Our Research & Policy Coordinator Bilal Shami gave a statement to the New Arab newspaper (in Arabic) on the BBC's coverage of the Syrian conflict. This piece by the New Arab was in response to a controversy caused by BBC Arabic's producer Antoine Khoury who stated during a program that "the Free Syrian Army are terrorists", calling into question the news channel's credible coverage, in both its Arabic and English outlets, of the Arab Spring and the Syrian revolution in particular. Shami said:
"The BBC's coverage of the Syrian conflict has played in favour of the Syrian regime's 'war on terror' narrative. This amplifies the role of extremist Islamist groups including ISIS while giving less attention to the Syrian regime's atrocities on local populations. This perspective has served to mislead the British public into directly associating Syria's unrest with 'terror' and 'Islamism', while pushing them away from recognising the Assad regime's repression of Syrians' legitimate aspirations for freedom and democracy which drove the conflict in the first place."
