Posing as a non-political
solidarity organization, the 'Syria Campaign' leverages local partners and media contacts to push the U.S. into
toppling another Middle Eastern government.
On
September 30, demonstrators gathered in city squares across the West for a
"weekend of action”
to “stop the bombs” raining down from Syrian government and Russian warplanes
on rebel-held eastern Aleppo. Thousands joined the protests, holding signs that
read "Topple Assad"
and declaring, "Enough With Assad." Few
participants likely knew that the actions were organized under the auspices of
an opposition-funded public relations company called the Syria Campaign.
By
partnering with local groups like the Syrian civil defense workers popularly
known as the White Helmets, and through a vast network of connections in media
and centers of political influence, The Syria Campaign has played a crucial
role in disseminating images and stories of the horrors visited this month on
eastern Aleppo. The group is able to operate within the halls of power in
Washington and has the power to mobilize thousands of demonstrators into the
streets. Despite its outsized role in shaping how the West sees Syria’s civil
war, which is now in its sixth year and entering one of its grisliest phases,
this outfit remains virtually unknown to the general public.
The Syria
Campaign presents itself as an impartial, non-political voice for ordinary
Syrian citizens that is dedicated to civilian protection. “We
see ourselves as a solidarity organization,” The Syria Campaign strategy
director James Sadri told me. “We’re not being paid by anybody to pursue a
particular line. We feel like we’ve done a really good job about finding out
who the frontline activists, doctors, humanitarians are and trying to get their
word out to the international community.”
Yet
behind the lofty rhetoric about solidarity and the images of heroic rescuers
rushing in to save lives is an agenda that aligns closely
with the forces from Riyadh to Washington clamoring for regime change.
Indeed, The Syria Campaign has been pushing for a
no-fly zone in Syria that would require at least “70,000 American servicemen”
to enforce, according to a Pentagon assessment, along
with the destruction of government infrastructure and military installations.
There is no record of a no-fly zone being imposed without regime change
following —which seems to be exactly what The Syria Campaign and its partners
want.
“For us
to control all the airspace in Syria would require us to go to war against Syria
and Russia. That’s a pretty fundamental decision that certainly I’m not going
to make,” said Gen. Joseph Dunford, the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a hearing of the Senate Armed
Services Committee this month.
While
the military brass in Washington seems reluctant to apply the full force of its
airpower to enforce a NFZ, The Syria Campaign is
capitalizing on the outrage inspired by the bombardment of rebel-held eastern
Aleppo this year to intensify the drumbeat for greater U.S. military
involvement.
The
Syria Campaign has been careful to cloak interventionism in the
liberal-friendly language of human rights, casting Western
military action as “the best way to support Syrian refugees,” and packaging a
no-fly zone — along with so-called safe zones and no bombing zones, which would
also require Western military enforcement — as a “way to protect civilians and
defeat ISIS.”
Among The
Syria Campaign’s most prominent vehicles for promoting military intervention is
a self-proclaimed"unarmed and
impartial" civil defense group known as the White Helmets. Footage
of the White Helmets saving civilians trapped in the rubble of buildings bombed
by the Syrian government and its Russian ally has become ubiquitous in coverage
of the crisis. Having claimed to have saved tens of thousands of lives, the
group has become a leading resource for journalists and human rights groups
seeking information inside the war theater, from casualty figures to details on
the kind of bombs that are falling.
But like
The Syria Campaign, the White Helmets are anything but impartial. Indeed,
the group was founded in collaboration with the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID)’s Office of Transitional Initiatives, an
explicitly political wing of the agency that has funded efforts at political
subversion in Cuba and Venezuela. USAID is
the White Helmets’ principal funder, committing at least $23 million to
the group since 2013. This money was part of $339.6 million budgeted by
USAID for “supporting
activities that pursue a peaceful transition to a democratic and stable
Syria" -- or establishing a parallel governing structure that could
fill the power vacuum once Bashar Al-Assad was removed.
Thanks
to an aggressive public relations push by The Syria Campaign,
the White Helmets have been nominated for the Nobel Prize, and have already
been awarded the “alternative Nobel” known as the Right Livelihood Award.
(Previous winners include Amy Goodman, Edward Snowden and Israeli nuclear
whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu.) At the same time, the White Helmets are
pushing for a NFZ in public appearances and on a website created by The Syria Campaign.
