Our Women on the Ground

by Zahra Hankir

  When the other journalists and I tried to enter Dara’a’s old city, where most of the violence was unfolding, we were turned back and instructed to wait outside the town’s ruling Baath Party’s head office. A uniformed, heavily mustachioed army major eventually showed up and told us we had to leave right away. “As you can see, everything here is back to normal and it is over,” he told us before we were led out of the city, escorted by two security vehicles.

  Back in Damascus, pro- and antigovernment crowds were clashing outside the historic Umayyad Mosque, hitting one another with fists and leather belts. That night, I heard that two colleagues from Reuters were missing, and that several journalists had been detained or expelled. I continued working, calling contacts in Dara’a from the privacy of my hotel room in the capital, half expecting security agents to barge in and haul me away any minute. I was very much aware that the breaking news I was putting out was being quoted on Arab TV networks and might get me expelled—or worse. It is at times like this when a journalist has to choose between self-censoring to stay in the government’s good graces and continuing to report the facts as they come, risking detainment or expulsion. I never considered the first option.

  A few days later I sat down with a group of Syrians to watch Assad’s highly anticipated first speech since the unrest had started. There was some hope at that point that somehow the president would strike the right tone or find the right words to temper the protests and stop what by now seemed to be a sure descent into chaos. In an hour-long speech in front of parliament, he quickly dashed any such expectations, blaming two weeks of popular fury on a foreign conspiracy and fabrications in the media. I glanced at a Syrian colleague sitting next to me. “What do you think?” I asked her. She took her time to answer me, her eyes fixed on the screen where members of parliament were standing up, clapping, and cheering Assad’s speech.

  “I think we have entered a dark tunnel, may God be with Syria,” she said, her eyes still fixed on the spectacle on TV.

  * * *

  —

  I had been reporting from Damascus for nine days when the dreaded call came from an information ministry official informing me that I was no longer welcome in the country. I had less than an hour to leave—or else.

  I knew there would be no sense in arguing or negotiating. Within twenty minutes, my photographer colleague and I had packed our belongings, paid the hotel, and arranged for the car that would take us back to Beirut. I was filled with a sense of foreboding as we sped down the Beirut Road toward the Lebanese border. We kept turning around nervously to see if we were being followed until we crossed over into Lebanon.

  I learned in the following days that I was blacklisted in Syria, which meant that my name was placed at the border crossing as a persona non grata, and that like many other journalists I would be banned from entering the country for the foreseeable future. I was stunned, and could not imagine how I would continue reporting without being able to travel there. But I was not alone. The government restricted media access to the country, refusing to grant visas to most journalists and expelling those already inside. Flashpoint areas like Dara’a and others were largely sealed off, with telephone calls going through only sporadically. Within a few days, even my Lebanese SIM card was blocked from calling Syria. I was astounded by the scope of the clampdown; for many, it harked back to the early eighties, when Bashar’s father, Hafez, had crushed an uprising by Islamists in the city of Hama, killing thousands. That time, the government’s actions had been almost completely hidden from the world. This time, there were smartphones and social media.

  Covering the war from neighboring Lebanon would become the new normal for me. Because of my extensive reporting from inside Syria for many years prior to the war, I already had a list of contacts to tap, although security concerns meant that very few Syrians were willing to talk to me on the phone. Skype, deemed a more secure option, became the go-to social network for communication. One source led to another, and in a relatively short time my colleagues and I had built an enormous list of contacts that we all shared at the Beirut bureau.

  Over the years, the list dwindled. One of my saddest moments was scrolling down that list of Skype contacts a few years later and reading the notes we had typed next to the names: “killed”; “imprisoned”; “went to Germany”; “joined al-Qaeda”; etc.

  Videos posted on the internet by people inside Syria became key to our coverage and were often our only visual window into events unfolding in the country. That also meant it was ten times more difficult to verify information and make sure that any user-generated content we were putting out was an accurate portrayal of what was happening on the ground. In the early days, we watched, incredulously, as exultant crowds of protesters danced arm in arm, singing “Yalla irhal, ya Bashar!”—a simple yet powerful lyric translating to “Come on, Bashar, leave”—to the beat of a drum. Eventually, as the government escalated its response and the protests became an armed uprising, the videos turned into an endless stream of horror showing protesters being gunned down, massacred victims in pools of blood, villagers digging through destroyed buildings with their bare hands for survivors, and children with grave wounds from heavy bombardment.

  * * *

  —

  As the opposition took over chunks of territory in northern Syria, journalists began entering the country from Turkey, crossing the border illegally at enormous risk of arrest, kidnapping, injury, or death. Many have paid the price with their lives. As a Lebanese, I didn’t want to jeopardize my chance of being allowed back into Damascus someday, and chose not to make the illegal trip from the north despite my overriding desire to be inside Syria again. Like many others, I continued covering the conflict from the outside. I have no doubt missed out as a journalist on a crucial aspect of the war by not being able to visit opposition-held areas, but in retrospect, as the Syrian army and its allies clawed back most of the rebel-held territory, I think it was the right decision. Many of my colleagues continue to be refused entry to Damascus.

