The

40

Story
Is Their
Lives

Covering the
war in Syria
is too dangerous
for professional
journalists.
Thats where
these guys
come in.
A dispatch from
the makeshift
media capital of
the Middle East.
BY MATTHEW SHAER
Photographs by
Bradley Secker

Ziad Homsi, a Syrian

amateur photographer,
operates from Reyhanli,
just over the Turkish
border.
42
FROM ANTAKYA, THE SEAT OF THE TURKISH PROVINCE OF HATAY,
OCTOBER 2 1, 2013 THE NEW REP UBLIC

it is a 40-minute drive to the town of Reyhanli, the last ten minutes

of which follow the jagged line of the Syrian border. The border
is protected by high watchtowers and barbed wire, but the tow-
ers are frequently unmanned, and making your way east on Route
D420, you can see Syrian refugeesmen, children, and women
with babies strapped to their chestsslipping easily between the
gaps in the fence.
Reyhanli was, until recently, a sleepy backwater. Even the na-
tives complained of feeling bored there. The area is shaped like a
sunbursta tightly-coiled town square and a series of progressively
diffuse lines wandering out into the patchwork farmland. In sum-
mer, the temperature regularly soars to 90 degrees, and a terrible,
parched stillness takes hold over everything.
But as the Syrian civil war approaches its third bloody year and the
refugee count soars, Reyhanli has been transformed. On the outskirts
of town, dozens of new apartment complexes are being built. There
are Arabic grammar schools for Syrian children and airless storefront
hospitals funded by donors in the Gulf states. In the afternoons,
long lines of amputees wait outside in the heat for treatment. And
due to its proximity to the border, Reyhanli has also become the de
facto base of operations for hundreds of Syrian citizen journalists.
On a mild morning in August, one of those journalists, a 26-year-
old named Wassim, was
dozing on the couch of the
Syrian Media Center (SMC),
an amateur operation head-
quartered above the local
barbershop. Wassimhe
asked that only his first
name be usedgrew up in
Homs and has amber eyes
and the lacquered hair of
a pop singer.
For the past six months,
Wassim had been sleeping
in SMCs offices, alongside
Lulu, a long-haired white
kitten. He typically awoke
at noon, ate flatbread and
cheese, smoked cigarettes,
and waited for videos and
photographs to come in
from the SMCs 100-odd
informants scattered across
FROM LEFT: Jameel Salou, editor of Syria. Most of the clips, sent
the Free Syrian News Agency. A press by an unpaid coalition of
conference, Syrian style, between
rebel soldiers and citizen journalists. young male activists, depict- Ghouta. Several of SMCs most trustworthy informants were
ed destruction: the bloody based in the area, and over the next two hours, as shells rained
aftermath of regime artillery attacks on schools, hospitals, and down on the city, they used a satellite Internet connection to
apartment buildings. Occasionally, there were shaky Handycam upload several video clips.
shots of running battles between opposition and regime forces. Wassim was no stranger to war: He had witnessed firsthand the
From evening to dawn, Wassim edited the videos down to two spray of viscera from a snipers bullet. But these videos werent like
or three minutes and posted them to the SMC page or its Arabic- anything hed ever seen. There was little blood. Rows of children
language Twitter and Facebook feeds. If he was lucky, the BBC, Al lay still in a makeshift morgue. Milky foam rolled out of the mouths
Arabiya (a Saudi-based network), or Al Jazeera picked up the foot- of the adult victims.
age. But he was content to reach the many ordinary Syrians who By early afternoon, the first clipsincluding many shots of dead
visited the SMC page every day. childrenappeared on the SMC website. They joined a flood of
August had been a bloody month, and when Wassim picked similar images from the other citizen-media organizations clus-
up his Galaxy Note that morning, he was expecting news of tered along the Turkish border or inside Syria itself: the Alep-
a fresh shelling. Instead, he heard panicked, garbled reports po Media Centre, the Free Syrian News Agency, the Center for
of some kind of chemical attack in the Damascus suburb of Documentations of Violations in Syria, the Shaam News Network,

