Read the original investigation:

The Trump administration’s campaign of extrajudicial strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, and its broader push toward a confrontation with Venezuela, rests on an extraordinarily weak and deeply cynical justification.

After boasting in October that “every boat kills 25,000 on average,” Trump celebrated a series of strikes that left dozens dead, claiming they were disrupting fentanyl shipments headed to the United States.

This framing obscures a far more serious and uncomfortable reality. The fentanyl crisis is not only the most urgent public-health emergency in the United States; it is a mass-death event that has unfolded so slowly and steadily over decades that it has come to be treated as routine.

Since 1999, drug overdoses—especially from opioids and increasingly from synthetic opioids—have killed more than one million Americans, most of them young or middle aged. On average, 120 to 130 Americans have died from overdoses every day for a quarter century. By life-years lost, the epidemic has already surpassed the American Civil War.

Despite early signals that it might scale back foreign entanglements and normalize relations with Venezuela, the Trump administration has returned to the same bipartisan foreign-policy script that guided its failed 2019 effort to install Juan Guaidó as president. In recent months, it has advanced a narrative accusing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of overseeing a state-run drug cartel known as the Cartel of the Suns. This narrative has served as the basis for a series of U.S. strikes on small vessels in the Caribbean that the administration claims are engaged in drug trafficking.

At a cabinet meeting, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem gushed over Trump’s actions, declaring that he had “saved hundreds of millions of lives” by destroying supposed cocaine shipments.

Yet outside of partisan media networks and MAGA social-media influencers, the allegations about Venezuela have not gained traction.

It is widely understood that fentanyl has mostly entered the U.S. from China and Mexico – a fact that Trump has campaigned upon and cited as a pretext for imposing tariffs on China in February, accusing the Communist Party of China “actively sustaining and expanding the business of poisoning our citizens.”

However, federal data contradicts the administration’s claims. No U.S. government report—from the DEA, the State Department, or any other agency—identifies Venezuela as a source of fentanyl. While some cocaine does transit through Venezuela, Maduro’s government is not implicated in its trafficking. Instead, it is elements of the opposition forces supported by the United States that have documented ties to criminal groups. Guaidó’s 2019 crossing into Colombia, assisted by the criminal organization Los Rastrojos, remains a stark example.

Even the Council on Foreign Relations, a central institution in U.S. foreign-policy circles, has noted that accusations linking Venezuela to fentanyl are false. The majority of the world’s cocaine production originates in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, and the principal trafficking routes run through the Pacific rather than the Caribbean.

What is largely unacknowledged—both in government assessments and across most media coverage—is that India has become a significant, and perhaps primary, source of fentanyl and fentanyl precursor chemicals entering the United States.

This is especially striking given the political and strategic importance Washington places on New Delhi, which former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard described during a March visit to India as “the geopolitical center of gravity in the 21st century.”

India’s expanding role in the fentanyl supply chain

Fentanyl began appearing in heroin and counterfeit pills around 2013, accelerating an already deadly epidemic. China was initially the dominant supplier, but by 2016 synthetic opioids had surpassed heroin and prescription opioids as the main drivers of drug-overdose deaths.

In 2018, the Center for Strategic and International Studies warned that India—already a major producer of the synthetic opioid tramadol, which was contributing to addiction crises in Africa and the Middle East—had been slow to regulate fentanyl precursor chemicals and did not regulate fentanyl itself. The report cautioned that India’s trafficking networks were expanding and could soon emerge as major suppliers to the United States.

In 2019, China responded to U.S. pressure by enacting a sweeping, class-wide ban on all fentanyl-related substances and precursor chemicals. Beijing simultaneously launched enforcement campaigns that dramatically reduced the flow of fentanyl to the United States. The impact was immediate: U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 314 fentanyl shipments from China in 2018, totaling 278 pounds, but only 12 shipments totaling just over 11 pounds in 2019—a 96 percent decline.

India did not take comparable action. Rather than adopt a class-wide scheduling regime, it chose to ban only the most common precursor chemicals, leaving numerous alternative precursors unregulated. This regulatory gap allowed traffickers and illicit chemists to adjust their methods with minimal disruption, creating conditions for India to assume a larger role in global fentanyl production.

Reports from the United Nations and U.S. agencies reflected this shift. A 2019 UN Office on Drugs and Crime assessment described India as an “emerging manufacturing centre for synthetic opioids,” noting more than 100 kilograms of fentanyl seized inside the country. That same year, the DEA identified India as a source of fentanyl and fentanyl precursors used by Mexican trafficking organizations and warned that production was likely to expand as China tightened its restrictions.

A 2022 study explained the structural reasons India was positioned to replace China: its large pool of trained chemists, extensive chemical and pharmaceutical industries, weak regulatory oversight, and socioeconomic conditions—including poverty and corruption—that make illicit production difficult to control.

Brookings Institution analyst Vanda Felbab-Brown likewise stated that India was the most immediate successor to China in the global fentanyl supply chain.

“So, China pulls out from its bag this magic wand and there is no more precursors coming out of China. There are many places in the world that could become the source of precursor chemicals. The most immediate locale is India. India already is a place from which precursors originate. It’s a major source of precursor chemicals for methamphetamine. It’s also a place where a lot of synthetic drugs are being produced and cooked and shipped around the world to Europe, to the United States… So, India already is a major actor in the illegal drug trade, and Indian chemist trafficking networks are very much involved in global synthetic drugs trafficking. So, India is like the immediate replacement where precursors could start originating at even a larger volume if China came out.”

These developments unfolded during the deadliest period of the opioid epidemic. From 2020 to 2023 alone, more than 310,000 Americans died from overdoses.

A strategic blind spot

India’s metastasizing role in the fentanyl epidemic has been largely omitted from U.S. national-security discourse. The Council on Foreign Relations article that debunked allegations against Venezuela did not mention India. Policy recommendations from U.S. foreign-policy institutions consistently emphasize deepening strategic, technological, and defense cooperation with India, a priority that makes acknowledging India’s role in the fentanyl supply chain politically inconvenient. The CFR itself called for Washington to “work toward a frontline partnership with India on technical training and capacity building for democracy around the world.”

The mainstream media has largely avoided it, though a handful of articles have been published by outlets including CNN. Alternative media, podcasts and social media influencers have ignored the elephant sized issue in the room too, even among those advocating against the U.S. war on Venezuela.

Meanwhile, China—widely cast as America’s principal geopolitical adversary—has taken far more aggressive measures to regulate and criminalize fentanyl production. India, a preferred partner in Washington’s long-term strategy to counterbalance China, has not even matched Beijing’s efforts.

India’s influence machine in Washington

The reluctance to confront India’s role overlaps with a growing network of political, diplomatic, and lobbying ties that bind New Delhi to Washington.

Tulsi Gabbard, whose personal, religious, and political connections to India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party are well documented, is only one example.

Numerous influential figures in the Trump administration are Indian nationals, have maintained direct connections to Indian political interests or have been involved in India-related lobbying efforts. Among them are:

• Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya, former Stanford professor and national security think tank fellow, head of the National Institutes of Health, who crucially covered up the fact that life expectancy declined as a result of opioid deaths.

• Trump administration National Security Advisor turned U.N. ambassador Mike Walz was the co-chair of the India Caucus in the House of Representatives before his appointment to the Trump administration.

• Suzie Wiles worked as a lobbyist for India for two years until her appointment as White House Chief of Staff.

• Ranjit Gill, known as “Ricky”, is a senior director for South and Central Asia on Trump’s National Security Council, where he – the grandson of an Indian officer in the British army – handles India policy

• Kush Desai is White House Deputy Press Secretary

• Saurabh Sharma is Special Assistant to the President for Personnel

• Sriram Krishnan is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist turned Senior White House Policy Adviser on Artificial Intelligence

• Anjani Sinha is U.S. Ambassador to Singapore

This phenomenon is not unique to the Trump administration. The Biden administration before it appointed roughly 130 Indians and Indian Americans to significant positions, including Rahul Gupta, who led the Office of National Drug Control Policy during the most lethal years of the opioid crisis.

The consequences of silence

The results of this geopolitical alignment are stark. China continues to restrict fentanyl production and precursor exports, while India’s role as a supplier has expanded and become normalized. Yet the U.S. political establishment has chosen to direct public attention toward a false narrative implicating Venezuela, a country that does not appear in any federal assessment of fentanyl trafficking.

By ignoring India’s growing involvement, Washington has preserved a strategic partnership at the cost of clarity, accountability, and ultimately American lives. The Trump administration’s effort to use the opioid epidemic as a justification for escalating actions against Venezuela rests on a fiction, while the underlying drivers of the crisis remain unaddressed. The United States continues to inch toward confrontation in the Caribbean, even as the real supply chains fueling the fentanyl epidemic remain intact and politically shielded.

Subscribe now

In July, 2020, amid suffocating lockdowns and an unprecedented fear campaign on the basis of a viral pandemic, Dr. Li-Meng Yan burst onto the U.S. media scene. She presented herself as a whistleblower who had fled China to reveal a chilling truth: that SARS-CoV-2 was not a naturally occurring virus, but a genetically engineered bioweapon created and released by the Chinese government.

“The reason I came to the U.S. is because I deliver the message of the truth of COVID,” she told Fox News on July 10, warning that the Chinese Communist Party would kill her for speaking out.

However, as this investigation will reveal, Yan has consistently left out key details of her personal and professional history that would undermine her image as a whistleblower and outsider to U.S. politics.

Overnight, Yan became a sensation. Her narrative – that China, America’s top geopolitical rival, had unleashed a pathogen on the world and – was eagerly embraced by media outlets and political influencers.

But behind her dramatic claims lay a web of deception, half-truths, and omitted connections. Far from being a rogue scientist risking her life to expose wrongdoing, Yan was embedded in elite biomedical networks, spent years working under two of the key virologists who shaped the earliest narrative surrounding COVID-19, married into a prominent U.S. virology family, and was promoted by figures at the center of a regime-change information war against China.

Her rise was not a tale of truth-telling. It was a political operation – one side of a dialectical propaganda campaign that convinced Americans a novel virus was rampaging across the country, justified sweeping lockdowns and emergency measures, and redirected blame toward a foreign adversary while radically restructuring society and social relations, and consolidating power and wealth.

In short: the whistleblower Dr. Li-Meng Yan was not exposing the machine – she was part of it.

Embedded in the Biomedical Establishment

Before the COVID era began, Yan was conducting postdoctoral research at the University of Hong Kong under Dr. Leo Poon at the World Health Organization’s designated reference laboratory for SARS.

Poon was no ordinary doctor. A virologist trained at Oxford, he and his longtime collaborator Dr. Malik Peiris have been central figures in identifying what are claimed to be pandemic viruses and crafting the official biomedical response to them. Peiris is credited with isolating the original SARS coronavirus in 2003 and was among the earliest researchers involved with SARS-CoV-2. Together, he and Poon developed PCR tests that were adopted by the WHO as a diagnostic tool despite that they were not specific to SARS-CoV-2. Both Peiris and Poon are also deeply involved in vaccine development, and Peiris was influential in shaping global policy as an advisor to the WHO International Health Regulations Emergency Committee on COVID‑19.

They were also deeply involved in vaccine research. In 2018, Yan, Poon, and Peiris co-authored a paper advocating for a universal influenza vaccine to counter what they described as "unpredictable outbreaks.” This has long been a high priority of NIAID, frequently articulated by Dr. Anthony Fauci.

This context – that Yan was not a lone rebel but part of the inner circle of establishment virology – was conspicuously absent from her media narrative.

The Myth of the Chinese Defector

According to a July 10, 2020, Fox News article, Poon asked Yan to discreetly investigate a mysterious cluster of SARS-like cases in Wuhan in late 2019. Yan claimed she contacted a scientist at the Chinese CDC who informed her of human-to-human transmission. When she shared this with Poon, she says, he urged her to remain silent.

"As he warned me before: 'Don't touch the red line,'" Yan claimed. “We will get in trouble and we'll be disappeared.”

She also accused Peiris of turning a blind eye to the viral outbreak.

Yan says she then contacted Wang Dinggang, a Chinese billionaire turned U.S.-based YouTuber and regime-change advocate who broadcasts under the name Lu De. On January 19, 2020, Lu De repeated Yan’s claims, accusing the Chinese government of covering up a lab origin of the virus.

Yan alleges that Lu De warned her that her life was in danger. Her husband, she says, discovered her communications, became enraged, and demanded she stop. She claims she fled China alone on April 28, 2020, narrowly escaping death.

This is the official origin story, which has gone unchallenged by both her supporters and critics, but is rife with glaring omissions and outright fabrications that leave no doubt to her role as a covert political operative rather than a whistleblower scientist.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Family Ties to U.S. Government Science

Although she portrayed herself as a recent defector, Yan had been in the United States years earlier. Public records show she married Ranawaka Arachchige Prasad Mahendra Perera (Ranawaka APM Perera) in Manhattan in New York City in 2014. Perera, a Sri Lankan who shifted from dentistry to virology, and has been funded by the Department of Defense, now works as a virologist and infectious disease researcher for the Department of Veteran Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania.

More revealingly, his parents are high-ranking figures in the U.S. biomedical bureaucracy. His father, Dr. Liyanage P. Perera, has been a longtime senior researcher at the National Cancer Institute. His mother, Dr. Pin-Yu Perera, works at the NIH and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Liyanage and Pin-Yu Perera are among the top all-time collaborators of Leo Poon and Malik Pieris, going all the way back to 1994.

Yan and her husband have co-authored numerous papers with Poon and Peiris too — including a May 2020 paper on SARS-CoV-2 transmission in golden hamsters and call for the development of vaccines, which received NCI and NIAID funding under Anthony Fauci.

These ties paint a very different picture from the one Yan presented to American audiences.

A photo of their wedding appeared in the Fox News article.

The Real Event 201

In 2018, Yan appeared at a symposium in Hong Kong titled “Framing the Response to Emerging Virus Infections” where she gave a presentation on combining vaccines for possible use as a universal flu shot. The speaker list – removed from the event website sometime before Feburary 2021 but archived online – included several well-known figures from the COVID era, including the very figures she would accuse of creating a bioweapon and covering up its release.

Among Yan’s fellow presenters were:

• Malik Peiris (keynote)

• Peter Daszak (keynote) - the co-founder of Ecohealth Alliance, the very figure responsible for the supposed lab leak that Yan would claim to blow the whistle on less than two years later. Daszak, along with Leo Poon, also co-authored the infamous 2020 Lancet letter asserting that COVID-19 had a natural origin, and participated in the WHO’s investigation into the Wuhan lab

• Ralph Baric - the figure believed by lab leak proponents to have developed the gain-of-function method that created SARS-CoV-2

• Tomas Cihlar - A Vice President at the pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences, who was in charge of antivirals, and in particular GS-5734 (Remdesivir), which was pitched at “Real Event 201” in 2018, though was not mentioned at the “look-at-this Event 201” held in 2019. It was the DOMANE program run by Dr. Robert Malone in January 2020 that suggested Remdesivir would be an ideal product to use for new deadly novel coronavirus.[47]

• Kizzmekia Corbett - then a senior figure under Fauci at the NIAID and NIH’s Vaccine Research Center and the figure who ran the first coronavirus vaccine trials.

Australia was also heavily represented, implying a presence of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.

Despite the prominence of its participants, this event received little attention from dissident media, which focused instead on highly publicized Johns Hopkins University’s “Event 201.”

Yan’s remote appearance used the same set as Corbett’s, raising the possibility that she was already in the United States – again contradicting her later story.

