African Digital Democracy Observatory/
Disinfo.Africa quoted Zunes June 27, 2025:
Washington Post echoes disputed claims that Saharan mercenaries were captured in Aleppo:
“On April 12, 2025, the Washington Post published a story describing the new Syrian government’s alleged efforts to dismantle illicit Iranian supply lines running through southern Syria… largely to aid Hezbollah in their war against Israel [and] implicated soldiers from an Algerian-based nationalist movement in the Iran-Hezbollah conspiracy. [But] this TruthAfrica investigation shows, the central pieces of evidence for these allegations appear to be a distortion of an Algerian ambassador’s statements and an inauthentic document…
Steven Zunes, an expert on U.S. Middle East policy at the University of San Francisco and author of Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution in Northwest Africa, told Truth Africa that ‘The Hezbollah/Iran connection is utter nonsense.’ In a phone interview on 21 May 2025, Zunes cited the fact that Polisario Front is a broadly secular movement composed of Sunni Muslims as one reason to be doubtful of the claim. The Iranian government and Hezbollah are both Islamist and Shia Muslim. ‘The idea that [The Polisario Front] would be lying with this autocratic, reactionary Shia group,’ he told us, ‘just seems quite absurd.’…”