Posted by OFF THE WALL

The big news today on regime’s media outlets was the Millions of people who marched to Saadallah Aljabri square in Aleppo to celebrate the Russian and Chinese veto and to declare, yet one more time their love and adoration of the Bashar Al-Assad.

I recall that during the Al-Aasi square anti regime demonstration. Jad, on Syria Comment argued that the square can not fit 500,000 protesters. He eyeballed the area near accurately, and I supported his calculation using the free distance measuring tool on Google Earth. Two of my regime supporting friends have argued that my support of the revolution is unscientific. I have no idea how can one scientifically support the revolution. But I decided today to use a bit more advanced tools to check the Millions in Saadallah Aljabri Square in Aleppo.

I started by using a public domain software called Quantum GIS (Geographic Information System). Using a plugin in the software I connected to Google WMS (Web Mapping Service), which allowed me to view Google Satellite layer and overlay it with other spatial data as well as perform measures not available except for paid Google Earth subscribers. Next was deciding on what would constitute the Pro Regime demonstration area.

As I was moderately generous in the case of Hama, I was excessively so here. I decided to allow people to share space with trees, to sit on fences, and to occupy almost every single square meter in the square as well as in many of its branching streets. For wider streets I decided to go until the second major street after the square. Once the hypothesis was completed. I went on to create a polygon overlay (pretty much a digitizing process), and then to measure the area with another area measuring tool.

The end result is shown below. A larger full size image can be seen when clicking on the image, and it shows that the area calculated is 2.315 hectare. A hectare is 100×100 meters square (10,000 square meters). So the square’s area is basically 23150 square meters (including greenery, trees, structures, and a lot of street space).

I do not recall how many individuals we allowed the Hamwis to have in each square meter, but again, I will be generous and assume 5 people as a first guess (nearly impossible). That would yield an amazing number of 115,750 marchers for the love of Bashar.

Saadallah Al-Jabri Square in Aleppo, Syria, where on the 19th of October, 2011, regime loyalists held one more “Millionic” march. The area within the red polygon, including the tree areas in the south central part of the image is less than 2.5 hectares. That is less than 25000 square meters.

The same approach was used to calculate the place where we Americans (of all origins) like to have our Million people Marches. It is the National Mall in Washington DC. The mall presents a little challenge in digitizing as one has to digitize account for the reflection pool and for few other small water bodies.

But it is doable as seen in the figure below, which shows that even with providing for a security zone for the white house (north of the ellipse park), and with much more conservative discount of tree areas than in the Aleppo case. The mall comes to a 1.037 square kilometer. A square kilometer is 100 hectare (1000m x 1000 m) making 1,000,000 square meters, which is a figure consistent with a much lower and far more realistic density of 1 person/square meter. To play the devil’s advocate recall that every time a group marches on the mall, its adversaries challenge the Million number despite of the full mall.

The National Mall in Washington, DC, where several Million person events were held and caused the mall to be packed. The area within the polygon is slightly more than 1 square kilometer, that is 100 hectares or more than 1 Million square meters.

Here is a photo showing how generous I was in estimating the area. Te green area with trees is not occupied, which takes at least a half hectare from the equation. But fine, let us be generous to those who love Bashar.

Disclaimers

The analysis herein is very approximate.

If you find the figure of 5 persons/square meter preposterous, you are right. It is. More appropriate is 2 in crowded situations, which would make the Men7ebbaks in today’s MASEERA nearly 46,000, assuming my hypothesis is correct.

Here is a Bonus. An image was shown on Syrian TV as having been found on a captured anti-regime revolutionist. Notwithstanding the stupidity of the message the image tries to convey. It was a poorly doctored image. While such may be idle nonsense,  it speaks volumes of the regime’s manipulation, desperation, and utter arrogance. The top image, which was published on Syrian TV had a banner saying (peaceful until freedom), the independence flag has a white border around it indicating that it was added to the image. The lower panel image is the original image without the flag and the banner says “the islamic movement of the mujahideen of Iraq”

That’s right: fake cities, built in Qatar by Al Jazeera, occupied by hordes of actors, under the direction of filmmakers to create a false impression of what’s happening on the ground in Syria. Or at least that’s the spin.

Or perhaps more accurately, propaganda. As this post from The New York Times mentions, the station that ran the allegations on September 9 is closely tied to the ruling regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

“Addounia TV is owned by Mohamed Hamsho, who is the brother-in-law of Maher al Assad, the commander of Syria’s Republican Guard and the brother of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.”

The post also links to this video of the broadcast, subtitled in English by a YouTube channel called the Syrian Interpreter and aptly titled “Addounia TV hitting the crack pipe, 9 Sept.”

The segment claims that movie-set versions of Syrian cities and public squares have been constructed with the help of American and French directors to dupe the global audience. It’s also suggested that a similar illusion was created in Libya.

“The world and the Libyans were deceived by those replicas that Tripoli fell. With those replicas, Al Jazeera will continue media fabrication and cinematic tricks by shooting scenes of big defections from the Arab Syrian Army and shooting scenes of clashes between some elements who claim being defectors and elements from the regime.”

The report also claims that Al Jazeera has had replicas built of Al Asi Square in the city of Hama, the Clock Square in Homs, and some of the neighborhoods in Idlib. Unconvincing zoom-ins of satellite images purport to back up these allegations.

The construction of a fake city—let alone multiple fake cities—would be a major undertaking. The sheer scale of it makes even the suggestion almost laughable. It calls to mind the climax of the 1974 Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles, in which a fake version of a town is created to fool a band of thugs intent on terrorizing the locals into leaving. Or the fake war created for TV in Wag the Dog. Or even the theory that the moon landing was filmed on a soundstage.

But if such a monumental building project were to take place, a pretty surreal alternate reality could be created. Maybe the Syrian government could even follow its own line of reasoning and build some fake cities to counter the fake cities they claim Al Jazeera has built. Instead of “staged” conflict, they could film a smoothly-functioning government that respects the will of its people. In Syria right now, a film set in a fake city might be the only place to find such a thing.