The Accent Slip and the Spy Claim

Yan later accused her husband of being a Chinese government agent who threatened to murder her. But his LinkedIn profile states he cannot read simplified Chinese (the language in which Lu De publishes) making it unlikely he read the messages that supposedly sparked his outrage.

Body language analyst Mandy O'Brien noted that despite Yan’s Chinese accent, she never stumbles over English and speaks at a rapid, fluent pace. In one interview on Bannon’s War Room, she briefly drops her accent while saying “sorry” in what sounds like native American English.

The slip, while subtle, suggests she may have spent more time in the U.S. — or even grown up here — than she has ever admitted.

According to the narrative Yan presented in the Fox News article, Perera pressured her to stay quiet about the supposed coverup after he read her communications with Lu De, the billionaire Youtuber seeking regime change from the U.S.. She has since expanded that narrative, accusing her husband of being a Chinese government spy and threatening to murder her and anyone who assists her when she told him she planned to leave Hong Kong.

However, Perera’s professional Linkedin profile indicates that he cannot read simplified Chinese, meaning he would have been unable to read text communications between Yan and Lu De, unless they had communicated in English rather than their native Cantonese tongue.

A Political Actor

In August 2017, having successfully guided Trump to the White House, Steve Bannon, the former Goldman Sachs banker turned Hollywood mogul, left his position as chief strategist to return to the mediasphere.

"I feel jacked up," he told the Weekly Standard. "Now I'm free. I've got my hands back on my weapons."

Bannon had long predicted a major war in the Middle East and another against China, portraying them as civilizational clashes against eastern forms of barbarism.

“You have an expansionist Islam and you have an expansionist China. Right? They are motivated. They’re arrogant. They’re on the march. And they think the Judeo-Christian west is on the retreat,” Bannon said in a February 2016 War Room broadcast.

“We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years,” he declared one month later.

He was introduced to Guo Wengui, a Chinese billionaire and fugitive from Beijing.

The pairing was brokered by neoconservative journalist Bill Gertz, who was fired from the Washington Free Beacon after secretly taking $100,000 from a Hong Kong tycoon tied to Guo while writing puff pieces about him. Gertz later joined the Washington Times, a right-wing paper run by the Korean Unification Church, where he published the first U.S. article claiming that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a Chinese lab.

Guo began to lavishly finance Bannon, and they together built GTV and GNews, media platforms designed to destabilize the Chinese government.

Guo ran call-in shows and published highly produced rock music videos, complete with bizarre outfits and back up dancers, calling to overthrow Beijing.

In January 2020, as the virus narrative gained steam, Bannon renamed his podcast War Room: Pandemic. His show featured ex-intelligence agent turned MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec and Kyle Bass — both active in Cold War-style anti-China advocacy.

“You may not have an interest in the pandemic, but the pandemic has an interest in you,” Bannon quipped on a January 25 broadcast alongside intelligence agent-turned MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec and cold warrior Kyle Bass.

At the same time, Wang Dinggang, a key player in their media network, promoted Yan’s claims.

By March 1, Bannon was appearing on Fox News to demand that Xi Jinping allow U.S and CDC inspectors into the Wuhan lab, and hailed Trump for his supposed efforts to “force more transparency” from the Chinese president. On April 28, Yan allegedly arrived in the U.S. on a flight paid for by Guo.

The lab leak narrative was quickly adopted by neoconservatives including Frank Gaffney and Republican officials Senators Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz. Trump himself claimed that he had seen evidence proving with a “high degree of confidence” that the virus originated in China, however, when pressed to publicize the supposed evidence, the president refused and cited a higher authority – a strange appeal for the U.S. government’s top official.

“I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that,” he said.

On June 3, 2020 — the anniversary of Tiananmen Square — Bannon and Guo launched the “New Federal State of China” from a yacht off Manhattan, livestreaming an eight-hour broadcast with the Statue of Liberty in the background. Guo shouted “Down with the CCP!” in Mandarin while Bannon looked on.

(Archived)

Weeks later, Yan appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight, The Epoch Times, Lou Dobbs Tonight, and Bannon’s show. Her interviews racked up millions of views. Her claims were censored on Facebook and Instagram, and her Twitter account was temporarily suspended – adding a layer of subversive appeal.

Politifact, owned by the Facebook-funded Poynter Institute, called Carlson’s interview of Li-Meng Yan a “debunked conspiracy theory,” though claimed that a lab leak is plausible.

She also appeared in the viral documentary Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus, produced by Falun Gong’s Epoch Times network. Though marketed as anti-establishment, the network has long received funding via Friends of Falun Gong — a front group created by U.S. diplomat and National Endowment for Democracy (NED) co-founder Mark Palmer.

On the July 28, 2020 episode of War Room: Pandemic, Bannon introduced Yan as a “defector” who would be essential in achieving regime change in China – what he called the “defining issue of the first half of the 21st century.”

Weeks later, Bannon was arrested on Guo’s yacht on charges of defrauding donors who had contributed $25 million to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, but Trump would later pardon Bannon in one of the final acts of his first term. In March 2023, Guo would be arrested and in July 2024 convicted of defrauding more than $1 billion from investors.

On October 8 2020, Yan released what she claimed was a scientific paper titled “SARS-CoV-2 Is an Unrestricted Bioweapon: A Truth Revealed through Uncovering a Large-Scale, Organized Scientific Fraud.”

While Johns Hopkins University and outlets like CNN and Vox pointed out its glaring weaknesses, none bothered to examine Yan’s personal and professional associations with the very people she blamed for creating a pandemic, nor the agenda she shares with them.

A Convenient Patent

On October 8, 2020, Yan released a paper titled “SARS-CoV-2 Is an Unrestricted Bioweapon,” which was widely panned by mainstream scientists as unscientific. What was less noted: on January 10, 2020, as Yan was making contact with Lu De, she, Leo Poon and Malik Peiris together filed a provisional patent application in the U.S. for a universal flu vaccine. The patent was officially filed a year later, and published in September 2023.

The patent was approved in 2023. In a 2022 speech, Yan boasted about it — but omitted the names of her collaborators, the very men she had accused of covering up the pandemic. This suggests that her claims against Poon and Peiris were disingenuous, and that they may have been in on a calculated deception.

No One Asks

Since her arrival, Yan has become a regular on right-wing media and in medical freedom circles, adopting the name Scarlet Yan. She has appeared on Dr. Drew, British daytime TV, and Indian news channel WION. She has toured the country, appearing in hotels, town halls and churches alongside Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Richard Urso and Dr. Ryan Cole, leading figures in what is promoted as a “medical freedom movement.” Her claims have been cited in Congressional hearings as evidence of a Chinese lab leak and she reportedly visited the White House, ostensibly to brief Trump administration officials.

Yet despite her prominence, no interviewer has asked her the most obvious questions:

• Why did she conceal her American marriage?

• Why hasn’t she disclosed her professional ties to Poon and Peiris?

• Why did she appear at a symposium alongside Peter Daszak and Ralph Baric?

• Why did she patent a vaccine with the same people whom she accused of complicity in the lab leak cover up?

At the same time, none of the media outlets that have criticized her as a political tool of Steve Bannon and Guo have investigated her background, thus covering up the real scandal of Li Meng-Yan.

Politifact has since upgraded its assessment of her claims presented on Tucker Carlson’s show from “debunked conspiracy theory” to “in dispute”, and the lab leak theory Yan helped popularize is now mainstream. But the architects behind that narrative – and the strange case of Dr. Li-Meng Yan – remain obscured and untouched.

Read Mark Kulackz’ original article and watch his stream on Housatonic Live.

“You want me to die in there or be blown up?”

“Obviously,” he recalled the soldiers telling him. “Why do think we brought you? For us to die?”

Subscribe now

Al-Masri was taken as a human shield after having fled bombardment and displacement in the northern Gaza village of Beit Hanoun for the third time when they encountered an Israeli checkpoint. When he was detained, he thought he would be searched and released to continue the arduous journey south.

However, as soon as the soldiers had allowed him to leave, he was again taken aside, handcuffed, blindfolded and put into a tank.

For the next three months, Al-Masri was a slave of groups of Israeli soldiers young enough to be his grandsons. He was starved, humiliated and abused. He was forced into houses and tunnels, and constantly feared death.

An image of Al-Masri was posted to social media by journalist Younis Tirawi.

The practice of using human shields is widespread in the Israeli military.

Al-Masri recalled seeing several groups of young men who would be forced the enter tunnels with cameras attached to their head.

The Associated Press reported that “orders often came from the top, and at times nearly every platoon used a Palestinian to clear locations.”

Alaa Radwan escaped from Gaza to Cairo with her husband and three small children in May 2024, having survived eight months of Israel’s mass slaughter.

I had met her in Gaza in 2015 through Dr. Refaat Alareer, her English literature professor.

We interviewed her paternal grandmother in Jabalya refugee camp, who vividly recalled how she tended to her land in the village of Najd, and at just 20 year old, survived the Nakba in 1948, escaping to nearby Gaza becoming a refugee.

I last spoke to Alaa in 2017 as I was working on my documentary ‘Killing Gaza.’

In December 2023, two days after Alareer was killed along with his family, I reached out to Alaa to check on her. Her house in Gaza City, which she and her husband had saved to buy, had been obliterated by Israeli bombing, and she was sheltering in a house in Deir al Balah, in the middle area of the Gaza Strip.

Subscribe now

With no money and no contacts, she was unable to find a way out and had given up hope.

With a few posts to my X account, my followers contributed enough money to pay for Alaa and her immediate family to travel. They escaped just days before Israel occupied and destroyed the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt.

Her parents, Mahmoud and Rasmeyya, and the rest of her family, were left behind. Like hundreds of thousands of others, they lived displaced in tent encampments inside what Israel cynically called “safe zones”, which it frequently bombed.

Her father, Mahmoud, suffers from a myriad of health issues. He has a heart condition, diabetes, kidney failure, high blood pressure, and underwent open heart surgery many years ago. As a result of diabetes, he had three toes amputated before the genocide, making the journey south on foot excruciatingly difficult.

Nonetheless, with the funds we raised, Alaa was also able to provide her parents and extended family with enough to purchase a small shelter with bathrooms and two water tanks.

In Cairo, she and her husband are unable to legally work and struggle to meet their daily needs. I have paid her what I’m able for translation work and she has taught online Arabic classes. This meager amount of money not only provides her immediately family, but for her parents and extended family in Gaza too.

With the January ceasefire, most of Alaa’s family making the journey back to northern Gaza, finding their home, like all others, destroyed and uninhabitable. Nonetheless, they decided to stay and eke out their lives in the rubble.

Since Israel broke the ceasefire, their situation became even more dire. Internet service is non-existent, requiring Alaa’s brother to walk miles to be able to send a message of reassurance that they are alive.

On March 21, the Israeli military issued “evacuation orders” for their northern Gaza neighborhood, waiting until just 15 minutes before they were set to break their Ramadan fast with whatever meager bits of food they could find.

However, physically and mentally exhausted from more than a year of displacement, starvation and death facing them at every corner, Alaa’s family has chosen to stay in northern Gaza.

“They are going to be killed,” Alaa told me.

With the Israeli military launching another extermination campaign and ground invasion, and her family’s neighborhood listed as the first target, her chilling prediction seems to be all but a certainty.

On March 21, at 6pm, we wait to see what the fate of Alaa Radwan’s family will be.

Contribute to her GoFundMe campaign here.

Jonathan Jay Couey's website Gigaohm Biological

Read the original investigation here:

On November 30, 2023, negotiations were underway between Israel and Hamas to extend a temporary ceasefire that had begun a week before.

The previous few days had been marked by jubilant scenes of reuniting families as the Palestinian resistance released 105 women, children, elderly people, and foreigners taken captive on October 7, and Israel released 240 Palestinian hostages and prisoners – 107 of whom were under 18 and three-quarters had not been convicted of a crime.

Relatives of Shiri, Yarden, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas, the orange-haired family that became a symbol of October 7 around the world, hoped for good news as Hamas released captives. However, each day their hopes were dashed as their loved ones’ names did not appear on any of the lists.

On the morning of November 30, another nightmare unfolded when Hamas published a video of Yarden Bibas screaming in agony after being informed that his wife and two young children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike.

“Netanyahu, you bombed and killed my wife and my two children, who were the most important things in my life! Bring them back home so they can be buried in Israel! I beg you to bring me, my wife, and my children back home!” he wailed.

The video contained Hamas’ offer to “transfer the Bibas family's bodies and release their father for their burial, along with two Zionist detainees.”

Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari called the video “psychological terror” and said it was working to determine if Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas had indeed been killed.

Hours after Hamas published the video, negotiations to extend the ceasefire broke down.

Israel’s mega-assault on the Gaza Strip resumed, having already killed at least 14,800 Palestinians including 6,000 children. With the full backing of the Biden administration, the slaughter would continue until January 2025, when U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, just days before taking office, forced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire.

While Israel blamed Hamas for the breakdown of the ceasefire, contemporaneous reports indicate that Netanyahu walked away from negotiations in order to avoid the transfer of the Bibas family’s corpses.

Among Israelis who supported a ceasefire and exchange, the Bibas family had become – with Shiri filmed as she desperately gripped her two young boys – the most potent symbol, not only of Hamas’ cruelty against the most defenseless civilians, but of the Israeli government’s total failure to protect the residents of the settlements surrounding Gaza.

Thus, any reinforcement of the notion that the Israeli government had abandoned them could have turned the tide in Israeli and international public opinion against resumption of the war.

As the end of the temporary ceasefire neared, negotiations were underway to extend it. Netanyahu and his cabinet, stacked with fanatical ministers and lawmakers, who had been demanding nothing less than a full ethnic cleansing of Gaza and had drafted official plans for its implementation, were looking for a way to resume the war.

Israel made a maximalist and deceptive demand for the release of all female captives, a proposal Hamas rejected because it considered soldiers, regardless of their sex, as legitimate prisoners of war. Hamas instead presented in the Yarden Bibas video its counter-proposal to release the bodies of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas, and to allow the father to attend the funeral of his wife and children.

This was widely reported at the time.

French state outlet AFP published an article titled “Hamas says offered to hand over remains of hostage baby, family,” noting that “Hamas's armed wing announced that Shiri, Kfir, and Ariel had been killed in an Israeli bombing before the now-lapsed truce went into effect -- a claim Israel's military has said it is investigating, but has yet to confirm.”

“Until now it was believed that they were alive,” reported AFP correspondent Jordana Miller.

Veteran Israeli correspondent Barak Ravid published an article in Axios stating that “Hamas in a statement said it had offered to release elderly men and two Israeli hostages, as well as the bodies of hostages it said were killed during Israeli airstrikes in Gaza” which “included a mother and her two children.”

Ravid’s article also noted that “Hamas said it offered to release the father of the children so that he could attend their funeral.”

Several other publications, including The Guardian, CBS, Haaretz, The Times of Israel and the Daily Mail published written and video reports on Hamas’ statement and proposal to transfer the Bibas family’s corpses.

None of the reports suggested, as Israel did, that Hamas was lying to advance its goals.

Hamas’s proposal was shot down by Israeli officials, who were intent on resuming the war on Gaza.

"Israel will not address propaganda-based reports coming from Hamas,” Netanyahu’s office told AFP.

‘They lie to us, they sacrifice them’

While Israel abandoned Yarden Bibas and his family’s corpses in Gaza as it continued to commit genocide, it killed several other Israeli captives and lied to the families about them.

On January 16, 2024, Israel told the family of Yossi Sharabi that he was murdered in Hamas captivity. However, weeks later, Netanyahou’s government was forced to admit Sharabi was killed by Israeli airstrikes.

