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Great pleasure to welcome the Stevens staff to speak to the last seminar of this term.

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He's a journalist who's lived in Damascus and elsewhere in Syria over the last five years, up until last year, 2012.

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And he worked first as editor for the Syria Times and then as a freelance reporter.

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So he's reported the popular uprising inside the country and has written the book for which the flyer is here, Revolt in Syria,

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published by Hearst, who of course have close links like the service's CW program of 12 times only, so incredibly good value.

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And he's also written in the Los Angeles Times, The Irish Times, USA Today, GlobalPost,

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The Times, The Globe and Mail, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post and The Sunday Times.

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Over the last year, September 2012 to April 2013, he was the month school fellow in global journalism at the University of Toronto,

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and today his title is less than vital to the people behind.

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So I'll leave you to say exactly what it is. But you can be sure you've got it right.

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Thank you very much. Thanks to everyone for coming.

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It's an honour to be here. The title of my talk is How the Syrian Regime Sells Its War at Home.

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I'm not quite sure if I'll speak for a full 45 minutes on that particular topic,

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but I have slightly more time for discussion about the broader kind of situation in Syria as it stands today.

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I moved to Syria from Ireland in early 2007. I graduated from a master's degree in international security conflict studies from university,

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from Dublin City University, and essentially moved to Moscow with little or no plan.

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So many students of few here who are thinking of travelling abroad encourage you to do so.

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And as you mentioned, a couple of months after arriving in Syria, I began working for Syria times,

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which was which is actually it's started functioning again recently is a an English language version of the Syrian government's news as they see it.

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And from the actual news perspective, Syria times wasn't very valuable at all.

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And I imagine I gained more from working in their office than they probably did from from I.

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But I think the six months that I spent there until 2008 was quite instructive in the sense that I got a sense for how to what degree at that level,

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how the Syrian regime operates its its propaganda, how it sells its message, and essentially what was reported in English and what went into there.

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The pamphlet was almost direct translations of of news that was reported in Arabic.

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There was little or no original content in English.

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We need to go back a couple of decades, I think, to understand exactly how the Syrian regime sells its war at home.

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And the most pertinent points as it stands today is that Hafez al-Assad,

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the former president and father of Bashar al-Assad, built the Syrian regime as it stands today.

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Bashar al-Assad became president in 2000, has inherited this system.

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There is a huge gap between building a state system in terms of security, in terms of administration and governance and inheriting this.

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These are two very, very different things. Hafez al-Assad came from a moderate town in the coastal mountains of Syria, not far from the city of Tokyo.

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And the essentially came from from from nothing knew exactly what he wants to do and was equally

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gifted and brutal in getting what he wanted and building a system that is important today.

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Because perhaps the chief question asked is why the Syrian revolution has failed slashed continue for so long

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in obviously in Egypt and Libya in other countries regimes were overcome in quite short periods of time.

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Many people expected, myself included, that the route that the regime would fall in Syria, perhaps after a couple of months it didn't happen.

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And even after being in Syria at that stage for four years or so,

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I expected at that stage that the regime would fall within months as opposed to years.

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Today, of course, we the idea of the regime falling or winning.

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These these concepts these concepts are, I think, less and less important than they were two or three years ago.

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In 1995, the Lebanese former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, was assassinated.

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Syria, the Syrian government is thought to be behind this. This was a period of time that was.

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Drones destabilise the Syrian regime to a very, very significant degree.

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I think its forces were forced out of Lebanon, where they had been for 29 years.

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Syria was on this so-called axis of evil subgroup.

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And for the Assad regime with Bashar al-Assad as president, this was the first kind of major issue that they had to deal with.

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What did they do? How do they survive? They didn't do anything aside from moving troops out of Lebanon.

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The Syrian regime is a reactive entity, and perhaps we can talk a little bit more about the chemical weapons issue later on.

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But this is also this place. More recently, this plays into that that points that the Assad regime doesn't actively make big

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moves and doesn't actively invoke important issues on an international stage.

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I think by 2008, President Bashar Assad was the guest of honour of Nicolas Sarkozy.

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The chance to say, I'm going from on the point of being invaded by the American administration in 25,

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26 to being a guest of honour in Paris two years later was a remarkable turnaround.

