BBC Two

In July 2016, Seth Rich, a young staffer working for the Democrats, was shot in the back in a Washington street at 4am. The police said it was a robbery but nothing was stolen - his watch, phone and wallet were found with him. The murder took place during one of the ugliest and most vicious presidential campaigns in American history. Within weeks of his death, stories emerged that Rich was behind the Wikileaks leak of thousands of damaging internal emails detailing the inner workings of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign - and that his murder was no random robbery. A whole array of right wing lobbyists and websites, as well as thousands of social media accounts, pushed the Seth Rich conspiracy theories throughout the campaign. After Donald Trump's election, as he faced probes into his own campaign's alleged collusion with Russia, Fox News pumped new life into the story. Despite repeated attempts to shut it down, the conspiracy theories continue to reverberate today, echoing so many crises of the Trump era: mistrust of the mainstream media, fake news and hacking. Who killed Seth Rich? The Democrats - in revenge for leaking? The Russians, who wanted to silence him because he uncovered their hacking of the DNC? Or was it just a bungled late night robbery?

In this two-part series, Lyse Doucet tells the story of one of the biggest humanitarian crises of our age, the Syrian civil war - seven years of brutal conflict, surpassing the length of World War II. Lyse, who has reported on the conflict from the start, explores how peaceful protest for change spiralled into unspeakable savagery - half a million people killed, millions of lives shattered and so much of Syria in utter ruins. The series tells the inside story of the war from multiple perspectives. It hears accounts of the experiences of Syrian people from different sides - civilians and fighters who stayed loyal to the government of President Assad, as well as those who rebelled. To gain greater understanding of how this catastrophe unfolded, Lyse also speaks to leading politicians and soldiers from within Syria and also from western and regional powers, including John Kerry, David Petraeus, General Lord David Richards and William Hague. In this first episode, Lyse tracks of the first months of the uprising through to the chemical attack in Ghouta that finally revealed the reluctance of the US to intervene in the war, despite the crossing of President Obama's 'red line' on chemical weapons. It starts by telling the story of two characters in Homs - one a protester, the other a government loyalist. Lyse shows how each viewed the protests from a different perspective. One saw them as a chance for democracy and freedom, the other saw them as violent and threatening. Within weeks the government had responded to the demonstrations with violence. The government claims this is because some protesters were armed - something that is denied. By speaking to politicians in the west and the Gulf, Lyse learns how those outside Syria watched with growing despair as protests slid into civil war. She speaks to the officers who led the early advances of the Free Syrian Army, the Americans like David Petraeus who wanted to arm them, and Obama's advisors, who explain why the p

Lyse Doucet tells the story of one of the biggest humanitarian crisis of our age, the Syrian civil war - seven years of brutal conflict, surpassing the length of World War II. In this two-part series, Lyse Doucet, who has reported on the conflict from the start, explores how peaceful protest for change spiralled into unspeakable savagery - half a million people killed, millions of lives shattered and so much of Syria in utter ruins. The series tells the inside story of the war from multiple perspectives. It hears accounts of the experiences of Syrian people from different sides - civilians and fighters who stayed loyal to the government of President Assad as well as those who rebelled. This second film in the series picks up the action as Raqqa falls to a mixture of Islamist and moderate forces. The story of the extraordinary events of the following months is told by two characters. One is a protester who aims to build a new civil society based on democracy, the other is a torture victim who joins the Islamists as a hired assassin. Within a few weeks of the fall of Raqqa, a new, even more extreme Islamist group arrive - ISIS. The civil society activists ends up being tortured in an ISIS jail, the other ends up joining ISIS and working his way through a kill list they have given him. Each tell their story with extraordinary candour. As Raqqa descends into chaos, arguably the most important battle of the war is entering its second year - Aleppo. Lyse meets the militia leader who was a key player in the government fightback against the rebels who had occupied a large part of the city. On the other side we meet the bomb-maker who takes us inside the Islamist forces as they dig tunnels underground to blow up government buildings on the other side of the frontline. To gain greater understanding of how this catastrophe unfolded, Lyse also speaks to politicians and soldiers from within Syria and also from western and regional powers. She asks difficult questions of