The day after the Israeli government lied to Sharabi’s family, it was revealed that the military had killed three captives in Jabalya, then lied to their families that Hamas had murdered them. The deception was only revealed when Mayaan Sherman, the mother of soldier Ron Sherman, had her son’s corpse examined and found that they had asphyxiated in a tunnel from poison gasses released as a byproduct of Israeli bombing, what she called “premeditated murder” carried out by the very military her son served in.

Meirav Svirsky, whose brother Itai was killed by Hamas as a result of Israeli military pressure, lambasted the Netanyahu government. "They lie to us, they sacrifice them, they give up on them, I was given up on completely,” she remarked on national television.

Propaganda value

While Israel abandoned and sacrificed the captives, and deceived the desperate families, its diplomats exploited the plight of the Bibas family in the international arena for maximum propaganda value.

On January 9, 2024, Israeli ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan stepped to the podium in New York City, brandishing a birthday cake decorated with the face of Kfir Bibas, who would have turned one year-old that day.

“Kfir, this birthday cake is for you. You are the reason Israel is fighting day and night,” he railed. “I only wish for you, for your first birthday, that next year, next year God willing, you will celebrate your birthday surrounded by your family and that the suffering of Israeli babies is important to the UN.”

At the same time, Israel arranged a special media tour branded the “World's Saddest Birthday" for local and international press at Kibbutz Nir Oz, and held events in Tel Aviv and cities around the world.

Hannibal Directive

All along, the danger Israel’s unprecedented bombing campaign presented to the captives held inside Gaza was obvious and widely discussed.

As I documented extensively in a January 2024 investigation, Netanyahu had plotted from the war’s earliest days to sabotage the families of captives who sought a ceasefire, and the Israeli right-wing openly called for the captives and hostages – including children and babies – to be sacrificed for the conquest of Gaza.

This kind of sentiment was echoed in Washington too.

Elliott Abrams, longtime neoconservative whose career in government had spanned from the Reagan administration to the first Trump administration, on October 11 advocated that Israel should reject negotiations with Hamas to save the captives.

“Israel cannot stop the invasion, cannot stop destroying Hamas because of that,” he explained. “I think they're going to have to, in this case, say ‘We can't today play that game anymore, we're going to have to do what we do.’”

The Bibas family returns in coffins

For 13 more months, Bibas family relatives rallied on their behalf but tempered their expectations and prepared for the possibility that Hamas had told the truth about Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir’s fate.

“I have real strong faith that they are alive and well. I must not believe otherwise for a moment,” Shiri Bibas’ cousin Yossi Schneider said as he toured the destruction of the Bibas home.

Public vigils with the color orange, representing the haircolor of the two children, were held all along. It was an ironic twist; the movement that sought to re-establish settlements in Gaza had long used the color orange and continued to as it held conferences making plans to colonize Gaza’s entirety.

After months of official silence on the Bibas family, Hagari admitted on January 25, weeks after the incoming Trump administration forced Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire, that there were “grave concerns for their fate.”

On February 1, Yarden Bibas was released from captivity and returned to Israel.

The family still had no confirmation on the fate of Shiri, Kfir, and Ariel. Nonetheless, the Israeli government published their names as officially dead, violating protocol that requires informing the family before releasing the information to the public. This act enraged the family.

"We have been waiting for 16 months for certainty that they could not give us, and now it has been determined before they are here?? Before they have been identified?? Before we are informed?" Ofri Bibas, Yarden’s sister, wrote on Facebook.

While the publication was said to be a mistake, it may also have been a Freudian slip, demonstrating that the Israeli government indeed knew Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir were dead.

On February 19, the Bibas family received official confirmation of their deaths. Their remains were transferred by Hamas in black coffins the next day, along with that of Oded Lifshitz, an elderly man also abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz.

On February 21, the Israeli military announced that Palestinians had murdered Ariel and Kfir Bibas and then mutilated their corpses to make it appear as if they had been killed in airstrikes.

“Contrary to Hamas’s lies, Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike. Ariel and Kfir Bibas were murdered by terrorists in cold blood,” he said. “The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys. They killed them with their bare hands. Afterwards, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.”

Hagari claimed that this conclusion was based on “forensic findings, the identification process and intelligence that supports the findings.”

The following day, Chen Kugel, a former Israeli military doctor who heads the Israeli National Forensic Institute of Medicine, announced that their examination “found no evidence of injuries caused by bombing.”

However, Chen Kugel had previously been caught repeatedly lying that he personally witnessed beheaded babies on October 7, despite the fact that only one Israeli baby was killed that day as a result of a stray bullet, and none were beheaded.

In the immediate aftermath of the transfer of the Bibas family’s corpses, the Israeli government’s claim that Palestinians had killed them with their “bare hands”, lacking any evidence, was uncritically spread across legacy media outlets and by politicians and influencers including Donald Trump Jr. and Rep. Richtie Torres.

Netanyahu attacks the ceasefire again

With the ceasefire scheduled to move into its second phase, Netanyahu once again began to exploit the suffering of the Bibas family in order to upend it and return to war. On the national stage, the prime minister made bombastic claims about the nature of their deaths that had not been shared with the grieving family.

On February 23, Netanyahu addressed an officers’ graduation ceremony, waving a photo of the Bibas family.

“They strangled the tender children with their own hands, and if they could, they would have murdered all of us with the same level of cruelty,” Netanyahu declares to cheers.

"Why didn't you save them?" a group of audience members shouted.

Ofri Bibas-Levy, the sister of Yarden Bibas, sent a cease and desist letter the next day to Netanyahu’s office and others, threatening legal action if he continued to discuss details of their deaths.

"This is outright abuse of a family that has already been enduring hell for 16 months," Bibas-Levy wrote on Facebook.

At the same time, Israel launched a massive propaganda offensive on social media, repeating Netanyahu’s claims against the Bibas family’s wishes.

On Tuesday, February 25, Netanyahu took his act to AIPAC, this time adding a new detail that Hamas first strangled the mother in front of the children, a sequence of events that would be impossible to determine, even if it were true.

“They crushed their tiny skulls with unspeakable cruelty and barbarism. What monsters! Their evil knows no bounds,” Netanyahu thundered. “We will ensure that no child, no parent, no family will ever face such horror again. This is our duty, this is our sacred obligation for we are fighting a war between civilization and barbarism and I say civilization must win, and civilization will win!”

While Netanyahu spares no effort or artifice in trying to wreck another ceasefire, using the Bibas family as the pretext, the lives of the remaining 63 Israeli captives and the millions of Palestinians of Gaza hang in the balance.

“I was definitely trying to take them out, I just fucked up. I just didn’t do it artfully and 100% truthful, and that looked very bad,” Shaw said.

ACP member Zachariah Primiano recorded the meeting under the direction of the party’s Director of Personnel Kyle Pettis. It not only fully debunks Shaw’s slanderous allegations against Cohen, Ives, Al-Din, and Pettis but is clear evidence of the disgraced former professor’s deceit and intent to defame them in a COINTELPRO-style smear campaign aimed at destroying the ACP from within. The meeting was held at former ACP and Midwestern Marx member Daniel Gutierrez’s apartment in Queens, NY on January 21, and was also attended by Christopher Prewitt and Shuvu Bhattarai.

On January 17, Shaw published on X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram, and his personal website a series of written articles and a video resigning from the ACP. While Shaw spends the majority of the 43-minute video denouncing Haz Al-Din and doxxing him by revealing his true identity (Ali Hammoud), he alleges that he witnessed, on a Zoom call, his then-comrades Al-Din and Pettis with his former colleagues Cohen and Ives, discussing plans to traffic weapons to armed groups in Haiti, particularly to Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, leader of the Viv Ansanm Political Party, whom Cohen and Ives have repeatedly interviewed and profiled in their written and video reports and in their documentary series Another Vision: Inside Haiti’s Uprising.

“Ali, Kyle, Dan Cohen, and Kim Ives began to coordinate arms trafficking with sketchy foreign actors and oligarchs to the paramilitary factions in Haiti,” Shaw said.

In another post titled “On the Cultishness and Liberalism of Ali “Haz” Hammoud & the ACP Executive Board”, Shaw alleges that “On November 1st, I was tricked into coming to a sit-down with Dan Cohen and Kim Ives so they could send more guns to Haiti through Haz.”

Far from being ambushed, Shaw had been pressuring Cohen for a public debate while rebuffing numerous requests from his ACP comrades to participate in a private meeting with Cohen and Ives to clarify and resolve his political differences with them.

Shaw speculates that Hammoud and Pettis are working on behalf of the U.S. government. “I felt deceived and trapped. The question that went through my head was: Are these federal agents or just ultra leftists who do the bidding of the federal government?” Shaw wrote.

Shaw also falsely claims that Cohen, Ives, Al-Din, and Pettis disparaged the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and that he repeatedly objected to such deprecation, but that the four men just ridiculed him.

“I raised every objection. They laughed and laughed at me, at the PSL, at Black Alliance For Peace & other groups who they said were ‘liberals’ and ‘humanitarians’ like me and actually cared about the masses. Why would Cohen and Ives take advantage of someone like Ali Hammoud, who has zero experience as a leader? I was forced to contact my lawyers and submit a sworn affidavit of this reckless adventurism that put me and the entire party at risk,” he wrote.

As he gorged himself on mango chicken and banana fritters, washed down by beet and celery juice, Shaw vacillated between overconfidence, bitterness, and spinning out more lies to his fellow plotters. By the end, he was audibly worried that his plot against his former comrades and colleagues had failed and there would be fallout.

Shaw’s allegations were an attempt to mount a coup against the ACP leadership.

The smear job was coordinated with Brianna “Bree” Barry, who resigned from the party on December 7, and John Molera, who was the party’s official attorney until he publicly resigned on the same day as Shaw. Shaw confesses that Molera helped co-write his articles, in which he doxxed Al-Din’s legal name. This violates legal confidence and could get Molera disbarred.

The allegations were uncritically promoted by professors Daniel Tutt and Colin Bodayle. Tutt is a George Washington University lecturer who is affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, an unofficial affiliate of the Democratic Party, and brands himself as a “public critic” of the ACP. Bodayle is a graduate assistant at Villanova University.

Shaw’s hit job was also cheered on by Jonathan Meade, who uses the X account @jonnysocialism, and Andrew Saturn, both of whom are members of the Socialist Party of America. Saturn describes himself in his X bio as a “federal appointee.”

Molera, a licensed attorney, had begun investigating Meade and Saturn for potential links to intelligence agencies, according to ACP leadership, but began to receive online harassment and death threats. He then suddenly turned against the ACP, culminating in his public resignation, which he coordinated with Shaw. Molera has since deactivated his X account and left DDGeopolitics, a channel where he had planned to launch a show.

Tutt told Cohen in a January 24 phone call that he suspected that Saturn is a federal agent. When Cohen asked Tutt why he objectively allies with people he suspects to be operating on the U.S. government’s behalf against the ACP, Tutt insisted that his criticism is different from theirs. He also stated that the ACP is worse than the Democratic Party.

Alternative media personality Fiorella Isabel of The Convo Couch also promoted the defamation, privately insisting to Cohen that ACP Executive Board member Jackson Hinkle is an FBI agent, although providing no evidence.

Back at the meeting, asked for evidence of the weapons trafficking allegations, Shaw admitted that he has none.

“The most I have is screenshots of Ali Hamoud preparing for the meeting, but it would have been him and Dan Cohen [who] were back channeling. I can't access that. The Zoom recording Ali Hamoud promised me.”

On January 21, the ACP sent a cease and desist letter to Shaw.

That evening, Shaw published a second video claiming to offer a “clarification and apology” but repeating the same allegations against Cohen, Ives, Al-Din, and Pettis. Shaw insisted that a recording of the November 1 meeting be made public and called for all parties to be subjected to polygraph tests, visibly smirking at his own suggestion, while reiterating the lie that the other men plotted to traffic guns through “Russian contacts.”

In the meeting at Gutierrez’ house, Shaw boasts that his “apology” was “mad slick.”

Even as he boasted of his duplicitous behavior, Shaw was aware that his smear campaign had backfired, although still posturing as a victim.

“These two journalists have completely mistreated me and the Haitian people, so I’ve tried to take them down too, but I just… I bit off more than I can chew.”

“My biggest mistake, right, like I told the comrades yesterday – any victory, small victories are ours – any mistakes, I take full responsibility. By dragging in the two journalists with the gun thing, it’s spiraled out of control,” he repeated, explaining that “it’s distracted from the work at hand” of destroying the ACP.

However, Shaw hoped to use Tutt as an intermediary to negotiate with with Cohen and Ives in order to isolate the ACP.

Tutt called Shaw during the meeting, suggesting that he fully retract his posts and accusations, based on the advice of a “lawyer” he had consulted.

When Cohen asked Tutt who the “lawyer” is, Tutt insisted that he is “a buddy of mine from college” who “doesn't even practice law.”

In the phone call with Tutt, Shaw remained defiant and insisted that he separate his conflict with ACP executives Al-Din and Pettis from that with Cohen and Ives.

Even as Tutt attempted to help Shaw, the group of conspirators denigrated their allies. Shaw said that talking to Tutt is like talking to Gargamel, the villain from the Smurfs children’s show, while Guttierez called Bodayle a “little wimpier.” The two then agree that Bree Barry is “a little bit of a loose cannon” and “individualistic.”

Shaw, worried that he and Tutt will be unable to negotiate their way out of conflict with Cohen and Ives, became audibly distressed by his plot’s failure and began to beg for divine intervention.

“I think Daniel Tutt is in for a rude awakening. I don’t think they [Cohen and Ives] really want to talk to me,” Shaw concluded.

“Cross your fingers though,” interrupted Gutteierez.

“Oh God!” Shaw prayed. “If I can get out of this one. Heavenly Father, oh Mother. I’ll join the Christian church if I can get out of this one. Oh God!”

Earlier in the meeting, Shaw implied that he is planning to blackmail the PSL, which he belonged to until 2018, when he was expelled.

“You know the PSL leadership is sitting back like ‘ah, we hope Danny doesn’t come for us next.’ You better toss me some bone, motherfuckers,” Shaw chides. “I’ll expose the shit out of those petit-bourgeois fools.”

Nonetheless, Shaw indicated that he was pleased that journalist Ben Norton called to congratulate him for his attack against the ACP, Cohen, and Ives.

Norton was fired in 2021 from The Grayzone for violations of his contract and then seized the Moderate Rebels podcast and its associated Patreon page from Grayzone editor and podcast co-host Max Blumenthal, who described Norton as a “criminal mind.” Now relocated to China, Norton co-founded the Geopolitical Economy Report website.

A history of lies

Shaw has a history of misrepresenting his experience on the ground in Haiti to advance his career. He has often claimed to have interviewed “thousands” of Haitians, whom he depicts as having a clear and unified position against Jimmy Cherizier.

In a March 7, 2024 interview with the Dominican outlet VISIONRDN entitled “Terrible gringo reveals - what Barbecue told him in Haiti”, the interviewer repeatedly and incorrectly stated as fact that Shaw had met and interviewed Cherizier, but Shaw did not correct the misinformation and stated that Cherizier was a “mercenary” and “death squad” leader.

Shaw’s attacks are the latest in a broader campaign of incitement against Cohen and Ives, a phenomenon that might be described as “Barbecue Derangement Syndrome.”

In the recording, Shaw boasts that he is “the principal voice of the anti-gang perspective,” a position which aligns with the U.S. State Department’s calls to “hunt down” Cherizier, which the French and Canadian governments also support.

