By Caitlin Johnstone on August 15, 2017
Al Jazeera, not often known to rock the establishment boat when it comes to the official narrative about Syria, has published an interesting new report on some recent findings of the International Organization for Migration. According to IOM, nearly 603,000 Syrian refugees returned to their homes in Syria between January and July of 2017.
And, naturally, those hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrians who are returning home are all returning to areas that are securely protected from the bloodthirsty tyrant Bashar al-Assad by the Freedom Fighters and Moderate Rebels who oppose him, right? They’d never willfully return to an area ruled by a sadistic dictator who routinely drops barrel bombs on his own people for no reason and kills children with poison gas, would they?
Well yes, if you believe the things that the western mass media have been saying about Assad, they would. IOM reports that of those displaced Syrians returning home this year, about 400,000 of them were coming home to their city of Aleppo, which was fully recaptured by pro-Assad forces in December.
You remember Aleppo, don’t you? I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t; corporate media outlets hardly ever talk about it anymore. It’s almost like they want us to forget the horror stories they told us about how the city that had been occupied by good, noble freedom fighters was about to be taken by an army of depraved psychopaths who wanted to rape women, burn children alive, and shoot civilians in their homes. Back at the tail end of 2016, though, it was all you ever heard. If the west didn’t intervene to stop Damascus and Moscow from retaking East Aleppo from the good-hearted rebels, everyone there would be raped, tortured, and butchered by the army of the Syrian government.
But oh my my, it sure is odd and peculiar and funny and interesting that hundreds of thousands of Syrians can’t wait to get back there. This same bloodthirsty government which wanted nothing more than to slaughter, rape and destroy them still controls the region, but people have been running back to rebuild their city anyway.
What’s up with that? Could we really have been misinformed about what’s been happening in Syria on such a massive scale? Could the near-unanimous perspective of pundits and politicians everywhere, the perspective that Bashar al-Assad is a sadistic tyrant who enjoys slaughtering civilians, be so dead wrong that the behavior of Syria’s own people seem to contradict it so directly?
In an eye-opening new article titled “SYRIANS ARE GOING HOME: Western Backed Terrorists Brought Nothing but Weariness, Poverty, Death and Loneliness”, independent journalist Vanessa Beeley describes her latest trip to Syria and the overwhelming longing of its people to just go home and get back to their peaceful lives before the war.
“I just want to go home,” Beeley was told by a man who is confined to a wheelchair due to attacks from Nusra Front terrorists.
Beeley writes:
“Everyone we spoke to from Raqqa, Homs, East Ghouta, Daraa — all said the same thing. They dreamed of going home, back to the lives they had before the “conflict”, back to their pre-war, peaceful lives. Many of the women did not want to be photographed, their husbands were fighting in the Syrian Arab Army and their lives would be in danger if their image were to be made public. One such woman, from East Ghouta, Hadia, told me: “We had “freedom” before the crisis. These so called “freedom fighters” brought nothing but suffering, they drove us from our homes. They brought nothing but weariness, loneliness, death and poverty”.
These people were never meant to go home. Syria was meant to become another chaotic failed state like Libya while western powers seized control of key assets in the strategically crucial nation. Clinton was meant to win the election and set up her no-fly zone, and Nusra Front was meant to have been marching into Damascus under NATO air cover by now. Russia was never meant to take the bold step of direct military intervention against US-trained terrorists, and Trump was never meant to win the US election. This is why Russia is now being targeted by the same unelected power establishment that is attempting to oust Trump. The world went off script and disobeyed its would-be masters. Syrians were not meant to be looking forward to peace and prosperity at this time.
Last year the University of Sydney’s Professor Tim Anderson wrote an essay titled “How ‘The Syrian Campaign’ Faked Its ‘70 Percent Fleeing Assad’ Refugee Poll” in which he dismantles a deeply flawed and incredibly misrepresented poll which was absorbed as establishment dogma in 2015. The lie that a majority of Syria’s refugees were fleeing Assad and not terrorists was promulgated as fact by outlets like Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek.
It was all a lie. Syria has been at the center of what may be the most extensive propaganda campaign in human history, and now the entire fake story is coming apart at the seams. The US-centralized power establishment was meant to utilize lies and propaganda to shore up another routine geopolitical power grab just like it always does, but it failed this time. The smoke and mirrors are falling away, and reality is finally getting a word in edgewise.
I’m just grateful that the people of Syria get to go home.
Source: Medium