Dear Deeply Readers,
Welcome to the archives of News Deeply’s Women & Girls Hub. While we paused regular publication of the site on January 22, 2018, and transitioned our coverage to Women’s Advancement Deeply, we are happy to serve as an ongoing public resource on the Arctic. 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].
CAIRO – Last year, Omar Haidar arrived in Egypt. As bombs rattled entire neighborhoods, the 26-year old hotel manager fled his family’s village in the hard-hit suburbs of Damascus.
On April 25, 2011, a man held up a video camera in Deraa. He was not an experienced videographer and he did not have a tripod.He stood in front of a group of Syrian army soldiers with tanks and filmed them shooting their machine guns towards civilian targets. Each time he watched the clip on his laptop, he noticed the footage was shaky due to his trembling hand, so he would go back to his exposed vantage point to film once more.
Aleppo—First Lieutenant Adnan Barazi, 27, was stationed with Special Forces at Jabal al Sheikh along the Israeli border before the Syrian revolution, defending the frontlines against Syria’s main enemy. A Kurd who grew up in Homs, he was transferred to Jabal al Zawya in Idlib in October 2011 to aid in the crackdown on opponents of the Assad regime.
As part of our ongoing effort to talk to journalists covering the Syria crisis, we reached out to Jenan Moussa, a correspondent with Al Aan TV. Just back from conflict-torn Mali, the Dubai-based Moussa has made seven trips to Syria and covered most major events in the Middle East over the past two years. Here, she discusses “overwhelming” Syria and covering the war for an Arab outlet. “When I have to go to Syria, the excitement disappears, there’s this grip of fear,” she says. “No matter how prepared you are, you cannot be prepared enough.”.
Aleppo—It was supposed to be the “mother of all battles” as the regime dubbed it in July, the city where the regime or the revolution would be crushed. But six months after rebels breached Aleppo the fight rages on, leaving civilians struggling to survive.
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.
Below is a conversation with a fighter who said he would be defecting from the Syrian Army the following day. We speak at a house in the Latakia mountains, where FSA fighters have gathered for dinner.
To date, 70,000 Syrian citizens have fled to refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan and languished. Though the majority of the evacuees are from Syria’s Kurdish cities, the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG, has done very little to accommodate the growing numbers.
For two years Salamiyeh, the Ismaili-majority city 20 miles east of Hama, has skirted much of the violence unleashed on its neighbors despite hosting large anti-government protests. It’s created an environment of political tolerance that differs from Assad regime strongholds and territories held by rebels.
Dozens of bodies, some in mass graves and others in shallow ones, have been discovered at Aleppo’s Infantry School, located just north of the city that fell into rebel control in December.
As part of our series of interviews with journalists covering the Syria crisis, we reached out to CBS News correspondent Clarissa Ward, whose extensive reporting from the war has been honored with both the DuPont and Peabody Awards. Here, she discusses the story behind the ‘Evening News’ piece that took her to the suburbs of Damascus in November of 2011. “It’s a very, very, very complex environment for a journalist,” she said. .
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.
Peter Kassig, a former U.S. soldier, aids Syrians on the ground.
As part of our effort to highlight civilian stories, below is a conversation between News Deeply and a Christian aid and relief volunteer from Aleppo. He shared with us some of his and his friends’ latest observations on the situation in Aleppo and the northern part of the country. .
Samir Aita is a member of the Syrian Democratic Forum, and editor-in-chief of Le Monde Diplomatique Arabic edition. Here, he discusses the collapse of the Syrian economy and the financial situation of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Karen Leigh is the Managing Editor of News Deeply. She has lived and reported in India, West Africa and the Middle East for publications including TIME and The New York Times. You can find her on Twitter as @leighstream. She took these photos while reporting for Syria Deeply in Latakia province, Syria.
As part of our series of interviews with journalists covering the Syria crisis, we reached out to Mexican journalist Témoris Grecko. On the morning of January 24, Grecko, who has reported from Syria for Mexican and Spanish-language publications, was kidnapped in Aleppo. Here, he discusses being surrounded by men with guns, his eventual release and the current state of the battle for Syria.
ALEPPO – Every night thousands of people gather outside Aleppo’s bakeries to buy their daily bag of bread. Syria’s civil war has transformed the formerly routine transaction into a six hour process. .
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 part of our series of interviews with journalists covering the Syria crisis, we reached out to Miriam Elder of The Guardian. Elder, the newspaper’s Moscow correspondent, discusses Russian media’s coverage of the war in Syria, its longtime ally. “The last report I can remember seeing from Syria,” she says, “was at the beginning of September.”.
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.
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.
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.
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. .
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