In recent months, Shaw has platformed two of the most vociferous counterrevolutionary Haitian voices – Jean St. Vil aka Jafrikayiti and Dahoud André – who have dedicated themselves to smearing Cohen, Ives, and Haiti Liberté for their reporting and analysis on Haiti’s national liberation struggle.

The ACP was not the only organization deceived by Shaw. Numerous English and Spanish-language publications and channels have published his tirades too, including The Jimmy Dore Show, The Grayzone, Venezuelan-state media outlet TeleSUR, Truthout, NACLA, and the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), among others.

Even as Shaw’s plot spirals out of control, he insisted he will do it again.

“Won’t be making any mistake like that in the next campaign,” Shaw says. “Nothing like a mistake to teach you in life.”

A COINTELPRO operation?

However amateurish, Shaw’s libelous smear campaign bears the hallmarks of a COINTELPRO operation, which U.S. intelligence agencies have long used to disrupt parties and organizations that they see as a threat.

It is notable that Shaw alleged that Cohen, Ives, Al-Din, and Pettis disparaged both the PSL and BAP, which is not only false but a typical COINTELPRO tactic to create or exacerbate acrimony between like-minded groups.

Whether or not U.S. intelligences agencies were involved in Shaw’s ill-conceived and sloppily executed attempt to sabotage the ACP from within and smear Ives and Cohen, the false accusations objectively aim to accomplish the same thing as any COINTELPRO operation: sow division, confusion, fear, and distrust. It is a cautionary tale of how progressive, anti-imperialist organizations and media outlets can be bamboozled by malicious actors that exploit good faith or naivete to advance a nefarious, imperialist agenda.

“In a Communist Party as young as ours, and which shows so much potential, wreckers and infiltrators like Shaw and Molera are to be expected,” said the ACP’s Chairman Haz Al-Din. “However, after their plot to subvert our Party’s constitution and depose me failed, their latest attempt to defame the Party has massively backfired, and our Party has emerged out of this stronger than ever.”

“Shaw has exposed his duplicitous and bankrupt moral character for the entire world to see,” Al-Din concluded. “Meanwhile, we will move forward with even greater resolve to meet the challenges of forming a united and independent party of the American working class.”

Read part 1 here.

For over a decade of color revolutions and destabilization plots in West Asia and North Africa, U.S. government officials with their allied NGOs and media outlets have summoned the spectre of mass graves to justify their interventionist policies.

“As President, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action,” President Barack Obama declared in a March 2011 speech justifying Operation Odyssey Dawn, the U.S. airstrikes that led to the deposal and grisly murder of Libyan president Moammar Qadaffi.

“Why batter Colonel Qaddafi and not intervene on the side of the opposition in Yemen, Bahrain, perhaps even Syria?,” The Economist wondered.

From the earliest days of the Syrian crisis, Western media began to disseminate anonymously-sourced and unverified claims of mass graves, particularly in the cities of Homs and Deraa, while ignoring the presence of armed opposition groups and their killings of Syrian police and military personnel.

Father Frans van der Lugt, a Dutch Jesuit priest who had spent decades in Syria before being murdered by armed opposition groups in 2014, wrote that “From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. The violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.”

“The opposition of the street is much stronger than any other opposition. And this opposition is armed and frequently employs brutality and violence, only in order to blame the government,” he wrote in another report.

This sort of vital information was rarely included in reports, certainly not by mainstream media outlets and billionaire-funded human rights groups.

In June 2011, a Human Rights Watch report alleged, based on interviews with “more than 50” anonymous Syrians and “Jordanian nationals” (some conducted by phone), that multiple mass graves existed in Deraa. The only tangible evidence provided was a video produced by the Turkey-based opposition-affiliated Sham News Network, which received glowing coverage from CNN, of a shallow grave dug with a single corpse and three body bags visible. A single source, who was not in Syria, claimed the bodies were of his family members. The report failed to substantiate its claims, noting that “While we did our best to verify the names and circumstances of the killings with witnesses and family members, this was not always possible due to restrictions on access and communications in Syria.”

The only documented mass grave of the Syrian government is in the southern Damascus neighborhood of Tadamon.

Tadamon was a front line in the first years of the Syrian war, with the Syrian military and Palestinian faction Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command fighting against a collection of armed groups which journalist Charles Glass identified as “troops from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and its erstwhile allies the Nusra Front, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and other extreme Salafist militias.” The armed opposition was so brutal that, according a The New York Times report, Jabhat Al-Nusra militants captured an Alawaite family in Tadamon and forced a brother to rape his sister at gunpoint.

The anti-government armed groups, according to a March 2013 Amnesty International report, executed anyone they suspected of being informants for the Syrian government, and dumped their bodies into a “a large hole dug for the foundations of a building in Souk al-Talata,” called the “hole of death.” Among the victims was Palestinian refugee Ali al-Zamel. When the Syrian military temporarily regained control of the neighborhood around September 2012, it recovered bodies from the hole, but Jabhat al-Nusra once again ousted Syrian government forces in 2013.

However, this opposition mass grave was ignored while a a Syrian military intelligence mass grave was featured in an exposé jointly-published by the U.S. government-funded New Lines Institute, The Guardian, and Al Jumhuriyah, a staunchly pro-opposition Germany-based outlet, funded by the German and Norwegian governments, Open Society Foundation and Ford Foundation, among others, through a cultural institution. The exposé was done in collaboration with two researchers at the University of Amsterdam, one of whom wrote that she posed as a fervent support of the Assad government in order to lure an intelligence officer who participated in the massacre to confess his participation, and said it was done in “revenge,” apparently for the killing of his brother.

The report found that a small group of Syrian military intelligence officers executed 41 people in a mass grave, set their bodies alight, and then covered up their crime.

When the reports were published in 2022, the Syrian government arrested the confessed perpetrator, Amjad Yousef.

Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham and ISIS mass graves

While Western media focus on the Syrian military’s mass grave in Tadamon, they have omitted the overwhelming majority of documented mass graves made by anti-government terrorist groups in Tadamon and throughout the country in territory that opposition forces had held.

In late 2011, Jabhat al-Nusra (which would go on to become Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), Ahrar al-Sham, Jaish al-Islam, and Jaish al-Fatah began to use the Idlib province’s Al-Habat quarry as a mass grave, according to a 2021 report by the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression. Militants threw into the quarry Syrian soldiers, members of government-allied militias, people accused of collaboration with the government, people accused of apostasy, adultery, or homosexuality, and Shia Muslim residents of the village of Foua and Kefraya (condemned as “infidels”), earning it the title “the Al-Ahm death hole.”

Video uploaded by the “Idlib Special Operations Brigade”, a faction of the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army, shows militants with captured Syrian soldiers in a truck who, according to the report, were then killed and dumped in the mass grave.

By 2015, the Al-Ahm “death hole” contained at least 110 bodies, and by 2017, 30 more victims had been thrown in. While some had already been executed, others were thrown in alive, or blindfolded and told to run for freedom, only to fall to their death.

HTS reportedly ceased using the pit to dispose of its victims and began to use it as a garbage landfill for all of Idlib province, which it governed. However, the report documents further cases in 2020.

In 2011, anti-government militias dumped the “mutilated bodies of 10 security agents whose hands, head and feet had been cut off” in a mass grave in Jisr al-Shughur in Idlib province. “At least four of the bodies were beheaded or struck on the head with an ax,” according to an Associated Press reporter.

In November 2013, Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS attacked the ancient Chrisitan city of Sadad, ransacking the city, desecrating churches, and taking a man as a human shield before they murdered 46 Syrian men, women, and children and dumped their bodies in two mass graves.

"What happened in Sadad is the most serious and biggest massacre of Christians in Syria in the past two and a half years... 45 innocent civilians were martyred for no reason, and among them several women and children, many thrown into mass graves. Other civilians were threatened and terrorized. 30 were wounded and 10 are still missing,” Archbishop Selwanos Boutros Alnemeh said.

After the Syrian government’s army expelled Islamic state forces from Palmyra in 2016, they discovered a mass grave that contained 40 bodies.

The greatest concentration of mass graves was in eastern Syria, where ISIS held territory for years, from Raqqa to Albu Kamal and around Deir Ezzor.

In 2017, the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition, with U.S.-backed Kurdish forces fighting under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces, expelled ISIS from Raqqa, leveling 80% of the city. First responders and residents began to uncover mass graves there too.

Unlike the White Helmets, who are lavishly funded by the U.S., UK, and Qatar and were once called the “Islamic state fire brigade” by ISIS prisoner journalist John Cantlie, Raqqa’s first responders received little funding from the U.S. government.

According to a July 2018 Human Rights Watch report on the mass graves, the U.S. was hesitant to allocate funds to exhuming graves there because it did not want to offend Ankara, which considers Kurdish groups to be terrorists.

“One of the issues reported is that some international organizations are unwilling or reluctant to support local authorities for fear of alienating Syrian government authorities in Damascus or to jeopardize their relations with Turkey, both of which are hostile to the local authorities,” HRW wrote.

Despite having no training or experience and little equipment, they organized themselves from the Raqqa Civilian Council and volunteered to exhume human remains of civilians and fighters killed by ISIS and by anti-ISIS forces, hoping to help bring closure to families missing their loved ones, the report stated.

By July 2018, they had found nine graves in Raqqa, with “each one estimated to have dozens, if not hundreds, of bodies, making exhumations a monumental task,” said Priyanka Motaparthy, then HRW’s acting emergencies director.

However, the paltry support was insufficient for the job.

“If workers continue to exhume the graves without adequate technical training, equipment, and support, families may lose the opportunity to accurately identify the remains of their loved ones. Evidence regarding crimes in the area, including ISIS crimes, may be lost,” the HRW report added.

Despite its limitations, the teams managed to excavate 22 mass graves in the Raqqa environs, discovering 5,656 bodies, and 522 in northeast Deir Ezzor from 2018 to 2019.

A 2020 report by The International Commission on Missing Persons, titled “The Missing in North East Syria: a Stocktaking.” There, residents and researchers began to uncover mass graves, from which 3,797 human remains were exhumed.

In January and February 2019, they exhumed 793 human remains in Raqqa’s Panorama Park “believed to contain a large number of bodies killed by the Global Coalition, including ISIS fighters.”

The Al Fakhikha Grave south of Raqqa City was exhumed from January to June of 2019 and contained 673 bodies.

Al Tala’a Camp Grave, south of Raqqa City, is the largest documented mass grave, containing 815 bodies. Excavation began in June 2019 and lasted until September 18.

The most shocking mass grave, which is believed to contain thousands of bodies, is in the Al-Houta gorge, which had been a popular hiking and tourist destination north of Raqqa city, near the town of Hammam al-Turkman.

According to Human Rights Watch, a terrorist group known as the al-Qadsiya Brigade, led by a local man named Faysal al-Ballo, attacked and overcame a Syrian government checkpoint in July 2013. The brigade had originally pledged allegiance first to Ahrar al-Sham, then to the Free Syrian Army, and finally to Jabhat Al-Nusra. The fighters executed at least 16 Syrian soldiers, the celebratory aftermath of which is shown in the video below, and then reportedly dumped their bodies in the Al-Houta gorge. This practice was continued by ISIS, which dumped bodies of hundreds of Syrian military personnel, religious minorities including members of the Muslim Ismaili sect, and anyone accused of collaborating with the enemy.

According to the ICMP report, under the command of a security chief whose nom de guerre was “Abu Yasser al-Iraqi,” ISIS killed members of the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army, at least 20 government soldiers, and Kurdish YPG fighters.

They not only disposed of dead bodies by the car-full into the gorge but also employed sadistic methods of murder, sometimes throwing people alive to their deaths, executing victims at the edge to allowing their bodies to fall in, or having victims “brought blindfolded and told to run to their deaths, under the pretense that they were being released and running to their salvation,” the same practice used as the Al-Ahm “death hole.” The report does not give a specific number of victims but believes it to be in the thousands.

When local residents complained to ISIS authorities of the stench and possibility of diseases from decomposing remains, ISIS dumped crude oil into the gorge and burned it.

Human Rights Watch published footage of militants executing prisoners and throwing bodies into the gorge, which a researcher had obtained from a worker at a computer repair shop who found the footage on a computer left by an ISIS militant and clandestinely sent it to the group.

In 2020, Human Rights Watch also documented the Al-Houta mass grave, with its researchers flying a drone into the depths of the gorge and revealing three corpses in pools of oil at its bottom.

‘Lack of political will’ to investigate HTS/ISIS mass graves

Any hopes that the families who had lost loved ones might have had of finding their missing relatives were dashed by the October 2019 Turkish-backed invasion of Kurdish-held areas in northeastern Syria, greenlighted by the Trump administration. Since then, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army has held the area. There have been no attempts to recover the bodies from the gorge nor international pressure to begin such a process, whether on the SNA itself or its Turkish sponsors, which have long supported the HTS and ISIS terrorists that dumped the bodies in the gorge.

“The families of the missing who spoke with Human Rights Watch said they had hoped that the territorial defeat of ISIS would quickly lead to information about their loved ones. However, a series of delays and an apparent lack of political will placed significant obstacles in their path,” HRW wrote in its report, entitled “Kidnapped by ISIS Failure to Uncover the Fate of Syria’s Missing.”

In 2019, HRW again noted that there were no efforts from the various forces, mostly foreign, to investigate these mass graves.

“At the time of writing, the extent of the control by the Syrian government, Turkey, NES, and the US-led coalition in former ISIS-held areas remains unclear, making it more difficult for families to identify who to speak to and recovery efforts more precarious… Regardless of who currently controls these areas, these developments highlight the urgency with which authorities should act on any leads available to learn what became of those missing at the hands of ISIS,” the report stated. “Thus far, authorities on the ground have not coordinated or systematized the limited local efforts to take up this issue.”

Legacy media ignore documented mass graves, promote evidence-free claims of Syrian government-filled mass graves

While mass graves in former al-Nusra and Islamic state-held territory in eastern Syria generated little interest in Western media, these outlets have promoted specious claims of mass graves perpetrated by the Syrian government.

The New York Times in 2022 published a report entitled “Mass Graves Identified in Syria Could Hold Evidence of War Crimes.” This misleadingly titled article contained no evidence of mass graves, relying instead on grainy and vague satellite photos of a field, described as a “suspected” grave, and an image of the Najha cemetery.

This was packaged with interviews from four Syrian men, two of whom were in Germany, another in Lebanon, and another in Syria. The Times granted them all anonymity for “fear of retribution by the Syrian government” despite the fact that all but one of them had left Syria.

One of the men who was interviewed participated in a trial against Anwar Raslan, a Syrian government official who defected to the opposition and was granted asylum in Germany. There, he gave lurid accounts about mass-torture in government prisons but was then convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison despite significant doubts about his testimony, and the participation of the CIJA.

The New York Times, however, ignored those details and offered no evidence to support its allegations of mass graves or whom might have been buried in the graves, admitting that, “The Times could not independently corroborate all the details in their accounts, including the total numbers of bodies they recalled seeing.”

Another one of the men interviewed appeared masked in the U.S. Congress, calling himself “the gravedigger,” spinning lurid tales of mass murder and pressing to ramp up sanctions on Syria.

His March 2022 congressional testimony was promoted by The Holocaust Memorial Museum, which had on its board ex-U.S. government official Elliot Abrams. He oversaw massacres in Latin America and was convicted of unlawfully withholding information from Congress in the Iran-Contra scandal.

The “gravedigger” character appeared in Congress again in June 2022 and April 2023, and in numerous media outlets including a September 2022 Vice interview. Each time, however, the “gravedigger” appears to be a different person.

