An Israeli attack over the Syrian capital Damascus killed two civilians and left some material damage, the country's state media reported Monday, citing a military source.
No attempt it made to verify or refute the claim, even though to my knowledge no civilian has died in the scores of Israeli airstrikes on Syria aiming to stem the flow of Iranian weapons to Hezbollah.
It is like Hamas' Health Ministry - if it makes a claim of civilians being killed, reporters assume they are telling the truth. When people object, the reporters hide behind the fiction that they are only reporting what the officials are saying. But these reporters never even attempt to verify or refute the claim. It takes a lot less effort to act as a stenographer for Hamas or Syria then it takes to do, you know, actual reporting.
Al Jazeera's reporting is slightly better than that of Reuters. After parroting the claims, it added:The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a monitoring group, said the missiles hit “a weapons and ammunition depot operated by Iran-backed militias near the Damascus International Airport”.The group, which relies on an extensive network of sources inside Syria, said it could not confirm civilian deaths.
According to reliable sources, two members of Iranian-backed militiamen were killed in the Israeli attack, one of whom is from the southern Syrian province of Daraa and was operating under the banner of a local Iranian-backed militia, and the other was not identified whether he is a Syrian or non-Syrian fighter.The Israeli attack also injured six Iranian-backed militiamen. Following the attack, the victims were transported to hospitals in the capital, Damascus.
So Israel didn't kill any civilians, only Iranian militiamen in Syria. Reporters could have updated the story with the truth - but the truth is not what they are interested in.
Syria's claim that Israel killed civilians has another angle, though.
Syria has long claimed that Israel and ISIS cooperate, which would really surprise ISIS. But once in a while, they need to manufacture "proof." So an Israeli attack on weapons warehouses outside Damascus gets transformed into an attack on a residential area, and somehow since it happened six or so hours after an ISIS attack, that's all you need to know to prove collusion.The [Syrian] Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants affirmed that "the Israeli enemy's aggression against residential areas hours after a crime committed by the terrorist organization ISIS shows the reality of accurate and direct coordination between them."
The ministry said in a statement: "It was never a coincidence that the Israeli enemy launched a new aggression this morning against residential areas in the countryside of Damascus, hours after the terrorist organization "ISIS", on March 6, 2022, committed a crime that claimed the lives of a number of the valiant Syrian army."
"They were on their way home," she said, explaining that "this terrorist-ISIS aggression shows the reality of accurate and direct coordination between the two."
