PICTURED: Several of the related media agencies’ logos. Photo credit: The Grayzone, ARR.

September 8th, 2020. A group calling itself “Anonymous” uploaded dozens of PDFs containing records, financial statements, bills of sale, progress reports, project drafts, and more, that implicate several western governments, principally the United Kingdom, in a vast Syrian propaganda/paramilitary conspiracy stretching back to the beginning of the decade.

WaL sourced the report from the Grayzone, an investigative American news outlet, who were unable to verify the integrity of the documents.

Principally among the documents are the categorical descriptions of media management operations by a UAE-based firm founded by former British Diplomat Alistair Harris called ARK.

In a description about business activities, ARK describes in one of the leaked documents: “ARK’s focus since 2012 has been delivering highly effective, politically- and conflict-sensitive Syria programming for the governments of the United Kingdom, United States, Denmark, Canada, Japan and the European Union”.

Propaganda inside Syria

Boasting of earning $66 million for programs for pro-opposition forces in Syria, Ark proudly displays the insignias of the Canadian government, British Foreign Office, U.S. Dep. of State, the Netherlands ministry of foreign affairs, and the foreign affairs ministry of Italy.

Starting as early as March of 2013, Ark began the process of creating a media project to “contribute to the transition away from the current Syrian regime to a more stable, accountable, open and inclusive Syria founded on respect for human rights and rule of law,” a job which they alleged to have completed for “HMG” (Her Majesty’s Government) for around 3 million pounds sterling.

Operating out of Turkey, as well as Aleppo and the besieged Idlib Province, ARK would construct the entire conflict narrative for western English speaking news outlets through their long experience operating out of the affected areas and their extensive list of “800 contacts inside Syria” and “65 paid affiliates”.

Real work started in July of 2013 with the “development of a core Syrian opposition narrative […] at an ARK-run workshop in collaboration with HMG”. It started with the understanding that ISIS and Assad, whom ARK considered their opponents in the media space, controlled much of what people read or saw.

None of this would be particularly incriminating, except for the fact that ARK worked to “soften the image” and provide a “re-branding” for the Supreme Military Council (SMC) of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) — a term for, as ARK describes it: “a diverse array of moderate, mostly Sunni Islamist armed groups intent on overthrowing the regime and establishing a new political order,” and who proved to be unvetted in some cases, and local al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra in others; with massacres of civilians, defections to ISIS and other atrocities being hung on their name.

In a leaked document which describes the overall methodology of ARK’s involvement, they describe a plan to “develop a core narrative around trust, discipline, bravery, service, patriotism and justice,” in order to “distinguish itself from extremist armed opposition groups and to establish the image of a functioning, inclusive, disciplined and professional military body”.

As detailed in the report from the Grayzone, this would include 668,600 print products, 10 FM radio stations broadcasting in and around Syria, and a dedicated social media campaign on Twitter and Facebook that published information on the Syrian chemical weapons attacks which have been summarily debunked in recent years by reporting as well as from whistleblowers from the organization that investigated them.

In the Mainstream Media

ARK boasted in its methodology report of how it will bring the SMC to inhabit the print journal space through its “well-developed network of print media contacts, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Canada’s Globe and Mail, Daily Telegraph, [and] Independent”. Grayzone mentions other networks such as CNN, the Guardian, and several Arabic publishers such as Al Araby, Al Jazeera, and Mideast eye.

Furthermore, ARK, through a partnership organization called Basma, managed to infiltrate mainstream media reporting by creating a “Syrian citizen journalism platform” that created a network of media agents trained by ARK in lighting, videography, post-production, social media handling, and more, and was widely embraced by Arabic news agencies.

According to one document, 9 of the 16 stringers from Syria used by Al Jazeera were trained by Basma, based in the same Turkish city where ARK was headquartered.

If indeed the goal was to train journalists to report on the crimes being committed by all major parties in the war, the document does not mention it, only that they would continue to be trained on how to create “feedback-loops,” perpetuating the original narrative crafted in phase 1 of their plan, as detailed in the leaks.

Furthermore, ARK recognized in their summary of current conditions dated to 2013 that the FSA consisted of some groups who would not represent a democratic, free, liberal Syria based on justice and the rule of law, as ARK has often described.

One such group is Harakat Nur al-Din al-Zinki, which tried to join wahabi militia groups Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, both of whom have been listed as “Allied” or “separable from” Jabhat al-Nusra, the resident al-Qaeda affiliate, by the 2015 Jordan report on groups in Syria. This designation entails the group and command structure of the organization is either one and the same, or involved in military operations out of necessity, with Jabhat al-Nusra.

The absolute extremities of the leaked documents and the number of US/UK funded media agencies involved in the Syrian Civil War propaganda can be found detailed in the Grayzone’s own report.

Note from the Editor: Some of the links to the PDFs have been taken down “at request from third party” and so the links have been replaced with Internet Archive Links that allow readers to visit the pages as they were in 2020.

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