# סיריע: א מענטשנרעכט טראַגעדיע אין די עלטער פון פאסט-אמת פּאָליטיק

With no end in sight and in its seventh year of conflict, Syria remains the most complicated and understated international struggle of our time. With a multitude of competing sides, ranging from Iran to the United States to Russia, what the world is witnessing are competing narratives and strategic gains. If it weren’t for the deaths of thousands, this issue would probably just be another Middle East quarrel - writes Bianca Matras.

What began as an internal discord has become the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis of this era, with more and more parties at odds with each other and with no interest to bring this disaster to an end. The country became a complex operational environment due to personal interests of regional and world powers. Forecasting the future, particularly the deep future, is a daunting task with global trends shaping every facet of society and international discourse, including security policy and warfare. A system complex theory, also known as the chaos theory, offers us a set of conceptual tools to help explain the diversity of and changes in the modern era undergoing globalization, and it suggests unpredictability, over predictability as the long-term prediction are becoming nearly impossible.

That said, is peace really the objective? In the age of post-truth politics, the politics of illusions, the global order of diplomacy and prudent laws is being undermined. With news stories being distributed for political reasons and facts being ignored for matching the political agenda, the term fake news takes center stage. With Putin stating that chemical weapon attacks were fake and untrue, with Trump, the father of fake news, trying now to limit the freedom of speech, and with Syria’s war photos going viral on social media while they might or might not be from Syria, the 24-hour news cycle drives the post-truth politics with social media helping to expand the volume and the influence of opinions.  This news is creating a vast pool of information from where the parties can choose what best suits them, consequently, evoking hyperreal feelings and overrated impressions.

To complicate matters, on top of this battle of narratives there is a battle of power and arms too. During the years, Syria has become the battleground for world and regional powers and it is now a failed state. Everyone has sensed an opportunity to extend their influence across the region by manipulating the events, and combating terrorism was the common pretext which bound together countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United States, Russia and about a dozen others. In this complex, full of chaos environment, the people of Syria stand no chance and the hundreds of thousands of deaths are already silenced.

In the new world order, it is much easier to demolish a system than to build one. Appeals to emotions are more influential in shaping the public opinion than the objective facts. Moreover, logic as a systematic theory and the study of reason, has nothing to do with the nowadays politics as the post-truth politics is not a matter of being both true and false at the same time, or just true, or false, it is about the creation of a hyperreal environment with no real interest whatsoever for the human rights and peace.

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