The New York Times also referenced a Human Rights Watch report that cited two anonymous defectors, interviewed in Lebanon and Turkey, who claimed to have served at military hospitals. The Times did not clarify if they relied on the same sources that HRW relied on.

“The two defectors Human Rights Watch interviewed who served at military hospitals said that soldiers transported the bodies to mass graves located on military land in the greater Damascus area, including near the Najha cemetary, near the Third Brigade military base, and near the Dhamir military airport. Human Rights Watch was not able to confirm these claims.”

While the Times alleged Qutayfah to be the largest mass grave, it was not mentioned in the 2017 Amnesty International “Human slaughterhouse” report that first claimed the Assad government was “exterminating” tens of thousands of prisoners and burying them in mass graves.

Staging a mass grave?

Outside of Damascus, graves may have been tampered with to produce the desired imagery.

Multiple reports documented an alleged mass grave in Adra, located near Damascus, which was being exhumed by the White Helmets, who have participated in numerous summary executions themselves and have demonstrated their capability to stage scenes.

A report by Turkish-state media outlet TRT showed the White Helmets at work, finding several bags of human remains in crypts. Correspondent Randolph Nogel made no effort to investigate and stated that they were all victims of Assad. However, an AFP report casually suggested that the graves were tampered with. According to Diab Serriya, co-founder of the Turkey-based Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison, “the bags of bones were probably brought from other graves" and "probably this grave contains detainees but also former regime or opposition fighters killed in battle.”

Neither report notes that Jabhat al-Nusra and other terrorist groups overran Adra in December 2013 and massacred Syrians soldiers and civilians from religious minority groups.

Assad falls and the narrative takes hold

The “gravedigger” was accompanied by Mouaz Mustafa, head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a regime-change outfit funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Since the earliest days of the crisis, Moustafa has played a central role. In 2013, he arranged for and accompanied neoconservative senator John McCain to illegally enter Syria to meet with anti-government militants who had kidnapped 11 Lebanese Shia pilgrims.

As soon as the Syrian government collapsed, Moustafa met with Biden administration national security adviser Jake Sullivan – who infamously wrote that “AQ [al-Qaeda] is our on side in Syria” – and then headed to Damascus along with his staffer Celine Kasem.

Moustafa apparently furnished multiple western media outlets with access to the alleged mass graves and interviews.

Days later, Channel 4, a British state-funded media outlet, published a report called “True scale of Assad’s slaughter revealed at Syrian mass grave,” showing what it claims are two mass graves in Qutayfah, east of Damascus, including one in which “around 150 thousand people may have been buried.”

The report contained no evidence and relied on drone footage of the open field that the New York Times alleged is a mass grave in its 2022 report using satellite photos and claims from the Syrian Emergency Task Force. The Channel 4 report also contains testimony from figures who claimed to have witnessed the disposal of bodies.

At a formal cemetery, the town’s former mayor, Mohammed Abdel Magid, estimates 300 to 400 bodies were dumped in a mass grave. The Channel 4 report additionally interviews a man named Esam Saad, who claimed to have been involved in covering up bodies.

The report also featured Moustafa, who speculated that his uncle may be buried there.

On December 17, Reuters reported that “a mass grave outside of Damascus contained the bodies of at least 100,000 people killed by the former government of ousted President Bashar al-Assad,” explicitly referencing Moustafa.

"One hundred thousand is the most conservative estimate" Moustafa claimed. "It's a very, very extremely almost unfairly conservative estimate."

However, Reuters was forced to admit that it was “unable to confirm Moustafa's allegations.”

A separate Reuters video report visited the Najha cemetery, which the 2022 New York Times article flippantly described as a mass grave without providing evidence. Reuters shows a neatly dug trench that appears to have been recent, but there are no human remains or any other evidence visible to prove their claim.

A man looks inside a hole dug under a marked grave, what Reuters reported is a “mass grave.” No evidence is visible. Source: Reuters

The X account Levant_24_ published images of Najha cemetery taken the same day that Reuters visited (evidenced by the armed man visible in both the video and photos), incorrectly describing it as located in Qatana and claiming it to be a mass grave of 100,000 of Assad’s victims.

A report from Qatari-state media Al Jazeera also interviewed Qutayfah’s former mayor and a man named Issam Ali Saad who identified himself as the owner of a construction business. He said that the Syrian government borrowed his machinery to bury tortured prisoners in Qutayfah. Also interviewed was a man named Abdo Sheikh, who identified himself as the graveyard’s keeper and claimed the government buried around 100 people there, a fraction of the amount alleged by the former mayor in the Channel Four report, identifying all of them as innocent civilians. This report too shows no evidence of its claims.

The Free Press, a neoconservative outlet run by Zionist cancel-culture queen Bari Weiss, published another video entitled “Exclusive: Syria's Largest Mass Grave,” produced by the Center for Peace Communications. This outlet also interviewed Saad on the same day (as evidenced by his clothing) but identified him as a gravedigger (it is possible but seems unlikely that he is both.) The report alleged that 200,000 victims were buried in Qutayfah but, like all other reports, showed no evidence.

Al Jazeera also published a report from a cemetery in Homs, claiming it to be a mass grave. The report contains footage of preparation for a mass grave but insists that the Assad government lied that some were Syrian soldiers. The report shows what it says is the cemetery register of bodies delivered from the military hospital but does not investigate the identities of any of those in the graves.

Hailing the mass murderers, memory-holing their mass graves

Since the Assad government’s ouster, the former opposition forces that used rape as a weapon of war, carried out summary executions, and threw thousands of bodies into mass graves have been transformed into heroic forces.

“When rebels overran portions of Tadamon early in the civil war, the district became an emblem of the resistance. Then when evidence emerged of mass killings, it seemed to encapsulate the sadism of Assad’s security forces,” Nabih Bulos wrote in the Los Angeles Times, making no mention of the atrocities carried out by HTS of any of its allied armed groups.

In the immediate aftermath of the coup, Democracy Now hosted Human Rights Watch researcher Hiba Zayadin in a segment entitled “Mass Graves Discovered as Syrian Families Seek Answers to Loved Ones' Disappearances Under Assad.” Zayadin spoke at length about the Tadamon massacre as Democracy Now showed drone shots of the Qutayfah field alleged to be a mass grave. However, she made no mention of the HTS “death hole” mass grave in Tadamon, or any of the other numerous mass graves in Syria, many of which were documented by HRW itself, that could not be attributed to the Assad government but to its opponents.

Similarly, the U.S. government-funded PBS Newshour published a report from correspondent Simona Foltynon on alleged mass graves. She visited an alleged Assad government massacre site and a rubble-covered area that she claimed was actually a mass grave where “countless souls perished in summary executions” carried out by the Syrian government. The only evidence shown is a single mandible on top of a street. The rest of the human remains, she alleged, were buried under the rubble after the Syrian military blew up the area to cover the evidence.

Foltyn interviewed a man identified as a neighborhood resident who claims to have witnessed heavy “massacres,”but also admits that the neighborhood was the “front line in the fight for Damascus,” although neither Foltyn nor the man interviewed mention the extremist nature and shocking brutality of the armed opposition groups. Like HRW’s Zayadin, Foltyn made no mention of the HTS’s “death hole” mass grave in Tadamon or any other mass graves the new HTS regime or ISIS were responsible for throughout the country.

Executing a long standing plan

At the center of the supposed evidence collection is CIJA, the aforementioned organization that paid huge sums to have false documents smuggled out of Al-Qaeda and ISIS-controlled territory.

CIJA’s chair is Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. congressman appointed by the Obama administration as Ambassador-at-large for Global Justice. The position was created by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who famously justified the killing of half a million Iraqi babies.

“We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,” Rapp said following visits to the alleged mass graves in Qutayfah and the Najha cemetery. In a CNN interview, he called the Assad government’s crimes “The worst atrocities of the 21st century,” likening them to the Holocaust.

Rapp is an overtly political actor and has been a vociferous supporter of regime change in Syria, appearing at a 2014 Atlantic Council event called “Making the Case Against Assad.”

More recently, Rapp defended Israel from international criticism, saying that evaluation of its actions in Gaza is “extremely complex,” denied the extermination of Palestinians there amounts to genocide, and admitted he advised Israel to feign internal investigation as a “magic bullet” to avoid international prosecution.

The Washington Post, like virtually all top legacy media outlets, published a report on Assad’s alleged mass graves in Qutayfah and Najha too, entitled “Mass graves shed a light on Assad’s ‘killing machine’”. Authors Loveday Morris and Suzan Haidamous noted that the alleged mass graves “will provide evidence for future war crimes trials.”

CIJA’s public relations figure Nerma Jelacic stated in an interview with Al Jazeera

that the alleged mass graves “are being ransacked by a variety of actors for a variety of reasons” – a similar excuse was given for the lack of forensic evidence for allegations of Hamas mass rape on October 7, 2023 – but insists prosecutions will go on using the already discredited evidence in Europe.

Two days after the Assad government was overthrown, the ICMP, funded by the UK and Germany specifically for its Syria project, produced a report called “Syria’s Disappeared: Justice Must be Secured for Hundreds of Thousands of Victims and Survivors of the Assad Regime,” using hyper-politicized language and making no mention of the HTS and ISIS mass graves throughout the country.

The ICMP’s work on Syria was collected in a document called “Addressing the Issue of Mass Graves in Syria” by its Policy Coordination Group (PCG) for Syria’s Missing and Disappeared, a project specifically funded by the UK and Germany.

Ironically, the report’s only evidence was of the HTS and ISIS mass graves. The document referenced its 2020 report on HTS and ISIS mass graves but tacked on the aforementioned New York Times article that failed to provide evidence for its allegations, and a report from Al Jumhuriya that details, similar to the ICMP report, mass graves in Raqqa under HTS (then called Jabhat al-Nusra) and ISIS.

It is not only Rapp, CIJA, and ICMP that are involved in the whitewash. A United Nations investigative team known as the “International, Impartial, and Independent Mechanism for Syria” stated that the new HTS Syrian government is receptive to prosecuting Assad government officials but made no mention of HTS or ISIS mass graves.

Clearly, a nefarious and deceptive political agenda seeks to whitewash the new ISIS-in-suits HTS regime rather than bring closure to long suffering families, provide a semblance of justice, and build towards a better future. Instead these “human rights” outfits and the mainstream media cherrypick and distort reports on mass graves, as Syria spirals into another civil war.

This is the latest chapter in a nearly 15 year foreign-sponsored dirty war that has been characterized not only by displacement, destruction, and death, but by one of the most deceptive propaganda campaigns in history to rebrand Al-Qaeda as a benevolent force in Syria.

Following the Syrian government’s collapse, media outlets seized on Sednaya prison, located outside of Damascus. Sednaya is one of ten prisons which held not only non-violent political prisoners and innocents caught up in the highly corrupt Syrian security apparatus’ lumbering bureaucracy, but also militants loyal to the Islamic state, HTS, and an ever-shifting alliance of Islamist armed groups.

Prior to 2011, Sednaya prison had served as a de facto incubator for what would become Syria’s most violent terrorist groups, including Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra.

In 2004 and 2005, around 700 Syrian jihadists, who had returned after battling U.S. forces in Iraq, were captured and imprisoned in Sednaya. In 2008, the prisons inmates rioted, taking hostage numerous officials and guards before security forces killed nine prisoners. They later killed the prison’s warden.

When the Syrian crisis broke out in 2011, Western human rights groups pressured the Assad government to grant them amnesty. It complied, releasing what The New York Times later described them as “Saydnaya Prison’s most radical long-term prisoners, Islamists who would later lead rebel groups”. Assad’s acceding to these demands did not satiate the foreign-backed opposition, which sought nothing less than regime change.

“We were told by brothers with lots of experience [in jihad], who had spent a lot of time in Sednaya, that upon our release we should sit and not work,” Abu Othman recalled about the 2011 amnesty. “Just sit and wait.”

Within weeks, Abu Othman and hundreds of other militants released from Sednaya had mobilized to begin a violent campaign, targeting civilians and state security personnel alike to overthrow the government.

“Many of today’s Ahrar al-Sham leaders belong to the ‘Sednaya generation’ of Islamists who spent the latter part of the 2000s in Sednaya Prison,” noted Carnegie Endowment analyst Aron Lund in 2014.

Among those imprisoned were:

-Amr ‘Abu Atheer’ al-Absi, the Islamic state’s top kidnapper and recruiter of European jihadists.

-Zahran Alloush, who commanded Jaysh al-Islam, was accused of kidnapping Syrian human rights lawyer Razan Zaitouneh, and was one of Syria’s most dangerous terrorists until his death in 2015.

-Abu Khaled al-Suri, co-founder of Ahrar al-Sham.

-Hassan Al Aboud, co-founder Ahrar al Sham and Islamic state member.

-Al Aboud’s brother, Abu Shadi.

-Ahmed Abu Issa, founder of Suqour al-Sham, which carried out joint suicide bomb attacks with Jabhat al-Nusra. Among the attackers was American citizen Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha.

-Abu Othman, long time al-Qaeda and Jabhat al-Nusra member.

When Al-Jolani was dispatched by ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from Iraq to establish an Islamic State branch in Syria, he made contact with the former Sednaya prisoners and began to form Jabhat al-Nusra, the group that, 13 years and two name changes later, would collapse the Syrian state.

Faux humanitarian concerns

While there is no doubt that Sednaya housed many violent criminals and terrorists, others were imprisoned on dubious charges by elements exploiting the long-standing Emergency Law and corruption in order to settle political and personal scores.

However, Sednaya’s violent Islamist prisoners were erased by human rights groups that published sensationalist and evidence-free reports, often prioritizing a preconceived political agenda over factual accuracy.

Amnesty International published a report in 2019 titled Human Slaughterhouse, alleging that tens of thousands of Syrians were executed in mass hangings at Sednaya and other prisons. However, the report contained no evidence, instead saying it “estimates that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were extrajudicially executed at Saydnaya between September 2011 and December 2015” – what it calls "extermination.” The bodies, it alleged, were buried in a small cemetery named Najha and a mass grave in Qatana.

The authors relied only on interviews conducted outside of Syria, mostly in southern Turkey, where the foreign-sponsored Syrian opposition based its operations.

Many of the interviews were furnished to Amnesty International by NGOs funded by Wwestern governments and billionaires, including SNHR and the Commission for International Justice and Accountability.

As Kit Klarenberg reported for Uncaptured Media, CIJA is an organization created by NATO state contractors at the outset of the Syrian conflict that paid huge sums to have “evidence” of Syrian government crimes smuggled out of Al-Qaeda and ISIS-controlled territory, but was found by the European Anti-Fraud Office to have engaged in “submission of false documents, irregular invoicing, and profiteering.” Nonetheless, his conviction was hailed as a “step towards justice” against the Assad government.

Despite the exaggerated claims about Sednaya, President Bashar Al-Assad in 2022 granted amnesty to 60 prisoners, including some who had been convicted on terrorism charges, excluding those whose actions led to death.

Prison break

A handwritten list of Sednaya’s prisoners has circulated on social media, apparently taken when HTS freed their comrades. Social media users posted a digital version too, with many comments from users searching for their family members.

Among the escapees, according to the list, were Saleh Mazen Bekdash And Omar Maddhi Asaad, who had car-bombed in 2013 an elderly Kurdish communist whose car was adorned with former president Hafez Al-Assad’s photo. Uncaptured Media is withholding the murdered man’s identity in order to protect his surviving family members, who remain in Syria.