Nashet. Most of these organizations, including the SMC, identified
the regime of President Bashar Al Assad as the culprit.
In September, the United Nations released a report confirming
that surface-to-surface rockets carrying sarin gas had indeed struck
Ghouta. But it was the shaky, fuzzy videoscarried by almost every
Western news channelthat captured the worlds attention. Never
before have we been so dependent on courageous citizens, rather
than professional journalists, for what we know about a war. The
motives of these amateur reporters, though, are varied and com-
plex and often difficult to discern.
SYRIA IS NOW THE MOST DANGEROUS COUNTRY IN THE WORLD
for reporters: According to the Doha Centre for Media Freedom,
at least 114 journalists have died there since the spring of 2011.
Among the dead are seasoned correspondents like the American
43
Marie Colvin, who was killed in Homs in 2012, and freelancers
like the Frenchman Olivier Voisin, who was wounded in February
near Idlib and later died in Turkey. Meanwhile, 16 foreign journal-
ists are officially missing, along with an untold number of fixers
and translators. Because of voluntary media blackoutsenforced
to avoid encouraging would-be kidnappersthe real number is
almost certainly higher.
As the conflict continues, Syria is becoming more dangerous
still. By one estimate, there are now more than 1,000 rebel
groups operating in the country, some secular and somesuch
as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISISdecidedly
jihadist. Regime forces have pushed back the rebels in key areas,
and the Free Syrian Army, or FSA, is often unable to protect re-
porters as it once did, or ensure safe passage through rebel-held
areas. These days, most foreign journalists do only short stints
44
OCTOBER 2 1, 2013 THE NEW REP UBLIC
inside Syriaget in under the radar, get what you need, and get
the fuck out before you get kidnapped is how one photogra-
pher put it.
There are exceptions: The veteran BBC correspondent Jeremy
Bowen traveled through Syria for weeks. (He has since left.) And
the Turkish border area has no shortage of optimistic freelanc-
ers hoping to establish their names. But we are far short of the
sustained coverage that informed our understanding of the up-
risings in Egypt or Libya.
In the absence of professionals on the ground, many outlets
have been forced to lean heavily on the reports of untrained citi-
zen journalists. The BBC regularly runs photos from activists, as do
the Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times, and CNN. These
outlets attempt to evaluate the accuracy of the reportsin Antakya,
for instance, Al Jazeera correspondent Anita McNaught assesses
amateur video recordings with two Arabic-speaking researchersor
else hedge their veracity.
Not everyone believes such meticulousness is warranted. Kamal
Kaddourah, a researcher for Englands Channel 4 News, told me:
I never read anything official. I keep myself pure for the You-
Tube videos and the Facebook messages. His voice rose: I dont
approve of this policy of skepticismit gets me upset when peo-
ple try to verify a video of an air strike or a dead child. These are
people filming their own tragedies. They didnt make it for fun.
Theyre not making it up.
Still, real videos of real tragedies can be edited, redubbed, and
repurposed. A few months ago, a video depicting the chainsaw
FROM LEFT: Ziad Homsi. Ali, a decapitation of two men began
former electrician, uploads video making the rounds online. An
from his roof. Wassim, a journalist
with the Syrian Media Center. Arabic voice-over identified the
men as rebels and the execu-
tioner as a regime soldier. It later emerged that the video was of
the gangland slaying of two Mexican drug cartel members. And in
one of the most blatant muck-ups, last year the BBC posted a pho-
tograph on its homepage showing hundreds of corpses wrapped
in white sheets. The BBC obtained the photograph from unnamed
activists, who claimed it had been taken in the village of Houla.
Although U.N. inspectors later found 92 bodies in Houla, the im-
age had actually been taken in 2003, near Baghdad. Somebody,
the original photographer, Marco Di Lauro, wrote on his Facebook
page, is using my images for anti-Syrian propaganda.
The Syrian media landscape has become a proxy battle for
forces throughout the Middle East, just like the conflict itself. In
the Turkish border area, there are independent organizations
like the one Wassim works for, there are FSA-aligned outlets, and
there are deep-pocketed operations backed by foreign interests
all flooding YouTube and Facebook with competing versions of
the uprising. I learned very early on not to immediately trust
everything I heard, said McNaught. For me, its about getting a
feel for who is reliablesussing out who the real bullshitters are.
And its about constantly cross-referencing. OK, this person tells
you this. Well, lets talk to five other people, and see what facts
they have in common, and when youve got an overlap, maybe
youve got something.

