Western media whitewashes destruction of Damascus water supply

Syria’s capital city Damascus continues to suffer without water. The water which fed millions of people, was cut off by terrorists who have occupied the aquifer in Wadi Barada since late December.

The terrorists, which include an alliance of US backed groups and Al Qaeda’s Syria branch Jabhat al Nusra, uploaded a video of themselves rigging the ancient Ein Al Fijeh spring with explosives. Two days before this upload, the terrorists tainted the water supply with diesel. As a result of the success of the Syrian military campaign to recapture parts of Wadi Barada, the insurgents were forced to agree to allowing engineers in to fix the aquifer as part of a ceasefire agreement. However, after the agreement was reached the terrorists shot and killed the negotiating team overseeing repairs. Previously they had shot at technicians as they attempted to enter Wadi Barada.

Several groups which included the so called “White helmets” NGO released a written statement, that they will not allow engineers to fix the spring until the Syrian government agrees to give them certain concessions. The White Helmets have received tens of millions of dollars from various Western governments. Their signed statement shows that they are complicit with AL Qaeda in what the UN has stated is tantamount to a war crime.

Yet NATO backed media outlets have failed to explicitly state this, tip toeing around the subject of responsibility. Some outlets were even initially suggesting it was the Syrian government that was responsible! The most offending headlines included this one from the Daily Beast, “Assad’s Newest War Tactic: Dehydration”. The Qatar linked Middle East Eye, a newspaper run by a former Guardian and Al Jazeera journalists, headlined with “Water war: Wadi Barada and Assad’s latest weapon”. Australia’s ABC News suggested that, “this was not the first time the Syrian government targeted it’s own facilities”. All of them totally distorted. Perhaps the worst offender was the discredited Bellingcat website, run by Eliot Higgins, which claims to be independent open source analysis while consistently backing up US State Department propaganda. They released an article claiming that the Syrian government was responsible for the damage to the aquifer. Bellingcat did not touch on the fact that it is the terrorists who refuse to allow the aquifer to be fixed.

There is also ample evidence that the insurgents were indeed behind the initial destruction of the spring. The terrorists uploaded a video of themselves on Facebook, rigging the ancient Ein el Fijeh spring with explosives. In the video a terrorist is seen walking through the pipes saying, “This is one of the water pipes of Ein el Fijah spring, the "revolutionaries", better to read "terrorists", are rigging it with explosives right now”.

The video was accompanied by the following written statement, saying: “Let everyone know that the lives of the traitors in Damascus are not more precious than the life of a child from Wadi Barada. This is one of the tunnels that supply the occupied city of Damascus with water, it’s currently being booby-trapped, and all the main tunnels will be detonated and will never be restored.”

The terrorists also made Facebook posts celebrating the destruction of the spring and taunting the people of Damascus.  One terrorist posted photographs of himself flashing victory signs over the rubble of the aquifer tunnels. One post reads:

“Hahaha just as like you wanted, your water has turned into diesel, and the bombing will happen tomorrow or the day after. The bombing is ready no matter what and after that let the flood come. We will burn the soul of each Christian, Shi'ites and those traitor Sunnis who sold their religion and decided to side with you, you Jew idiots.”  

Seemingly in coordination with the US backed terrorists, ISIS cut off the water supply to Aleppo later, suggesting that the water crisis was a planned reprisal for the liberation of Aleppo. This would not be the first time that the terrorists cut off water to Aleppo, Syria’s second capital. In 2014, they filmed themselves celebrating the destruction of Aleppo’s water supply. The population of Aleppo was without water for over a year.

Furthermore, the terrorists have motive to cut off the water supply while the Syrian government doesn’t. The recent liberation of Aleppo city, involved the evacuation of the terrorists to the city of Idlib in green buses, part of the terms of their surrender. The Syrian military was approaching Wadi Barada with the same terms of evacuation on the table. The terrorists from the area have cut water supplies to Damascus several times in the past as a bargaining chip to prevent the Syrian army from entering the area and pushing them out.  This was likely what caused the terrorists to use the water again as leverage, and escalate by not only stopping the water flow as they have done previously, but destroying it entirely. This is reflected in the Facebook posts made by them, that “bombing the aquifer is better than evacuation”.

The people in Wadi Barada do not get their water from Ein el fijah spring, but from sources further upstream, hence the terrorists would not be damaging their own water supply by poisoning and bombing the spring. On the other hand there is no motive for the Syrian government to cut off water to Damascus, a city which they hold and reside within. It was the government who demanded to get engineers in to fix the aquifer, and in the meantime initiated a program of rationing and distributing water.

Bellingcat’s author Nick Waters was wise to this and did not attempt to invent a motive. Instead he claimed that the Syrian government had destroyed the aquifer by accident, coincidentally at the same time that the terrorists were rigging it with explosives. The claim that the attack could have been an ‘accident’ is contradicted by the United Nations, which said the “infrastructure was deliberately targeted.”

Bellingcat is assumed an investigative search network based in Britain, allegedly investigating the use of weapons in Syria. However, Bellingcat and its founder Elliot Higgins are committed to building narratives in support of the US State Department’s agenda. In the past, Bellingcat attempted to pin the blame on the crash of Malaysia MH17 on Russia. Bellingcat also produced shaky analysis claiming to have smoking gun evidence that the Syrian government was responsible for the chemical weapons attack in Ghouta. The article, jointly written by Dan Kaszeta and Eliot Higgins, was contradicted by well-known Physics Professor and rocket engineer Theodore Postol who also stated that Dan Kaszeta was a fraud. Dan Kazseta claimed to be a chemical weapons expert but in fact had no education in chemistry. Bellingcat’s article on the water crisis in Damascus will stand as further testament to the unreliability, even intentionally deceptive nature of its reporting.

The United Nations has stated that the cutting off of Damascus’s water could constitute a war crime. One awaits similar UN statements to be made about Aleppo where there is no shadow of doubt that the US-backed terrorists cut off the water supply in 2014. The UN’s statement meant that the Al Qaeda linked White Helmets NGO is red-handed in committing war crimes. This raises the stakes for NATO governments who have provided them with tens of millions of dollars in donations. It is no wonder that a campaign of disinformation is being run to deflect blame and whitewash the incident.

That was from an article by Maram Susli, also known as "Syrian Girl", who is an activist and social commentator specially covering the foreign-made crisis in Syria.

EA/ME