med insurgents rather than Syrian troops”.
In Daraya, however, no one was aware of this “prisoner swap”. And even his own interviewees didn’t support his conclusions. Most gave evasive answers. And the only interviewee he cites as supporting his theory casts further doubt on it: “Although he had not seen the dead in the graveyard,” writes Fisk, “he believed that most were related to the government army”.
The record was quickly set straight by the American journalist Janine di Giovanni who sneaked into Daraya disguised as a local and interviewed survivors without the intimidating presence of regime forces. (The Free Syrian Army had left two weeks earlier.) Di Giovanni revealed in precise detail how the offensive began, what weapons were used, and how the slaughter was carried out. Human Rights Watch corroborated her report.
Fisk was undeterred. A few months later he visited “one of Syria’s most feared military prisons”. But even though two of the four prisoners he interviewed “gave unmistakable hints of brutal treatment”, even though their testimonies sounded like “stories that the Syrian authorities obviously wanted us to hear”, Fisk tried to convince readers that they were telling the truth because they “were clearly anxious to talk to us”, because the prison guards left at his insistence, and because Fisk “refused later requests by the Syrian authorities for access to our tapes”.
That all the prisoners confessed to being motivated by religious extremism or sectarian hatred, that one pronounced himself “happy to be arrested” by the Mukhabarat, and that one admitted to receiving “very good treatment” from his interrogators did nothing to raise Fisk’s suspicions. Indeed, Fisk’s usual cynicisms is absent when these doomed men—likely awaiting the grim fate suffered by at least 11,000 others—tell him that the FSA are just “thieves, killers and rapists” and condemn “the Emir of Qatar for stirring revolution in Syria”.
The list goes on…
A once revered journalist, who ended his reporting career as an Assad apologist.
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