Assad is winning the war in Syria but he's doing it by essentially bombing his own people.
The Syrian Civil war has persisted for six years and has lead to the deaths of more than
400,000 people.
The conflict is messy.
It involves lots of opposing players and supporting governments, all of whom have different goals.
Because of this, it can be difficult to discern who the enemy is and what’s actually happening
on the ground.
But among all the chaos one group has emerged as the unequivocal good guys.
A small group of volunteers called The White Helmets run into smoldering rubble and rescue
injured and trapped victims, including infants.
This was an organization that basically formed around the idea that...let’s do what we
can to protect human lives.
So why is it that when Googling ‘White Helmets’, one of the first results is
‘fake?’
The White Helmets is volunteer-based and completely non-political - meaning it doesn’t matter
if the victims are rebels, civilians, or members of the Syrian military - every human life
is equal in the eyes of first responders.
The group’s work has not gone unnoticed.
They’ve garnered millions of dollars in donations, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016,
and were even the subject of a Netflix documentary which won an Academy Award.
In western media, the White Helmets are basically heroes.
But state-run Russian TV tells a very different story...
This narrative is, unsurprisingly, echoed by Russia’s allies in the Syrian media.
And it’s even been adopted by right wing conspiracy sites in the U.S., like info wars
The basic allegation is this: the white helmets are a terror organization fooling western
media into thinking it's a humanitarian group by staging rescue missions.
But, why target a group that’s not taking either side in this war?
We asked white helmet’s member Khaled Khateeb, who said that merely documenting what’s
happening on the ground makes the group a target for propaganda.
they are starting a big propaganda against our work because we have documented a lot
of massacres...and now a lot of people around the world know whats going on.
Khateeb is a cinematographer from Aleppo.
He captured much of the footage for the Netflix documentary.
When we [got] involved in this film it was only to document what’s going on in Syria..Assad
regime used chemical attack, barrel bomb, cluster bomb.
The people can’t work and the children can’t go to school.
Most of the infrastructure is completely destroyed.
Assad and Russia are doing a vast majority of the bombing in Syria.
In 2016 alone, Syrian forces dropped nearly 13 thousand barrel bombs in cities and suburbs.
99 percent of the victims were civilians.
But, Assad and Russia don’t want you to know this.
They want you to think that they’re targeting terror groups.
And part of the way they propagate this lie is by casting doubt on those whose footage
shows otherwise.
In a sense it's to trying to level the playing field…
This is Perry Cammack, an expert on regional trends in the Middle East.
Assad knows and the Russians know that they will never be able to portray themselves as
the good guys in this fight.
But if they can tarnish the other side it muddies the waters...Very few people that
see these tweets or watch the propaganda videos really have the time or energy to kind of
track very carefully what's going on in Syria.
And so that's the environment in which conspiracy theories such as this one thrive.
Of course, Assad and Russia are not the first governments to use propaganda to delegitimize
groups that are seen as a threat.
The Nazis did it before and during World War Two to spread distrust of Jews and intellectuals.
The Soviet union used it to target bankers, landlords and other members of the bourgeois
class.
Today, propaganda is still a part of our everyday life, but it primarily exists online and in
the media.
And this makes it even more dangerous because it’s much harder to recognize as propaganda.
The online, the propaganda, the social media are becoming really a central part of these
conflicts….You take your group's strongest point in this case their reputation, their
courage, their heroism, and you attack precisely that spot.
Only now, we're finding that the Russians and the Assad regime figured out this kind
of fake news post truth media landscape to weaponize this.
I think really the effort is just kick a little bit of dirt up enough to make people think
when they hear the White Helmets, ‘hmmm, the White Helmets those guys are heroic right?
Or maybe they're al Qaeda.’
So, I think what happened with Russian interference in the U.S. elections in 2016, a very sophisticated
campaign against the white helmets now, really this is the future of warfare in some sense.
So in this post truth world, how do we know what’s real, and what’s propaganda?
Citizens themselves are going to have to be responsible.
They're going to have to kind of consider the source.
Just because you see a poster by an anonymous source on Twitter, don't necessarily assume
that what that source conveys is accurate.