Ukrainian National Guard Tweet Claiming Ukraine Has Been Bombed More Than Syria Sparks Outrage
11:53 GMT 25.03.2022 (Updated: 16:46 GMT 08.01.2023)
© AP Photo / Gabriel Chaim
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The Syrian government has been at war against foreign-backed militias and jihadist groups including Daesh (ISIS)* and al-Qaeda* since 2011. The United States, Turkey and Israel intervened in the conflict and have dropped tens of thousands of bombs on the Middle Eastern nation since 2014.
The Ukrainian National Guard’s official Twitter handle posted and then deleted a tweet claiming Syria has only been bombed with 100 missiles over the past five years, and that Ukraine, by comparison, has been hit by 1,100 Russian missiles in 22 days.
“Realize the scale of the disaster,” the tweet, which was screengrabbed by Press TV journalist Richard Medhurst before being disappeared, read.
They deleted it but I kept a screenshot.
— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) March 24, 2022
The Ukrainian government actually posted this picture, acting like Ukraine has been bombed more than Syria.
This is not only despicable, but a flat-out lie. pic.twitter.com/OWlvXWwhcT
“The Ukrainian government actually posted this picture, acting like Ukraine has been bombed more than Syria. This is not only despicable, but a flat-out lie,” Medhurst, a Syria-born British journalist and broadcaster who has written and commented extensively about the Syrian crisis, wrote in a thread accompanying the screenshot.
“This is part of the same mentality that Ukrainian refugees are more ‘civilized’ than Syrian ones. Apparently they’re even more ‘Christian’ (as if Christianity didn’t start in Palestine/Syria). And now they act like the destruction is also worse. Y’all don’t know when to stop huh,” Medhurst suggested.
The journalist pointed out that Syria has been in a state of war for more than a decade, and that large swathes of its territory remain occupied by the US, Turkey and Israel, with over 350,000 Syrians killed, and millions more injured or becoming refugees, and suffering from the destruction of key infrastructure and historical and cultural artifacts.
“The West already supports Ukraine. I don’t even understand what the point of posting this garbage is, or [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky going around making absurd comparisons to the Holocaust. This is so uncalled for. If the goal is to garner sympathy, it failed. A lot of people are rightfully angry,” Medhurst added.
Medhurst’s post garnered a flood of support, with users recalling the leveling of 80 percent of the Syrian city of Raqqa in 2017 by Syrian Kurdish and US forces, and pointing to reports by CNN in the midst of the US-led air campaign over Syria and Iraq in 2015 during which the Pentagon said it was running out of bombs after expending over 20,000 missiles and other munitions during the operation. Others recalled the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, with the US reported to have fired more missiles and bombs into the country in a single day than Russia had in three weeks of its operation in Ukraine.
It’s not immediately clear where the Ukrainian National Guard got its figures from to create its graphic.
In 2018, the United States, France and the UK launched more than 100 air and cruise missiles at Syria in the aftermath of a false-flag chemical attack in Douma. A year before that, the United States launched 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria at an airbase, “in response to” a separate staged chemical attack blamed on the Syrian government.
The US-led anti-Daesh coalition in Iraq and Syria has expended nearly 120,500 missiles and bombs over the two countries, 15,184 of them over the past five years, and 554 in the first year of the Biden presidency.
Separately, Israel has admitted to bombing targets in Syria “hundreds” of times, while Turkish air raids have targeted Syrian Kurdish militia positions in the country’s north repeatedly in the wake of Ankara’s incursion into the country in 2016 and then again in 2018 and 2019.
A Russian Defence Ministry summary of the military operation in Ukraine indicated Thursday that since the beginning of the operation on 24 February, Russian forces destroyed 257 Ukrainian drones, 202 anti-aircraft systems, over 1,500 tanks and other armoured vehicles, 160 multiple launch rocket systems, 633 pieces of field artillery and mortars, and 1,379 military vehicles. The MoD does not keep (public) tabs on exactly how many missiles and bombs have been expended to date.
* Terrorist groups outlawed in Russia and many other countries.
