People are making fake memes to point out the Syrian civil war is actually quite complicated

For every complex political situation in the world, there are seemingly hundreds of over-simplified memes endlessly shared on social media - and the Syria crisis is no different.

As MPs debated last Wednesday to decide whether or not to carry out air strikes on Isis targets in the country, debate on Twitter and Facebook was fierce.

While many tried to express their feelings with 140 character bursts on the former and long rants on the latter, others opted for simplified bits of text accompanying images from popular culture:

But now there has been a backlash. As well as an article on our sister website the Independent by Ben Weller debunking the most popular "righteous memes", journalist Sunny Hundal has started to make his own parody versions to point out how ridiculous it is to distill such a complex situation into a couple of lines of text:

Hundal explained to i100.co.uk that last week's debate over parliament's vote was the tipping point for him:

Here is a complicated four-year-old civil war that has created the worst refugee crisis in 50 years, and all I saw on Facebook over the last week were people sharing these simplistic, over-emotional memes that reduced the conflict to... nothing.

Too many of them knew little about what was going on - they just wanted to feel better by saying they FINALLY cared about Syria now that Britain was getting involved.

Hundal, who has also asked others to create their own, explained that while he does not like the idea of air strikes, he acknowledges that something must be done to end the conflict.

Let's stop pretending there are easy answers and the world will be better if we did nothing. We have sat on our hands for four years and 250,000 have been slaughtered in the meantime.

You want to wait until that reaches a million deaths? Life isn't simple and political decisions aren't either. There was better standard of debate in Parliament than on Facebook.

If you have any fake memes on the Syria conflict, you can tweet them to Sunny here.

More: Debunking the righteous Syria memes that fill up your thread