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In his recent interview for CBS' 60 Minutes, Putin flatly rejected Western media claims that the Syrian military commits war crimes, not least the incessantly repeated claim that the Syrian military is wantonly dropping 'barrel bombs' over civilian areas, telling American journalist Charlie Rose, "Speaking in the professional language of the intelligence services, I can tell you that this kind of assessment is an 'active measure' by enemies of Assad. It is anti-Syrian propaganda." Since the conflict began, many massacres have been blamed on Syrian forces, but later turned out to have either not taken place at all or have been carried out by so-called 'rebels' or 'terrorists'.

Within a year of the so-called 'Syrian uprising' they told us the death toll was hitting 100,000. By late 2013 it was 200,000. And today Western media outlets throw around figures of 'over 320,000 dead'. The primary source for these figures throughout the 'civil war' - which is really a war of conquest by proxy mercenaries in the pay of Washington, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, - has been the 'Syrian Observatory for Human Rights', an opposition 'group' whose reports about what's happening in Syria have been taken at face value, despite its clear interest in portraying the Syrian government in the worst possible light. The information on which the figures are based are internationally considered so dubious that the UN gave up trying to keep an accurate count almost two years ago.

Routinely cited by every single Western media outlet, and its reports taken as gospel truth, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) has effectively been inventing a narrative of what's happening in Syria that fits Western foreign policy interests. With no real 'ears on the ground' in Syria, SOHR produces reports on troop movements, government policy, and public sentiment, all of which amount to so many lies that are uncritically swallowed and regurgitated by Western presstitutes. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) consists of one Syrian expat - Abdul Rahman, aka Rami Abdulrahman, aka Osama Suleiman - and his 'team of four activists in Syria'. Rahman, a three-term convicted criminal in Syria, found refuge in the West, where he miraculously sees all in Syria from his two-bedroom house above a clothes shop in Coventry, England.

A more likely figure, based on information collected by the Violations Documenting Center, a group that is actually in Syria, suggests that some 120,000 people have been killed. This is the cumulative death toll from four years of the Syrian army, with modest support from Hezbollah, fighting off tens of thousands of religiously-demented, bloodthirsty, foreign mercenaries that have poured into Syria. This means that most of these deaths came after the commencement of explicit Western, Turkish and Gulf states' military intervention - in the form of weapons, training, communications, and lately, airstrikes - in Syria. As with the 'humanitarian interventions' in Serbia and Libya, the death toll from relatively low-level existing conflict was grossly exaggerated to support a casus belli for Western military action, which then made 'true' the lie that hundreds of thousands or millions of people were being killed or fleeing the conflict.

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"Putin and Assad did it!" - Syrian refugees fleeing US-backed 'rebels'.
And yes, indeed, millions of people are now fleeing Syria, but that's because the Syrian state is on the brink of collapse thanks to the US-led proxy war against Syria, not because Assad is 'a bad man killing his own people'. The same was true of Gaddafi's Libya. It really boggles the mind how the same infantile slander can be used time and again by Western Warmongers to justify the slaughter of innocents abroad, and yet the people never seem to catch on. Then again, who would ever imagine that our vaunted 'democratic, peace-loving' leaders in the West could be so inhuman as to falsely accuse someone else of killing civilians to justify killing those same civilians.

The one large number related to Syria that Western media rarely draws attention to is the total number of jihadists there (and still pouring into the country from Turkey and Jordan with ease). Based on the official numbers listed here, and making no distinction between the different brands of terrorists because they all ultimately work for the same master, we count an army of 123,000 terrorists - including the so-called 'Free Syrian Army', and excluding Kurdish fighters from Iraq because they're undecided as to which takes priority: eliminating the mercenaries or Assad.

'Dynamic Narratives' aka 'Make shit up as you go along'

While horrific, no one can fail to be impressed by U.S. and European government officials' persistence in pursuing their aim of convincing Western populations to support the wholesale slaughter of civilians in foreign lands. Four years ago the public was bombarded with propaganda claiming that "Assad is killing his own people". This was followed by the equally bogus claim that "Assad is gassing his own people". Then ISIS appeared on the scene about two years ago, a mercenary army imported into Syria to both attack the Syrian military and population and provide justification for Western military intervention to finish off Assad and empower a Syrian elite that will transform the country into a Western vassal. The macabre spectacle of ISIS atrocities, apparently stage-managed specifically to inflame European and American sensibilities, distracted attention from "evil Assad" because he too was fighting ISIS, but not for long.

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Power engaging in a paramoralistic diatribe at the U.N.
The most recent line of outrageous BS from Western warmongers is that Assad is directly responsible for ISIS because, by not submitting to the West's proxy war against him and his people, he is, in the words of the intolerably pusillanimous David Cameron: "one of the great recruiting sergeants for ISIS". This narrative that Assad, not the U.S., Turkey and Saudi Arabia, are to blame for the existence of ISIS appears to have become the 'new reality' about two weeks ago when U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, told CNN correspondent (and likely CIA asset) Christiane Amanpour that Assad "attracts jihadis to the Syrian theater". Since then, several U.S., British and French politicians have all repeated the same mantra.

The irony that 'Mrs Genocide' Samantha Power would be one of the most vociferous cheerleaders for what amounts to genocide against the Syrian people is apparently lost on her. Then again, Power appears to be the type of person who, if she hadn't made her name in politics, would have ended up as a fundamentalist evangelical preacher, exhorting the faithful to be "washed in the blood". She's a "bomb them to save them" or "kill them all and let god sort them out" kind of gal. In mental health circles such people are known as 'asthenic' psychopaths.