The Syria
Campaign has garnered endorsements for the White
Helmets from a host of Hollywood celebrities including Ben Affleck, Alicia
Keyes and Justin Timberlake. And with fundraising
and “outreach” performed
by The Syria Campaign, the White Helmets have become the stars of a slickly
produced Netflix documentary vehicle that
has received hype from media
outlets across the West.
But
making the White Helmets into an international sensation is just one of a
series of successes The Syria Campaign has achieved in its drive to oust
Syria's government.
Targeting
the UN in Damascus
When
an aid convoy organized by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) and United
Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs came under attack
on its way to the rebel-held countryside of West Aleppo in Syria this September
18, the White Helmets pinned blame squarely
on the Syrian and Russian governments. In fact, a White Helmets member was
among the first civilians to appear on
camera at the scene of the attack, declaring in English that “the regime
helicopters targeted this place with four barrel [bombs].” The White Helmets
also produced one of the major pieces of evidence Western journalists have
relied on to implicate Russia and the Syrian government in the attack: a photograph supposedly
depicting the tail fragment of a Russian-made OFAB 250-270 fragmentation bomb.
(This account remains unconfirmed by both the UN and SARC, and no evidence of
barrel bombs has been produced).
Ironically,
the White Helmets figured prominently in The Syria Campaign’s push to undermine
the UN’s humanitarian work inside Syria. For
months, The Syria Campaign has painted the UN as a stooge of Bashar Al-Assad
for coordinating its aid deliveries with the Syrian government, as it has done
with governments in conflict zones around the world. The Guardian's Kareem
Shaheen praised a
50-page report by The Syria Campaign attacking the UN’s work in Syria as
"damning." A subsequent Guardian' article cited the
report as part of the inspiration for its own “exclusive” investigation
slamming the UN’s coordination with the Syrian government.
At
a website created by The Syria Campaign to
host the report, visitors are greeted by a UN logo drenched in blood.
The
Syria Campaign has even taken credit for forcing former UN Resident Coordinator
Yacoub El-Hillo out of his job in Damascus, a false claim it was later forced to retract.
Among the opposition groups that promoted The
Syria Campaign’s anti-UN report was Ahrar Al-Sham, a jihadist rebel faction
that has allied with Al Qaeda in a mission to establish an exclusively Islamic
state across Syria.
A
Westerner who operates a politically neutral humanitarian NGO in Damascus
offered me a withering assessment of The Syria Campaign’s attacks on the UN.
Speaking on condition of anonymity because NGO workers like them are generally
forbidden from speaking to the media, and often face repercussions if they do,
the source accused The Syria Campaign of “dividing and polarizing the
humanitarian community” along political lines while forcing humanitarian
entities to “make decisions based on potential media repercussions instead of
focusing on actual needs on the ground.”
The
NGO executive went on to accuse The Syria Campaign and its partners in the
opposition of “progressively identifying the humanitarian workers operating
from Damascus with one party to the conflict,” limiting their ability to
negotiate access to rebel-held territory. “As a humanitarian worker myself,”
they explained, “I know that this puts me and my teams in great danger since it
legitimizes warring factions treating you as an extension of one party in the
conflict.
“The
thousands of Syrians that signed up with the UN or humanitarian organizations
are civilians,” they continued. “They not only joined to get a salary but in
hopes of doing something good for other Syrians. This campaign [by The Syria
Campaign] is humiliating all of them, labelling them as supporters of one side
and making them lose hope in becoming agents of positive change in their own
society.”
This
September, days before the aid convoy attack prompted the UN to suspend much of
its work inside Syria, The Syria Campaign spurred 73 aid organizations
operating in rebel-held territory, including the White Helmets, to suspend
their cooperation with the UN aid program. As the Guardian noted in its
coverage, “The decision to withdraw from the Whole of Syria programme, in which
organisations share information to help the delivery of aid, means in practice
the UN will lose sight of what is happening throughout the north of Syria and
in opposition-held areas of the country, where the NGOs do most of their work.”
Despite
The Syria Campaign’s influence on the international media stage, details on the
outfit’s inner workings are difficult to come by. The
Syria Campaign is registered in England as a private company called the Voices
Project at an address shared by 91 other companies. Aside
from Asfari, most of The Syria Campaign’s donors are anonymous.