Whitewashing the black flag

As HTS militants flung Sednaya’s doors open, a disinformation campaign was rolled out in the Western press and on social media. This propaganda amounted to a whitewashed, highly exaggerated, and outright deceptive campaign, similar to the Israeli government’s propaganda offensive to distort the nature of Hamas’ October 7 attack, which served to justify the ongoing genocide and motivate the soldiers carrying it out. This time, the narrative painted a simplistic, black and white picture, where anyone inside Syrian government prisons was an innocent victim of “dictator” Bashar al-Assad.

What the New York Times in 2015 called the “infamous jail near Damascus where the government warehoused those it considered Sunni extremists,” became in 2024 “a symbol of human rights abuses under his rule.” The Times documented in 2022 how Islamic state fighters had attacked prisons in order to free their fellow militants in both Syrian government and Kurdish-held territory, but now those Islamist militants were heralded as “rebel fighters” and “conquering rebels” who were merely searching for their family members.

While media outlets were careful to de-emphasize the radical and violent nature of some of the inmates, a CBS News report from an eastern Syria prison containing ISIS fighters, including many foreigners, noted that prison guards have been careful to not allow the inmates to find out that the Syrian government was toppled because it could be “dangerous” – suggesting they would be inspired by the former al-Qaeda affiliate’s takeover of Syria.

It was not only the prisoners’ character that became a key piece of propaganda, but their numbers too. In 2009, Human Rights Watch estimated that Sednaya held 1,500 inmates. However, amid the chaos, absurd and evidence-free claims that 100,000 to 150,000 prisoners were held in Sednaya prison spread like wildfire.

However, the Turkey-based Association for Detainees and the Missing in Saydnaya Prison, which is fervently anti-Assad, published a document saying there were 4,300 detainees, 1,483 of which were held under charges of terrorism and military tribunals.

Videos said to show women and child prisoners liberated from Sednaya went viral on social media, promoted by outlets like the UK publication The Metro and The Guardian “open source investigations lead” Manisha Ganguly. Think tank Hassan Hassan, editor in chief of the U.S. government-funded New Lines Institute, Thomas Van Linge, also a New Lines writer, and self-declared Zionist Avi Bitterman promoted the footage too. However, an investigation from Verify-Sy showed that the footage was of opposition militants storming and ransacking a children’s charity, and that only men were imprisoned in Sednaya.

As family members of disappeared prisoners combed through Sednaya to search for their missing family members, propagandists claimed to show a machine used to execute and dispose of prisoners.

“Iron execution press in #SednayaPrison,” wrote Qusay Noor, a longtime propagandist associated with terrorist groups Faylaq al-Rahman and Jaysh al-Islam. “After he is hanged, they put him in the press and press him to become like paper. His body and bones are crushed. There are blood channels under the press.”

However, social media users pointed out that the supposed murder machine is likely to be a veneer press, used for laminating wood.

Within days, Syrians reported encountering violent criminals, including rapists, who had been released.

None of these outlets mentioned that HTS itself has long run prisons in Idlib province, which it has occupied since 2015. A UN report noted that the group held civilian men and women, as well as Syrian soldiers, whom they tortured and executed. HTS also employs makeshift religious courts where summary executions of prisoners is common.

The report notes “women and children being separated from their male relatives and being held in squalid conditions, with little food. They were forced to pray. The former detainees described hearing men screaming while being beaten by members of Jabhat Al-Nusra. Both also heard Government soldiers being brought into the prison and pleading for their lives before being executed by shooting.”

Protesters in Idlib have called HTS prisons “slaughtershouses”, but media and human rights groups have avoided using this term, in sharp contrast to Amnesty International’s infamous characterization of Sednaya.

Cancel culture queen

Among the outlets participating in this propaganda campaign is The Free Press, a neoconservative outlet run by Bari Weiss. It published a video report from inside the Sednaya prison, which was emptied of all prisoners in the immediate aftermath of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s ouster.

Weiss is a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, a loosely affiliated group of pseudo-intellectuals that was formed amid the “cancel culture” phenomenon, and include pro-Israel figures like Eric Weinstein, then a manager of tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s investment firm, his brother Brett, who denounced calls for a ceasefire as Israel slaughtered men, women, and children in Gaza.

As a pro-Israel student activist at Columbia university, Weiss pressed for the firing of Palestinian-American professor Joseph Massad. Upon graduation, she began climbing up the Zionist media ladder, first at Tablet Magazine, then onto the Wall Street Journal, where she worked with neoconservative Bret Stephens. Weiss followed Stephens to the New York Times, where she became a columnist. After three years, Weiss resigned as a protest against “wokeness”, claiming to be a victim of cancel culture herself.

Following the October 7 Hamas attack, Weiss served as a stenographer for the Israeli government’s mass propaganda campaign, taking the cancel culture she made a career railing against to lethal proportions.

When Refaat Alareer, a world renowned professor, writer, and poet in Gaza poked fun on X at macabre Israeli propaganda which falsely claimed that Hamas militants had burned an Israeli baby in an oven, Weiss wrongly accused him of joking about burning an Israeli baby, singling him out as Israel carried out its genocidal military campaign.

Alareer, flooded with death threats on X, wrote in a post that “If I get killed by Israeli bombs or my family is harmed, I blame Bari Weiss @bariweiss and her likes. Many maniacal Israeli soldiers already bombing Gaza take these lies and smears seriously and they act upon them.”

Weeks later, Israeli airstrikes indeed targeted Alareer, killing him and several of his family members in what the Euromed Human Rights Monitor called an "apparently deliberate” attack.

The Israel lobby

The Free Press’s Sednaya video was done in collaboration with the Center for Peace Communications, a New York-based nonprofit founded by Joseph Braude, a neoconservative Iraqi-American who works closely with the U.S. government. CPC’s board of directors include pro-Israel former U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross and Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, described by former Israeli military-intelligence officer Sima Vaknin-Gil as an Israeli government asset.

The video, titled “Tour of Assad’s Slaughterhouse,” showed the now emptied cells of Sednaya prison, with a description of summary executions and torture methods, falsely claiming that women and children were imprisoned inside. The video also repeated the claim that the veneer press was used to flatten human remains and that bodies were also burned in crematoriums.

The video then shows men breaking down walls into what they claim is an underground section of the prison. This video reinforced claims promoted in Western media outlets like the BBC, which reported that the White Helmets (a propaganda operation funded by the U.S., U.K. and Qatari governments that has participated in staged massacres and public executions) sent five “specialised emergency teams" to rescue prisoners. A video of a White Helmets member with a rescue dog searching through piles of rubble for an entrance to a secret entrance went viral.

This was accompanied by cartoons showing a vast underground complex below a prison, which also went viral on social media platforms, including X, Instagram and Facebook, gardening

Similarly, an image said to be of a man emerging from Sednaya’s underground complex went viral, garnering millions of impressions on X, Facebook and other platforms.

In reality, the image was taken from an AI-generated video posted to Tiktok on December 3.

The claim was debunked by iVerify, a project of the Centre for Excellence in Journalism at the Institute of Business Administration University in Karachi, Pakistan.

An image of an emaciated prisoner went viral, though it was taken at Ho Chi Minh Wax Museum in Vietnam.

A BBC update included a statement from the ADMSP which said that "There is no truth to the presence of detainees trapped underground, and the information contained in some press reports is inaccurate.” The White Helmets too confirmed that there were no prisoners underground.

Days after the report was debunked, The Free Press continued to promote the deception.

The video report also interviews Fadi Abdulghany, head of the dubious and opaque NGO Syrian Network for Human Rights. This organization, while working with Western governments, media outlets and human rights groups, has scrubbed information from its website admitting that it is funded by “states”, a fact glossed over by The Free Press’s propaganda piece. SNHR has downplayed deaths committed by ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the Syrian conflict and openly called for foreign military intervention.

Abdulghany claimed that 96,000 people were forcibly disappeared and 40,000 imprisoned but provided no evidence.

An X account called HamasAtrocities posted a video claiming to show prisoners “found deep in the dungeons of the Sednaya prison in Damascus.”

However, the video was taken from a Persian-language Instagram account that aggregates content.

Days later, CNN’s Clarissa Ward filmed what appeared to be a prisoner found lying under a blanket inside Sednaya, unaware that HTS had freed his fellow prisoners days before. However, an investigation from Verify-Sy found that the prisoner was a Syrian intelligence officer who had been jailed for taking bribes.

It was not the first time Ward has produced shady propaganda in Syria. In 2017: she hired American Al-Qaeda propagandist Bilal Abul Kareem to produce a documentary in Idlib province. CNN then obscured his role to cover its tracks, irking Abdul Kareem.

Ward told former CIA director Michael Morell in 2021 that she was so incensed by the U.S. not overthrowing Assad that she wrote angry emails to then deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes chastising the Obama administration for not doing enough, although it carried out the most expensive intelligence operation in history to overthrow Assad.

The U.S. government in 2017 alleged that the Assad government had built a crematorium in Sednaya, distributing satellite photos labeled “probable crematorium” to back its claim.

“The attempt to cover up mass murders in the Assad crematorium is reminiscent of the 20th century’s worst offenses against humanity,” said then-ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, likening Syria to Nazi Germany.

Acting Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Stuart Jones assured reporters that evidence of the crematorium would be presented to the world. However, the U.S. government never did present evidence, and since Western reporters have had access, none have bothered to verify Washington’s incendiary claims.

Weiss turns to Al-Qaeda to smear Hamas

The Sednaya disinformation piece was not The Free Press’s only foray into pro-Al-Qaeda propaganda.

In October, as Israel attempted to undo the PR disaster resulting from its publication of the last moments of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, The Free Press published a video interviewing three residents of Idlib, in northwestern Syria.

Idlib fell from Syrian government control in 2015 and is firmly under the control of HTS, headed by the notorious terrorist Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, for whom the U.S. government had offered a $10 million reward.

Al-Jolani was dispatched from Iraq to Syria in by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in order to found Jabhat al-Nusra as the Islamic state’s Syrian branch but betrayed Al-Baghdadi and swore fealty to then-Al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri. Al-Jolani consolidated power in Idlib province, described by Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL Brett McGurk as the “largest Al-Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.” Jabhat al-Nusra officially broke ties with al-Qaeda and rebranded under the name Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (Front for the Conquest of the Levant), and then to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Organization for the Liberation of the Levant). However, the U.S. Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) profile of HTS notes that Jolani “broke with al-Qa‘ida in 2016 because of strategic disagreements,” rather than ideological ones. Journalist Jenan Moussa’s 2017 documentary Undercover in Idlib, which documented the total dominance there of al-Qaeda, demonstrated that the break with al-Qaeda was indeed, as the ODNI noted, only cosmetic.

The UN Human Rights Office reported that HTS “detained, tortured, and executed civilians expressing dissenting opinions, including journalists”, and that “female media workers were doubly victimized, as the terrorist group continued to systematically discriminate against women and girls, including by denying their freedom of movement.”

“HTS, moreover, indiscriminately shelled densely populated civilian areas, spreading terror amongst civilians living in Government-held areas,” the report added. “Women, men and children that we interviewed faced the ghastly choice of being bombarded or fleeing deeper into HTS controlled areas where there are rampant abuses of human rights and extremely limited humanitarian assistance.”

“The acts by HTS members amount to war crimes,” said Commissioner Karen Koning AbuZayd.

Amnesty International Syria specialist Diana Seeman noted in a 2018 BBC interview that HTS carried out numerous war crimes including, “summary killing of civilians, especially activists, human rights defenders, beheading, and the stoning of women.”

In 2020, American Al-Qaeda propagandist Bilal Abdul Kareem was imprisoned by HTS, held in solitary confinement for six months, threatened with beatings, and frequently heard torture.

“Almost every day of every week, I had to listen to the screams of torture just a few metres away from me. Everyone in the prisons can always hear the torture,” he told Middle East Eye.

Al-Jolani, then furnished an interview with PBS, claim that there was no torture.

“Just to sum up the whole thing: Abu Mohamed al-Jolani, point blank, he lied,” Abdul Kareem insisted.

In this repressive environment, the fervent Zionist Weiss found ideological allies against the Palestinian resistance movement of Hamas.

“In my view, he got what he deserves,” remarked one Idlib man on Sinwar’s killing.

“He was on the side of Assad, the regime we are against,” another man explained.

A hidden agenda

The collaboration highlights the tacit alliance between Zionism and Al-Qaeda, both of which Washington supports in order to destabilize and promote regime change wars against governments in the Middle East that pursue a foreign policy independent of U.S. interests.

Indeed, throughout the Syrian dirty war, Israel played a key role in arming jihadist militants and providing them with medical care. Netanyahu even met with opposition militants receiving medical treatment in Israeli hospitals before they were sent back to Syria to continue fighting. In 2018, Israel evacuated the White Helmets from Syria.

Moti Kahane, the Israeli-American businessman whose firm is seeking to run biometric concentration camps in the Gaza Strip in collaboration with former CIA director David Petraeus, was a longtime supporter of the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army, a collection of rival factions that contained many former Al-Qaeda and ISIS fighters and served as a “larger Islamist and jihadist factions, including Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate.”

When the FSA attacked Kurds in 2019, Kahane publicly denounced them.

As the recent HTS offensive unfolded, so-called "opposition activists" appeared on Israel’s public broadcaster to profess their support for Israel.

"We love Israel and have never been its enemies, because Israel is not hostile to those who are not hostile to her,” they said.

This was the first in a series of statements from HTS-aligned figures who welcomed Israel’s bombing of their country.

While the video compares Sednaya with Nazi Germany and Rwanda, it makes no mention of the Israeli prison Sde Teiman, where guards starve, torture, gang rape, burn, amputate limbs from, and murder Palestinian detainees, around 9,500 of whom are held in Israel’s prison archipelago, including hundreds of women and children, according to the United Nations. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published a report entitled “Welcome to Hell,” saying that “Sde Teiman is only the tip of the iceberg.”

Amnesty International, which deemed Sednaya the “human slaughterhouse”, is tepid in its reporting on Sde Teiman. It avoids such characterizations, instead calling its July 2024 report “Israel must end mass incommunicado detention and torture of Palestinians from Gaza.” The BBC’s December 9 report borrowed Amnesty’s “slaughterhouse” title for Sednaya, while its August 5 article only referred to “abuse” in its headline. The New York Times report on Syria’s prison was titled “Syria Shudders as Assad’s Prison Atrocities Come Into the Light” while it used softer language to describe Sde Teiman, titling its article “Inside the Base Where Israel Has Detained Thousands of Gazans.”

The Jerusalem Post seized on the propaganda campaign too in order to discredit popular protests against the Gaza genocide and justify Israeli conduct.

“Assad’s regime represents dehumanization on a mass scale, yet the global response has been indifferent at best. Those who claim to champion human rights on the world stage remain conspicuously quiet,” wrote Zina Rakhamilova “While the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza is a legitimate concern, anyone with a moral compass can discern the difference between a war initiated by a terror organization and crimes against humanity like those we are now uncovering in Syria.”

The Times of Israel, which has published calls for genocide and lebensraum, described Sednaya as a “death dormitory.”

As HTS consolidated power and Western media outlets that had published deceptive reports about Syria now had access to the country, the propaganda campaign has reached a new level.

A video report published by Israel’s Channel 12 shows militants loading boxes of weapons collected from southern Syria into Israeli vehicles to be transported to Israeli territory.

“Hundreds of ammunition boxes, mortars, bombs grenades and many weapons – that’s the loot that Israeli army forces now collect inside Syria,” the presenter describes.

Israeli soldiers then show crates, canisters and grenades of “chemical substance” designed to irritate skin. The soldiers take no precautions when handling the weapons, indicating that they are not highly dangerous or lethal.

