floor, and a human-sized patch of dust
has turned blood red. Wael leads the
way to a dark room whose walls are re-
inforced with sandbags. In the middle of
the floor, there’s a wide hole. Wael shines
his phone’s light into it. It is 20 feet deep,
and there is a tunnel at the bottom.
“There are probably bigger rooms in
there,” he says. “Even bedrooms and
offices.”
“We’re not going in there,” I say.
We walk down the hall. Other roomshave tiny cells built into them, barely
long enough to lie down in. Zayn says
isis would put up to four men in each
one. When I shine a light inside them, I
see tick marks on the walls and scribbles
in Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin scripts. “My
heart is aching,” one message in Uzbek
says. “My soul is staying here and part
of my body is staying here. Dear God, I
am leaving my husband in your hands...
Please God bring us together soon.”
“Praise the Caliphate,” reads one mes-sage. Another says “I ♥ Shariah.” One
cell has crude drawings of a handgun, a
grenade, and a suicide belt with “victory
or martyrdom” written on it.
I’m surprised that so much of the
graffiti is pro-isis. When Zayn was
locked up, prisoners received long daily
religious lessons. isis also showed the
prisoners battle videos and discussed
war strategy. “I knew several people
who went in for something small,” Zayn
says. “They went through interrogation,How the War
Was Spun
Trolls and conspiracy theorists have helped
the Syrian government cover up its crimes.among syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s most reliable allies are the
armies of Twitter bots, trolls, and digital defenders who have been quick
to spread confusion in the wake of his government’s atrocities. Russia
has often been at the center of this disinformation campaign. “The Rus-
sians are really good at this. Better than us,” a senior British general in
the US-led coalition against isis said last year. “In many of our nation’s
capitals, we didn’t realize we were being played.”
After the United States determined with “high confidence” that
the Syrian government had killed more than 1,000 people in an August
2013 chemical weapons attack, Assad’s backers began aggressively
spinning the story to deny his culpability. Russian Foreign Minister
Sergey Lavrov questioned the “rebel narrative,” saying that videos
of the “purported attack” were posted online before it supposedly
happened, echoing a false claim initially made by bloggers loyal to
the regime. When UN officials released
a forensic report that implicitly linked
the attack to Assad, Lavrov dismissed it
and cited alternative accounts, such as
one from “nuns at a nearby convent,” an
apparent reference to a Lebanese nun
who did not witness the attack but who
told Russian state media it was “staged.”
Much of Russia’s information war in Syria has centered around the
White Helmets, the volunteer force that has rescued thousands of civil-
ians from bombed-out buildings. The group considers itself neutral, but
it operates mainly in rebel-controlled territory and has drawn atten-
tion to government attacks on civilians. As the White Helmets became
international heroes (a film about them won an Academy Award in
2017), they became a target for regime apologists and conspiracy theo-
rists. After the Syrian government used chemical weapons in northwest
Syria in April 2017, pro-regime news sources accused the “Al Qaeda–
affiliated White Helmets” of creating a false-flag attack. The theory
was amplified by Russian media and spread online with the hashtag#SyriaHoax. American alt-right figures,
who opposed President Donald Trump’s
military response to the attack, ran with
the fact-free version of events. Infowars
called the White Helmets “an al-Qaeda
affiliated group funded by George Soros
and the British government.” That lie was
shared on Twitter by Infowars founder Alex Jones and conspiracy the-
orist Mike Cernovich and retweeted thousands of times.
A UN report released later that year squarely pinned the attack
on Assad’s government. But the trolls had already done their
damage—aided by Twitter’s and Facebook’s slow and often hap-
hazard responses to false news on their platforms. “The disinforma-
tion campaign waged against the [White Helmets] has been brutal
and unrelenting,” the investigative group Bellingcat concluded. “It
has attempted to cast doubt on their ability to provide evidence,
painted them as ‘terrorists’ and ultimately tried to transform them
into ‘legitimate targets.’” —Dan Spinelli