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The following year, as Prime Minister of Lebanon, Saad al-Hariri was invited to Damascus and went and,

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you know, essentially his his father had been killed by elements linked to the Syrian regime.

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But the regime had proved so at that stage that they were able to essentially

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get Saad Hariri as prime minister of Lebanon to come to Damascus with his tail,

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basically between his legs. And, you know, this is this really an important point, I believe, in terms of how durable the Assad regime is.

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But to working in Syria times in 2007 and 2008.

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The building we walked in, we shared offices with the Tshering, with Tshering,

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which is an Arabic language title, one of three state newspapers in Syria at the time.

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All news came from Sana, which is the official state media Tshering Abbas and a soda and three times the

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English language equivalents got all their news and information from Sana.

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This is important in terms of stressing how centralised the message coming from the government was at that stage and continues to be today.

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I think the journalists that worked in Syria at times and into stream were not so much journalists

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as state workers looking for a stable income in a government sector for the rest of their lives.

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At that time, I think the average salary for those workers was about $250 a month.

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You had people working in Syria at times that could speak little or no English.

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They were only there because their arms or uncle or father or some relative could get them a job there.

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They had little or no journalism training, no English language experience, and essentially shouldn't have been there.

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But this also gives you a sense of exactly how the regime operates, I think.

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So there was no reporting to screen for three times all us for the most part.

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And generally speaking, Syrians across the board, I think,

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see these state newspapers for what they are, which they present the government's perspective.

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And and that's about it. That's about it.

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They're important to the to the extent that there is no free press or at that stage there was no free press in Syria.

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And aside from certainly in the print and the print media, people, of course, had access to Al Jazeera and a lot of media and regional Arabic media.

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But in terms of what was happening specifically in Syria, you had these three titles, a couple of websites that were a little bit less you know,

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these were less pro-government, weren't controlled to the same degree as the newspapers were.

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But this is where people got their news about Syria for the most part.

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An important aspect, I think, and it's it's perhaps overlooked is and correct me if I'm wrong,

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the idea of cult of the personality, when any of you go into Syria, I'm sure there have maybe there are some people here,

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some Syrians, perhaps the first thing certainly the first time that you're there,

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you the first thing perhaps people remarked about is the the pictures of Bashar al-Assad in Homs.

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And I said everywhere. They're not there for no reason.

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They're there for a specific reason.

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The obviously the idea is that in everything you do, in every public and every public space, there are always on you, essentially.

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So there's a lot more to it than just pictures of Bashar al-Assad everywhere.

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In March 2011, as the regime as the revolution picked up, there was a full on propaganda assaults right from right from the beginning.

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In the first couple of weeks of the revolution, when you had protests in Dhahran, in Baniyas,

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and in one small protest in central Damascus, immediately you had this counter efforts whereby you had Syrian government security cars,

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supporters driving around the streets of Damascus and other cities shouting their support for Bashar Assad,

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holding pictures of Bashar al-Assad, decrying Israel, the US, the UK.

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All the the standard for talking is in the eyes of the Syrian regime.

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And at one stage the same day I believe, I think it was March 17, 2011 or the first major deaths all came from Deraa in the south.

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There was a massive, massive rally in central Damascus.

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There were hundreds of thousands of people.

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Now, a question you might ask it's an important issue is that were all these people did people come by themselves or they co-opted more state workers?

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Were they students from school who were brought out onto the streets because they had to do so?

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To a large degree? They were.

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But there was certainly an element in those hundreds of thousands of people that came because they genuinely supported Bashar al-Assad,

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because what he had done for a segment of Syrian society,

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the middle class, urban based people, specifically in Damascus, to a lesser extent in Aleppo and the other kind of cities around the country.

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The even Bashar al Assad excuse me.

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And this was this was a really this is an important issue, I believe.

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Why do they support the regime? Why? They support Bashar Assad.

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Why did they oppose in certain degrees what was happening?

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And there are where you had this popular revolution, an uprising, so to speak, in the beginning, because these were people with relatively good jobs.

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These were people who could get loans from banks, who had bank accounts,

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who were able to dine in restaurants a couple of times a week, who were able to travel and holiday in Turkey once a year.

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And they saw Bashar Assad responsible for where they were at the time.

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They didn't want anything to change, perhaps.

