With the fall of Aleppo to regime forces in Syria signaling a turning point in the war, some more hawkish members of the media are in a full blown panic.  In a last ditch attempt to demonize the Syrian government and push for regime change, the Daily Beast has published a somewhat bizarre account of how President Assad invented ISIS.  One central claim of the three part series is that the Syrian government launched false flag attacks against itself in order to make it appear as if they were fighting Jihadists rather than moderates rallying for democracy.

The death of Syria’s deputy minister of defense, Assef Shawkat, remains a mystery with facts hard to come by.  While the Daily Beast claims that he was killed in a bombing engineered by Assad that involves a fairly extensive and byzantine conspiracy theory, a new account has been recently published in reaction by a Syrian insider.

Ehsani writes:

In a three-part series, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Roy Gutman relies on a number of Syrian opposition members to make the central claim that “the Syrian regime’s collusion with the terrorists of the so-called Islamic State goes back a decade.” This is not the first time that Assad has been accused of complicity in the horrors of ISIS. But the claims have renewed urgency because the Syrian opposition is worried that Donald Trump’s anti ISIS strategy will come at the expense of U.S. support for the Syrian opposition. They worry that Washington will “shift policy in the Syria conflict from one of support for the moderate opposition to collaboration with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.”

The rest of the article can be read here, and you can make your own determination about what really happened.