This is a recent Al Jazeera documentary interviewing women in Assad’s gulag. Understanding Syria isn’t a matter of following your intuitions & reading only what agrees with them. That would be substituting prejudice for knowledge. Nor is it simply accepting the authority of celebrity journalists whose politics tanked in the 1980s. Nobody speaks ex cathedra in a world of such complexity.
Serious political people don’t operate from ignorance & don’t follow the leader but investigate & compare sources to understand complex events–which involves looking at every point of view.
It’s impossible to listen to these women who were political prisoners in Syria & question whether it’s fake news or not. It’s horrific & unmistakably authentic.