Looming
over this opaque operation are questions about its connections to Avaaz, a
global public relations outfit that played an instrumental role in generating
support for a no-fly zone in Libya, and The Syria
Campaign’s founding by Purpose, another PR firm spun out of Avaaz. James Sadri
bristled when I asked about the issue, dismissing it as a “crank conspiracy”
ginned up by Russian state media and hardcore Assadist elements.
However,
a careful look at the origins and operation of The Syria Campaign raises doubts
about the outfit’s image as an authentic voice for Syrian civilians, and should
invite serious questions about the agenda of its partner organizations as well.
A
creation of international PR firms
Best
known for its work on liberal social issues with well-funded progressive
clients like the ACLU and the police reform group, Campaign Zero, the New York-
and London-based public relations firm Purpose promises to deliver creatively
executed campaigns that produce either a “behavior change,” “perception
change,” “policy change” or “infrastructure change.” As the Syrian conflict
entered its third year, this company was ready to effect a regime change.
On
Feb. 3, 2014, Anna Nolan, the senior strategist at Purpose, posted a job listing. According
to Nolan’s listing, her firm was seeking “two interns to join the team at
Purpose to help launch a new movement for Syria.”
At
around the same time, another Purpose staffer named Ali Weiner posted a job
listing seeking a paid intern for the PR firm’s new Syrian Voices project.
“Together with Syrians in the diaspora and NGO partners,” Weiner wrote, “Purpose
is building a movement that will amplify the voices of moderate, non-violent
Syrians and mobilize people in the Middle East and around the world to call for
specific changes in the political and humanitarian situation in the region.”
She explained that the staffer would report “to a Strategist based primarily in
London, but will work closely with the Purpose teams in both London and New
York.”
On
June 16, 2014, Purpose founder Jeremy Heimans drafted articles of association
for The Syria Campaign’s parent company. Called the Voices Project, Heimans
registered the company at 3 Bull Lane, St. Ives Cambridgeshire, England. It was
one of 91 private limited companies listed at the
address. Sadri would not explain why The Syria Campaign had chosen this
location or why it was registered as a private company.
Along
with Heimans, Purpose Europe director Tim Dixon was appointed to The Syria
Campaign’s board of directors. So was John Jackson, a Purpose strategist who
previously co-directed the Burma Campaign U.K. that lobbied the EU for
sanctions against that country’s ruling regime. (Jackson claimed credit for
The Syria Campaign’s successful push to remove Syrian president Bashar
Al-Assad’s re-election campaign ads from Facebook.) Anna Nolan became The Syria
Campaign’s project director, even as she remained listed as the
strategy director at Purpose.
“Purpose
is not involved in what we do,” The Syria Campaign’s Sadri told me. When
pressed about the presence of several Purpose strategists on The Syria
Campaign’s board of directors and staff, Sadri insisted, “We’re not part of
Purpose. There’s no financial relationship and we’re independent.”
Sadri
dismissed allegations about The Syria Campaign’s origins in Avaaz. “We have no
connection to Avaaz,” he stated, blaming conspiratorial “Russia Today stuff”
for linking the two public relations groups.
However,
Purpose’s original job listing for its Syrian Voices project boasted that
“Purpose grew out of some of the most impactful new models for social change”
including “the now 30 million strong action network avaaz.org.” In
fact, The Syria Campaign’s founder, Purpose co-founder Jeremy Heimans, was also
one of the original founders of Avaaz. As he told Forbes, “I
co-founded Avaaz and [the Australian activist group] Get Up, which inspired the
creation of Purpose.”
New and
improved no-fly zone
The Syria
Campaign’s defensiveness about ties to Avaaz is understandable.
Back
in 2011, Avaaz introduced a public campaign for a no-fly zone in Libya and
delivered a petition with 1,202,940 signatures to the UN supporting Western
intervention. John Hilary, the executive director of War On Want, the U.K.’s
leading anti-poverty and anti-war charity, warned at the
time, "Little do most of these generally well-meaning activists know, they
are strengthening the hands of those western governments desperate to reassert
their interests in north Africa… Clearly a no-fly zone makes foreign
intervention sound rather humanitarian—putting the emphasis on stopping
bombing, even though it could well lead to an escalation of violence.”
John
Hilary’s dire warning was fulfilled after the NATO-enforced no-fly zone
prompted the ouster of former President Moamar Qaddafi. Months later, Qaddafi
was sexually assaulted and beaten to death in the road by a mob of fanatics.