  By mid-2012, the war had significantly escalated. The weapons that the Syrian government used in their attempts to crush the uprising progressed from guns to artillery to helicopters and war planes to indiscriminate helicopter-dropped barrel bombs, or “barrels of death,” as the Syrians called them. Rebel groups proliferated and got progressively more radicalized as the conflict went on. In the summer of 2012, the fighting spread to the northern city of Aleppo. Syria’s largest and arguably most beautiful ancient city split into two halves, a rebel-held eastern part and a government-controlled western part. Death crossings, sniper corridors, and hatred separated the two sides. It was painfully similar to my own country’s divide during the Lebanese civil war, and I have often thought back to that vendor in Damascus who wanted to know whether we were from east or west Beirut. History has a strange way of repeating itself.

  As the war progressed, so did the way we covered it. Skype gave way to WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger. It seemed every rebel group, every militia, and every activist had their own social media channel. Statements, comments, and videos were posted on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. I went to sleep with my phone and reached out for it as soon as I woke up. Almost inevitably, there would be news of some massacre or development that would make my heart drop and jolt me into action. I would often leave work after a twelve-hour shift, only to head back into the office later or get back in front of the computer as soon as I arrived home. I missed out on weddings and birthdays and time spent with family and close friends.

  Being a journalist as well, my husband understood the life of a reporter, especially one covering the Middle East. But it wasn’t easy for him either. I took my phone with me everywhere. It lit up with notifications at the dinner table, at the movies, and on vacations. He joked that it was stuck to my hand like a magnet. I argued that I couldn’t ignore contacts who were risking their lives to talk to me, or that this particular news deve
lopment was too important. He would look at me, shaking his head like I was crazy. Privately, I struggled with my guilt. Was he right? Was I so immersed and focused on the war that I was starting to think and behave as though nothing else mattered? Would it make a difference? Would anyone remember?

  * * *

  —

  It seemed like every time the conflict appeared to settle into a routine, there would be some huge development that would reshuffle the deck, pushing Syria back up to the top of the global news cycle. On June 10, 2014, we had just landed in Switzerland, where we were planning to visit relatives of my husband, when the breaking news flashed on my phone: “The Islamic State group overruns Iraqi city of Mosul, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians fleeing in terror.”

  Another nightmare had begun.

  Less than three weeks later, the Islamic State group declared the establishment of an Islamic State, or caliphate, in territories it controlled in Iraq and Syria, demanding allegiance from Muslims worldwide. Raqqa, in northeastern Syria, became the caliphate’s de facto capital.

  Despite being accustomed to the endless stream of bad news and gruesome videos from Syria, we were not prepared for the brutality of the Islamic State group, which publicized their beheadings, crucifixions, burning, and drowning of their opponents. The dangers for journalists covering the conflict also multiplied. By the end of 2013, dozens of reporters had gone missing or were kidnapped in Syria.

  One August night in 2014, I was woken up by an editor in New York, inquiring about a video that had just surfaced on the internet.

  “Sorry to call you up so late, but could you take a look at this video I sent you, please?” It was disturbing, he warned.

  I was alone at home. I fired up my laptop and clicked on the link, which led me to a video claiming to show the beheading of American journalist James Foley, who had been missing in Syria for more than a year. It was a hot summer night, but I was shivering with cold as I watched the masked Islamic State fighter dressed in black brandishing a knife next to Foley, who was kneeling in the desert in an orange jumpsuit. Struggling to put all personal feelings aside, I typed up the news alert and clicked SEND.

  The Islamic State group’s barbaric activities became the subject of global fascination and dominated the news, sadly overshadowing the Syria war itself and the suffering of millions of besieged, displaced, and bereaved civilians. Freelance journalists complained that if their story did not have an Islamic State element to it, editors weren’t interested.

  I remember around that time interviewing an activist who ran an opposition radio station in Idlib for an hour and a half. Afterward, he thanked me for taking an interest, adding: “No one thinks of us as real people anymore. The world thinks everyone in Syria is a walking Daeshi.”

  I was once again gripped by worry that we were not adequately reflecting the situation in Syria.

  We were being pulled in so many directions all the time, from the global catastrophe of the Syrian civil war and the resulting migrant crisis in Europe to the deadly terrorist attacks around the world that were being plotted and claimed by the Islamic State group.

  Among the Islamic State’s targets were ancient archaeological sites in Iraq and Syria, including the magnificent site of Nimrud in Iraq and the two-thousand-year-old temples in Syria’s Palmyra. The group used sledgehammers, bulldozers, and explosives to destroy them, erasing history. The unprecedented scale of heritage destruction was, of course, no more painful than the wanton killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Syrians. But there was something so cruel about this collective demolition of civilization that left us—particularly journalists from the region reporting on the loss of our heritage—feeling utterly desperate and hopeless.

  * * *

  —

  I was eventually allowed back into Damascus, very briefly in 2012 and then for longer visits in the past few years. For the casual visitor, the city appeared to be more or less the same, relatively untouched by the war. From my perspective, it was completely changed.