BEFORE THE REVOLUTION, WASSIM MADE LEATHER PURSES,
which he sold at a stall in a Homs souk. Like many young Syr-
ians, he was not political; being political only brought imprison-
ment, torture, or death. Then came the popular uprisings in Libya,
Yemen, and Syria itself. Wassim and his friends spent many eve-
nings tracking the latest developments on the radio.
On March 25, after afternoon prayers, Wassim joined a protest.
Swept up in the moment, he held up his Nokia cell phone and
took a picture. Later, he was arrested and thrown into jail. It was
useful for me, Wassim told me. I started to meet other activists,
other journalists. Upon his releasehe served a monthhe was in-
troduced to the brother of the leader of the Syrian Media Center,
a start-up operation with a presence in Homs; the SMC provided
him with a Canon camera. He took to roaming the city, filming
crumpled buildings, annihilated schools, and shattered hospitals.
Last year, Wassim was one of several Syrian citizen journalists to
receive training from a U.S.-based nonprofit. (For security reasons,
the nonprofit requested that it not be identified by name.) He was
taught how to use time stamps and how to frame photographs
with prominent landmarks so they could be verified.
Wassim couldnt stay in one place for longpacking a few changes
of clothes and his camera, he moved from apartment to apartment.
At one point, masked men stormed his familys house and, failing
to find him, carted his little brother off to jail for a month instead.
In February, an employee of the nonprofit that trained Wassim
received a video from him showing a rocket shrieking up toward
the lens, followed by darkness. She thought Wassim was dead.
45
But two months later, he resurfaced, having bribed regime troops
to allow him passage out of Homs and paying a second bribe to
enter Turkey.
The SMC survives on the donations of businessmen inside Syria
and in the diasporaenough to fund its activities and stock the pan-
try, but not enough to pay Wassim. For the foreseeable future, he
plans to shack up at the office.
Journalism, it seems, has afforded him a certain prestige. Most
of the citizen journalists I met were of a very specific type: early
to late twenties, with carefully coiffed or tousled manes, glumly
charismatic. Like the rebel fighters who are revered in many parts
of Syria and the Turkish border areas, the citizen journalists, too,
are viewed as heroes of the revolution.
IN MAY, A PAIR OF CAR BOMBS WERE DETONATED IN REYHANLIS
main square, which is filled with food stands, banks, and small
markets. Fifty-one people were killed, and hundreds more injured.
Officially, the Turkish government blamed the attacks on twelve
Turks sympathetic to Assad, but most Syrians believe it was a re-
gime operation to warn Turkey against involvement in the war.
Reyhanli has little protection against future threats: In five days, I
saw only two police officers.
But the recent chaos in Reyhanli also partly explains its appeal to
citizen journalists. They blend in with the deluge of refugees and
can cross the border without a passport with relative ease. All the
while, theyre able to take advantage of the reliable Internet con-
nection and cheap rent.
46
OCTOBER 2 1, 2013 THE NEW REP UBLIC
One day, I paid a visit to the four full-time members of the
Consolidated Media Centre of the Free Syrian Army (CMCFSA),
who live in unmolested squalor on the ground floor of a dingy
apartment complex. I was greeted by Fadi, the pompadoured
leader of the organization, and shown to a smoky bedroom.
This was where Fadi slept and also where most of the organiza-
tions editing was done. On a cluttered desk, alongside a pack of
Gauloises-Legeres and a silver Zippo, sat three battered Toshiba
laptops; a Nikon hung from the shutters of the only window. A
rebel fighter was curled up on the floor, wrapped in a red blan-
ket and snoring loudly.
Fadi has 30 reporters in Syria, and I asked how he knew he
could trust them. He explained that reporters rarely come to him
usually, he receives recommendations from other activists. These
informants are unpaid, which presumably increases their suscepti-
bility to bribes, but Fadi insisted he had never been duped.
The CMCFSA journalists travel with the soldiers, usually dressed
in jeans and a T-shirt, or in camouflage like the fighters. They up-
load their footage at night, assuming they can find a decent Inter-
net connection. Then Fadi and his colleagues edit the videos and
post them to the CMCFSA Facebook page or YouTube channel.
Most of the videos center on the exploits of the FSA. Rebel fight-
ers weave through the dense Idlib brush, Kalashnikovs hanging from
their necks. Fadi told me that the media had come to rely on the
CMCFSA to help track the rebels movements. I want to show the
world whats happening in my country, he said. However, CMCFSAs
main Facebook page is in Arabic, and since it cannot afford a trans-
lator, its audience is necessarily limited.
Taking a hard drag on his Gauloises, Fadi told me that the
CMCFSA had recently received a donation of 40,000 Turkish li-
ras, or $20,000. But instead of upgrading his media equipment,
he had channeled the money to the FSA, which had used it to
buy new gear.
He added that, when he accompanied the rebels, the high-zoom
lens on his camera had been used to pick out snipers at a regime
checkpoint. We guide the rebels on how to fight, he said, or
how to make an operation. If they want to storm a regime check-
point, we give them the video of another successful operation, so
they can imitate it. Fadi described himself as a journalist, but what
his organization was doing appeared, in many cases, closer to mil-
itary intelligence gathering.
I asked if he had been armed during his time with the rebels. He
brought his pointer fingers together. Only with a pistol, he said.
THE NEXT DAY, I HOPPED A SOUTHBOUND BUS FROM THE CITY
center. At one point, the man to my right embarked on a long ti-
rade in Arabic, punctuated by the English word America, which
he spat out like an olive pit. My fixer, a Syrian Ill call Sami,
FROM LEFT: Images by Ziad translated: America has de-
Homsi. Shada, an opposition news
channel. A photojournalists work
stroyed the entire world, and
space. A Syrian woman recounts now it wont intervene in Syr-
a state army raid on her village. ia, so that will be destroyed,
too. I heard this complaint
often in Reyhanli: The United States meddles too much, but in
Syria it was not meddling enough. (Sami took these encounters
in stride: Once, in a shared taxi to the border, when a man inter-
rogated me about Israels influence on U.S. politics, Sami inter-
jected: What, did you confuse Matt with John Kerry?)
Sami was himself a former citizen journalist. A year ago, he took
two sniper bullets, one in the shoulder and one in the eye. Hed
traveled to Turkey for surgery, which left his eye intact, but unsee-
ing. Among rebel media groups, the injury was a badge of honor,
helping to earn us access to organizations that otherwise might
have shut their doors in my face.
That day, we had arranged to visit the offices of Nashet, one of
the best-funded citizen-media organizations. The scene could not
have been more different from the one in Fadis bedroomthere
were flatscreen televisions on the wall, SLR cameras on the desks,
and enough Sony camcorders to supply the newsroom of an Amer-
ican daily. Ten young men sat in a white-walled suite, simultane-
ously monitoring their laptops and the televisions.
Nashetactive, roughly, in Arabicis housed in the same build-
ing as the Syrian group Ahl Al Athar, a well-known Syrian charity
that comprises both religious education and military wings and is a
prominent player in the opposition. According to Thomas Pierret, a
lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and the author of a book on
Syria, Ahl Al Athar is funded by a private Kuwaiti association called
Renaissance of the Islamic Heritage.
Nashets spokesman, Bilal Mohammed, told me that Nashet op-
erated separately from Ahl Al Athar. But the separation did not ap-
pear to be total. Next door to the media center was a room full of
grim-faced, bearded religious educators in white jellabiyas; down
the hall, camouflaged revolutionaries were drinking coffee. While
I watched, educators and soldiers ducked into the media center to
chat with the editors, and vice versa.
Mohammed (a pseudonym) forbade the use of a recorder,
but he answered my questions in a straightforward manner.
He told me that Nashet has 300 reporters in cities across Syria.
Nashet often highlights the good deeds of the opposition. Its vid-
eos show the distribution of food and milk to starving families,
a flour-making factory in Aleppo, rebel-led crews fixing downed
electricity wires.
One of the reporters changed the channel on a nearby television
to CNN. Every Western media organization had an agenda, said
Mohammed. CNN is always talking about ISIS, Al Nusra, Islamists,
Al Qaeda. But they never talk about humanitarian aid.

