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Iskenderun, Turkey–As opponents of the Assad regime scramble from one foreign capital to another, trying to secure funding for weapons and aid to help Syrians in need, some prominent religious leaders are sitting on the sidelines, quietly organizing themselves to provide spiritual guidance after the bloodshed ends.
In our effort to showcase unseen images of the Syrian crisis, we’ve featured the work of photojournalist Nicole Tung. Tung is a 26-year-old American whose photos from Syria have been published in TIME magazine, The New York Times, and other global news outlets. The Hong Kong native is a graduate of New York University and has traveled in and out of Syria since the early months of the war. Here, she photographs patients in and around the hard-hit Aleppo suburb of Sha’ar, including the Sunni stronghold’s since-destroyed Dar al-Shifa Hospital.
As part of our series of interviews with journalists covering the Syria crisis, we reached out to Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. Kristof is a bi-weekly columnist and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He has been covering the Syria story since its earliest days, reporting from Syria in late November. ‘It’s frustrating that we have this apathy,’ he tells us.
Abu Leila is a Syrian journalist from Aleppo who contributes reporting and analysis to Syria Deeply. He has written under that pen name since the start of the conflict. Today he looks at escalating social tension between newly-arrived Syrians in Beirut.
Millions of Syrians are using social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Skype to disseminate and discuss the conflict. Each week Syria Deeply monitors the online conversation in English and Arabic, pulling out the highlights in a feature called the Social Media Buzz.
The group Doctors Without Borders, also known as Medicins Sans Frontiere, delivers emergency medical services in Syria’s crisis. On Saturday they said that growing insecurity in Aleppo is weakening efforts to provide those services. They sent over these notes from the field.
Abu Adnan and I meet on a cold dark night, a few days before the end of the year. He’s lean and grizzled in jeans and a dark overcoat. He holds a flashlight, standing at the precipice of an incline in the mountains along the Turkey-Syria border. He’s about to walk me down and looks wary, but determined, at the thought of yet another cross through this well-used smuggling route.
Azaz, Syria—The Turkey-based Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), and its Syrian political wing, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), have stumbled into a precarious situation. They are now administering a string of towns and cities along the Turkish border after the Syrian army handed the PKK control of the territory last summer.
The drive from Al Sultan Selim al Woal Battalions house in Turkman to the little girl’s house in Akrad takes about 90 minutes on a good day. On those days, you have to pull off the road only once to avoid a passing helicopter. At various points, the roads are rocketed out, fresh craters filled with mud that scrape the car.
Millions of Syrians are using social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Skype to disseminate and discuss the conflict. Each week our Mohammed Sergie monitors the online conversation in English and Arabic, pulling out the highlights in a feature called the Social Media Buzz.
JEBEL TURKMAN, Syria – On a sunny day here, there are chirping birds and not-so-distant echoes of bombs and rockets dropping on civilian homes.My Kia, driven by a Free Syrian Army minder, careens down steep, narrow roads and arrives at a tree-shrouded safe house operated by the FSA.
As part of our effort to highlight civilian stories, below is a conversation between Syria Deeply and an architecture student from the University of Aleppo. She is in her final year and working on her graduation project. This conversation predates the latest blast at the university’s architecture school. Luckily, she was absent on Tuesday, January 15, the day of the tragic incident. At her request, we are not disclosing her name. The text has been edited for clarity.
Social media and user-generated content have come to play a key role in how we see the Syria conflict – quite literally. One platform, Bambuser, has given us the ground view of raging battles, streaming live, through the cell phone cameras of its users inside the country.
As part of our effort to highlight civilian stories, below is a conversation between Syria Deeply and Midya, a trained pharmacist who belongs to Syria’s largest ethnic minority, the Kurds. She lives and works in Qamishli, the unofficial capital city of Syria’s Kurdish region. Midya is known locally for the active role she has played in street demonstrations since the start of the Syrian Revolution. The following interview was conducted with repeated interruptions due to the poor state of communications in Qamishli at present.
Millions of Syrians are using social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Skype to disseminate and discuss the conflict. Each week our Mohammed Sergie monitors the online conversation in English and Arabic, pulling out the highlights in a feature called the Social Media Buzz.
Azaz, Syria—Fighters of the Kurdish Saladin Brigade greet visitors with marhaba, hello, rather than the Islamic salam alikum. They lack the bushy beards that mark the more conservative Muslims who fight alongside them in the battlefields.
In June, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) opened a hospital in the Idlib region in northern Syria, an area under rebel control. Fabrice Weissman, MSF’s operations advisor, returned from a mission in Syria in early December. He was particularly struck by the breadth of the needs and the lack of international response.
As part of our effort to highlight civilian stories, below is a conversation between Syria Deeply and Abu Skandar, the mayor of Al Ghassanieh, a predominantly Christian village just past Jebel Akrad in Latakia province. .
The battle around Damascus has grown fierce as the regime strives to take back suburbs around the capital city that have fallen into rebel hands. It is a vital showdown in the political survival of President Bashar Assad’s regime.
