M Night Shyamalan pushes war propaganda about Syria.

The famous director recently gave a testimony pushing propaganda to justify U.S. war and sanctions on Syria.

Recently director M Night Shyamalan who has made films such as The Sixth Sense and The Village gave testimony to the U.S. “Commission on Security Cooperation In Europe” where he repeated pro-war talking points about Syria and called for more sanctions, arms sent to rebels and even U.S. troops going to Syria. While Shyamalan is clearly not knowledgeable about the conflict, his testimony is a good framework to talk about the Western C.I.A proxy war and crippling sanctions in Syria along with the propaganda used to justify it.

Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria: The CIA proxy war ignored in Shyamalan’s testimony.

Shyamalan starts his testimony by saying “America started all of this'' in reference to the idea that the American view of democracy inspired the rebellion against the Syrian government. Shyamalan portrays a narrative of pro-democracy rebels fighting the Syrian government for the entirety of the war. While it is true that there were pro-democracy and pro-reform protests in 2011 that the Syrian government brutally repressed, they were quickly taken over by sectarian extremists who were funded and armed by the CIA, western states, and Gulf monarchies in a covert attempt to do regime change. Shyamalan leaves this important part of the story out of his testimony. In 2013 the CIA launched Timber Sycamore, a covert program created to arm and train Syrian rebels fighting Bashar-Al Assad. The New York Times has described this program as “…one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A'' and “…one of the most expensive efforts to arm and train rebels since the agency’s program arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s”. Leaked documents show this program cost the CIA one billion dollars per year. According to the Washington Post, a U.S. government official confirmed the program injured or killed 100,000 Syrian soldiers in its first four years. The program officially was intended to arm “moderate rebels” but ended up arming sectarian extremists including Syria’s Al Qaeda affiliate, Al Nusra. The think tank “The Century Foundation'' reported that the program has functioned as a “battlefield auxiliaries and weapons farms for larger Islamist and jihadist factions, including Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate.” The CIA program backed fighters from the “Free Syrian Army'' who were portrayed by the State Department as moderate rebels but the New York Times revealed that many of the weapons “ended up with Nusra Front fighters” and “some of the rebels joined the ( Nusra Front) group”. There have also been many other reports of CIA-backed free Syrian Army fighters defecting to Al Nusera which in 2012 the U.S. defense intelligence agency admitted was one of the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” along with the Muslim Brotherhood. There is also a lot of evidence that suggests the CIA knew its program was arming Al Qaeda but continued with it anyway. An email on Wikileaks shows Hillary Clinton's advisor and current American National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan saying “AQ is on our side in Syria”. A leaked video shows John Kerry, who was secretary of State while Tymber Sycamore was active, admitting that the U.S. was allowing ISIS to grow in Syria because they thought it could bring Assad to the negotiating table. The aforementioned DIA report that showed Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood were driving the insurgency in Syria was mostly ignored by U.S. government and CIA officials who went forward with arming the insurgency despite this warning.

Ignoring Syrians that don’t fit with the narrative

Throughout his testimony, Shyamalan portrays the Syrian war as being “the people against the government” and implies that the people of Syria want Western intervention and regime change. This ignores the many Syrians both in Syria and abroad who oppose regime change. They are often painted as “Assad loyalists” but most of them are not fans of Assad at all and oppose the Syrian state being collapsed by foreign-backed extremists as well as crippling sanctions that hurt civilians. New York Times journalist Robert F. Worth went to Aleppo after it was taken back from rebel forces and interviewed many people who opposed the regime change policy. One Aleppo resident interviewed in the piece was Anas Joudeh who took part in the initial 2011 protests against Assad but strongly opposed what the opposition had become. He is quoted in the article saying “no one is 100 percent with the regime, but mostly these people are unified by their resistance to the opposition…”. Joudeh is also quoted arguing that Syrians abroad are unaware of what the opposition has become saying “Syrians abroad who believe in the revolution would call me and say, ‘We lost Aleppo.’ And I would say, ‘What do you mean?’ It was only a Turkish card guarded by jihadis.” The piece also interviewed Tarif Attora, an engineer who assembled a team that repaired water pipes and electricity lines during the war in Aleppo. Attora is a critic of the Syrian government but was heavily critical of the destruction caused by foreign-backed rebels saying “Freedom doesn’t come from destroying the country” and “…opposition — it doesn’t mean I must destroy my country and put us back 100 years. That kind of opposition is a betrayal of the country”. He also pointed out that the war was a foreign-backed proxy war saying “We all served the politics of other countries in our own land, whether we knew it or not…” Another report by Journalist Martin Smith showed many Syrians including those not fans of the government are opposed to this regime change policy. Smith was able to get into government-held Syria without a government minder following him and reported that the people he talked to were strongly opposed to the CIA-backed rebels. As the report says:

And for the most part, people were open about their hopes and fears. As to how the war began, they had a consistent narrative: That the protesters that took to the streets in 2011 had legitimate demands, but that the demonstrations were quickly hijacked by foreign backed jihadists. They reject the idea that Western-backed rebels are “moderates” as they are often termed in the US. 