The Islamic State and an assortment of militias filled the void left in the
Jamahiriya government’s wake. The political catastrophe should have been
serious enough to call future interventions of this nature into question. Yet
Libya’s legacy failed to deter Avaaz from introducing a new campaign for another no-fly zone; this
time in Syria.
“To some
a no-fly zone could conjure up images of George W. Bush’s foreign policy and
illegal Western interventions. This is a different thing,” Avaaz insisted in a
communique defending its support for a new no-fly zone in Syria.
Sadri portrayed The Syria Campaign’s support for a no-fly zone as the product
of a “deep listening process” involving the polling of Syrian civilians in
rebel-held territories and refugees outside the country. He claimed his outfit
was a “solidarity organization,” not a public relations firm, and was adamant
that if and when a no-fly zone is imposed over Syrian skies, it would be
different than those seen in past conflicts.
“There
also seems to be a critique of a no-fly zone which is slapping on templates
from other conflicts and saying this is what will happen in Syria,” Sadri
commented. He added, “I’m just trying to encourage us away from a simplistic
debate. There’s a kneejerk reaction to Syria to say, ’It’s Iraq or it’s Libya,’
but it’s not. It’s an entirely different conflict.”
Funding a
"credible transition"
For the
petroleum mogul who provided the funding that launched the Syria Project, the
means of military intervention justified an end in which he could return to the
country of his birth and participate in its economic life on his own terms.
Though
The Syria Campaign claims to “refuse funding from any party to the conflict in
Syria,” it was founded and is sustained with generous financial assistance from
one of the most influential exile figures of the opposition, Ayman Asfari, the
U.K.-based CEO of the British oil and gas supply company Petrofac Limited.
Asfari is worth $1.2 billion and owns about one-fifth of the shares of his
company, which boasts 18,000 employees and close to $7 billion in
annual revenues.
Through
his Asfari Foundation, he has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to
The Syria Campaign and has secured a seat for his wife, Sawsan, on its board of
directors. He has also been a top financial and political supporter of the
Syrian National Coalition, the largest government-in-exile group set up after
the Syrian revolt began. The group is dead-set on removing Assad and replacing
him with one of its own. Asfari’s support for opposition forces was so
pronounced the Syrian government filed a warrant for his arrest, accusing him of supporting
“terrorism.”
In
London, Asfari has been a major donor to former British Prime Minister David
Cameron and his Conservative Party. This May, Cameron keynoted a
fundraiser for the Hands Up for Syria Appeal, a charity heavily supported
by Asfari that sponsors education for Syrian children living in refugee camps.
The Prime Minister might have seemed like an unusual choice for the event given
his staunch resistance to
accepting unaccompanied Syrian children who have fled to Europe. However,
Asfari has generally supported Cameron’s exclusionary policy.
Grilled
about his position during an episode of BBC’s Hardtalk, Asfari explained, “I do not
want the country to be emptied. I still have a dream that those guys [refugees]
will be able to go back to their homes and they will be able to play a
constructive role in putting Syria back together.”
In
Washington, Asfari is regarded as an important liaison to the Syrian
opposition. He has visited the White House eight times since 2014, meeting with
officials like Philip Gordon, the former Middle East coordinator who was an
early advocate for arming the insurgency in Syria. Since leaving the
administration, however, Gordon has expressed regret over having embraced a
policy of regime change. In a lengthy September 2015 editorial for Politico,
Gordon slammed the
Obama administration's pursuit of regime change, writing, “There is now
virtually no chance that an opposition military ‘victory’ will lead to stable
or peaceful governance in Syria in the foreseeable future and near certainty that
pursuing one will only lead to many more years of vicious civil war.”
Asfari
publicly chastised Gordon days later on Hardtalk. “I have written to
[Gordon] an email after I saw that article in Politico and I told him I
respectfully disagree,” Asfari remarked. “I think the idea that we are going to
have a transition in Syria with Assad in it for an indefinite period is
fanciful. Because at the end of the day, what the people want is a credible
transition.”
For
Asfari, a “credible” post-war transition would require much more than refugee
repatriation and the integration of opposition forces into the army: “Will
you get the Syrian diaspora, including people like myself, to go back and
invest in the country?” he asked on Hardtalk. “…If we do not achieve any of
these objectives, what’s the point of having a free Syria?”
