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Why Syria’s Ancient Objects are in Danger
This month’s strike on Krak des Chevaliers, the 12th-century Crusader castle, put UNESCO, historians and antiquities experts on edge.
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.
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Exploring Syrian civil society as well as grassroots and international social initiatives that deal with everyday civilian life in Syria.
Follow via RSSThis month’s strike on Krak des Chevaliers, the 12th-century Crusader castle, put UNESCO, historians and antiquities experts on edge.
Every Saturday, a group of women in Salamia, a city in western Syria, meet to discuss the events of the past week in relation to the two-year uprising against President Bashar Al-Assad.
RAS AL AYN, Syria / Like many of his countrymen, Abu Zechariah, a now-penniless farmer, spends his days trying to eke out a living. As war makes crop farming here all but impossible, he’s been forced to harvest another kind of crop — oil.
Paul Sullivan / World Policy Institute
Syria makes my head hurt and heart ache. More people have died in Syria than in all of the Arab-Israeli wars, and the bloodshed shows no signs of abating. Those who are hoping for the U.S. and its allies to ride in and save the day are kidding themselves. .
As part of our series of interviews with journalists covering the Syria crisis, we reached out to Rania Abouzeid, whose extensive reporting from Syria has appeared in TIME, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy and on television with the CBC documentary “Syria: Behind Rebel Lines.”.
Millions of Syrians are using social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Skype to disseminate and discuss the conflict.
Elmira Bayrasli
Despite the ongoing conflict raging in their country, a handful of intrepid Syrian entrepreneurs continue to operate their tech-based businesses.
QALAAT AL-MADIQ, HAMA PROVINCE / Just a few years ago, Syrian students in this Sunni town had to pledge allegiance to Baath party principles and express loyalty to Bashar al-Assad.
Maysaloon
Maysaloon is a renowned Syrian Arab blogger and commentator. He writes at www.maysaloon.org.
Nawar Nemeh is a 17-year-old rising senior at San Diego High School in California. Until age 16, he lived in Damascus, fleeing to the U.S. with his family after the war began. At his private school in the Syrian capital, Nemeh watched as the facets of regular teenage life – curfews, social studies lessons and playground dynamics – were transformed by conflict. .
Dr. Greg Elder is deputy director of operations at Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders France. The organization currently operates five field hospitals in Syria. An emergency room doctor by training, Elder has made two trips into Syria, the last one six months ago in the vicinity of Aleppo. Based in Paris, he helps oversee operations for MSF’s Syria team, designing and evaluating programs and supporting teams in the field. .
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.
Hajj Bilal, a 35-year-old small business owner from Tripoli, recalls Syrian refugees starting to pour into into this northern Lebanese city in large numbers just five months after the Syrian revolt broke out. Since then, his network of businesses has been a hub for those desperate for work.
The Syria Needs Analysis Project (SNAP) is a partnership between the Assessment Capacities Project (ACAPS) and MapAction. It’s “aimed at strengthening the shared situational analysis of humanitarian responders by providing an independent analysis of the humanitarian situation of those affected by the Syrian crisis.” To do this, SNAP’s analysis review and compile data from secondary sources including journalists and the United Nations. .
As part of our effort to highlight civilian stories, below is a conversation between Syria Deeply and a 24-year-old teacher and university student in Homs who wished to be identified only as “SA.” Last week, all eyes were on the battle over the strategic city of Qusayr, but for SA the biggest worry was the changing demography of Homs amid a new wave of arrests – and a census.
Mina al-Oraibi is an Iraqi journalist and the assistant editor-in-chief at Alsharq Alawsat, the daily Arabic international newspaper headquartered in London. As Syrian coverage fades off the front pages of most Western publications, al-Oraibi says coverage is as strong as ever in the Arab press. She spoke with Syria Deeply Managing Editor Karen Leigh about the difference in coverage.
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.
Dina Shahrokhi
Last week on Syria Deeply, Jenan Moussa argued that Syria has “no Joan of Arc” – no woman who has taken a leadership role in the revolution. Even bigger than the potential gender gap is that Syria has no charismatic leader – period. Nobody in Syria symbolizes or personifies the revolution. Syria has no Che Guevara.
Once, the artist Tammam Azzam woke each morning and walked the busy streets of Damascus until he reached his studio. There, he’d paint – landscapes, or whatever came to mind. Now he operates from a financial complex with takeout sushi and the Ritz-Carlton a stone’s throw away, working where he finds space.
In a city where many live in fear for their lives, some languish without even the psychological ability to grasp what is happening to them.