The report goes on to say that while many of the people Martin spoke to were not fans of the government they feared what would happen as a result of Western-backed regime change after watching what happened in Iraq and Libya. As the article says

Others might talk about supporting the government, but that “was not because we love the regime” as one man put it, but because “we don’t want the collapse of the state.” They saw what happened in Iraq after Saddam, and in Libya after Qaddafi. They watched as state infrastructure — schools, hospitals, police, water, electricity — crumbled with the fall of central government, and they don’t want to see the same to happen to them.

Issa Touma, a Syrian Photographer and filmmaker famous for filming scenes of the Syrian civil war from his apartment window in Aleppo has strongly criticized the Western narrative of the war being one between “freedom fighters” and the government, saying:

“If that was really the case, then why did 80-90 percent of the inhabitants flee to the dictatorial side when the freedom fighters came? If it was freedom that they brought, then surely the people should have gone the other way?”

He also pushed back on the idea that those who stayed in Aleppo after it was taken back by the Syrian government were supporters of the government saying:

“People fled from eastern to western Aleppo because they were terrified of the Islamist fighters, not because they liked the government.”

MSNBC once interviewed Tima Kurdi, the aunt of Alan Kurdi, the two-year-old boy who tragically died escaping the Syrian war. When asked what Trump could do to help the situation in Syria she replied “I would hope President Trump would stop supporting regime change in Syria”.

Shyamalan repeats deceptive propaganda to push for murderous sanctions:

In the testimony, Shyamalan refers to 50,000 photos of women and children tortured by Assad. What Shyamalan is referring to is a trove of leaked pictures that were presented as entirely being photos of Assad’s victims. An investigation from Human Rights Watch found that only half of these photos depict people killed in government custody while the other half depicts people who were killed by the U.S.-backed rebels that Shyamalan is promoting in this testimony. As the report says:

Researchers reviewed the collection of 28,707 photographs showing detainees who died in detention, as well as some of the 24,568 photographs depicting dead government soldiers and crime scenes (including incidents of terrorism, fires, explosions, and car bombs).

The photos actually prove that both sides in the Syrian war have committed crimes and severe human rights abuses, something that directly goes against Shyamalan’s dictator vs freedom fighters narrative.

These photos were used as justification to place brutal sanctions on Syria (which Shyamalan later endorsed) that do not affect the government but have horrific consequences on citizens. The sanctions have stopped reconstruction in the aftermath of the Syrian war and have “deprived Syrians of their basic needs” according to Alena Douhan, the UN Special Rapporteur on the impact of sanctions. An article in the outlet “American Prospect” reported that Syrian doctors were forced to smuggle medical equipment into the country as it was made illegal by U.S. sanctions. Syrian American journalist Hekmat Aboukhater went to Syria last year to report on the effect of these sanctions and revealed that Syrians are unable to attend online classes because the sanctions block IP addresses in Syria from attending.

Conclusion

There are a million legitimate reasons to criticize the Syrian government and Bashar-Al Assad, it is a repressive police state with a long record of human rights abuses such as torture both under him and his father who led the country before him. But M Night Shyamalan is not doing this, he is whitewashing a foreign-backed proxy war and violent sectarian extremists as well as pushing for more war and sanctions on Syria. At the end of his testimony, Shyamalan calls to keep sanctions on Syria, arm “the Syrian Free Army” and even says “One day we are going to have to send our brothers and sisters over there to do something”. His testimony portrays violent extremists as “freedom fighters'' and focuses entirely on war crimes committed by the Syrian government and its allies like Russia and Iran while completely leaving out the fact that Western states and Gulf monarchies were backing rebel groups who were equally as violent. Shyamalan even makes an absurd claim that he met a Syrian grave digger who buried “500,000” bodies. This would mean this grave digger buried every single person who died in the entirety of the Syrian war. While Shyamalan thinks he is sticking up for human rights and freedom, in reality, he is doing propaganda that will be used to justify more war and sanctions on Syria that will hurt more people.