Kim Kardashian Gets Involved in Syria’s Social Media War

On March 30, Kim Kardashian tweeted the following:

The celebrity, who is of Armenian descent, was drawing attention
to the predominantly ethnically Armenian-populated town of
Kassab in northern Syria, which was captured by rebels,
including Al Qaeda-linked
Jabhat al-Nusra, late last month.

Kardashian was only one of the Twitter users
using the #SaveKessab
hashtag to highlight atrocities such as mass killings and the
desecrations of churches carried out in the town by rebels.

However, Kardashian and many others on Twitter who thought they
were drawing attention to a recent horror committed by some of
Assad’s opposition were in fact probably perpetuating a myth that
may have been started by supporters of Assad.

From the
Associated Press:

Kassab’s residents fled after rebels seized their village on
March 23, as part of a rebel offensive in the coastal Syrian
province of Latakia, Assad’s ancestral heartland.

There are no credible reports that rebels killed any residents,
or that they inflicted major damage on churches.

The Daily Beast explains that one of the images of a
supposed victim of violence in Kassab is from a horror film;
another shows the body of a decapitated girl who was killed in
2012, not recently.

There have been atrocities carried out by some of Assad’s
opposition in the Latakia province before. In October Human Rights
Watch released
a report on the killings of civilians in Latakia.

Kardashian’s tweet is one of the most prominent examples of how
social media is being used in Syria’s civil war. Whether it be
Assad’s Instagram
account or the jihadist opposition group the Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria
live-tweeting an amputation, social media is being used by
different actors in the conflict to disseminate propaganda.