food Aid and shooting civilians trying to escape.

When a UN aid convoy finally arrived in Madaya a year ago, many residents jumped at the opportunity to escape, but Ahrar al Sham survived with its remaining 'human shields'. Now that the scheme to protect their terrorist brothers in East Aleppo has failed, it is Ahrar and its allies around Madaya who are called on to carry the torch of the fake revolution forward.

This is the vital context, and the context missing from Western news and media, which is now reporting the exact narrative prepared by Al Jazeera, Syria Solidarity UK and other leaders of the propaganda war on Syria.

It is not the 'rebels' of Wadi Barada who are responsible for sabotaging Damascenes' drinking water, but Hezbollah and the Syrian Army. The Syrian Army is not targeting Jabhat al Nusra, who don't have a presence or support in Wadi Barada, but is trying to drive out the civilian population and its 'rebel' defenders. And the 'regime' in now holding 100,000 civilians under siege, cut off from food and water and essential supplies.

 But - say the 'defenders of Wadi Barada' - 'we will urgently seek to restore the water supply, and arrange for maintenance persons to come in, as soon as the Syrian Army and Hezbollah cease all their attacks on our citizens.'

 'And if they don't agree to this, then we can no longer recognise the ceasefire..'

   No doubt there will be many Syrians now saying 'why did you let the terrorists go to Idlib and not take them straight to prison?'

  (I have a 'disclaimer' - I work with the Syria Solidarity Movement, which rather like the REAL Syrian Civil Defence works to support Syrians in their fight against Western backed terrorists and their supportive propaganda. We are totally opposed to everything that 'Syria Solidarity UK' stands for and supports, which include the fake 'Syrian Civil Defence' or 'White Helmets', a No Fly Zone over Syria, and the removal of Syria's democratically elected and popular President by whatever means are necessary.)

Great advances this week by the Syrian army and Russian air force have broken the rebel siege of two towns, and broken their umbilical link with Turkey. But they have also revealed the truth about Western media 'journalism'...

Something really significant happened this week. It wasn’t the last-ditch attempts to find a peaceful solution to the Syrian conflict in Geneva, or their failure. Neither was it the game-changing developments on the ground in Syria and the tightening of the noose around the foreign-backed terrorist armies – though this was certainly ‘significant’.

What happened was that the mask of ‘humanitarian relief’ fell off the Western interventionists and their media cheer squads like so much dirty linen, exposing the naked self-interest behind the whole rotten Syrian conspiracy.
While the ridiculous deliberations over what style of terrorist was an acceptable participant in the Geneva talks may have been a vexing spectacle for Syrians, and the attention paid by the Western media to the ‘High Negotiations Committee’ an affront to their senses, it didn’t really surprise anyone.

Perhaps Syrians weren’t surprised either by the rapid gains of the Russian-Syrian offensive and moves to cut the last convenient border crossing west of Aleppo – something which so many had been hanging out for for so long and specially in rebel-besieged Aleppo. Unlike all those ignorant souls unable to see out of the Western media bubble, they had been watching it all unfold for weeks, as well as being conscious of the strategic significance and urgency of cutting Turkey out of the Syrian war – thanks in no small part to the Russian military’s free supply of information.

But as a collective cheer echoed around Syria when it was announced that the border had been cut, a collective spasm engulfed Western media commentators and government spokesmen, rapidly spreading to UN representatives and Aid agencies, Foreign Ministers and leaders.

“Rebel supply lines have been cut!” they cried indignantly, as if Russia had cut them by accident, not realising the rebels depended on these ‘supplies’ that came in from Turkey just to survive.

It may be a struggle to understand how it can be that all these people ‘just don’t get it’- don’t understand that the Syrian army and the Russian air force, Hezbollah and Iran are targeting their ‘rebels’ intentionally; that they are trying to kill them or drive them out, or trap them so they are forced to surrender. This is after all what military campaigns do, and it is abundantly clear that only a military solution is now possible against these murderous militants.

