After pitching successfully to the Comment Editor at The New Arab, on 2 February 2017 I submitted an article that asked why the media was ignoring leaked US government documents about Syria.

This was important to highlight, I argued, because the documents completely contradicted the dominant narrative about the West and Syria that is endlessly repeated in the media. My article was published on 7 February 2017, and in the next couple of days was retweeted hundreds of times, and got over 5,000 Facebook shares.

However, when I went to read the comments under my article on the morning of 9 February 2017 I found that the article had been removed from The New Arab website. I emailed the Comment Editor, asking what had happened and was directed to the CEO of The New Arab. The CEO told me he had removed my article from the website because he "found it to be contrary to our editorial line." He continued:

"I made the decision to remove it from the website because our values should not be undermined. I have no problem with publishing some differences of opinion on the Syrian issue, but I cannot allow something to be published that undermines the revolution that started against what is a bloody and tyrannical regime."

The CEO ended by noting:

"I certainly don't wish to censor anything. You can criticize whom you want. But the issue here was not criticism. It was an inference that I cannot accept given our stance."

I replied to the CEO:

Thanks for your reply.

By removing my article for the farcical reasons you give below you have, regrettably, massively undermined the credibility of The New Arab and yourself.

Very obviously my article does not 'undermine the revolution' or argue the revolution was a 'Western construct'. There is a plethora of evidence that Western governments and its allies in the region have supported the insurgency - including the US government sources I quoted in the article you have censored.

I would like to thank [the Comment Editor and Assistant Editor], both of whom have been a pleasure to work with.

Kind regards

Ian Sinclair"

George Soros' most well-known NGO is the Open Society Institute, is highly active in Macedonia and itself works with a plethora of "civil society organizations" throughout the country that function as the OSI (and hence the West's) tentacles in Macedonian society. This is what has prompted some in Macedonia to say in regards to Soros that "Soros came into Macedonia like a Trojan horse, and now he is an octopus."

The OSI has been active in Macedonia for some time, with Vladimir Milcin heading the organization for nearly twenty years. Milcin was a former police informant in the days of Communism. Milcin was instrumental in ratting out a dissident actor Risto Siskov.

The Soros networks in Macedonia are extremely powerful. As Jay Nordlinger reported for the National Review after having traveled to Macedonia,

In America for the past many years, we have had a plethora of Soros-funded groups: MoveOn.org, Media Matters, the Center for American Progress, etc. Macedonia has its rough equivalents. But they mean more in Macedonia than the Soros-funded groups do in America. Back home, we have a zillion conservative groups to counter the Soros groups. The Left has its billionaires, we have ours. You hit me with Soros? Okay, I'll hit you with a Koch or two. In Macedonia, I'm told, there is no tradition of donating money to a cause. There aren't think tanks and activist groups and the rest on the right. So, the "Sorosoids" own the field.

Russia seems to be playing along with the regime's fantasy that all opposition groups are terrorists. In fact, the majority of opposition groups are moderate. They are key to a Syrian-led transition because, alongside the political opposition in exile, they offer a credible third narrative for Syria apart from the tyrannies of Assad or ISIL. Furthermore, from an international security perspective, Russia's regime-serving narrative risks weakening them as the only credible ground force against ISIL.

Who are the armed opposition? Leaving aside ISIL, which has almost no presence in Western Syria, and who are in open conflict with all other opposition groups, there are two broad categories of armed opposition. Some are doubtlessly extremists, most notably Al Qaida-linked Jabhat Al-Nusra (JaN).

But by far the larger group are what we would call 'moderate'. That means not extremist, nor terrorist, but focussed only on the removal of the tyrannical Assad regime and the horrors of ISIL from their country. Aside from in JaN's stronghold in parts of Idlib and the rural far North-West of Syria, more moderate forces dominate the space.