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And even, you know, there were people who didn't outwardly like President Assad and the regime and I guess saw for what it was that,

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you know, if you say the wrong thing in the wrong at the wrong time, that you you know, you've been turned.

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But for them, life is quite good at that stage.

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For people in Daraa and people in, you know, cases in eastern Aleppo, in eastern Damascus, it was a very different story.

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They did not have bank accounts. They did not have stable jobs. Thousands of them came from eastern Syria because there was a drought for three

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years that destroyed much of the country's agricultural production at that time.

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They came to the poor parts of the major cities looking for jobs, many of them.

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What this taxi drivers were very much disenfranchised, I guess very much unhappy with the regime.

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They felt that they had been forgotten. And at that stage, you had a growing divide between the urban middle class to speak of Rome,

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to be happy with where they were, didn't want regime change as that happened in Egypt at that stage.

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And these people on the periphery who were facing a very difficult situation indeed.

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At that time in the first couple of weeks. There was a multiplication of pro-government propaganda.

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So all the radio stations and the TV stations in Syria were co-opted by the regime to essentially put out this message.

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That theory was strong, that showed us this is this is right and powerful.

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And there's those right by the Syrian people.

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And it was a sensory overload. I think even, you know, as a foreigner myself at that time,

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we got a sense that this is this is really, really something that in every aspect of public life,

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you drive down the streets and you see the posters everywhere,

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and you turn on the radio in the in the book, the bus or the Negro in your car, you get the same message.

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You go home and you put on TV. The Syrian TV at least.

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And you get the same message over and over. Of course, for people who you chose to watch Al Jazeera and Arabiya,

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there was obviously a very different message for why you had people phoning in from the peripheral towns like that are like Banias.

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That's the image from areas of eastern Damascus.

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And, you know, at that stage, this, I think, increased this divide between the urbanites and between the rural poor moving forward.

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Now, there were a couple of attempts by the international community to force the Syrian government to open up.

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So in late in November 2011, the Arab League sent a group of observers to Syria to essentially see what was happening.

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The Assad government welcomed them and said, you know, we're abiding by international, by the Arab League.

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You asked us to open our country up to you to see what was happening, and we're doing it so on.

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At one stage I went with the An Arab League contingents in January of last year,

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almost two years ago, went to a town called House, which is about an hour north of of Damascus.

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What happened essentially was that we drove in a convoy from Damascus.

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We got to the first roundabout outside the town.

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The Arab League observers got out of their cars, which were escorted by Syrian government troops.

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We're told by the soldiers at this checkpoint that the town of Rancocas,

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which was just over here, was in control of rebels, insurgents, as they call them.

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And the soldiers said, the government soldiers, that we can't guarantee your safety if you go there.

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So for about a half an hour, the RV goes over water on this roundabout, essentially spoke to some of the soldiers there.

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There were a number of checkpoints that were passing people passing traffic there.

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And of course, with us was a large contingent of Syrian media.

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So whenever the Arab League observers would go up to speak to some individuals or some locals, the Syrian state media was right on their shoulder.

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So as the Arab League representative spoke to the average taxi driver,

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you had the Syrian government's TV presenter with the camera and with the the microphone on one side and on the other side, you had some security.

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And so obviously the guy, the taxi driver in the car was saying everything is great, that Bashar al-Assad is his excellency.

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And, you know, everything is fantastic in Syria and this is a foreign plot and so on.

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And at one stage, one taxi driver wouldn't stop. He drove through the checkpoints.

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And one of the stunning to one side, one of the security guards, he kind of I mean,

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the way he he he looked at this taxi driver who wouldn't stop was was was really quite menacing.

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A half an hour later, as I say, the Syrian government's army officer arrives at the scene of the roundabout and said,

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you're free to go into the town, we can't go with you and we can't guarantee you your safety.

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The Arab League observer said, okay, we won't go in. They got in the convoy, drove back to Damascus.

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I drove with them as I was covering them that day. There were some journalists in the New York Times and The New Yorker magazine State went into

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the town by themselves 2 hours later and the Syrian government began shelling the town.

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The point of all this is that this is what was being reported by the Syrian media and B, by, of course,

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the Arab League observers that, you know, for the most part, everything was fine and people were happy with the regime and so on.

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Meanwhile, 2 hours later, shells were falling on the town inside.

