I call it the proxy war, as it could hardly be called a civil war. The war would have ended within a year if Western funding and material support had not been provided. On top of that, a large percentage of the rebel forces were not even Syrian natives.
Many lies were propagated by Western governments and their media outlets. These ranged from "moderate opposition" being a viable fighting force all the way to the Syrian army being allied to ISIS. I will go over a long list of deliberate lies told about this war by the complicit western media.
The idea of "moderate opposition" was one of the biggest lies of the Syrian war. The two most formidable fighting forces in Syria had decidedly become extremist in nature. The two most powerful groups at one time were Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS. That is not to say there were no "moderate" Free Syrian Army groups, just that they were in fact not moderate.
The FSA was allied to ISIS until late 2013 to early 2014. They took part in several joint offensives together in 2013. These included the capture of Minnagh airbase in Aleppo, to the 2013 Latakia offensive. There were instances of cooperation at later dates. Two FSA groups in Hama that were supplied TOW missiles by the CIA were allied to ISIS affiliate Jund al-Aqsa until 2019. One FSA group fought alongside ISIS in the town of Zabadani in the Qalamoun mountains during the Syrian army's 2015 offensive. The FSA and ISIS even openly engaged in trade in Northern Aleppo province until around 2016.
The cooperation with AQ was far worse. Almost all FSA groups, and indeed all that received TOW missiles from the CIA, fought alongside AQ in many joint offensives. The paper I wrote on the subject of their cooperation from 2014-2016 alone is over 100 pages long.
The lie of the "White Helmets," a so called humanitarian organization. When people rightfully called out members of this organization for being friendly with extremists, western media called this a conspiracy theory. I alone found the Facebook profiles of hundreds of White Helmet members. All of them had mutual friends with extremist fighters, and 65 of them posted jihadist material to their own personal pages.
Stories would frequently be fabricated in Western media about the Syrian war. It was often hard to tell how much of a story had been made up, but it was always evident that at least parts of it were. I remember one story I read about an "Iraqi Hezbollah leader" giving a speech in the southern Aleppo town of al-Eis on a certain date. There was one problem, on that date al-Eis had been retaken by rebel forces a week or so before. The author did not know this, nor did most others in the West. This proved to me that the entire story was a complete fabrication. The unscrupulous author had made a complete work of fiction to push war propaganda.
One of the most repeated lies by Western outlets was the fictional tale that the Syrian army did not fight ISIS, or worse, were allied to them. Anyone watching the war would have known that this was blatantly not true. The Syrian army began fighting the modern iteration of ISIS in 2013 and continued until their defeat at Yarmouk camp in 2018. However, small pockets of ISIS remain in the Homs desert and the Syrian army occasionally fights these. Nomadic insurgencies are difficult to root out, so this may continue indefinitely.
Most Americans are unaware that the US military currently occupies one third of Syria in the East. This is done ostensibly to "fight ISIS." The real reason is to occupy the oil fields and prevent passage between the Iraqi and Syrian borders. The USA controls 80% of Syrian oil reserves. This is continued to punish Syria in addition to sanctions.
