If you are reading this, you are at war. This page, online or in print, is a battlefield. So is the rest of this paper, your Facebook and Twitter feeds and everything that you see on TV or YouTube.

That, at least, is how a new breed of information soldiers backing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are trained to see the media, both mainstream and social.

It might not feel like it, but even before America, Britain and France fired their rockets on Saturday night and Sunday morning, you were on an invisible military frontline. Or you were if you picked up your phone or laptop.

The latest crisis kicked off after pictures emerged of what Syrian rescue workers, opposition activists and major western governments said was a chemical weapons attack at Douma outside Damascus on April 7. France, which once ruled Syria, has said it has proof of the atrocity, which witnesses said killed more than 40 people. Russia, which now props up the Syrian regime, says the footage was staged.The Herald: A medical worker gives toddlers oxygen following an alleged poison gas attack in Douma (Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets/AP)

One of the chemical weapons attack images disputed by Syrian and Russian sources

Russia and Syria’s propaganda machine paved the way for that theory. Ben Nimmo, an analyst who monitors social media output for the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, first recorded a spike in the term “false flag” about Douma as early as April 8. It came from Russian, Syrian and far-right sources, including the former British National Party leader Nick Griffin, whose Twitter avatar is now a Russian and Syrian flag crossed.

READ MORE: Fake news? How Russians are told chemical attack was staged

This weekend some foreign journalists were taken to Douma by regime minders. One was Pearson Sharp, a correspondent for the pro-Trump One America News Network. He said he interviewed 30-40 people close to the scene of what he called the “alleged attack”. All, he said, told him they loved Mr Assad and that the events of April 7 were staged by what he called “terrorists”, the term used by the Syrian regime for the Saudi-backed Islamist group Jaysh al-Islam which had controlled the town until recently.

The Herald: Men load a carpet and mattress on to a bicycle in front of damaged buildings in the town of Douma, the site of a suspected chemical weapons attack, near Damascus (Hassan Ammar/AP)

Douma

Another journalist, veteran Independent correspondent Robert Fisk, reported similar stories from those he met on the trip, stories, he acknowledged, very different to those who have fled the site. He added: “It did occur to me....that the citizens of Douma lived so isolated from each other for so long that ‘news’ in our sense of the word simply had no meaning to them.”

Mr Fisk, who has been both hailed as a hero and condemned as a stooge for his Douma reporting, might have a point in his aside. There is an old saying, that truth is the first casualty of war. We might need a new version, that news is the first weapon of war, at least for authoritarian regimes.

And, of course, they want you to think everything is propaganda and we all get to believe whatever news you like. Remember the confirmed chemical attacks in Syria in 2013? Kremlin TV station says they were staged too.

This station, says its editor, is an "information weapon". Back in 2013 she said: "The information weapon is used in critical moments, and war is always a critical moment."

Her weapon has been deployed. Watch it explode on a screen near you, whatever, if anything, international inspectors ever find at Douma. Whatever the facts.