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The Syrian regime enacted a dual policy, I guess, of soft power and hard power early on in the revolution.

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What they would do every evening is get a group of priests,

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Shia sheikhs and Sunni sheikhs around the table on TV and they would pray together in Christian prayers,

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Islamic prayers, giving the idea that Syria was opposing.

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This is very important, I think, for minority groups, particularly Christians,

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at least in my experience, that, you know, the Syrian regime is a voice for them.

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This is our priest on TV. He is obviously supporting the governments.

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So for the most part, this is what we should do, too.

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At the same time, you had a number of, I guess, debate programs on on Syrian TV and on the second TV channel run by finance,

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by least by running Makhlouf, the president's brother in law.

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So you would have a group of young people in a very well very choreographed kind of situation.

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They would call on television and they would be interviewed by a Syrian host.

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And, you know, they would be asked, what's your your plans for your problems?

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Do you have a job? All these kind of issues. And through the GRI, there was a little bit of pushback at that stage.

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And, of course, for everyone that watched this, saw that, you know, this is something new.

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We haven't seen this before in Syria ever before. There is some criticism of criticism of the regime.

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At the same time, the Syrian governments, the parliament voted to end emergency laws, obviously in name only.

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So to the grief of the Syrians who wanted to believe that the regime was right and that the revolution itself was a foreign plot,

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there was something for them to show them that, in fact, yes, the regime is is is kind of addressing our concerns.

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We're seeing things on television that we've never seen before that people were criticising the regime.

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At the same time, you would see also on Syrian state television kind of montages of the Syrian cultural history,

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of the famous tourist sites, how beautiful Syria was, how unique its history was.

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And of course, when people watched Al-Jazeera, that we'd see pictures of tanks firing on mosques,

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people getting killed, people getting gunned down, dead bodies and so on.

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This idea, of course, the montages of the historical sites were that this is peaceful Syria and this is peaceful Syria under the Assad regime,

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and this is peaceful Syria for the last 40 years. This is how it's been with us.

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And this, of course, is the revolution, what you see in Jazeera. And this is a very you know, this is not what you want at all.

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This is a very unstable situation. People getting people are dying for the most part.

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You know, I'm not sure of who any of you here on Twitter.

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Any of you follow the follow sonnet to Sana's English Twitter feed.

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It's on. So no, it's it's quite remarkable that they they give information about parties and gatherings and so on.

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You know, again, the idea is to present this idea that life is continuing, that everything is fine,

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that day to day life and activities are still continuing in areas of the country that

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the regime controls and that in areas of the country that the regime doesn't control,

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even though it's not expressly say that, of course, they were not represented at all.

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The World Revolution, revolts, uprisings, civil war.

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For the first year at least, was never used by Syrian state media.

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People refer to it as the crisis. And of course, a lot of people would copy essentially what people were saying on television.

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And that, I think, of course, is what everything I spoke about until now is about elements of Syrian society that were relatively well-to-do,

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relatively stable, didn't want things to change,

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had seen the Syrian government reacting to what they believed was this revolt,

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this crisis specifically, and were for the most part, convinced by the governments of the hard power.

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Also, what you would see on television, pictures of the Syrian governments, the Syrian army firing rockets, soldiers marching.

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Pictures that you'd associate, I guess, with North Korea often that the Syrian government with strong picks,

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lots of pictures of of citizens throwing rice and soldiers, you know, elderly women kissing soldiers and so on.

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People love the army and so forth.

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They will also do interviews with people who had done wrong things in the past and who realise the mistakes of what they had done.

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They would put them on television and say, Yes, we support this. We were given money by some guy from Saudi Arabia or some guy from Jordan.

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They would pay recordings of television conversations between the person that they

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had interviewed who would suddenly right the wrongs of the past and of course,

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completely fabricated. This also give a sense that, you know, this is what's happening and this is the regime's position.

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I suppose one of the most sorry, the first 12 months you the most important elements of the Syrian government's,

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how it saw its war for you was that there were a number of daily bombings in Damascus, in Aleppo during the first number of months.

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And of course, both Syrian television and newspapers would show these pictures,

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these awful scenes of charred bodies, of people blown to bits of cars and fire.

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They would interview people who'd ask, you know, rhetorically, of course, is this true freedom?