  Almost none of the people I knew from before the war were still there. Old friends and colleagues had long moved on and settled abroad. People I would have visited before the war were now exiled or imprisoned. There were few young men in Damascus—they were all either fighting with the army or had moved away in search of a life outside Syria. The city was full of internally displaced people from Deir ez-Zor, Aleppo, and other violence-plagued cities. It seemed like everyone was grieving, having lost someone or something to the war. In a way, I was also grieving for the Syria I had known. Traffic snaked in long lines through military checkpoints, blast walls surrounded government buildings, and streets were deserted at night, when the sounds of nearby gunfire and shelling were loudest. Random mortars fired from rebel-held suburbs crashed unannounced into residential neighborhoods.

  In April 2016 I traveled to Palmyra, days after Islamic State militants withdrew and thirteen years after my last trip as a tourist. The Roman ruins that had once provided the backdrop for magical summer concerts were sealed off as Russian military teams worked to dismantle land mines left by Islamic State militants. Instead of the European and Asian tourists who filled the place before the war, young Russian soldiers were taking selfies with Palmyra’s towering citadel. The nearby town was an uninhabitable wreck. People were coming back to salvage whatever souvenirs and home appliances they could from their destroyed homes. It was a scene that had sadly become all too common across Iraq and Syria. “Our country was a paradise, how did this happen?” a woman asked me after finding her home relatively intact but completely looted.

  In May 2017, in the town of Zabadani, near the border with Lebanon, I met a Syrian couple and their ten-year-old daughter who had just arrived for the first time in five years to check on their home. So immense was the destruction in the town that they were having a hard time locating their apartment amid the endless vista of rubble and collapsed buildings. The woman walked over the mounds of rubble and abandoned buildings in disbelief, wiping away tears.

  Later, standing inside their charred apartment picking through heaps of trash to find family photos and other mementos, I asked her husband, a forty-six-year-old builder, what he planned to do now. He gazed at the horizon, his eyes watering, and said he would rebuild their home, of course.

  “What’s a home without neighbors and a town without people, though, is it still home?” he asked. He then smiled sadly and answered his own question: “They will come back, everything needs time and patience.”

  I felt a lump form in my throat as I tried to hold back my own emotions. Hearing the sadness in this wonderful man’s voice as he tried desperately to hang on to hope, I thought of the millions of other ordinary Syrians whose lives had similarly been uprooted in the most brutal of ways, and who were still confused as to how it all happened. There were some who had faith in their president and genuinely believed their country was a victim of a conspiracy; some who, in retrospect, would have never taken part in any antigovernment protests had they known it would lead to this devastation; and some who still believed it was all worth it for a little taste of freedom. Did we do them all justice in our reporting?

  * * *

  —

  On September 21, 2016, a group of AP colleagues and I drove from Beirut to Damascus as guests of the Syrian government. After years of unanswered requests, we finally had an interview with President Bashar al-Assad. I wondered how it would feel to meet in person the man whose rise to power I had chronicled from the very beginning, and who was now at the center of a bloody civil war that had killed close to half a million people and uprooted half of the country’s population.

  On the day of the interview, a palace car picked us up from the hotel to drive us to the Muhajireen Palace, a relatively modest white building in Damascus where the president often works and where the interview was to take place. There, at the entrance, was the president, wearing an elegant dar
k suit and a smile. The battle for Aleppo was raging and there were reports of children dying from malnutrition in the besieged rebel-held suburbs of Damascus only a short drive away from where we were. All that seemed far away here in this beautifully decorated compound. Not surprisingly, Assad projected confidence and composure in the interview. While acknowledging some mistakes, he contested any excesses by his troops, denied his forces were besieging Aleppo, and said Syria will bounce back as a more unified state, pledging to rebuild the ruined country.

  Following the interview, we exchanged pleasantries and the president shook my hand with a smile, before posing for the standard, postinterview photos with all of us. There was such a strong disconnect that the war outside almost seemed like it was happening in another nation. I wondered, standing next to the fifty-one-year-old president in this almost surreal setting, when, and how, all this would end for him and the country.

  * * *

  —

  I sometimes think about that night many years ago at the Ocean Club casino and the sense of excitement that prevailed among the crowd of mostly rich, privileged Syrians. I did not think of it at the time, but in retrospect, perhaps there were some clues to the tragedy that would befall Syria.

  The glittering casino was celebrated as an indicator of liberalization—a showcase for Syria’s gradual shedding of its socialist past. Looking back, I cannot help but think it emphasized Syria’s classist divide and the glaring disparity between rich and poor, which was, after all, one of the driving forces of the revolution. It was no surprise, then, that the casino became an early target of the uprising, shuttered in the first weeks of unrest to appease critics after an Islamic backlash. Perhaps Syria’s disorderly shift to a more open-market economy amid the rampant corruption and cronyism that defined the political system was too quick, creating opportunities for ambitious businessmen linked to the Syrian political elite, even as it deepened the dangerous societal divisions.