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Syria-Iran alliance key topic in Mideast narratives


Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has blamed a foreign conspiracy for trying to destabilize Syria amid renewed calls by the Arab League for the Syrian government to stop its violence against civilian protesters.

Meanwhile, the long-standing alliance between Syria and Iran continues to be of significance to both countries, particularly Syria, and has been a key topic in the region's Media narratives since the conflict began in March 2011.

Iran-Syria alliance in the media
Since early December 2011, the Syrian opposition's traditional and social media outlets have featured reports saying that Iran - as well as Russia - has been sending arms, equipment and advisers to assist the authorities in suppressing civilian protests.

Speaking in December 2011, the leader of the main opposition group, the Syrian National Council (SNC), Burhan Ghalyun, said that relations with Iran and the Lebanese Shi’i party Hezbollah - Iran's principal ally in Lebanon - are likely to change for the worse should the SNC come to power.

These political tensions have been reflected in the various factions' media rhetoric, including Lebanon-based Hezbollah. For example, while the Syrian opposition factions are keen to display on user-generated content websites, such as YouTube, footage of violent clashes between protesters and the Syrian authorities, Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Manar TV in early January 2012 posted on its YouTube channel footage showing Syrians telling men appearing to be Arab League monitors that they had been victimized by anti-state "armed gangs".

Similarly, at the beginning of the Syrian unrest in March 2011, Iran's state-run media were largely silent and chose later to describe the unrest as "limited protests".

Iranian pro-government Mashregh website said in March 2011 that the West had tried through the popular social networking website, Facebook, to create "a day of rage in Syria", but had failed owing to "the lack of welcome by Syrians [which] turned into another disgrace for the US and its allies in the region".

Officials in Syria have been critical of the coverage of the clashes on the Qatar-based pan-Arab Al-Jazeera TV.

Iran's media have also reacted sharply to the December 2011 kidnapping of seven Iranian engineers by an anti-Shi’ah group calling itself the "Movement Against the Expansion of Shi’ism in Syria", close to the city of Homs in Syria.

Iran's Press TV reported in January 2012 that the Iranian envoy to Damascus, Mohammad Reza Raouf Sheibani, had described the abduction of the Iranian engineers in Syria as "a scare tactic to bully Iran into changing its stance on Syria".

Topic of interest to Syrian opposition
The nature of the Syrian authorities' control over the country’s domestic media environment has altered subtly since March 2011, in particular, the authorities' influence on the internet.

In July 2011, Syrian activist Rami Nakhlah was quoted in the Western media as saying that Syria was enlisting technical help from its ally Iran in order to conduct cyber activities, such as hacking and pro-Asad comments. However, there has been no direct evidence that Iran is assisting Syria with cyber activities.

The Iran-Syria alliance is likely to continue generating comments at the grass-roots level within Syria, particularly through Arabic-language Social Media Outlets. In the short-term, this issue is likely to become a more significant topic within Syria's opposition narratives.
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Syria-Iran alliance key topic in Mideast narratives

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