Traveling through rebel-held parts of Latakia province, in the Jebel Turkman region, we met 34-year-old Umyara, an Alawite nurse working in a field hospital. In Latakia, a stronghold of President Bashar al-Assad, Sunnis and Alawites have lived side by side for centuries. Now, with intense fighting in the Alawite-led regime and the mostly Sunni-led Free Syrian Army, many fear that the animosity could spread to civilians across the religious divide.
Millions of Syrians are using social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Skype to disseminate and discuss the conflict. Each week our Mohammed Sergie monitors the online conversation in English and Arabic, pulling out the highlights in a feature called the Social Media Buzz.
Below is a conversation between News Deeply and a 20-year-old man who defected from the Syrian Army’s Sulas Military Base and joined the rebel side. At his request, we will not use his name in this article.
Below is a conversation between News Deeply and a 20-year-old man who defected from the Syrian Army’s Sulas Military Base and joined the rebel side. At his request, we will not use his name in this article.
Rural Idlib, Syria–Adel and Ahmad, two 24-year-old college graduates from Idlib, are survivors of a showdown between the rebels and the regime. When the battle began for a military school near Aleppo, they were inside, serving time in the Syrian Army.
Loubna Mrie paid a steep price for her place in Syria’s revolution. As an Alawite who took a stand against President Bashar al Assad, she pitted herself against her community; many Alawites have remained staunchly behind Assad, as the leader of their sect and the protector of their privileged position of power. .
Michel Kilo is one of Syria’s famous dissidents, a political opponent of President Bashar al Assad. He rose to prominence in the Damascus Spring, a brief flourishing of political freedom and expression in 2000.Kilo left Syria eight months into the revolution and now lives in Paris with his family. He answered questions from Syria Deeply via Skype. For more on his story we’ve included a link to a video interview about his time in prison, jailed for his prominent political dissent.
Maaret Misreen, Syria–Omar, a former marketing student at a private university in Damascus, is living a life he never could have imagined. He’s originally from Idlib, one of Syria’s smaller cities in the heart of the northwest olive groves.
As the world celebrated the dawn of 2013, in Syria, the regime and the rebels were fighting for the suburbs of Damascus. President Bashar al Assad’s reportedly launched air raids that struck across the country, killing at least 160 people. Aleppo’s International Airport shut down, said AFP, reportedly after a rebel assault. The bottom line: more deadly fighting, with neither side really able to take control.
Millions of Syrians are using social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Skype to disseminate and discuss the conflict. Each week our Mohammed Sergie monitors the online conversation in English and Arabic, pulling out the highlights in a feature called the Social Media Buzz.
As part of our effort to highlight civilian stories, below is a conversation between News Deeply and Ayesha, a 29-year-old woman living in the Atma refugee camp in Idleb Province. She is one of an estimated 50 pregnant women in the camp; volunteers tell us there’s an acute need for baby milk. .
As part of our effort to highlight civilian stories, below is a conversation between Syria Deeply and a young schoolteacher in Homs. When he’s not in the classroom, he volunteers for a relief organization helping the victims of Syria’s conflict.
As part of our effort to highlight civilian stories, below is a conversation between Syria Deeply and a law student at Aleppo University. He stopped going to class after the regime crackdown on student protests earlier this year.
As part of our effort to highlight civilian stories, below is a conversation between Syria Deeply and a tradesman in Aleppo. He hasn’t been able to reach his shop since August because it’s on the frontline between government held areas and rebel controlled neighborhoods.
> Millions of Syrians are using social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Skype to disseminate and discuss the conflict. Each week our Mohammed Sergie monitors the online conversation in English and Arabic, pulling out the highlights in a feature called the Social Media Buzz.
As Bashar Al Assad’s grip on power weakens, fears are mounting over the fate of the Alawite community, the Assad family’s heterodox Shiite sect. Who are the Alawites? Why are so many of them fighting for the regime? How they fare in the next phase of the conflict will likely shape Syria’s future.
Jabhat Al Nusra, now a U.S.-designated terrorist group believed to have links with Al Qaeda, still wins fans in Syria for its disciplined, ferocious fighters. It is considered the most effective fighting force against the Assad regime, and its latest film highlighting attacks in and around Aleppo seeks to bolster that reputation.
Why did the U.S. choose to designate Jabhat al Nusra a terrorist group, in the thick of its fight to topple Bashar al Assad? Ambassador Robert Ford, the U.S. envoy to Syria, sat down with us in Marrakech to describe America’s rationale.
I watch people become refugees on a cold, damp November night, buses lurching through the gates of this dusty camp on the Jordan-Syria border, their passengers looking bewildered as they disembark into a new life. It’s one I doubt they’d expected they’d have.
Even as the Assad regime loses control of Syria’s countryside, and Russia shifts its stance, verbally weakening support for Bashar al Assad himself, it may not signal the end, says analyst Ayham Kamel of Eurasia Group.
Syria Deeply caught up with Yaser Tabbara, a Syrian-American member of the opposition and one of the architects of the National Coalition. In an interview in Marrakesh he outlined the next steps beyond the Friends of Syria meeting, toward a transitional government.
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