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Syria’s Assault on Doctors
Annie Sparrow
Deputy Director of the Human Rights Program, Icahn School of Medicine
Annie Sparrow Deputy Director of the Human Rights Program, Icahn School of Medicine
Dear Deeply Readers,
Welcome to the archives of Syria Deeply. While we paused regular publication of the site on May 15, 2018, and transitioned some of our coverage to Peacebuilding Deeply, we are happy to serve as an ongoing public resource on the Syrian conflict. We hope you’ll enjoy the reporting and analysis that was produced by our dedicated community of editors contributors.
We continue to produce events and special projects while we explore where the on-site journalism goes next. If you’d like to reach us with feedback or ideas for collaboration you can do so at [email protected].
Exploring Syrian civil society as well as grassroots and international social initiatives that deal with everyday civilian life in Syria.
Follow via RSSAnnie Sparrow Deputy Director of the Human Rights Program, Icahn School of Medicine
As part of our effort to highlight civilian stories, below is a conversation between Syria Deeply and an English teacher in eastern Ghouta, which is under a regime-imposed siege that prevents any goods or people from entering or exiting.
Syria Untold
Every Syrian city is unique, and such uniqueness has contributed to the richness and diversity of the Syrian uprising. From Daraa, which is dubbed “the cradle of the revolution”, to Homs, “the capital of the revolution,” each city has made its own contribution to the uprising that started in March 2011, filling it with different colors and nuances, after decades of silence and stagnation.
When Syri-Arts started in Beirut three months ago, its chairwoman, Nora Jumblatt, didn’t think she’d get such a big response.
Plans for high-level Syrian peace talks have stumbled this week, with the U.S.-backed Syrian National Council undecided on whether to attend and how to engage the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
Omar, 21, dropped out of university to join the Syrian revolution in March 2011 and has taken photos on the battlefield ever since.
Students from Syria’s rebel-held areas are in limbo in their quest for higher education. The majority, fearing arrest and perilous commutes to campuses in neighboring cities, refuse to enter state-sponsored universities.
In a supposedly “liberated” area of Syria, a group of opposition journalists is still being forced to operate in secret.
In the northern city of Raqqa, the condemned - some civilians, some soldiers, shabiha or alleged Assad collaborators - are brought blindfolded and handcuffed to the city square to be shot in the head in public.
As part of our effort to highlight civilian stories, below is a conversation between Syria Deeply and a Hama-based medical student in his 20s who used the pseudonym Adam for security reasons.
Al Marj Settlement, Lebanon - Four million children are caught up in the war in Syria. Thirteen-year-old Rabia is one of them.
Maysaloon
A very interesting piece was recently published on Al Monitor by Sultan Saood al-Qassemi. In it he makes the claim that Gulf cities are the new “centers of the Arab world,” and according to him they have usurped the position traditionally held by cities like Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad. Where do Damascus, and Syria, now fit?
Aleppo native Kinda Hibrawi is a painter and a cofounder of the Zeitouna Foundation, which provides arts education to Syrian children at the Atmeh refugee camp in Atmeh, Syria.
Nour Daoud
I am Nour Daoud, a Syrian student studying electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), under the Jusoor scholarship.
As part of our effort to highlight civilian stories, below is a conversation between Syria Deeply and a Syrian woman in her 30s who works in the Damascus office of an international organization.
At 13, Hazem, who lives in Azaz, is one of Syria’s youngest teachers.
Syria Untold Staff
The town of Al-Tall, in the countryside of Damascus, the Syrian capital, is famous for its highly educated inhabitants and its active women groups, despite the traditional nature of the community.
Amal Alachkar
As the international community watches to see what steps world leaders will take to address the recent atrocities in Syria, there is something that the education community can do to help invest in the country’s future.
With the first September rainstorms, Syrians have begun to prepare for winter.
From their earliest days posting videos to YouTube, a number of Syrians have made their name as citizen journalists, their work appearing across international media, their stories redefining what it means to be an iReporter. .
At an event last week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) officially released the Emergency Red List of Syrian Cultural Objects at Risk.
Nada, a teacher, starts her classes by asking her third-grade students to express their feelings. She is trained to deal with children who exhibit signs of trauma after living in a war zone for over two years.
Maryam Jamshidi
Syria is witnessing an improbable social, cultural and political renaissance driven by individuals and organizations operating at the grassroots level through various innovative political, artistic and tech platforms.
Shane Farrell and Ayman Mhanna
The following is an excerpt from the report “Journalists’ Security in War Zones: Lessons from Syria,” written and researched by the Beirut-based SKeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom. .
The al- Qaida-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), known colloquially by its Arabic acronym, ‘Daesh,’ has earned the disdain of Syrian civilians for its brutal practices and hard-line ideology.
Ahmed shares his stories from running Radio Alwan, a talk radio station in the Syrian city of Saraqeb. .
Syria Untold Editing Team
I woke up this morning in the resilient city of Damascus to find a pigeon sitting at my kitchen stove. Perhaps it’s a ray of hope in this weary city. But the scene is telling: the pigeon threw its caution to the wind in search of food. It is the ultimate quest in a time of war.
This is the first in a series co-produced by Syria Deeply and Hyperallergic, investigating the visual and cultural responses to the crisis in Syria.
Fatima, a 64-year-old grandmother from Hasakeh, remembers when the first electricity connection came to this city. The artificial light was exciting, a novelty.
Syria Deeply Staff
As summer ends and the school year begins, the Local Council of Aleppo, elected by residents in rebel-held areas of the city, is finding ways to schedule classes – sometimes held in tents, with students and teachers working through power cuts that can last up to 11 hours per day.
A week that started with a march toward war, that melted in the heat of U.S. politics, that morphed into high-level diplomacy, ended with a U.S.-Russian deal to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons.
Human Rights Watch’s Lebanon researcher Lama Fakih has been monitoring the humanitarian situation in Syria since the start of the conflict. She recently returned from a trip to government-held areas of the country, where she asked civilians about their lives before and after the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack on eastern Ghouta, near Damascus. .
The citizen journalist starts his day at dawn, waiting at one of Homs’ taller buildings (or what’s left of it) for the first explosion of the day. Once it happens he heads to the site, ignoring the dangers that surround him.
Amal Hanano
I had two New Year’s resolutions in 2011: to read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Anna was completed by Jan. 25 – just when our lives turned into a 24-hour TV marathon tuned to Cairo’s Tahrir Square as the world watched a dictator fall in 18 short days.
Millions of Syrians are using social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Skype to disseminate and discuss the conflict. Syria Deeply monitors the online conversation in English and Arabic, pulling out the highlights in a feature called the Social Media Buzz.
Lara Setrakian Co-Founder and Executive Editor, News Deeply
One year ago, my team came together to build Syria Deeply, a platform dedicated to spreading knowledge about the state of Syria’s conflict. We were a volunteer army, an impassioned group of journalists and technologists dedicated to helping explain the Syria crisis to a U.S. audience.
*As part of our effort to highlight civilian stories, b**elow is correspondence from Mohamed, a Syrian journalist based in Damascus.*.
The photos and video circulating of yesterday’s alleged chemical gas attack in the east Damascus suburb of Ghouta are haunting. In some, dead bodies, including those of children, are lined up shoulder to shoulder on the floor.
In a joint effort with the Baker Institute at Rice University, we reached a range of voices inside Syria to get a diverse set of answers on the same question. Below is an excerpt of perspectives on the conflict in their country. .
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