Assad regime troops, Damascus, Syria, April 2020


Even in the midst of the Coronavirus crisis, the Assad regime is devoting prime-time effort to its attempt to quash opposition in Syria’s nine-year conflict.

State TV SANA headlines a Saturday night State TV presentation of “confessions” over “recent terrorist attacks”.

Five men and a woman were paraded on camera to say that they had targeted cars in and near Damascus. They supposedly acted “in exchange for sums of money from their operators who were encouraging them to be agents and implementers of the plans of the enemies of Syria and its people”.

The “confessions” named the coordinator of the attacks as “Abu Ashur, a known terrorist in the countryside of Quneitra and Damascus”. The program claimed he is head of the engineering department of the Liwa al-Furqan faction, led by Mohammad al-Khatib.

Extending its allegations to take in foreign powers, the report alleged that al-Khatib is in Jordan working with the Military Operations Center, “which includes, British, American, Israeli and Saudi officers”.

The program claimed that none of the four bombings sought by the detainees succeeded.

But in their “confessions”, the six said, “We were staging demonstrations involving approximately 15 people and filming it and writing anti-government phrases on the wall.”

Fact-Checking the “Confessions”

Tens of thousands of detainees have been tortured to death, executed, or died from poor conditions in regime prisons since the Syrian uprising started in March 2011. International investigators have collected evidence for possible war crimes trials against Bashar al-Assad and leading military and political officials.

Rebels in southern Syria were supported by the MOC in Jordan, but the assistance was reduced in 2015 amid the prospect that Assad could be forced from power in Damascus.

The subsequent Russian intervention to prop up Assad then enabled the regime to seize all territory in the south. They culminated in months of conventional and chemical attacks in 2018 taking areas near Damascus and Daraa Province, the first site of the 2011 uprising.

Liwa al-Furqan was one of the rebel factions involved in the fighting in the south. However, it halted operations in 2017, saying they would resume if Iranian-supported militia or Hezbollah entered their area.

Mohammad al-Khatib rose to the leadership of the faction in late 2013. While there have been guerrilla attacks against regime forces in Daraa Province this year, there is no evidence that al-Khatib has been working with the MOC to implement them.