Syria: The World's War - a striking reminder of the human cost of the conflict, review

In an era of fake news, the aphorism that truth is the  first casualty of war has never been more correct, and nowhere more so than in the seven-year conflict in Syria. A lack of easily verifiable information in the early years of the war has morphed into  a global propaganda battle played  out on social media and echoed on  the world stage. 

In Syria: The World’s War (BBC Two), Lyse Doucet attempted to provide an objective account of how we got here, and to put a human face on what for most is a distant war. But her measured approach at times left viewers with the challenge of  working out whose version of the truth they believed. 

Her gentle interrogation was frustrating, however, especially  when a smirking Syrian foreign minister told us that his government has never detained innocent civilians.

We later saw him claim that the opposition was responsible for the 2013 sarin chemical attack on the rebel-held territory of Ghouta, a proposition that has taken hold among conspiracy theorists worldwide, and been repeated by Russia and the regime in the aftermath of the recent attack on Douma. 

Where Doucet’s approach worked best was in the testimony from ordinary Syrians caught up in the war.  Noura, a young opposition activist who saw her friends tortured during six months spent in regime detention, and Hayat, a pro-regime journalist whose soldier son was killed in  battle, provided insight into how  the revolution quickly became  a fight for survival. 

I found myself sympathetic to both women. As Hayat put it, “Everyone  in Syria has lost a house, a son.”  The recounting of the 2013 attack provided some of the most difficult viewing of the hour-long documentary, the bodies of small children strewn across a hospital floor.

“I saw them as children who were sleeping,” said a young Damascene who filmed the aftermath of the attack, which left hundreds dead. 

Via an array of international players, including former foreign secretary William Hague and former US secretary of state John Kerry, Doucet charted the steps, and missteps, on the path to the current quagmire. She did not attempt to provide answers to Syria’s seemingly intractable problems, but this first instalment of her two-part programme (which concludes tonight), which ended on the pivotal sarin attack and the failed call for action by the Obama and Cameron governments, was a useful reminder of how things have spun out of control.