May 03, 2015

The Lies Of Anne Barnard

Anne Barnard is the New York Times’s Beirut bureau chief covering Syria, Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East region. Like her Washington Post's colleague Liz Sly she reports along the established Washington propaganda lines emphasizing Arab sectarianism and "U.S. does good" claims.

Here she writes on the killing of at least 52 civilians in Fridays bombing of Bir Mahli, in Aleppo Province by a U.S. led "coalition" air attack. The last sentence of her short report reads:

The Observatory said that members of at least six families were killed, along with some Islamic State fighters, and that 13 were missing.

Now compare that with the AFP report on the issue:

"Not a single IS fighter" was killed in the strikes on Birmahle, said Abdel Rahman, adding that the village is inhabited by civilians only with no IS presence.

The Associated Press report of the incident:

On Saturday, the Observatory director Rami Abdurrahman said the strikes hit only civilians in their homes in Bir Mhali, a mixed Kurdish and Arab village, killing 52, including seven children and nine women.

How can Barnard claim the Observatory said the civilians were killed "along with some Islamic State fighters" when the Observatory, according to AFP and AP, said the opposite?

What Barnard wrote is not some fudging or misunderstanding. It is a clear lie.

That lie lets her readers believe that the murdered families were "collateral damage" of a well intended, legitimate strike. But that is clearly not the case. No IS fighters were killed and none were even nearby. The killing of these civilians may even have been intended from nefarious reasons.

McClatchy, with its own reporting and a historically much better record than the NYT, finds no IS fighters killed but suggests that the airstrikes and killing was part of an ethnic cleansing campaign by Kurds, supported by the U.S. "coalition", against the Arab population in the area:

The reported deaths of the villagers also embroiled the United States in Syria’s fierce ethnic rivalries, with activists pointing out that the fishing and farming village of about 4,000 Arabs has had tense relations with Kurds living nearby – especially with the Kurdish “People’s Protection Units” or YPG.

...

The activist, who spoke to McClatchy by Skype on condition of anonymity out of fear of both the YPG and the Islamic State, said the coalition may have received flawed intelligence about the target from its allies on the ground, a reference to YPG forces. “ Kurdish hostility towards Arabs in the area has been pretty clear for a long time,” the activist said. “Otherwise, how would you explain the Kurds burning Arab houses under their own control?” He added that the coalition had bombed a bridge at the town of Karakozak some months ago that he said was the only crossing over the Euphrates River in the area. The bridge’s destruction had “put the whole area under siege.”

If the U.S. relies solely on YPG information about targets we can expect a lot more bombing of Arab civilians in the areas next to YPG positions. We can also expect that Anne Barnard will then again claim that all those murdered in such strikes were killed "along with some Islamic State fighters".

Posted by b on May 3, 2015 at 10:49 UTC | Permalink

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