The
Independent has described Asfari
as one among of a pantheon of "super rich" exiles poised to rebuild a
post-Assad Syria — and to reap handsome contracts in the process. To reach his
goal of returning to Syria in triumph after the downfall of Assad’s government,
Asfari not only provided the seed money for The Syria Campaign, he has helped
sustain the group with hefty donations.
Just
this year, the Asfari Foundation donated $180,000 to the outfit, according to
The Syria Campaign’s media lead Laila Kiki. Asfari is not The Syria Campaign’s
only donor, however. According to Kiki, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund also
contributed $120,000 to the outfit’s $800,000 budget this year. “The rest of
the funds come from donors who wish to remain anonymous,” she explained.
Shaping
the message
Among The
Syria Campaign’s main priorities, for which it has apparently budgeted a
substantial amount of resources, is moving Western media in a more
interventionist direction.
When
The Syria Campaign placed an ad on its
website seeking a senior press officer upon its launch in 2014, it emphasized
its need for “someone who can land pieces in the U.S., U.K. and European
[media] markets in the same week.” The company’s ideal candidate would be able
to “maintain strong relationships with print, broadcast, online journalists,
editors in order to encourage them to see TSC as a leading voice on Syria.”
Prioritizing PR experience over political familiarity, The Syria Campaign
reassured applicants, “You don’t need to be an expert on Syria or speak
Arabic.” After all, the person would be working in close coordination with an
unnamed “Syrian communications officer who will support on story gathering and
relationships inside Syria.”
Sadri
acknowledged that The Syria Campaign has been involved in shopping editorials
to major publications. “There have been op-eds in the past
that we’ve helped get published, written by people on the ground. There’s a lot
of op-eds going out from people inside Syria,” he told me. But he would not say
which ones, who the authors were, or if his company played any role in their
authorship.
One
recent incident highlighted The Syria Campaign’s skillful handling of press
relationships from Aleppo to media markets across the West. It was August 17,
and a Syrian or Russian warplane had just hit an apartment building in
rebel-held eastern Aleppo. Sophie McNeill, a Middle East correspondent for the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation, received a
photo from the Syrian American Medical Society, which maintains a WhatsApp
group networking doctors inside rebel territory with international media.
The photo
showed a five-year-old boy, Omran Daqneesh, who had been extracted from the
building by members of the White Helmets and hoisted into an ambulance, where
he was filmed by members of the Aleppo Media Center. The chilling image depicts
a dazed little boy, seated upright and staring at nothing, his pudgy cheeks
caked in ash and blood. “Video then emerged of Omran as he sat blinking in the
back of that ambulance,” McNeill wrote without explaining who provided her
with the video. She immediately posted the footage on Twitter.
“Watch
this video from Aleppo tonight. And watch it again. And remind yourself that
with #Syria #wecantsaywedidntknow,” McNeill declared. Her
post was retweeted over 17,000 times and the hashtag she originated, which
implied international inaction against the Syrian government made such horrors
possible, became a viral sensation as well. (McNeill did not respond to questions
sent to her publicly listed email.)
Hours
later, the image of Omran appeared on the front page of dozens of international
newspapers, from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to the Times of
London. CNN’s Kate Bolduan, who had suggested during
Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip in 2014 that civilian casualties were,
in fact, human shields, broke down in tears during an extended segment
detailing the rescue of Omran.
Abu
Sulaiman Al-Muhajir, the Australian citizen serving as a top leader and
spokesman for Al Qaeda’s Syrian offshoot, Jabhat Fateh Al-Sham, took a special
interest in the boy. "I cannot get conditioned to seeing injured/murdered
children," Al-Muhajir wrote on
Facebook. "Their innocent faces should serve as a reminder of our
responsibility."
Seizing
on the opportunity, The Syria Campaign gathered quotes from the photographer
who captured the iconic image, Mahmoud Raslan, and furnished them to an array
of media organizations. While many outlets published Raslan’s statements, Public Radio International was
among the few that noted The Syria Campaign’s role in serving them up,
referring to the outfit as “a pro-opposition advocacy group with a network of
contacts in Syria.”
On August
20, McNeill took to Facebook with a call to action:
“Were you horrified by the footage of little Omran?” she asked her readers.
“Can't stop thinking about him? Well don't just retweet, be outraged for 24
hours and move on. Hear what two great humanitarians for Syria, Zaher Sahloul &
James Sadri, want you to do now.”