The presenter then states that the Israeli occupation forces plan to stay for the long term, or as long as international considerations allow.

Israel has been involved with the Syrian regime change project since its earliest days. In May 2011, Israeli singer Amir Benayoun produced Arabic-language songs that would become celebrated as anthems by the anti-government movement. Benayoun later composed a song called "Ahmed loves Israel", written from the perspective of a Palestinian who wants to murder Jewish babies.

In southern Syria, Israel funded and armed anti-government forces, and provided them with medical care in field hospitals before sending them back to battle.

Israel did not only forge relationships with so-called “moderate rebels.” When Islamic state fighters opened fire on an Israeli military patrol, defense minister Moshe Ya’alon announces that the terrorist group apologized to Israel.

Ya’alon later stated that he prefers ISIS to Iran in Syria.

“In Syria, if the choice is between Iran and the Islamic State, I choose the Islamic State,” he remarked in 2016.

With Israel deepening its occupation of the Golan Heights, its long term relationship with militants is paying off and ensuring that Syria will be incapable of defending itself, regardless of who is in power.

In the immediate wake of the Syrian government’s abrupt collapse, much remains uncertain about the country’s future. While longtime leader Bashar Assad has sought refuge in Moscow, most of his government and its military, security, and intelligence apparatus remains in Damascus. Calls for reconciliation between officials and the predominantly foreign “opposition” abound, but the prospect of show trials for state apparatchiks is high. After all, elements of Anglo-American intelligence have been planning for such an eventuality since before the Syrian civil war even started.

In May 2011, just weeks after the crisis began, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) was birthed by shadowy NATO state contractors, ARK and Tsamota. Its first act was to train handpicked Syrian “investigators, lawyers, and activists in basic international criminal and humanitarian law…enabling [them] to link state and non-state actors to underlying criminal acts.” Dedicated “teams of investigators according to their regions” - including Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Idlib - were created, “and equipped with field investigative kits.”

Their objective was to gather evidence of alleged war crimes committed by Syrian government forces, in support of a “domestic justice process in a future transitional Syria.” We must ask ourselves how such a project came to be before the Syrian army was formally deployed by Damascus, in response to the foreign-fomented crisis that commenced in mid-March 2011 particularly given that bringing officials to trial in a “future transitional Syria” was wholly contingent on all-out regime change.

The timing of CIJA’s launch is a palpable indication that foreign actors were laying foundations for that overthrow outcome from the very first days of Syria’s “peaceful revolution,” before full-blown civil war had erupted. Given their affiliations, ARK and Tsamota were well-placed to know in advance of Western governments’ designs to forcefully topple the Assad government. Fourteen years later, with the Syrian state in ruins, it may be time for their dormant, long-standing plan to at last be activated.

‘Regime Change’

Founded by MI6 journeyman Alistair Harris, ARK, “an international development company,” was one of a constellation of contractors, staffed by military and intelligence veterans, employed by British intelligence at a cost of many millions to conduct covert psychological warfare campaigns in Syria, from the initial days of the crisis. The aim was to destabilize Assad’s government, convince the domestic population, international bodies, and Western citizens that genocidal CIA and MI6-backed militant groups pillaging the country were a “moderate” alternative, and deluge media the world over with pro-opposition propaganda.

Under this operation’s auspices, ARK founded and ran numerous ostensibly independent opposition media outlets targeting Syrians of all ages, while tutoring and equipping countless local “citizen journalists”, teaching them “camera handling, lighting, sound, interviewing, filming a story…video and sound editing…voice-over, scriptwriting,” and “graphics and 2D and 3D animation design.” The firm’s students were also instructed in practical propaganda theory, such as “target audience identification, media narrative analysis and monitoring, behavioral identification/understanding, campaign planning, behavioral change, and how communications can influence it.”

The media operation represented a highly-evolved and modernized version of the U.S. government’s program in the 1980s to train Afghan mujahideen to document or manufacture Soviet crimes, as Dan Cohen reported for Behind The Headlines.

Such was ARK’s intimate proximity with anti-Assad elements that it boasted in leaked submissions to the Foreign Office of being entrusted by Western governments to develop a dedicated Office for Syrian Opposition Support. This entity identified the most promising groups for the proxy war’s sponsors to finance, in turn “[helping] present them to international donors, and provide access to networks that could deliver assistance.” These efforts intensified “as the conflict deepened and it became apparent that regime change would not occur in the short term.”

Tsamota’s primitive official website describes the company as “a security and justice sector consultancy which provides rule of law, forensics and natural resources advisory services,” working in “in politically, legally, socially and logistically challenging environments” for Western governments. The firm is not a likely candidate for holding government officials anywhere accountable for war crimes. Tsamota has since its inception offered guidance to major corporations on how to maximize profits in the Global South, while limiting their local and international legal liabilities.

In 2013, Tsamota director William Wiley gave a scandalous presentation to Canadian consortium MineAfrica Inc. where he set out a series of hypothetical scenarios in which mining companies operating in countries such as the Congo and Mali employed private security firms to crack down on striking workers or deal with “local militias” interfering with their operations. Wiley outlined a number of means by which companies could be insulated from repercussions of heavy-handed responses to such incidents, up to and including murder.

That presentation described Tsamota as composed of “experts” drawn from “national police, military and intelligence forces.” Wiley is no exception, having served in the Canadian military for almost two decades. Subsequently, he turned to international law, among other things, overseeing the trial of Saddam Hussein from October 2005 - December 2006 for crimes against humanity. Mainstream accounts acknowledge Wiley was imposed on the former Iraqi leader’s defense team without consent - a major breach of basic legal norms - by the U.S. embassy in Baghdad’s Regime Crimes Liaison Office.

After capture, Hussein was initially interrogated by the CIA. Contemporaneous media reports note there was significant concern within the Agency that “their questioning could become public during his eventual trial,” raising issues around “how to conduct the questioning and record the conversations.” The reasons why were unstated, although a likely explanation would be that Washington wished to avoid awkward disclosures in court about Hussein’s long-running relationship with the CIA, and active U.S. complicity in many of the most heinous crimes of which he was accused.

To say the least, this was a sensitive role. Even prominent Iraqi supporters of the U.S. invasion and occupation charged that Baghdad’s “interim” puppet government was seeking “show trials followed by speedy executions” of Hussein et al. to boost its credibility. That Wiley was entrusted with this mission speaks volumes about his reliability from Washington’s perspective. It also raises obvious questions about the nature of his relationship with the CIA, and whether that bond influenced CIJA’s creation half a decade later.

‘Moving Documents’

A series of leaked ARK files on CIJA’s activities authored in the years immediately following its creation make grand claims about its achievements. One declares the Commission “innovated in the field of transitional justice…aiding the collection of evidence to document war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other violations of International Humanitarian Law” in Syria. Another states its work represented “a landmark development in international justice: the contemporaneous gathering of evidence of violations of international humanitarian law conducted by regime forces”:

“[CIJA], through expert training, effective equipment provision and a commitment to the truth were able to ensure that when the conflict ends, the raw material of a post-conflict war crimes process is ready for trial, in turn providing a key contribution to truth telling, reconciliation and the future of Syria.”

Elsewhere, ARK boasted how CIJA had seized thousands of kilograms of “contemporaneous documentation”, hundreds of thousands of pages of “evidential material” and thousands of videos from Syria, “all of which had to be hand carried” out of the country. Cut to February 2021, and Commission chair Stephen Rapp, a U.S. diplomatic warhorse, bragged to CBS about the sheer volume of evidence that CIJA had collected. He claimed the paper trail exposed a systematic strategy of Assad government-directed executions of opposition activists, along with ensuing coverups:

“Now we have 800,000 pages of original documents, signed and sealed with original signatures going all the way up to Assad, that document this whole strategy…We see reports back about ‘well, we’ve got a real problem here, there are too many corpses stacking up, somebody’s gonna have to help us with that’...Everything is handled in this sort of totalitarian system where they frankly think they can get away with things...they were almost stupid…they created evidence.”

If such damning, incontrovertible proof was bagged at any stage by CIJA, it has never emerged publicly. Still, throughout the Syrian dirty war, the Commission enjoyed glowing profiles in Western media, while providing journalists and human rights groups with multiple scoops supposedly exposing Syrian government atrocities. At no point did any mainstream reporter or NGO question, let alone raise concerns about, the manner in which the Commission garnered the material upon which its cases against government officials in Damascus was “hand carried” out of the country.

CIJA chief Wiley acknowledged in 2014 that his organization smuggled evidence from Syria by working with every opposition group “up to but excluding Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.” However, a 2019 investigation by The Grayzone amply indicates that CIJA was frequently in extremely close quarters with both groups. Moreover, they were paid handsomely for their assistance in securing documentation. This included material seized in Raqqa after its January 2014 capture by ISIS, right when the ultra-extremist group was massacring Alawite and Christian religious minorities.

In a 2016 New Yorker profile of CIJA, Wiley detailed the practical hassles and financial drain inherent in “moving documents [over] international borders” and opposition-controlled “checkpoints,” while relying on “rebel groups and couriers for logistical support.” He described how bundles of government files “typically” arrived at the Commission’s offices “in a dizzying array of crappy suitcases.” Wiley lamented, “we burn enormous sums of money moving this stuff.”

Accordingly, CIJA received tens of millions of dollars for its efforts from a variety of Western governments, including those at the forefront of the Syrian dirty war. However, despite the vast windfall, the Commission’s work produced zero prosecutions for many years. This changed in late 2019, when Anwar Raslan and Eyad Gharib, two former members of Damascus’ General Intelligence Directorate, were indicted in Germany for crimes against humanity.

‘Many Contradictions’

Raslan headed the Directorate’s domestic security unit, while Gharib was one of his departmental subordinates. The pair defected to the opposition in December 2012. Raslan and his family fled to Jordan, where he played “an active and visible role in the Syrian opposition.” He was part of the opposition delegation to the Geneva II conference on Syria in January 2014. In July that year, Raslan was granted asylum in Germany.

After fleeing Syria, Raslan told numerous lurid tales of abuse and atrocities perpetrated by his unit, and the Assad government more widely, during his 20 years of state service. He claimed his defection was spurred after learning that an apparent opposition attack in Damascus which he was charged with investigating was, in fact, staged by security forces. Significant doubts about his accounts, and whether his defection was principled or just cynical opportunism, have been raised in many quarters.

In a perverse irony, Raslan’s propensity to be a loudmouth was his undoing. His assorted post-defection claims provided grounds for arrest by German authorities and were used against him and Gharib in their prosecutions. These legal actions heavily relied on documents seized by CIJA, including Central Crisis Management Cell records. This unit was created in March 2011 by Damascus to manage responses to mass rioting that erupted this December. These documents have been widely described as the “linchpin” of the Commission’s case against “the Syrian regime.”

Yet, as this journalist has previously exposed, the Central Crisis Management Cell files in fact show the Assad government explicitly and repeatedly instructed security forces to protect peaceful protesters, prevent violence, and keep the situation under control. The documents also show that, all along, sinister, unseen forces systematically murdered police officers, soldiers, pro-government figures, and demonstrators to foment catastrophe, in a manner eerily similar to many CIA/MI6 regime-change operations, old and new.

In February 2021, Gharib was found guilty of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity. He received a four-and-a-half year prison sentence. A year later, Raslan was given life for crimes including mass torture, rape, and murder. The pair were not convicted for personally perpetrating these horrors but for serving in the General Intelligence Directorate at the time they were allegedly committed. “Expert” witness evidence provided at their trials left much to be desired.

For example, judges and prosecutors alike were disquieted at “many contradictions” in the testimony of “P3”, a Syrian government operative who purportedly worked in a security service “mail department” and was central to Gharib’s conviction. P3 professed to seeing sensitive documents “related to the transfer of corpses” of opposition activists “to burial sites.” They “provided contradictory information” in statements to German police and the court and were “visibly nervous” while testifying. All along, their chagrined attorney sat nearby “putting his hands behind his head.”

Meanwhile, during Raslan’s prosecution, “P4” - a nameless individual who claimed to have been detained in a Syrian prison but bribed his way out - testified that he saw 500,000 corpses buried via a “bulldozer and a truck” next to his house, in an area which was previously “a desert.” Reports of the trial indicate there “was a feeling” among those present in court, including “the public,” that these numbers were greatly “exaggerated.”

‘False documents, irregular invoicing, and profiteering’

The sense that Gharib and Raslan were prosecuted because they were within easy reach, and CIJA needed something to show for all its well-remunerated efforts, is unavoidable. The Commission had strong grounds to be anxious about failing to fulfill its founding objective. In March 2020, the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) formally accused the organization of “submission of false documents, irregular invoicing, and profiteering” relating to an EU “Rule of Law” project it ran in Syria.

Fast forward to today, and The Guardian reports that “the abrupt implosion of the infrastructure of state terror” in Syria “has made available a huge volume of evidence.” The outlet quoted CIJA chief William Wiley at some length. He compared Assad’s fall to “a situation much like Germany in 1945 or Iraq in 2003,” with “a sudden availability of all state records” making prosecution of state officials a sure thing.

“It’s a very unusual situation, and its suddenness creates challenges and opportunities in simply dealing with the material,” Wiley said. “If there’s any security intelligence guy that rocks up in Europe, there’s typically going to be enough material already to hand.”

On December 8, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham leader Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani walked through the cool Damascus air, before prostrating himself in prayer.

Al-Jolani and his band of Turkish-backed insurgents had just conquered the Syrian cities of Aleppo, Homs, Hama and Damascus, the seat of Bashar Al-Assad’s government.

Their lightning offensive faced little resistance from Syria’s military forces, which inexplicably retreated, leaving observers on all sides shocked by the sudden collapse of an army that had spent more than a decade successfully defending against an array of foreign-backed mercenaries and extremist groups.

Around the same time as Al-Jolani strode through Damascus, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared in an outpost on Mount Hermon in the occupied Golan Heights that retreating Syrian forces had just evacuated.

“This collapse is a direct result of our forceful action against Hezbollah and Iran, Assad’s main supporters,” Netanyhahu boasted, which “set off a chain reaction of all those who want to free themselves from this tyranny and its oppression.”

Indeed, the Syrian state’s sudden collapse represents a major victory for Israel in its war against the regional array of counter-hegemonic forces known as the “Axis of Resistance.”

Al-Jolani’s HTS, which terrorized Syrian religious minorities and imposed a strict Wahhabist interpretation of Islamic law in its stronghold of Idlib, is now set to take over areas of Syria formerly under the control of the Assad government, while others remain under the control of U.S.-backed Kurdish separatists and the U.S. military itself.

While Israeli officials have sought in the past to downplay the well-documented links between Israel and opposition forces in Syria, with Assad out of power, the veil is now being lifted.

Speaking with Jewish Insider, Brigadier General (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, former Israeli military intelligence chief and Director General of Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry , now a senior research fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs and the Misgav Institute for National Security, admitted that the danger from putschist forces in Syria to Israel “exaggerated.”

“Their first mission is to stabilize Syria, and Israel is not the central question they are addressing,” he added.

Kuperwasser appears to be downplaying what are, in reality, positive relations between the new Syrian regime and Israel. On Monday, Dec. 9, Israel occupation forces patrolled the southern Syria village of Quneitra in a non-armored vehicle, demonstrating the total comfort they enjoy.

Days before, a Syrian “rebel” appeared on Israel’s national television channel Kan 11 to encourage Israeli investment and friendly relations.

Tel Aviv university lecturer Dina Lisnyansky remarked that because of relations between Israel and Turkey, HTS may see “Israel not as a potential enemy but as a potential ally to a new Syria.”

