On March 10, Huffington Post correspondent Joshua Hersh traveled to Obeen, Syria, an Alawite village that had come under attack by rebel fighters. As one of a handful of reporters to cover the Syria conflict from the government side, Hersh says he felt a “moral obligation to report that there’s suffering happening on both sides.”

Hersh, who also files for the New Yorker, has reported extensively from Cairo and Washington, and across the Arab world. Here, he discusses traveling to the Latakia countryside and covering the conflict from “the other side.”

Like a lot of people who’ve covered this war, I’ve covered it from Lebanon and Turkey, from the outside. Like everyone, I was really eager to see what it looked like on the other side. There’s a point at which it felt to me like I was just getting one side of the story. And not just predominantly one side; only one side. You weren’t even hearing responses from the other side. I’d do a story standing at the border in Kilis talking to refugees streaming out of Aleppo, where there was a barrel bombing, hearing numbers of how many people had fled and who was being targeted. And the reality was that I had no way to ask anyone on the government side, or even sympathetic to the government, what their version of the events was. So I really wanted to have some idea of what other side was thinking.

I was in Syria for two weeks. I was invited by government minders to see things, and I found there was a fine line between being invited to see something and having to go see it, between an opportunity and an obligation. About half the time, it was fairly regulated, I was being invited to see things, but for the other half, I was able to move around pretty freely in Damascus. It was like night and day. When I was being shown things, I was taken around in a car and had someone whispering in my ear. When I was on my own, I really was. I was able to talk to whoever I wanted and go wherever I wanted.

One of the fallacies is that if you are being taken around, it’s not possible to do real journalism, and if you’re unaccompanied, it is. It doesn’t play out that way in today’s Syria because if you’re being taken around, people might speak more freely because they know you have permission. If you are on your own, they might just feed you a line because they’re not sure who you are and [they worry] they’ll get in trouble for talking to you.

My trip up north is a great example about how being taken to see something by government officials can in fact produce interesting journalism. Your job is not to report credulously exactly what you’re told. It’s to look at what you are being shown and see if there are any nuggets worth sharing with the world in there. And there often are. I had an opportunity to go up to the suburbs of Latakia, to villages where Alawites had come under attack by extremists among the rebels last August. It was part of a forward assault to take the city of Latakia. They didn’t get very far, but they did kill a lot of people on the way.

The episode itself is newsworthy, because it hasn’t been written about much in the Western press. But more broadly, the fact that this kind of thing is happening – ugly massacres perpetrated by forces associated with the rebels – may not be widely recognized outside, but it is a huge factor inside. That’s crucial to understanding the mind-set of the pro-government population.

I learned about this side of the war. I felt a moral obligation to report that there’s suffering happening on both sides, but it’s more about trying to understand why there’s a community of people who still very strongly support Assad and the military. When you mention Assad or the Syrian army in the West, or in southern Turkey, it triggers thoughts of brutality and terror and simplistic language like “evil.” There may be truth to all that – I’ll leave that to others to litigate – but it’s not a very engaging way to look at the conflict, and it does nothing to explain why both Assad and the army have so much support. So it’s helpful to meet an Alawite farmer for whom the forces of evil and murder are the opposition, whom they consider terrorists, while the forces of good are the Syrian army and Assad, who saved their lives last summer.

I was surprised by how stable Damascus seemed to be. Obviously some of that is orchestrated illusion – the government puts all its effort into creating that little bubble. But so far it’s been really effective. And it’s created this atmosphere where you might have a bunch of people who have various ideologies and philosophies about the government, and the regime, but who all share a common interest in keeping Damascus from turning into Aleppo or Homs. So there’s a lot of incentive to support the government right now.