"This week The Daily Mail, a British tabloid, published photographs of a so-called ghost unit, loyal to Mr. Assad and accused of systematically killing Syrian civilians. The tabloid described them as “steroid-mad” and tattoo-covered, and wielding “AK-47s and machetes.”
Two images showed a purported member with a large semiautomatic pistol. The weapon was later determined, by the newspaper Al Bawaba in Jordan, to be a blank-firing replica of an Israeli-made Desert Eagle pistol. Al Bawaba chided the opposition for circulating such images, suggesting that overreaching risked eroding the anti-Assad fighters’ public standing. As the opposition has become “increasingly desperate for the outside world to take notice of Assad’s atrocities, the lines become blurred as to what is truth and what is propaganda,” Al Bawaba wrote."
