Jana Barakat

2 months ago | occrp.org | Hala Nouhad Nasreddine |Jana Barakat |Sana Sbouai |Shaya Laughlin

On September 17, a Syrian military intelligence branch fired off an urgent dispatch with troubling news: According to a local source, pagers used by the Syrian government’s ally Hezbollah had exploded in Lebanon. As the day unfolded, the messages kept coming. As officers struggled to gather intelligence, they relied on rumors and outdated information to make sense of the situation.