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 Syrian National Coalition, Syria’s main opposition group, missed a key chance to restore confidence among its supporters last week at a meeting in Istanbul. After days of wrangling over political representation, the heavily Islamist body offered only five seats to the liberal, Western-backed bloc led by Christian activist and writer Michael Kilo – far below the 22 seats hoped for by Kilo and his supporters. .
Tuesday marked the third consecutive day of a major offensive against Qusayr, located just across the border in Homs province. On Sunday, 28 elite Hezbollah fighters were killed and over 70 wounded in the fighting, catalogued by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. [Syrian] rebels suffered casualties twice as high, losing 50 men to air raids, shelling attacks and fighting, Three civilian women and an elderly man were also killed in the assault.
Internet activism has taken center stage throughout the Arab Spring, turning citizens with mobile phones into journalists, and Facebook and Twitter into engines of revolt.
Bloodshed has followed Syrian refugees across the country’s borders, from this month’s bombing in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli that left more than 50 civilians dead, to the Lebanese city of Tripoli, where Sunni–Shiite strife has exploded. And ever-expanding refugee camps are biting away at already limited natural resources. Jordan’s infamous Zaatari refugee camp, the second largest camp in the world, is now the Hashemite Kingdom’s fifth-largest city. These large camps have especially harmed neighboring communities in Jordan, some of whom have suffered weeks without water and deal with continuous price hikes of essential goods.
Kelly McEvers is National Public Radio’s bureau chief in Beirut. Since 2011, she has repeatedly traveled into Syria. Her work from the conflict was honored with the 2013 Peabody Award. Previously, she was NPR’s Baghdad bureau chief. She spoke with Syria Deeply about changes in covering the conflict and why Syria is not Iraq.
Jenan Moussa
The following is the edited text of Jenan Moussa’s speech, with a new angle on Syria’s women, delivered at the 2013 Oslo Freedom Forum. Moussa is a correspondent for Al Aan, a pan-Arab satellite television channel based in Dubai. She makes frequent trips into Syria.
Ali Ferzat is a renowned Syrian political cartoonist and the creator of more than 15,000 published drawings. In August 2011, Ferzat was reportedly dragged out of his car while driving in central Damascus by masked forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad’s regime. His fingers were systematically broken and he was left for dead by the side of an airport road. In 2012, TIME magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The Hama-born 61-year-old currently lives and works outside Syria.
As a regular feature, inspired by your questions about the Syria conflict, we’ve rounded up answers from some of the top minds in our network. If you’d like to submit a question for us to tackle, send it to [email protected].
Clarissa Ward / CBS News
The following post first appeared at CBSNews.com. ZAATARI REFUGEE CAMP, Jordan – It is impossible for most of us to understand what life is like for the more than half-million Syrian refugees living in Jordan. Most have fled the violence and chaos of Syria’s civil war only to themselves trapped in a life of grinding poverty – unable to work legally in Jordan and unable to return to their homeland.
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.
As Syria’s revolution rages, three young rockers from Damascus have reached their own boiling point. Armed with guitars, drums and lyrics, Pressure Pot (or Tanjaret Daghet in Arabic) burst onto the scene with their own kind of revolt. Now based in Beirut, the band members are Khaled Omran on vocals and bass guitar, Tarek Khuluki on guitar and vocals and Dani Shukri on drums. They say the name represents the eruption of discovery and creativity the three musicians have found through playing together. .
Syrians are voicing a range of reactions to a series of Israeli airstrikes launched in the past week on Syrian soil.
As of last week, Nadia, a 66-year-old grandmother, was living comfortably in the U.S. at the home of her daughter in an upscale Washington, D.C. suburb. Today, she finds herself back in a leafy district of Damascus wondering when Syria’s civil war will come to an end.
Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff
Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff is the Executive Director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force. He’s based in Washington, DC.
In Syria today, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces stand accused of massacring Sunni families en masse. The more gruesome images and video<wbr>s speak to a brutal campaign of sectarian cleansing that has managed to shock even veteran Syria watchers.
Christy Wilcox
There is no way to sum up my friend Austin. When I try, I think of passion, tenacity, humor and, oddly enough, Taylor Swift. Austin is a hard-driving conflict correspondent, a former Marine, a student at Georgetown law school. But Taylor’s country pop is his favorite.
NEW DELHI / More than 3,000 miles separate New Delhi and Damascus, but for Indian diplomats, the two-year-old crisis in Syria must feel much closer. For India, the global community’s sharp debates over Syria have less to do with Syria – India and Syria enjoy a casual rapport – and more to do with the fragile network of allegiances and interests that India has built over the past decades, now being tested by new international pressures.
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.
Clare Morgana Gillis
Clare Morgana Gillis is an American journalist. She has reported from Egypt, Libya, Syria and Mali for The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Policy and USA Today, among others. Currently based in Istanbul, she holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
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