The role of information and psychological warfare in the fall of Syria at the hands of terrorists

+ SYRIA AND "OUR ASSETS"

What follows is my English translation of an interesting article by Leonardo Sinigaglia, originally in Italian, published on L’Antidiplomatico today, Monday 9th December 2024. (Bold emphasis mine, italics and footnotes original).

The role of information and psychological warfare in the fall of Syria at the hands of terrorists

The “new types of war” that could already be glimpsed at the end of the last millennium is now the constant. The interpenetration of the military to the non-military plane of warfare is almost total, and it can now be said that direct confrontation between armies now represents a minority, albeit certainly fundamental, part of the experience of war.

The rapid advance of terrorist militia forces over the past week has radically changed the Syrian scenario, which had seemed to have been made substantially stable thanks to the Astana dialogue. Turkish, Ukrainian and Zionist support, as well as US support, has made possible an accumulation of forces and military means capable of forcing the Syrian Arab Army troops into a gradual withdrawal, surrendering two vital cities such as Aleppo and Hama into the hands of the Salafists. This was caused not only by the disorganisation of the Syrian army and the underestimation, especially by the Russians, of the threat still posed by the terrorist enclave of Idlib, but also by the terrorist militias' use of information and psychological warfare tools.

From the first moments of the attack against the Syrian positions west of Aleppo, the network was invaded by videos and messages announcing the Salafist occupation of villages and districts of the city. False information, but which, combined with the jamming attack carried out against Syrian communications, caused panic to spread among the troops in Damascus. Entire units thus abandoned their positions, because they were convinced they were being surrounded. But in reality, the terrorists had yet to engage in combat, and were thus able to penetrate semi-deserted settlements. The new propaganda material produced by these occupations further weakened the morale of the defenders, leading to a domino effect with destructive results. This is reported by journalist Ahmad Serhan, among others: “Most of the Syrian areas that have fallen in the last few days fell initially thanks to the media, even before the terrorists reached them, where rumours spread about them, so people withdrew from these areas and the terrorists reached them without any difficulty. They have been preparing and training for years, especially with regard to the media, and unfortunately they have managed to triumph in some places without any noteworthy media confrontation. The media is not only television”¹.

As much as psychological warfare operations have always played a key role in contemporary times - think of the “vampire” attacks deployed by the CIA in the Philippines to terrorise the population in an anti-communist key, or the “Chinese manifesto” operation conducted in Italy thanks to the collaboration of the Ufficio Affari Riservati with the neo-fascist movement Avanguardia Nazionale - with the global spread of the Internet and cheap digital tools, they have become not only more frequent and effective, but also extraordinarily simple to carry out. Psychological and information warfare operations have become on the one hand “simpler” in their execution, and on the other more sophisticated, becoming increasingly integrated with other conventional and unconventional warfare instruments. What we see today is the latest segment of a decades-long journey. As early as 1999, the People's Liberation Army colonels Wang Xiangsui and Qiao Liang in their famous text “Unrestricted Warfare” identified omnidirectionality, i.e. the combination of an all-round vision and the use of every single means, military and non-military, to conduct warfare operations, as one of the principles of contemporary “unrestricted warfare”: “In terms of warfare beyond limits, there is no longer any distinction between what is and what is not a battlefield. Spaces of nature, such as land, seas, air and outer space, are battlefields, but so are social spaces, such as military, politics, economics, culture and psyche. And the technological space that connects these two great spaces is even more the battlefield on which all antagonists spare no effort to contend. War can be military, or quasi-military, or non-military. It can be violent or non-violent. It can be a confrontation between professional soldiers or between emerging forces composed mainly of ordinary people or experts. These characteristics of warfare beyond the limits are the watershed between it and traditional warfare, and the starting line for new types of warfare”.²

These “new types of war” that could already be glimpsed at the end of the last millennium are now the constant. The interpenetration of the military to the non-military plane of war operations is almost total, and it can be said that direct confrontation between armies now represents a minority, albeit certainly fundamental, part of the experience of war. The organisation of an offensive operation no longer only involves preparations related to logistics, cooperation between different arms and communication between the various units and between them and the officers, but also those related to the production of a large number of digital contents capable of moving the needle at an informative and psychological level. The Syrian case is emblematic because it shows the effects on the ground brought about by widespread panic by digital means, but one could also cite the Georgian experience or, more generally, that of any attempt at a “colour revolution”, where a central part is played by media content capable of giving strength to a narrative aimed at presenting attempts at violent subversion of a country's constitutional order as spontaneous, “democratic” mobilisations, animated by “young people in search of Europe”. In this way, not only can a vociferous minority magically become the absolute majority of a country on the screens and in the newspapers, but a government can see the international recognition of its legitimacy crumble overnight.

The Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine was once again a watershed. From the first moments of the Russian intervention, a mammoth psychological war machine was set in motion, capable of creating propaganda material out of thin air aimed at both demoralising the enemy and supporting the home front. From little old ladies capable of shooting down drones with tin cans to the “ghost of Kiev”, numerous “myths” were created overnight to give life to the image of a country united in the courageous and determined struggle of resistance against the Russian invader. Such fantastical representations were mainly designed for internal Western consumption, to feed the narrative of a “heroic” Ukraine ready for anything, provided the Euro-Atlantic countries were able to play their part by sending increasingly sophisticated and lethal weaponry. And, at least at first and especially in the Nordic countries, this narrative unquestionably worked.

The wide availability of cheap digital equipment, from smartphones to GoPro, has enabled an increasingly widespread production of quality propaganda material that can be immediately shared on the net. A great example of this is the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which are able to disseminate a large quantity of videos of successful assaults and infiltration operations that, although generally resulting in the near-annihilation of the group itself, compensate for the low combat impact with a great media and information impact. The raids in the Bryansk and Kursk oblasts and the incursions on the Crimean coast represent this well. These were psychological operations carried out by combat personnel, whose objective was not to cause material damage to the military structures of the Russian Federation, but to cause image damage, sow fear and discouragement, and provide the West with the propaganda material it needed to justify the continued influx of weapons by proving their effectiveness on the ground. Another current example is that offered by the al-Qassam brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement. Since the attacks of 7th October 2023, the operations of the Palestinian fighters have been filmed and broadcast almost daily. The famous “red triangle” that accompanies videos of attacks against Zionist troops has become an international symbol, and this footage has contributed decisively, especially in the Muslim world, to combating Tel Aviv's narrative of a Palestinian resistance essentially “destroyed” by bombings and ground operations, showing how instead Israeli patrols continue to fall into deadly ambushes in areas that seemed “pacified”, leading to the deaths of even high-ranking officers. This media capacity is not unconnected to that shown by Hezbollah during the same period: the dozens of Merkava tanks destroyed were almost completely filmed in videos broadcast daily by the Lebanese organisation's media channels, which also managed to organise drone footage of key military installations of the Zionist forces. Such footage not only proved Hezbollah's data-gathering capabilities, but also showed the flaws in Israel's defence, which Tel Aviv's narrative has always presented as among the best in the world.

But it would be wrong today more than ever to limit the impact of psychological operations to the battlefield. They see wide-ranging use within political, social, cultural and ideological contexts not only through direct propaganda, but also through operations of infiltration, discourse pollution, provocation and misdirection. A radical faction of the opposing camp can be sustained -or built from scratch- to destabilise the enemy, promote internal conflicts and alienate it from the sensibilities of the majority of the population; through infiltrated or conditioned agents one can bring the debate to levels judged harmless or functional to one's own strategic needs, while pushing the enemy to waste resources on conducting a useless if not counterproductive struggle; through particularly visible actions, one can provoke a desired reaction to force the enemy to assume positions that are difficult to defend, to reveal his true ideas, to divert resources from other fronts in order to “save face”, to have to come to terms with internal contradictions; through the dissemination of false or biased information, one can make something else go unnoticed, or condition the enemy's or the public's reaction so that it focuses on desired factors. All this applies to the battlefield as well as to political confrontation, cultural discussion and information warfare.

In the field of psychological operations, the forces of imperialism prove incredibly more effective than their opponents. The USA, England and Israel have repeatedly succeeded in subordinating disparate and openly conflicting movements to their strategic needs. Nazis in Eastern Europe, Salafists in the Muslim world, narcos, evangelicals and military coup d'états in Latin America, right-wing radicals and LGBT activists in Western countries are all under the same leadership, albeit essentially without their knowledge. This testifies to a great capacity on the part of the Euro-Atlantic intelligence services not only to concretely manage material and political support operations, but also to create narratives capable of inducing, by a sort of heterogenesis of ends, people with profoundly different worldviews to concretely collaborate for Washington's imperial interests. If we want to cite two major manifestations of this capacity, we can think in the first place of the infiltration and manipulation operation of the extreme left, which began with the creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, created in 1950 and which came to link up with fundamental figures of radical intellectuality such as Adorno and Horkheimer, and then continued at the international level thanks to Operation CHAOS, and secondly of the specular operations carried out within the radical right, from the construction under Atlantic patronage of that axis between republicans and anti-communist ex-partisans which led to the formation of the Nuclei per la Difesa dello Stato, to the various coup plans and the legacies of the 1965 conference at the Hotel Parco dei Principi on the “revolutionary war”, and which brought together, through the covert initiative of the Ministry of Defence, key figures of the neo-fascist subversion of the following years, from Stefano Delle Chiaie to Pino Rauti.

