By Christoph Reuter DER SPIEGEL GERMANY

After spending months reporting on the conflict, a SPIEGEL journalist has pieced together a realistic view of the situation on the ground, and reports that dictator Bashar Assad’s fall seems inevitable. But as the fighting grows more barbarous on both sides, he worries what the ultimate price will be.

It was August 2012 and we were sitting in front of the TV. The Syrian state-run channel was reporting that the country’s army was fighting bravely in the streets of Maraa, and was close to defeating the terrorists there. At this very moment, the program continued, Syrian army troops were storming the cultural center where the last terrorists had holed up. The screen showed soldiers running past three-story apartment buildings.

We had been in Maraa for days, waiting for a driver who would take us further into the interior of the country. Not a single government soldier had been seen in this small city north of Aleppo in quite a while. Not even the artillery cannons in Aleppo were capable of reaching the town. Someone called an acquaintance living near the cultural center, and learned that everything was quiet there too. And the multi-story apartment buildings? There aren’t any in Maraa.

The entire report, several minutes long and related in a breathless tone, was fiction. This time we ourselves were witnesses and knew the truth.

When the Syrian state-run television channel or the private channel al-Dunya, which is owned by the Assad family, expose a Satanic conspiracy against Syria under the direction of United States President Barack Obama, or reveal that the movements of FC Barcelona’s soccer players are actually secret commands directed at Syrian rebels, no one in the West pays much attention. These reports are all too clearly grotesque propaganda.

But when the events reported are ones that seem plausible at first glance — for example the flood of foreign al-Qaida fighters supposedly organizing the Syrian rebellion, the presence of a huge number of CIA agents or the expulsion of Christians from Syrian cities — these claims elicit a response in the West. It’s often difficult for us journalists to determine whether or not they are true, because the Syrian civil war is far less accessible than the war in Libya was. In Libya, the eastern part of the country around Benghazi was liberated in a week, making it possible for journalists to travel there.

There is no Benghazi in Syria. Any corner of the country’s embattled regions can be hit by an air strike at any time. At the same time, the regime’s Orwellian PR machine not only presents journalists with its official view of the situation, but also provides us with supposed eyewitnesses to atrocities and al-Qaida fighters it has allegedly captured.

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