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Is this is this your this is what you want?

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And this kind of continuous loop they would show, you know, for Tuesday, two days after a particular bombing.

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Often it was military and security buildings that were targeted.

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This, again, reinforced this idea that this is not a popular revolution, a peaceful revolution,

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whereby people went in the streets and called for how do you this was a violent and deadly and chaotic situation.

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So, you know, this was also for the the section of Syrian society.

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Again, I must stress this, that we're not directly involved in the revolution.

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The silent majority of we can still use that term today,

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people who would rather be happy to what they had recognised often that the regime was a a a brutal entity also,

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but did not want things to get worse for them.

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This is, of course, these bombings created quite considerable outrage and led the revolution to be associated,

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I say, with this deeply unstable, deadly new chapter in Syria.

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The result is essentially a population confused and angry. And as I say, if not totally convinced by the regime's the regime's message on some.

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Now, the government uses the same language over and over and over,

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and you can watch the Syrian media as English or Arabic news updates on on the Syrian state television website or by the same language is used,

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you know, the army is destroyed, terrorists and terrorist dens, you know, this every day, the same kind of four or five words more militants, gunmen,

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then the same words over and over, reinforcing this idea of of what was happening, of course, their own perspective.

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But each time they would defeat terrorist money might that my friends student

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Syria have been telling me for well over two years that the regime is winning.

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Of course, you know, it's it's not the case that it's going to be over soon and so on.

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Another important aspect, again, in terms of of of giving its message was that it would it co-opted a number of well-known actors,

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filmmakers, musicians, and that.

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So at one stage, I'm not sure if any of you were in Damascus in kind of the first few months,

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you had posters of the Syrian squadron hum, perhaps the most famous Syrian actor concert and somebody Syrian officer,

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at least on every corner of every street in Damascus and in Aleppo and in parts of the government,

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parts of the country controlled to control his picture, calling for people to take responsibility to be responsible.

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Oftentimes they would also appear on Syrian talk shows. So you had someone well known by the Syrian public.

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For their acting work, appearing in a political space on television, talking to people about what they felt, what they thought was happening.

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And these are obviously important individuals, people, you know, that that were looked up to in that.

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At one stage there was a concert in the women's square in the mosque is free of charge.

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You know, hundreds of thousands of people went. Many of my friends went not because the concert was free or because it was a fee.

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Habib was well-known Syrian singer, but because it was, you know,

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lots of people I know went there because it was an opportunity to be close to girls and to mingle with girls and talk to girls, basically.

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As things continued, let's say, into the second year of the revolution slash war,

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the tone used by Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya shifted away from interviewing activists

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and eyewitnesses of of common atrocities through a much more partisan perspective.

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I think now if you watch on of if you turn on Al Jazeera Arabic, not the English Channel,

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you see that you get a very one sided view of what's happening in Syria.

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For the most part, this again, this large sort of majority, we can kind of quantify them.

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I think we can't measure them in terms of population, in terms of number.

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They see when they went to to look for information about what was happening in there in the beginning,

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a year later, they were getting a very different line,

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I think a much more partisan position, much more anti Syrian governments when of course,

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what was happening on the ground, what they were experiencing every day was quite different.

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They felt, of course, that they were seeing, you know,

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their experience of what was happening in Syria was very different than what Al Jazeera were publishing.

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And it was just the same with York, not that it obviously the same degree of the Syrian state media, but it was really,

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you know, a very one one dimensional perspective on what was happening in Syria, always pro rebel anti Syrian government.

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And that and this really, you know,

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a lot of people I think turned off got turned off by this very much partisan message from Al Jazeera and a lot to be a point at a time before a year

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previous the they were an important voice I think in for Syrians who wanted to hear what was happening in the the small towns around the country.

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This, of course, is reflected by the fact that Saudi, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabian elements, at least Saudi Arabian governments,

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Qatari government, were much more involved in arming and financing particular rebel groups.

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So this this is not something that happens by itself.

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The chemical weapons attack, which it seems a long, long time ago, obviously only happens last August.

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This was, for me at least just the latest way the Syrian government was able to twist things and present things to their own advantage.

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The regime is able to portray the chemical weapons deal. Of course, I'm not sure.