On the contrary, the anti-imperialist forces on the whole show a decided inferiority to the enemy in this field, caused above all by their inability to fully exploit the new digital tools. It is symptomatic that the multiplication of videos, images and other media products from the enemy side is not able, with the rare exceptions already mentioned, either from the battlefronts or the streets to respond adequately. To cite one example, there is no “Russian” counterpart to the famous photos of Georgian protesters hit by security forces' jets of water: the reason is not a lack of material, but an operational approach that is out of step with the times. The weakness of what is called by the Anglo-Saxons “soft power” demonstrated, and acknowledged, by the Russians and Chinese clashes with an international situation that is objectively more and more inclined every day to be interested in an alternative narrative to the one proposed by the Washington-Brussels axis and in different worldviews. The growth in popularity of the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China in Africa is in fact due more to objective than subjective conditions, despite the positive efforts of broadcasters such as Russia Today to adapt their content to an African audience, or high-level diplomatic initiatives such as the Forum for Sino-African Cooperation.

Apart from fanciful narratives about the alleged “Russian influence”, Western countries are the most difficult terrain for the dissemination of favourable perspectives on the multipolar world. This is not only because of media saturation and the cultural hegemony of the imperialist power stations, but also because of the objective difficulty of elaborating a message that would be appropriate for the Western public, which for decades now has been accustomed to reasoning according to the mantra of “there is no alternative”. The risks of a new world conflict brought about by the increasing bellicism of NATO and the United States play a key role here. This, combined with the economic consequences of the plundering of the European economy by US finance, is the “gateway” through which to introduce elements of critical analysis of reality and proposals for alternative readings of ongoing processes. As much as a certain Russian commitment in this direction is unquestionable, one thinks of the interviews given by President Putin and Lavrov to the US journalist Tucker Carlson, it is also in this part of the world that one can see how the change in public opinion's attitudes depends more on the objective deterioration of socio-political conditions than on any subjective informational commitment of the Russian Federation.

This situation amplifies the responsibility of the forces that from within the West struggle against US hegemony, in favour of national independence and a multipolar world. They suffer from weakness due to their disorganisation and fragmentation, but are forced by material needs to put on the agenda the problem of the effectiveness of their narratives and their impact on social, political and cultural power relations. The fact that there is currently no military activity in the West pitting the imperialists against the forces of liberation does not mean that we cannot speak of war. Indeed, it is wrong to read the internal clash within the West as something external or separate from the ongoing international conflict. As has been said, it is now recognised that the non-military component has an increasing importance in war clashes. The anti-imperialist resistance forces in the West should become aware of this by working to become capable of countering the psychological warfare operations conducted by US power with a form of “psychological guerrilla warfare” capable of weakening it.

This requires the clarification of shared strategic objectives, but also an accurate study of the operational methods the enemy employs to manipulate and deceive public opinion in western countries. It is necessary to make one's own the instruments of action that the agents of imperialism adopt for their psychological operations, turning them against him. Not having state or parastatal resources at their disposal, it is clear that the resistance forces active within the West must work on these tools to creatively develop them and adapt them to the particular context in which they operate. This should perhaps take priority over the construction of electoralist [sic] micro-projects.

Precisely to cope with the scarcity of resources, one should emphasise the flexibility of operations and try to use the same force as the enemy against him. One should exploit the more fanatical and extremist components of the Euro-Atlanticist front to elicit the “mainstream” media coverage that would otherwise be denied; one should initiate targeted campaigns to fuel divisions in the opposing camp, exploiting divisive themes and personal enmities to foment disunity; one should also have the unscrupulousness to act provocatively, promoting “false flag” information and media operations to delegitimise the imperialist forces and their narratives; one should gather information, both through OSINT [Open Source INTelligence] and personal contacts, on the initiatives and projects of the opposing side. All this, as far as it may seem from the “traditional” political struggle, has always been at the heart of it, however inconspicuously. In the face of an enemy that threatens the atomic annihilation of mankind and in a historical phase in which it is concretely possible to bring it down, one must become aware of one's own task and work appropriately and comprehensively for the conquest of national independence and the construction of a multipolar world and a human community with a shared future.

