Last month, colleagues and I gathered in Istanbul for a workshop titled ‘Syria: Religion in Revolution, War, and Displacement’. 

As Syria experts, we presented our findings with a healthy dose of humility, recognising that much of what we thought we knew about religion and revolution in Syria was developed in the crucible of the now-defunct Assad regime. 

Despite embracing uncertainty of things to come, most participants offered cautious optimism about the prospects for a post-Assad transition.

As we wrapped up our time in Türkiye, news came of violent clashes along the Syrian coast. My colleagues and I were alarmed and indeed considered the prospect that elements of the transitional government had gone rogue and engaged in revenge killings against the Alawite minority that was so thoroughly weaponised by the Alawite Assad family. 

Still, we left Istanbul concluding that the dust simply needs to settle before we can offer authoritative commentary – about this latest spate of violence, who bears the lion’s share of responsibility, and what it ultimately means for the future of Syria.

At most, we were able to conclude that the interim government needs to immediately put a vetted and independent mechanism in place to bring perpetrators of revenge killings to justice. 

Sectarianism in Syria is not a fait accompli – the Assad regime deliberately built its security state by stoking bigotry, but tensions between the country’s Sunni Arab majority and its multiple religious and ethnic minorities needn’t define political life in the country moving forward. With the right moves by the interim government, past tensions can be overcome.

But upon leaving Türkiye, I returned to the world of social media, where one would likely think that a sectarianised Syria is indeed a foregone conclusion.

Exercising no discretion at the lack of clarity of the facts on the ground, keyboard warriors have declared open season on Syrian religious minorities. 

And many went beyond the Alawite religious minority, claiming that Syrian Christians are being systematically killed en masse by the interim government led by Ahmed al-Sharaa.

The Syrian Christian community itself has since debunked these claims, with the pastors of Christian churches in Latakia, the Catholic Bishop of Syria, and other Christian entities in the country explicitly denying allegations of widespread persecution of Christians by the interim government.

Nonetheless, these claims persist and are being retweeted by influential Western figures like right-wing talk show host Tucker Carlson and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, both of whom have millions of followers on social media.

Stoking fire online

For those of us who have specialised in Syria for the past decade, this is not an isolated incident. Rather, it is part of a targeted campaign of disinformation that has proliferated since the start of the Syrian uprisings of 2011.

Even before the term “fake news” became part of our global lexicon by the rise of Donald Trump, disinformation campaigns on social media managed to distort a Syrian-led popular protest movement – working in lockstep with the Arab Spring protests throughout the region – as a CIA-run plot to overthrow a “popular leader” of a sovereign Arab state.

And as the Syrian uprising proceeded, largely Russian-sponsored disinformation campaigns ratcheted up their efforts, attempting to absolve the Assad regime of its role in demonstrable atrocities. 

The 2018 chemical weapons attack in Douma, universally acknowledged by the international community, was rebranded as a blatant fabrication.

And perhaps most insidiously, the figures like Greyzone, promoting this narrative, have maligned the efforts of the White Helmets, spreading disinformation that undermines their humanitarian work.

Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and winner of the Right Livelihood Award in 2016, the White Helmets is an emergency humanitarian relief organisation tasked with rescuing survivors from bombed buildings. But pervasive disinformation networks dismissed them as agents of the al Qaeda terror group.

Unsurprisingly, many of the same figures involved in this decade-long disinformation campaign against Syria have resurfaced in light of the recent spate of violence along the Syrian coast. 

But this time, they have exceedingly powerful allies like Musk amplifying their conspiracies.

With Musk’s imprimatur, social media is rapidly proliferating charges of an ongoing genocidal massacre of religious minorities by the Syrian interim government – a massacre, this narrative continues, that is being deliberately concealed by mainstream media. 

At its most obstinate, these accounts make arbitrary claims of some 7,000 Christians wantonly slaughtered by Ahmed al Sharaa’s forces. American politicians like Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jim Risch and even Secretary of State Marco Rubio have subsequently lent credence to these allegations.

Syrians fight back

Nonetheless, even faced with such powerful antagonists, Syrians and their supporters on social media are properly prepared to do online damage control. 

The hashtag #FactCheckSyria on the X social media platform has done admirable work documenting falsehoods about the country. In several instances, images and videos purporting to show victims of Syrian interim government forces massacring minorities are actually dated footage of wholly different contexts, like as massacres committed against Syrian civilians by the pro-Assad Lebanese militia Hezbollah.

Almost comically, one post of an alleged victim of sectarian violence in Syria, upon further investigation, wound up being Elon Musk’s father, Errol.

In actuality, violence along the coast took place primarily between armed remnants of the Assad regime and the interim government. 

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, killings were carried out by both sides, and indeed included civilians belonging to the Alawite sect, but there are no demonstrable signs of mass killings of Alawites or other religious minorities. 

Rather, extrajudicial killings numbered closer to 800 casualties, and al Sharaa has since pledged to take measures to reassure Alawite civilians and bring perpetrators of revenge killings to justice.

Whether al Sharaa makes good on those promises remains to be seen. 

But as responsible analysts, we are tasked with doing proper investigation and vetting before offering formative conclusions, either about the attacks along the coast or the more recent announcement of the interim Syrian government, and what it ultimately means for Syria.

My colleagues and I in Istanbul purposefully chose to exercise caution and restraint before rushing to deliberate on the attacks on the Syrian coast. 

Perhaps the richest man in the world can stand to follow suit.