Fact Checking the Arab Media

Almost from the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, several online media outlets in the Middle East, as well as some social media users, have claimed that Syrian fighters loyal to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were being recruited by Russia and/or their allies in order to deploy on Moscow’s side in the war.

On its face, the claim seemed possible: After all, the Russian military had itself deployed heavily in the Fall of 2015 in order to prop up Assad’s teetering hold over Syria. Perhaps now that chit was being called by the Kremlin? Still, over the last 11 years of the exceptionally brutal Syrian civil war, such early rumor and speculation has often turned out to be false, the result of one side trying to gain a temporary advantage in the media sphere and inflict as much damage as possible no matter the factual basis of the claim.

As Middle East Institute Syria Analyst Gregory Waters cautioned in a report on March 16, “The first significant claims of Russian recruitment came from Deir Ezzor 24, an [anti-Assad] opposition outlet notorious for publishing misleading stories to boost readership and gain attention.” Deir Ezzor 24 first reported that Russians were “opening the doors to recruitment” in Deir ez-Zor on March 4 and then followed up with another broader “exclusive” on March 14 that claimed to quote the Russian “volunteer request” and its six months “contract” terms.

While Waters debunked the alleged “volunteer request” (it was actually the script of a petition that Syrians from Russian-backed units “have been signing as a show of support for the Russian military, not an actual contract for deployment”), both the Ukrainian and Russian governments have now said that fighters from the Middle East are - at the very least - registering to fight for Russia in its war with Ukraine. These two announcements came after US intelligence assessments from early March, first published in The Wall Street Journal, that asserted Russia was “Recruiting Syrians for urban combat in Ukraine.”

Russian President Vladamir Putin’s confirmation of the news came during a publicly broadcast March 11 meeting with his Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu, who told Putin that more than 16,000 volunteers from the Middle East had applied to be sent to eastern Ukraine to fight on Moscow’s side. Although the number could very well be an exaggeration - it perfectly matches Ukrainian President Zelinsky’s earlier announcement of having received 16,000 foreign volunteers - given Russia’s intervention in Syria since at least 2015, it is very likely that the bulk of any volunteer recruitment would come from the ranks of Syrians who fought with Moscow in their own country’s civil war.

The Ukrainian government, for its part, on March 13 and then again on March 17 issued communiques that asserted the registration of volunteers from Syria had started in earnest: “Putin's Russia,” the first communique said, “has opened 14 mercenary recruitment centers in Syria in territories controlled by the regime of Bashar al-Assad (Damascus, Aleppo, Hama, Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor). After a short training, the mercenaries will be transported to Russia through the Khmeimim air base by two Tu-134 (up to 80 passengers) and Tu-154 (up to 180 passengers) aircraft to the Chkalovsky air base, Moscow region.”

Although the specifics of both the Russian and Ukrainian announcements remain unverified - and whether Syrians will ever actually be deployed is an open question - Deir Ezzor 24’s initial “scoop” that Moscow was “opening the doors to recruitment” for Syrians who want to fight on its side in its war with Ukraine is true, even though some of the evidence subsequently presented by the website was misleading.