But perhaps they do understand it, and this is just ‘wilful ignorance’ – an attempt to maintain the sham reality of the ‘revolution’ and the ‘Free Syrian Army’ so they can go on using it to conceal their unrelenting campaign to seize power from Damascus.

What the falling of the ‘humanitarian mask’ has revealed is that all these drivers and accomplices to the armed insurgency have lied and obfuscated and spun their dirty conspiracy from the start. But now that Russia has ripped off their cover they are shameless about what they’ve done.

What is more, the admissions of complicity in this illegal armed insurrection against Syria’s elected government have come first from Western reporters and commentators, such as the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Matt Brown, who framed the news on the breaking of ‘rebel supply lines’ like this:

MATT BROWN: "It's substantial because of that supply line. It demonstrates the power of Russian air strikes because the UN says that they were unprecedented in this operation.

It's also cut the rebels off from supplies of food, fuel, ammunition, weapons and fighters that they were getting down that supply route from Turkey."

That’s right – the ‘rebels’, who we have been told for years need our ‘aid’ because they are being massacred and starved by the Syrian government have not been doing so badly after all.

Every time there was a new ‘massacre’ we have listened to earnest discussions on supplying ‘non-lethal aid’, and humanitarian aid, and demands that ‘humanitarian corridors’ must be opened.

And when the Syrian government has opposed these plans on the grounds that arms and ammunition might be smuggled in with the humanitarian aid, it has then been blamed for the failure and the ongoing war.

How astounding it is then to hear this admission from someone like Brown – who despite his record of advocacy for the rebel cause, has never revealed his knowledge of its umbilical connection to Turkey. In fact this reality has been concealed from his Australian audience at all costs, even though it’s been plain as daylight to the rest of us.

Back in 2013 Matt Brown made a documentary called ‘Ibrahim’s war’, which told the story of a 11 year old boy living in the rebel-occupied part of Aleppo, whose father had abandoned his job and went out every day to fight ‘on the front’. That this was actually with the Front – the Al Nusra Front – was never admitted by Brown, even less what this terrorist group was actually doing – targeting neighbouring residential areas with snipers and indiscriminate rocket and mortar fire.

Brown related his experience at the time he made his ‘UN award-winning’ documentary in the report above:

"In 2013, I drove down to Aleppo from the north, a little further to the east than where this has happened in what is now territory controlled by the Islamic State group; and earlier I had hiked in further to the west across the border into the towns west of Aleppo.

We slept in the same houses as foreign fighters actually, who were also crossing in, and the government is now pushing in that direction.

So, it just gives you some idea of how cut off the rebels in Aleppo are becoming. That's underlined the power also of Iranian advisors, the pro-government militias and those Russian air strikes and the rebels say it proves that the government isn't serious about those peace talks."

It might sometimes be a narrow line between journalism and political advocacy, but for Brown and his media colleagues this line has evidently now become invisible. But whether they identify themselves as political actors has almost ceased to matter, because as far as their audience is concerned they are only journalists, award-winning ones. When they report what 'the rebels say' - how would this audience know they are hearing dangerous nonsense?

As is was, proof that the rebels aren't serious about peace talks was just provided by the ABC's sister state TV channel, SBS in its evening news bulletin about the latest developments around Aleppo. Opinion was sought from the Syrian Opposition's 'Chief Negotiator', who turned out to be none other than Mohammed Alloush, the new leader of one of the Saudi's most favoured terrorist groups in Syria.

Do they really believe that the Syrian government could 'negotiate' with this man?

Article first published in Russian Insider. Check the comments out there too.

If the downing of a Russian airliner in Sinai was in fact an act of terrorism, Western media's veritable gloating over the murder of tourists is another mark on their long record of shame. (Article first published in Russian Insider on Sat, Nov 7, 2015.

Sometimes we can almost laugh at the twisting of truth in the Western media, as commentators come up with weird analyses to make sense of their own preposterous stories. So it was recently, when their fantastic creation of the 'moderate rebel fighter' was exposed to Vladimir Putin's incisive 'common sense' at Valdai.