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Quite so familiar. Of course, there was the use of chemical weapons in eastern Damascus in a town in the west southwest of Damascus called Multimedia.

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Russia presented this idea that the Syrian going to give up its chemical weapons.

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And, of course, the Syrian government said, yes, of course, we'll do that.

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As you know, Barack Obama was seriously talking about airstrikes on Syrian military targets.

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The regime was able to save its military, airports and airfields, its weapons, as a result of this chemical weapons deal.

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Of course, as ghastly as the use of chemical weapons is, it only represents a very,

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very small percentage of the overall war that the government's war on on rebel elements.

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So, of course, they've given up this car, but they still have a whole, you know,

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close to a full pack that they can fully work with in terms of their conventional military assets.

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Inside Syria at that stage.

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The regime initially blamed rebels for this use of chemical weapons, pardon me, initially denied anything happens and then blames rebels.

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Some work done by The Wall Street Journal within the last couple of weeks. I'm not sure if you've read the article.

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You should. It's very interesting whereby they have, for the most part, presented at least the idea that the Syrian government was responsible,

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mistakenly used chemical weapons that had on a number of occasions used chemical weapons against the rebel rebel forces.

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But on a very small scale, what happens on August 21st was an accident.

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It shouldn't have have been as deadly as it was. But read the Wall Street Journal article.

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It's interesting. At the same time, you over the previous two and a half years,

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you had this message that I've been speaking about, that these areas of eastern Damascus,

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these areas under rebel control that had fallen out of Syrian government's control were bad spots that bad people live there.

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If you if you live there, you're you're anti-government, regardless of if you are or not.

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But there was a sense that bad things were always going to happen to people who live there.

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So that's say in Eastern Ghouta, where the chemical weapons were were used.

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People living in government controlled Syria were not perhaps that surprised because, you know,

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this had been they had known from personal experience that these were parts of

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the country and parts of Damascus that had been anti-government for a very,

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very long time.

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So this was, of course, the Syrian government's propaganda message was that this was the case, so that when the chemical weapon attacks happens,

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as I say, there wasn't a huge amount of surprise, I think from, again, the section of the Syrian society still living in government controlled areas.

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For me the most the regime's smartest move and we can discuss this further I think was to use the term Syria

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when it meant regime when it was so when when they would say things on Syrian TV that the regime was strong,

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that Syria was strong. Excuse me. They meant the regime they replaced.

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The regime, the governments with the war in Syria. And of course, for Syrians, their national identity, like any country, is a very important thing.

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But the Syrian regime managed to to use this word to use the word Syria to represent themselves.

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So if you were against Syria, you know,

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the international community is doing things against Syria that so on and so forth that there was going to be an attack on Syria when in fact,

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for us, the Westerners and foreigners, and that this was an attack in Syria at all, this was an attack.

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This would be an attack, at least on Syrian government, the Syrian regime, on Syrian government, military points.

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But of course, it back home Syrian army apparatus presented this as an attack on Syria.

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So they don't use, obviously, the word regime. They don't use the word governments.

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The word they use is Syria. This is a really key points, I think.

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I would argue that the regime has collapsed.

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There have been defections, that it's perhaps using only two divisions of the of the Syrian National Army, the fourth Division under Republican Guard.

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It has collapsed, but I think it's collapsed inwards. What you had today is a much more durable entity that is much more much better at fighting wars,

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less so at governance, at creating jobs and keeping people in jobs and stabilising the the the Syrian era.

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It's essentially, I think that the Syrian government has brought the country to where it is to this violence chapter.

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This is what the Syrian regime is good at. It's good at rounding up dissidents.

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It's good at torture. It's good at military issues.

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Not so much good at governance. Not so much good at creating jobs. Very good at propaganda, of course.

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So it's it's collapsed, I think, but collapsed in words.

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Why is this matter today? For people who still live in government controlled Syria.

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A they believe that there is a foreign conspiracy against their country, against Syria.

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B, they see the violence that has happens in other parts of the country as a result of the revolution in places that are controlled by rebels.

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It's a very dark place. There are some serious issues there.

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We can talk a bit more about that, I think, later. They don't want that.

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People still living in certain government controlled areas do not want that life.

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And C, of course, is the foreign jihadi elements.

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That's, you know, for for urban Syrians still in government controlled areas.

