English 
فارسی 
العربية 
Foreword
This report is the result of a year of Naame Shaam’s work. It draws largely on information gathered from monitoring Syrian, Iranian and the international media’s coverage of events in Syria. The majority of the information and sources found in this report are thus in the public domain. The authors have drawn on private sources on only a few occasions. This is the case, for instance, with the Syrian ‘crisis cell’ assassination story towards the end of chapter II. Even in such cases, however, the authors did their best to verify and corroborate the information conveyed to them from other, publicly available sources.
Readers will notice that the authors have made a special effort to reference almost every piece of information mentioned in the report. This is because they want readers to be able to verify the information and to expand on it if necessary. The references should also be useful for legal practitioners and organisations wishing to use the original sources as evidence in any future lawsuits.
Naame Shaam has backed up and made copies of all the web pages referenced in the report, just in case they ‘disappear’, as many Iranian news reports concerning Syria have done in the past.
While drawing on a wide range of sources in a variety of languages, the authors have deliberately avoided using Syrian opposition groups and media outlets as a source, except when that was unavoidable. The reason for this is to avoid accusations of bias and unreliability.
A note on language and spelling. The authors have mostly used the Iranian English spelling of names and places, even when these are originally Arabic. Thus, they use ‘Hezbollah’ rather than ‘Hizbullah’, and ‘Sepah Qods’ rather than ‘Quds’. The reason is that numerous quotes from Iranian reports originally in English are used throughout the report, so the authors opted for keeping the spelling of such words consistent as much as possible.
The authors would like to thank all their Syrian, Iranian and Lebanese correspondents, colleagues and friends who provided them with the information and news that formed the core and basis of this report. Thanks are also due to the Rule of Law Foundation for its support.