HTS is heavily backed by NATO member Turkey whose leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has fiercely condemned Israel for its ongoing genocide in Gaza and claimed to have cancelled trade agreements, but continues to export goods and Azerbaijani oil, fueling Israel’s war machine.

The Times of Israel published an interview with a “rebel commander” of the Free Syrian Army – a loosely affiliated patchwork of militias that have long served as what analyst Sam Heller in 2017 called a “weapons farm for larger Islamist and jihadist factions” – who fought alongside HTS in Aleppo.

“We are open to friendship with everyone in the region – including Israel. We don’t have enemies other than the Assad regime, Hezbollah, and Iran. What Israel did against Hezbollah in Lebanon helped us a great deal. Now we are taking care of the rest,” the commander told them, dismissing concerns about HTS’s radical ideology.

Asked if he is in contact with any Israeli officials, he declined to comment. “I will only say that we are thankful to Israel for its strikes against Hezbollah and against the Iranian infrastructure in Syria, and we hope that after the fall of Assad, Israel will plant a rose in the Syrian garden and will support the Syrian people, for the benefit of the region.”

He then called on Israeli warplanes to launch more attacks.

“Israel should consider striking forces backed by Iran wherever it sees them. We are trying to block them on the roads and ambush them, but Israel should also act from the air.”

However, Israel has focused on bombing Syria itself, wiping out military infrastructure including the country’s air force, naval fleet and air defenses, to ensure the beleaguered country can not defend itself, and killing civilians in the process.

Nedal Al-Amari, an opposition figure who cheered on the HTS takeover, complained that Israel continued to bomb after Assad’s departure.

“There is no excuse for Israel to target the newly liberated territories now,” he wrote on X. “In the new Syria, we are not a hostile country, and therefore Israel must stop these strikes.”

“I'm one of the people who defended Israel’s right to destroy Hezbollah because it is a threat to the entire region, I will now stand with all my strength against this Israeli advancement in Syria,” he added in another post, seemingly unaware that Israel had just obliterated Syria’s military capabilities.

Israeli plans do not stop as destroying Syria’s military. Settler leader Daniella Weiss has opened a social media account called “Syria Is Ours”, dedicated to expanding the Greater Israel project into the newly conquered territory.

If Israel has a rival in post-Assad Syria, Israel’s so-called “experts” believe it is Qatar, which has long been a patron of HTS, formerly known as the Al-Nusra Front.

“Before Qatar gets in and invests economically and ideologically, we have to try to create as many connections as possible with all of the factions,” Lisnyansky said.

Kuperwasser anticipates “positive potential” among the various factions vying for power in Syria that seek to be “good neighbors to Israel.”

“What happens next is a big question… There is negative and positive potential. Whether the positive potential is realized depends on [Israel’s] caution and the cleverness with which we act,” he added.

At the Atlantic Council, which serves as NATO’s unofficial think tank, former U.S. intelligence officer Jonathan Panikoff wrote that Israel should “seek out a quiet, private engagement with emerging leaders.

“If Israel wants to better ensure its security in the north, it should reach private, serious agreements with a new Syrian government that the country won’t be used to transfer weapons to Hezbollah to rebuild the group.”

While Turkey, Israel, and Qatar jockey for position in the chaos of post-Assad Syria, Mordechai Kedar, an influential Israeli academic, urged Saudi Arabia to invade Qatar and depose the ruling family as a prelude to collapsing Iran.

“Today, after the oppressed Syrian people have proven their ability to successfully confront the axis of evil, it is time to implement the Saudi plan to invade the State of Qatar to expel the Al Thani family and rid the world of their evil. Iran will sit idly by as it did nothing to save Sinwar, Nasrallah and Assad. Iran is finished, and it is time to eliminate its lackeys,” he wrote on X.

With the black flag of Al-Qaeda flying over Damascus, a long-standing neoconservative dream is realized, providing the U.S. with a renewed pretext for its illegal occupation, and driving the region into further disarray. With Israel swallowing up more land, the elation among Assad’s opponents will likely be short-lived.

I documented several aspects of it in the 2018 mini-documentary, “The Syria Deception: Al-Qaeda Goes to Hollywood.”

The documentary’s relevance has been renewed as the same imperialist forces are now collapsing the Syrian state while Washington’s media organs give the foreign-sponsored extremist organizations attacking Syria a makeover.

I had the honor to speak at the UN Security Council on Monday, November 20 regarding U.S. plans for a UN military intervention in Haiti.

Watch my speech or read the text below:

Distinguished members of the council,

I am an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker, one of the few independent journalists to report from Haiti in recent years. My most recent film is titled Haiti: Intervention versus Revolution.

The UN Security Council is being asked to approve deployment of another so-called “peace-keeping” mission to Haiti. Let us recall that Haiti has been under US and UN occupation for 21 of the last 30 years, from 1994 to 2000 by UNMIH, UNSMIH, UNTMIH, and MIPONUH, and from 2004 to 2019 by MINUSTAH and MINUJUSTH. However, those two plus decades of occupation never achieved their stated goals. In fact, UN soldiers, under the familiar pretext of “combating gangs”, in one operation that became emblematic of their conduct, wantonly fired some 22,000 bullets into the slum of Cite Soleil, killing residents in their ramshackle houses. These UN troops were also responsible for crimes against the Haitian people, from the introduction of cholera to the rape of children, for which they were never held accountable. Now, the Haitian people are being asked once again to let UN troops occupy their nation.

Yet it is clear that there is another agenda at play. The United States’ government, my government, seeks to impose its will on Haiti, with or without the approval of this council. 

Don’t take my word for it. In December 2021, China and Russia voted to limit the Security Council mandate for U.S. trainers to the Haitian National Police to only 9 months rather than the 12 months that Washington sought. This outraged U.S. Senator Robert Menendez, then the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. During a briefing to his committee, Menendez rhetorically asked a State Department official: “Why do you think China and Russia stopped us?”. He answered his own question, saying “They want total unrest in the hemisphere, that’s their whole purpose in this hemisphere, is creating instability.”  He added, “At some point we have to think about how we circumvent that.”

In 2023, Washington indeed found a way to circumvent the UN Security Council when it was prevented from once again using this body, as it did in 1994 and 2004, to further its interventionist goals in Haiti. It concocted the Multinational Security Support mission or MSS, which U.S. representative to the UN, Jeffrey Jeffrey DeLaurentis, called “a new way of preserving global peace and security.”

Indeed, the United States has enacted legislation known as the Global Fragility Act, which might be better described as the Crumbling Empire Act. This bipartisan legislation, signed into law by President Trump in 2019 and continued under the Biden administration, seeks to combine military force and soft power to push back against the growing influence of China and Russia, which Washington, still applying its long-discredited imperial Monroe Doctrine, sees as a threat. Haiti is the pilot case for this new strategy, which the U.S. openly stated it seeks to apply to so-called fragile states around the world, beginning with Libya, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea, and Benin, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea, and Togo in West Africa.

This intervention assumes that the Haitian people are incapable of solving their own problems, an insulting notion to those who know Haitian history. An intervention would be, first and foremost, a violation of Haitian sovereignty. But even more so, it would empower and support the forces which have carried out the most heinous acts of violence in Haiti today.

My outlet, Uncaptured Media, in collaboration with Haiti Liberte, recently published footage we obtained of a Haitian National Police officer summarily executing an unarmed civilian, picking his pocket, and then running over his corpse with an armored vehicle provided by the United States, ostensibly to fight gangs. This is not an isolated incident. A September 30 report by the Panel of Experts established pursuant to Security Council resolution 2653 addressed to the Security Council’s President noted that “From 1 January to 31 March 2024, 590 civilians unrelated to gangs were killed or injured during police operations against gangs.” The document cited reports that police officers had carried out extrajudicial executions as seen in the footage we published.

One must also note that the Kenyan police forces sent to Haiti under the auspices of the MSS have an abysmal human rights record going back decades.

A 2009 report by the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions

Philip Alston found “death squads operating on the orders of senior police officials” killed ​1,113 people following Kenya’s December 2007 elections. Little has changed since then. Even the U.S. State Department’s Kenya 2018 Rights Report noted “unlawful and politically motivated killings; forced disappearances; torture; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.”

Any UN operation would work hand in glove with these corrupt and murderous Haitian and Kenyan police officers.

The proposed UN intervention, like that of the MSS, is a violation of Haitian law and the UN Charter. Haiti has no elected government, but a regime effectively appointed by the outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. Interim president Leslie Voltaire, who most recently requested UN military intervention, has zero legal authority, like former Prime Ministers Ariel Henry, Garry Conille, and now Didier Fils-Aimé . Not one of them has ever been elected nor holds any respect or legitimacy outside of Washington DC and this building. That such an illegal intervention is even being considered is an insult and affront to the Haitian people.

From my numerous visits to Haiti in recent years, it is clear that the overwhelming majority of the Haitian people do not want another intervention. In 2023, as this council considered whether to bless the MSS, Haitian popular organizations hung banners across main thoroughfares in Port-au-Prince saying no to intervention and reminding the population of the cholera outbreak it introduced.

The only sector of the Haitian population that supports an intervention are the tiny few who stand to benefit from it, who disproportionately live outside of the country, and who profit from the status quo of controlled chaos. They are the corrupt oligarchs who funded the armed groups to do their bidding and have now lost control of them, and those who Washington’s soft power arms like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy have groomed as its preferred future leaders of Haiti.

For anyone who naively believes that foreign armed intervention would benefit the Haitian people, one only needs to examine the results of previous interventions, and remember the old adage, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

In fact, this proposed intervention could be worse. Haiti is awash in military-grade weapons imported from the United States, thanks to lax gun laws and porous borders. An intervention would meet stiff armed resistance and would cause bloodshed to the Haitian population and among UN troops. Haiti’s history is marked by its resistance to foreign invasions from its glorious 1804 revolution to today.

Haitian sovereignty must be respected, but first re-established by the Haitian people themselves. Let Haitians, not foreign bodies, choose their leaders and their future.

Thank you.

On the morning of Sat., Nov. 9, 2024, officers of the Haitian National Police (PNH) in an armored car, without provocation, shot, robbed, and then ran over the body of a man who had willingly stopped to talk to them near the intersection of Rue des Casernes and Avenue Jean-Jacques Dessalines (Grande Rue) in downtown Port-au-Prince.

In the shocking video, the victim first approaches the black, armored car – emblazoned with the identifier COB-9 – in a manner that suggests he bore no enmity for or fear of the officers inside. After relaxedly communicating with them as he stood about four feet from the vehicle’s half-opened door, the man was suddenly shot in the stomach by an officer inside the vehicle. As the victim fell backwards onto the road, a hooded police officer emerged from the armored car with his rifle. The wounded man attempted to flee, but the cop shot him to death, splattering the victim’s blood all over the road’s pavement.

The armored car then began to drive away, but then the shooter again got out of the vehicle, walked over to the prone corpse, and removed an item from the victim’s pants’ pocket. As the police vehicle backs up, the masked cop casually tosses the stolen item into the armored car, climbs back in, and the vehicle drives away. The armored car soon returns and purposefully drives over the legs of the victim’s corpse.

This ghastly scene was filmed by a drone operated by the Viv Ansanm (Live Together) coalition of armed groups which is battling the combined forces of the PNH and the Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission, a UN-sanctioned mercenary force of about 430 mostly Kenyan cops paid for primarily by Washington.

The killing is emblematic of massacres occurring on a vast scale in recent months throughout metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince, as police officers – usually from armored cars –  kill Haitian civilians, men and women, young and old, without reason, warning, provocation, or cause, according to dozens of witnesses and news reports.

A PNH officer explained to France24 in May that they operate under the assumption that there are no civilians in impoverished neighborhoods.

“We don't need to know if they're armed or not. We just fire,” he remarked.

In the spring and early summer, in an area called Maïs Gâté near the Health Ministry (MSPP) and the Port-au-Prince International Airport, the PNH began duping the bodies of dozens of unidentified victims, mostly young men – two, three, and four at a time – according to numerous reports which Haïti Liberté received. Witnesses and Haïti Liberté reporters were too frightened to take photographs or video of the dumping ground, out of fear they would end up in it, but word of the killing field soon spread and the dumping there was stopped.

This spring, the Viv Ansanm released another drone video of a young man emerging from a police vehicle in which he was apparently being held. As he unhurriedly walked away from the car, the officers shot him in the back from the vehicle, killing him.

On Jun. 29, in a long on-line recording, Jeff “Gwo Lwa” Larose of the Viv Ansanm affiliate in Canaan, condemned the PNH for indiscriminately gunning down residents of his neighborhood and other communities. The victims included market women and innocent pedestrians walking along the roads, he said. He claimed the cops were wantonly sowing terror in many poor neighborhoods.

In a declaration the same day, Haitian journalist Ralph Laurent of “Tele Live Tanbou Verite A” said:

“Before the Kenyan mercenaries arrived in the land of Jean-Jacques Dessalines this month, a bunch of foreign and local mercenaries spent more than three months murdering young women and young men in our various neighborhoods, accusing them of being ‘gang members.’ Remember, if your National ID card is marked Delmas 2, Delmas 4, Delmas 6 until at least Delmas 24, UTAG-10 [the PNH’s Anti-Gang Unit] and other mercenaries condemn you to death. After they kill you, they stuff you inside a their tank. If you are a woman, they rape you before they shoot you, and they do this even if you are a man because they have gays among them too. After that, they smash your head and burn your body. When UTAG-10 eats us like this, the police already have several media lined up to say that we are criminals ... and also to make us believe that Viv Ansanm murdered us.

         For example: A UTAG-10 armored car and other invisible mercenaries shot at a public transportation bus last month in the Fontamara area. At least six passengers died on the spot. Although there were among the victims some who filmed the scene on the spot and confirmed that it was a [PNH] armored car that carried out the massacre, just like Delmas 60, 95 and 103, Radio Tele Métronome, which I always respect, declared that it was the Viv Ansanm thugs who fired on the bus and killed the passengers...

         Popular neighborhood people, my message to you, ... is that the criminal mercenaries of Kenya and [the PNH] UTAG-10... will massacre outside of your neighborhoods...  Don't let the Kenyan mercenaries and PNH criminals who are armed tools of the embassies in [Haiti] destroy our bodies...  Let the world see that the plan was indeed a genocide in our neighborhoods...”

On Sep. 30, 2024, a UN panel of experts presented their report to the UN Security Council in which they stated that in only three months, from Jan. 1 to Mar. 31, 2024, “590 civilians unrelated to gangs were killed or injured during police operations against gangs. There have been also reports of extrajudicial executions by police officers in the areas of Cité Soleil, Drouillard, and Vincent in the commune of Port-au-Prince.”

Meanwhile, the PNH Inspector General has “opened 23 investigations of alleged human rights violations committed by the police, [but] so far none of those cases have been concluded.”

As Jake Johnston, a researcher specializing on Haiti at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) noted in an Oct. 31 tweet: “Lost amid the focus on combating Haiti's armed groups has been the increase in extrajudicial killings by police.”

The PNH is trained and funded by the U.S., which has sent numerous tactical and armored vehicles, including the one the killer cop rode inside. Just five days before the killing took place, the U.S. delivered its most recent shipment of armored personnel carriers, which was sent to support the MSS troops.

Today’s latest video dramatically shows the terrible and arbitrary carnage being unleashed through “extrajudicial killings” and cold-blooded murder against Haitian civilians by the very “forces of order” which claim to be protecting their lives and security.

Subscribe now