Konflikten i Syrien

Almost two years later HRW got the full file, and ran much the same story, except for one
important extra detail. Almost half the photos, HRW admitted, were those of ‘dead army
soldiers or members of the security forces’, or the victims of ‘explosions, assassinations …
fires and car bombs’ (HRW 2015: 2-3). This had never been mentioned before and, for the
rest of the HRW report, was not mentioned again. Without making public the full file, HRW
said that ‘the largest category of photographs, 28,707 images, are photographs of people
Human Rights Watch understands to have died in government custody’. Those photos had a
consistent numbering pattern to them and there were ‘multiple photographs of each body’,
sometimes as many as twenty. These photos were estimated to ‘correspond to at least 6,786
separate dead individuals’ (HRW 2015). However HRW, while admitting that at least 27,000
photos of dead bodies did not depict prisoners of ‘the regime’, proceeded to ignore them.
HRW simply said ‘this report focuses on analyzing the first category of photographs in
greater detail’ (HRW 2015: 3). The casual reader of the HRW report might not even have
noticed the admission that almost half these secret photos had nothing to do with ‘industrial
scale’ killing of ‘opposition’ people (Black 2014). It was a particularly brazen deceit by HRW
to maintain the original story, when they knew better. Rick Sterling (2016) pointed out that
partisan publicity over these photos came on the eve of peace negotiations.

/.../In any case, Roth’s tweets were insistent, biased and reckless. The head of HRW said little
about Saudi Arabia, Qatar, USA, UK and France arming all kinds of extremist jihadist groups
in Syria. His focus, like that of Washington, was the Syrian Government. He made a series of
reckless errors, as shown in Graphic 2 and Graphic 3. In early 2015 he posted a photo of
bombed out Kobane (a.k.a. Ayn al Arab, the Kurd-Arab city which had resisted ISIS attacks,
then suffered US bombing) suggesting it was damage from Syrian ‘barrel bombs’ (MOA
2015a). Soon after that Roth posted a photo of Israeli bombing damage on the Gaza strip,
suggesting it was damage from ‘Assad’s barrel bombs’ in Aleppo (Johnson 2015; MOA
2015b). That photo switching is shown in Graphic 2. Soon after that Roth posted, as ‘Assad's
barrel bomb’ damage in Aleppo, a photo which was originally titled by the US Getty agency
‘destruction in the Hamidiyeh neighbourhood of Aleppo as local popular committee fighters
… try to defend the traditionally Christian district … [from] Islamic State group jihadists’
(MOA 2015c). That ‘reinterpretation’ is shown in Graphic 3. Three ‘mistakes’, all in the one
direction, are enough to illustrate the partisan activity of the HRW director.