Sadri
happened to be the director of The Syria Campaign and Sahloul was the Syrian
American Medical Society director who partnered with
The Syria Campaign. In the article McNeill wrote about Omran's photo, which was
linked in her Facebook post, both Sahloul and Sadri urged Westerners to join
their call for a no-fly zone— a policy McNeill tacitly endorsed. (Sahloul was
recently promoted by the
neoconservative columnist Eli Lake for accusing Obama of having "allowed a
genocide in Syria." This September, Sahloul joined up with the Jewish
United Federation of Chicago, a leading opponent of Palestine solidarity
organizing, to promote his efforts.)
As
the outrage inspired by the image of Omran spread, New York Times
columnist Nicholas Kristof (a friend and publisher of
Syria Campaign board member Lina Sergie Attar) called for “fir[ing]
missiles from outside Syria to crater [Syrian] military runways to make them
unusable.” Meanwhile, on MSNBC's Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough waved around
the photo of Omran and indignantly declared, "The world will
look back. Save your hand-wringing…you can still do something right now. But
nothing’s been done.”
As
breathless editorials and cable news tirades denounced the Obama
administration's supposed “inaction,” public pressure for a larger-scale
Western military campaign was approaching an unprecedented level.
Damage
control for opposition extremists
The day
after Omran made headlines, the left-wing British news site the Canary
publicized another photograph that exposed a grim reality behind the iconic
image.
Culled
from the Facebook page of Mahmoud Raslan, the activist from the
American-operated Aleppo Media Center who took the initial video of Omran, it
showed Raslan posing for a triumphant selfie with a group of rebel
fighters. The armed men hailed from the Nour Al-Din Al-Zenki faction. At
least two of the commanders who appeared in the photo with Raslan had recently
beheaded a boy they captured, referring to him in video footage as “child”
while they taunted and abused him. The boy has been reported to be
a 12-year-old named Abdullah Issa and may have been a member of the Liwa
Al-Quds pro-government Palestinian militia.
This
was not the only time Raslan had appeared with Al-Zenki fighters or expressed
his sympathy. On August 2, he posted a selfie to
Facebook depicting himself surrounded by mostly adolescent Al-Zenki fighters
dressed in battle fatigues. “With the suicide fighters,
from the land of battles and butchery, from Aleppo of the martyrs, we bring you
tidings of impending joy, with God's permission,” Raslan wrote. He sported a
headband matching those worn by the “suicide fighters.”
Despite
its unsavory tendencies and extremist ideological leanings, Al-Zenki was until
2015 a recipient of extensive American funding, with at least 1000 of its
fighters on the CIA payroll. Charles Lister, a
senior fellow at the Middle East Institute who has said his
research on the Syrian opposition was “100% funded by Western govts,” has branded Al-Zenki
as “moderate opposition fighters.”
This
August, after the video of Al-Zenki members beheading the adolescent boy
appeared online, Sam Heller, a fellow for the Washington-based Century
Foundation, argued for
restoring the rebel group’s CIA funding. Describing Al-Zenki as “a natural, if
unpalatable, partner,” Heller contended that “if Washington insists on keeping
its hands perfectly clean, there’s probably no Syrian faction—in the
opposition, or on any side of the war—that merits support.”
This
September 24, Al-Zenki formally joined forces with
the jihadist Army of Conquest led by Al Qaeda-established jihadist group,
Jabhat Fateh Al-Sham. For its part, The Syria Campaign coordinated the release
of a statement with Raslan explaining away his obvious affinity with Al-Zenki.
Sophie McNeill, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reporter who was among the
first to publish the famous Omran photo, dutifully published Raslan’s statement on
Twitter, acknowledging The Syria Campaign as its source.
Curiously
describing the beheading victim as a 19-year-old and not the “child” his
beheaders claimed he was, Raslan pleaded ignorance about the Al-Zenki fighters’
backgrounds: “It was a busy day with lots of different people and groups on the
streets. As a war photographer I take lots of photos with civilians and
fighters.”
Mahmoud
Raslan may not have been the most effective local partner, but The
Syria Campaign could still count on the White Helmets.
In Part
II: How the U.S.-funded White Helmets rescue civilians from Syrian and Russian
bombs while lobbying for the U.S. military to step up its own bombing campaign.
