It has just become more dangerous to be a foreign correspondent reporting on the civil war in Syria. This is because the jihadis holding power in east Aleppo
were able to exclude Western journalists, who would be abducted and
very likely killed if they went there, and replace them as news sources
with highly partisan “local activists” who cannot escape being under
jihadi control.
The foreign media has allowed – through naivety or self-interest – people who could only operate with the permission of al-Qaeda-type groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham to dominate the news agenda.

The precedent set in Aleppo means that participants in any future
conflict will have an interest in deterring foreign journalists who
might report objectively. By kidnapping and killing them, it is easy to
create a vacuum of information that is in great demand and will, in
future, be supplied by informants sympathetic to or at the mercy of the
very same people (in this case the jihadi rulers of east Aleppo) who
have kept out the foreign journalists. Killing or abducting the latter
turns out to have been a smart move by the jihadis because it enabled
them to establish substantial control of news reaching the outside
world. This is bad news for any independent journalist entering their
territory and threatening their monopoly of information.

There was always a glaring contradiction at the heart of the position
of the international media: on the one hand it was impossibly dangerous
for foreign journalists to enter opposition-held areas of Syria, but at
the same time independent activists were apparently allowed to operate
freely by some of the most violent and merciless movements on earth. The
threat to Western reporters was very real: James Foley had been
ritually beheaded on 8 August 2014 and Steven Sotloff a few days later,
though long before then foreign journalists who entered
insurgent-controlled zones were in great danger.

But the threat was just as great for a local persons living under
insurgent rule who criticised their actions or ideas. This is made clear
by an Amnesty International report published in July this year entitled
Torture Was My Punishment. Philip Luther, director of the
Middle East and North Africa Programme of Amnesty International, says
that in these areas civilians “live in constant fear of being abducted
if they criticise the conduct of armed groups in power or fail to abide
by the strict rules some have imposed”.

Any genuinely independent journalists or activists are targeted,
according to the report. Speaking of Jabhat al-Nusra (which has renamed
itself Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and was formerly the Syrian branch of
al-Qaeda), a 24-year-old media activist called “Issa” said “they are in
control of what we can and cannot say. You either agree with their
social rules and policies or you disappear.”

What follows after such an abduction is made clear by a political
activist called “Ibrahim” who in 2015 organised a peaceful protest in
support of the 2011 uprising. Such independent action was evidently
unacceptable to Nusra who kidnapped him. He says: “I was taken to the
torture room. They placed me in the shabeh position, hanging me
from the ceiling from my wrists so that my toes were off the ground.
Then they started beating me with cables all over my body… after the shabeh they used the dulab (tyre) technique. They folded my body and forced me to go inside a tyre and then started beating me with wooden sticks.”

Bassel, a lawyer in Idlib, said: “I was happy to be free from the
Syrian government’s unjust rule, but now the situation is worse.” He
criticised Nusra on Facebook and was immediately detained. Amnesty says
the main armed opposition groups are equally severe on anybody differing
from them.

There was a period in 2011 and 2012 when there were genuinely
independent opposition activists operating inside Syria, but as the
jihadis took over these brave people were forced to flee abroad, fell
silent or were dead. In August 2013, I appeared on the same television
programme as Razan Zaitouneh, a renowned human rights lawyer and founder
of the Violations Documentation Centre which recorded crimes and
atrocities. She was speaking by Skype from the opposition stronghold of
Douma in north east Damascus where I had been the previous year, but it
had become too risky for me to visit.

Zaitouneh was describing the sarin poison gas attack that had killed
so many people in rebel-held districts of Damascus and denouncing the
Syrian government for carrying it out. She was an advocate for the
non-jihadi Syrian opposition, but she also criticised the Saudi-backed
Jaish al-Islam movement that controlled Douma. On 8 December, its gunmen
broke into her office and seized her and her husband Wael Hamada, and
two civil rights activists: Samira al-Khalili, a lawyer, and Nazem
al-Hamadi, a poet. None of the four have been seen since and are very
likely dead.

It was convenient for the international media to broadcast the videos
and Skype interviews from east Aleppo as if they had been given as
freely as in Copenhagen or Edinburgh. To do otherwise would have damaged
the credibility of the graphic and compelling material in which the
speakers looked frightened, and with good reason, and there was the
crackle of gunfire and the boom of exploding shells.
None of this was necessarily fake – but there were many omissions.
There was no sign of the 8,000 to 10,000 armed fighters whom the UN
estimated to have been in east Aleppo. In fact, I cannot recall seeing
anybody with a gun or manning a fortified position in these
heart-rending films. The only visible inhabitants of Aleppo are unarmed
civilians, in complete contrast to Mosul where the Iraqi armed forces
are battling thousands of Isis gunmen who are using the civilian
population as human shields.

It would be simple-minded to believe that this very appealing and
professional PR for the Syrian armed opposition is all their own work.
Foreign governments play a fairly open role in funding and training
opposition media specialists. One journalist of partly Syrian extraction
in Beirut told me how he had been offered $17,000 a month to work for
just such an opposition media PR project backed by the British
government.
The dominance of propaganda over news in coverage of the war in Syria
has many negative consequences. It is a genuine civil war and the
exclusive focus of on the atrocities committed by the Syrian armed
forces on an unarmed civilian population gives a skewed picture of what
is happening. These atrocities are often true and the UN says that 82
civilians may have been summarily executed in east Aleppo last month.
But, bad though this is, it is a gross exaggeration to compare what has
happened in Aleppo to genocide in Rwanda in 1994 or the massacre in
Srebrenica the following year.