It was reported that on April 7, 2018, over 40 people were murdered in a chemical attack in the Syrian city of Douma. According to reports from the World Health Organization’s Health Cluster partners, “an estimated 500 patients presented to health facilities exhibiting signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals.”

They concluded that 43 deaths were “related to symptoms consistent with exposure to highly toxic chemicals,” including respiratory failure and disruption to the central nervous system.

U.S., Britain, and France accused Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad of masterminding the attack — Douma, of course, is part of East Ghouta, a rebel stronghold in the country’s ongoing civil war. On April 13th this three member coalition responded with a series of airstrikes in and around the cities of Damascus and Homs. A day later, France issued a report offering evidence of Assad’s involvement.

Meanwhile, Russia — a key ally of the Assad regime — promised “consequences” in response to the coalition airstrikes, which it called a “flagrant violation of international law.” President Putin himself denounced them as an “aggressive action.”

And Russian government officials weren’t the only people crying foul. President Trump’s decision to bomb a sovereign country without congressional approval was blasted by Republicans and Democrats alike as “illegal” and “unconstitutional.”

The left-wing ANSWER Coalition condemned this “criminal assault” on the Syrian people by “colonizers of the Middle East,” and promoted anti-war protests. Code Pink, the anti-war organization that attained infamy during the height of the Iraq War, protested outside lawmakers’ homes.

Just in the U.S., demonstrations were held in Sacramento, El Paso, Salt Lake City, Coeur d’Alene, Portland, Boston, Houston, and Los Angeles. Large protests also took place in Iraq, Greece, Cyprus, and Israel.

But it wasn’t just the Left that demanded an end to the bombing. So did the extremist Right, though not for the usual humanitarian reasons. In the lead up to the airstrikes, fringe conspiracy theorists and alt-right activists warned that the chemical attack in Douma — like many atrocities — was actually a “false flag.”

Wingnut “journalist” Paul Joseph Watson of InfoWars interviewed Maram Susli, a pro-Assad media personality better known as “Syrian Girl” or “Partisan Girl.” A longtime conspiracy theorist herself, Susli labeled the Douma incident a “false flag chemical attack” in a short video for the YouTube channel Russia Insight.

In her appearance on Watson’s show, Susli condemned the White Helmets, a group of Syrian first responders, as “basically [the] Army of Islam or al-Qaeda basically putting on a white helmet.”

The claim that the White Helmets are a terrorist organization or in league with radical Islamists is just one of many unfounded smears against the humanitarian group. According to a report from The Guardian, several of these conspiracies have been linked to a Russian disinformation campaign:

The analytics firm Graphika has spent years analysing a range of Russian disinformation campaigns including those around the Macron leaks and the Russian doping scandal. In research commissioned by the human rights group the Syria Campaign, it found that the patterns in the online network of the 14,000 Twitter users talking about the White Helmets looked “very similar” and included many known pro-Kremlin troll accounts, some of which were closed down as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the US election. Other accounts appeared to generate more than 150 tweets per day (more than 70 is seen by scholars studying bots as suspicious).

Susli also claimed that the White Helmets had been caught fabricating rescues, informing Watson that they “did a very silly video of themselves basically frozen in time, rescuing this guy, and later he comes out and he’s like, ‘Oh I’m fine,’ but his acting during the rescue was as if he was very much in pain.”

As the Guardian article pointed out, this conspiracy centers around a group of White Helmets who posted their version of the “mannequin challenge,” an online video trend in which people “film themselves frozen mid-action.” In 2016 the video was uploaded by the Revolutionary Forces of Syria Media Office, but was “stripped of its context and reshared” in order to prove they staged their own rescues.

But that’s not all. Susli also alleged that the brains behind this organization is an MI6 agent. “And of course, the group is funded by Holland, the U.S., [and] the U.K.,” she added. “And it’s interesting that Holland actually, at the United Nations, said, ‘Oh this is a very trustworthy group.’ Well of course they’d say that because they’re the ones who are paying them!”

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This wasn’t Susli’s first InfoWars appearance either. A devoted acolyte of Alex Jones, Susli made an appearance on July 9, 2014 where she claimed that ISIS received covert funding from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the U.S., and Israel — the “usual suspects” as she labeled them. Nearly a year later she was on the show yet again, defending the Gamergate movement against charges of misogyny, and claiming it was a response to “cultural Marxists” ruining video games.

And she’s associated with other extremist media outlets too. On November 13, 2015, Susli was a guest on the white supremacist podcast Radio 3Fourteen hosted by Lana Lokteff. During the episode Susli and Lokteff chatted about the evil “globalists” seeking to destroy Syria, as well as the similarities between Susli’s birthplace and Nazi Germany — both countries banned secret societies, Lokteff cheerfully pointed out.

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