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They share little or nothing in common with they see people coming from the UK,

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from the states, from Canada, from Chechnya to fight a holy war in Syria.

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But these people in central Damascus, for people on the in the cities along the coast,

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for Christians, for the ordinary population, they have little or nothing in common.

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Of course, with these people. Many of these people go to nightclubs, money of the Syrians.

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And speaking of go to nightclubs, dress literally, learn English, learn French are, you know, well-travelled enough.

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So what they see when they see these people coming from all different countries to fight jihad, to blow up checkpoints and whatnot, you know,

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this is the third important issue that they they cannot identify with at all today,

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almost three years or approaching three years of the revolt slash civil war.

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There's a huge sense of fatigue, not just, you know, there's a different type of fatigue.

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I think in the rebel held areas, people are facing different issues there.

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But four in four populations still living under the Syrian government control is a tremendous sense of fatigue.

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This is likely to lead to less activism and likely to lead to fewer people supporting

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the revolution in any sense or seeing the revolution as a positive thing.

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But people today are more concerned with is, you know, again, in Damascus,

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that they're more concerned with with the mortars that are falling on their neighbourhoods than

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they are with the the international dimension and diplomacy surrounding the the broader conflict,

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I think. They have no time, they have no money, they have little electricity to be concerned by such issues.

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They're trying to get by day to day. They have seen how brutal the Syrian government is.

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They do not want to be involved in politics and they're essentially waiting it out.

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Couple of anecdotal points. Interestingly enough, in early 2011, I was granted a year long journalist visa by the Syrian Ministry for information.

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When you go to the Syrian Ministry for information in the Mizzi area of Damascus, you see essentially what the Syrian regime is about.

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It's an old, decrepit building.

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It's something that many Syrians associate with the regime as opposed to the emergent private sector that was developing in 2009, 2010 and early 2011.

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So you would go through the elevators don't work. You know, the building is not clean.

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You go upstairs. The half some of the employees are asleep, you know, others are drinking tea, smoking cigarettes don't appear to be doing much.

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So on one occasion, I went to the foreign media section where there was an employee I knew quite well and asked him,

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You know, I want to visit Homs, you've got to let me go.

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At that stage, there were the governments allowing groups of journalists from the Guardian, various organisations,

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to go, obviously in government controlled trips to Homs and Iran, various parts of the country.

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I wasn't allowed because I was a permanent member of the staff based in the city.

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Now, when I was in this office, I saw a bunch of English language newspapers,

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and at that stage it was quite difficult to get The Guardian in the Times,

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the International Herald Tribune, as it was known, and these kind of newspapers,

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they asked the employee, Can I take these weight to the Yeah, sure, no problem at all.

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So I took some of these newspapers away. I went to a café and opened up The Guardian, and there was a story about the account of a.

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Exactly some specific event, but it said something about how the Syrian regime forces had killed x number of people and whatnot.

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And under on this short paragraph have been underlined presumably by someone working in the Ministry of Information.

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So on one level you see this decrepit building.

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No one's working people there for, you know, jobs, for life kind of kind of thing.

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But underneath that, they're doing a job.

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They are seeing that The Guardian is writing very negative things about the Syrian regime.

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So it's something, you know, that's a.

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Important points like summing up.

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Mm hmm. I think there's little to no control in the hands of individual media organisations in Syria.

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Um, the, the, the news comes from Sana and goes to all the other various organised media organisations in Syria.

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That's how it works.

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Violence employed by the regime has silenced many of the silent majority, which we can discuss a bit more about to what extent that even exists.

386
00:45:41,550 --> 00:45:51,210
The Syrian government to complete control of the public sphere in the first 12 months or so and then changed its message to a case that it was a war.

387
00:45:51,450 --> 00:45:59,850
After about a year, 15 months or so, it was fighting foreign jihadists to control complete control of all public space.

388
00:46:02,370 --> 00:46:05,640
It changed the idea that a revolution was happening.

389
00:46:06,390 --> 00:46:09,000
It changed it from the guilty.

390
00:46:09,030 --> 00:46:19,290
That was revolts to to a war funded by Saudi Arabia, by Qatar, by Israel, even by Turkey, and overseen by the United States.

391
00:46:20,520 --> 00:46:22,470
And I think that's. Yes. Thank you very much.