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And here is a shorter post (originally in two parts: 1 and 2) published by Pino Cabras on his Telegram channel last night (all emphasis mine):

SYRIA AND "OUR ASSETS"

It is very interesting to read the parade of short statements by so many Western bigwigs on the end of the Syrian Arab Republic, now conquered and replaced by a jihadist coalition led by Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani, who has a long militancy in ISIS and Al-Qa'ida on his CV and who, as a first measure, frees all ISIS leaders from Syrian prisons.

The declarations of the West's bigwigs are also interesting for the uniformity of style and arguments, all of which are exposed with the same cliché: 1) jubilation for the overthrow of Assad, referred to as a “dictator”; 2) generic and very bland reference to the risks associated with the new leaders because of their past, almost never explicitly mentioned; 3) confidence in the good opportunity to make good deals with the new leaders; 4) belligerent joy for a strategic defeat of Putin. Look on the web for the declarations of Biden, Scholz, Von Der Leyen, Macron, Metsola, Starmer, Kallas: the heads of institutions that in certain phases have done everything possible to frighten us with the danger of terrorist fundamentalism are today celebrating the first truly great triumph of jihadism becoming a state, and they do so by reading and disseminating the same leaflet, like parrots, like mere repeaters of received ideas, like zealous executors of a predefined scheme.

Are you surprised? For those who have been following these events for many years, like the writer, no surprise at all. On 19th January 2016, clear statements by Tel Aviv's then Defence Minister Moshe Ya'alon came out in The Times of Israel, explaining that Iran posed a greater threat than the Islamic State, and that in the event the Syrian regime fell, Israel would prefer Syria to come under the control of ISIS rather than Iranian power. Ya'alon's sounded just like a declaration of war on Iran, an all-out war in which every move, overt or covert, was pre-emptively covered up and justified by Tel Aviv. Ya'alon unabashedly explained what we already knew, but which millions of Western citizens do not know because the newspapers do not inform them: Israeli hospitals at the height of the jihadist aggression against Syria ten years ago were treating wounded Syrian jihadist militiamen, then sending them back to fight and thus weakening the Syrian state.

The Russian intervention in the Syrian war had changed the balance, and those who had bet for different balances complained angrily: so did the great old men of US imperialism, Zbignew Brzezinski (1928-2017) and John McCain (1936-2018), who blamed Moscow for “destroying our assets”, i.e. the militants of terrorist formations, considered organic resources with respect to imperial geopolitical strategies. McCain, in particular, had met several jihadist bosses on 27 May 2013 after crossing the Turkish-Syrian border to discuss sending heavy weapons and other support. [See for instance this video]

It is interesting to re-read today a communiqué leaked by Wikileaks, dated December 2006 and signed by William Roebuck, who at the time was chargé d'affaires at the US embassy in Damascus, which said:

“We think Bashar al-Assad's weaknesses lie in how he chooses to react to looming problems, whether real or perceived, such as the conflict between economic reforms (albeit limited) and the entrenched force of corruption, the Kurdish issue, and the potential threat to the regime posed by a growing presence of Islamist extremists. This communiqué summarises our assessment of these vulnerabilities and suggests that there may be actions, statements, and signals, on the part of the US government, that could increase the likelihood of these potentials occurring”. Translated less plushily, “we are blowing on fire and anything that can burn Assad, including cutthroat scum, that comes in handy”.

It matters little that until a few years before, al-Qa'ida and the ghosts of their leaders, al-Zarqawi and Osama Bin Laden, were execrated by the West as terrorists expressing absolute evil in order to exploit every technique of manipulating mass fear and imposing new wars and draconian security laws. Those who - like yourselves - used to produce a wealth of documents to demonstrate the contiguity that had always existed between Islamist terrorist organisations and the Western services, as well as with the dirty operations of the Israeli services, were accused of “conspiracy [theories]”. Today, the actions of that world are the object of jubilation on all social media by the entire elite of Western rulers.

The first lesson that comes from the facts: what is commonly referred to as “terrorism” is, for the most part, an instrument of manipulation of the masses, supported by state entities and orchestrated with the consent of the few owners of almost all the mainstream media. The latter have the task of feeding collective hysteria and fear on command, highlighting some innocent victims and ignoring others. With such an iron control of the narrative, one also succeeds in the opposite operation: turning cut-throats into new statesmen.

Second and no less important lesson: the parroting uniformity of government leaders and Eurocrats in hailing the Syrian breakthrough shows that they too, like al-Qa'ida cadres, are not “leaders”: they are merely “assets”. Assets entirely in the hands of those who really lead the empire. Between “assets”, which is all they are, they will know how to understand each other.

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1. https://t.me/TheSimurgh313/46769

2. Qiao Liang, Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare, Beijing, PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1999, pp. 206-207.