Waging War with Propaganda

NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel is re-reporting a key detail of his December 2012 kidnapping in Syria after new information surfaced suggesting he may have been misled about the identities of his captors, according to sources familiar with the matter.

[...]

Engel identified his captors as the shabiha, a shadowy Shia militia acting on behalf of Syrian President Bashar Assad. He is now investigating whether the men were actually Sunni, and if so, whether they were motivated by money or posing as Shia militiamen as part of an anti-Assad propaganda ploy.

[...]

Some observers had indicated skepticism early on about the identity of Engel's captors. The same day Engel surfaced from captivity, California State University professor As'ad AbuKhalil, who blogs at a site called the Angry Arab News Service [http://angryarab.blogspot.com.br/?m=1], expressed doubts that the captors were pro-Assad agents linked to the Iranian government and Hezbollah.

[...]

After The New York Times began inquiring about details of the kidnapping, according to sources, Engel revisited the ordeal twenty-eight months later to determine who exactly was responsible for the kidnapping .

[...]

AbuKhalil, who expressed doubts in his initial blog post that the captors were, in fact, tied to Iran and Hezbollah, examined the graffiti [in a video posted by the captors] in a second post. “I looked at the video and it is so clearly a set up and the slogans are so clearly fake and they intend to show that they were clearly Shi’ites and that they are savages,” he wrote. “If this one is believable, I am posing as a dentist.”

  Huffington Post

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.