But such light-hearted moments quickly give way to the more rational sentiments of frustration, vexation and incredulity, and an enduring cynicism about everything that is said and done by those across 'the credibility crevasse' that now separates the West from 'the East'; how can we ever succeed in getting 'common sense' back into the current Western narrative around the Syrian conflict?

Following Russia's intervention in Syria there was a wave of optimism on her side of the crevasse that some sense might prevail in the Western corridors of power - a hope that even if Russia's request for cooperation in fighting terrorism was dismissed, those powers and their local agents would at least stop actively fuelling the conflict with arms and propaganda. Some hope.

This week frustration with the Western media narrative has turned much darker - the despicable reaction of many media commentators to the tragic deaths of 224 innocent people in the Russian plane crash in Sinai has now turned that frustration to intense anger. Far from this being an occasion to take a step back and ask 'what are we doing that has led to this?' - following on from widespread suspicion that this crash was no accident, those commentators have already framed it as a response to Russia's actions in Syria and Ukraine - even a justified response.

Interviewing Australia's Foreign Minister Julie Bishop on Monday, the ABC's long serving and widely respected radio presenter Fran Kelly posed her question like this:

 “Of course the Australian government - as you've said - extends its sympathies to countries which have lost citizens here and the families of those citizens, but I must ask you minister does it strike you as ironic that Russia wants to wait until a full investigation is conducted into the causes of this plane crash, before making any further comment, given how hostile President Putin was to a full investigation into flight MH17?”

Although Bishop preferred not to speculate until more was known about the cause of the crash, she prefaced with this comment:

“Yes I'm sure the irony won't be lost on people, but now is not the time for me to make such a comment.. (..considering the grieving relatives and friends..)”

For those of us who understand the depths of deceit over the downing of MH17, and the lengthy and compromised Dutch inquiry into the causes of that crash, Kelly's casual dismissal of Vladimir Putin's conduct is highly offensive. Although we all know that Russia's investigation into the Ukrainian crash was stymied by the refusal of the US to release its satellite data, and Kiev's refusal to release air transport control records for the flight, Kelly and other commentators ignore this. They continue to claim that Russia vetoed moves at the UN to set up a criminal investigation because this would reveal Russia's guilt over the atrocity. Because of them, Australians now believe that Vladimir Putin has 'denied justice to the victims of MH17'.

It is disturbing to realise that the thinking of Western commentators, and of the public who believe them, have been so poisoned by Imperial propaganda that they feel free to express the most despicable of sentiments about officially approved enemies, and are able to do so without condemnation. Such is the implicit suggestion that somehow the downing of the Russian plane over Sinai, and killing of 224 Russian citizens is atonement for 'Russia's shooting down of MH17'. Such views may only have been expressed openly on Twitter - as reportedly happened in Holland - and in the Newscorp press, but they seep from every news outlet, social gathering and Parliamentary session, reflecting Australia's growing Russophobia and public demonisation of Vladimir Putin.

As seems to happen frequently nowadays, new developments around this subject demand inclusion. And anger turned to disgust, as news reports today that a terrorist bomb may have been responsible for the downing of the Russian plane completely excluded any reference to Russian opinion or intelligence on the matter.

But it wasn't just that - the framing of these reports, which were from the UK and US agencies, was that 'the international ramifications will be enormous' if ISIS was responsible. So says Sir Nigel Inkster, former director for operations and intelligence at MI6, interviewed in London by the ABC:

   Nigel Inkster: “Well, I think there are two things -

   Firstly the Egyptian economy is heavily dependent on tourism, so anything that eroded internation comfidence in Egypt as a tourism destination is going to have significant implications.

  Now obviously, the other question is: was this an act of revenge, could this have been an act of revenge for Russia's engagement in Syria on the side of President Assad?”

Something was horribly missing from this news - any mention of how the relatives and friends of the victims of the Russian plane crash might be feeling now, knowing that their loved ones had been unwilling martyrs in the fight to save Syria from Western-backed terrorism.