Earlier, when I had asked Mohammed what he wished to see
in Syria, he had answered quickly: A modern Islamic state. But
when I pointed out that Nashet also had an agenda, the room grew
hushed and tense. CIA, a reporter sitting behind me whispered
accusingly. Sami motioned me to leave. Outside, he remarked,
You cant have that kind of place if you dont have a backer with
a big agenda.
Mohammed declined to tell me where Nashets money
comes from, but it seems likely, given the quality of the equip-
ment and the large staff, that it comes from the same place as
the money for Ahl Al Athar: Kuwait, a majority Sunni country,
which has an interest in seeing Assad toppled and replaced by a
Sunni government.
Which is why it may be so important to Nashet to highlight the
benevolence of the Sunni-led opposition, while playing down
its less savory aspects. The same goes for an operation like
the Jordan-based Al Hurria, which recently opened a large
outpost in Reyhanli.
One experienced Western journalist told me that because of
such influences, she had ceased to rely on citizen journalist
reports altogether. The danger here is that we might start thinking
we can trust these videos, though we dont understand the context
in which theyve been produced.
OF ALL THE CITIZEN REPORTERS I MET, JAMEEL SALOU WAS THE
closest to a traditional journalist. He was also the only one to encour-
age me to use his real name. I have nothing to hide, he told me.
Salou, who is 33, had served several stints in jail. In 2000,
he and some friends were arrested for running a popular news
website, Eye on Syria. They spent five years in Sednaya Prison,
where Salou was beaten so badly by the guards that he lost sight
in his left eye. Later, he was falsely accused of planting a bomb in
a Damascus square and held captive by a branch of the military
security services for 40 days. Before we went to jail, we hated the
regime and we hated its corruption, Salou, who is slouchy and
round with thinning black hair, told me. After being in jail, we
wanted to try hard to topple it.
In 2010, Salou reopened Eye on Syria, recruiting activists he had
met in Sednaya. But in 2011, the office was shelled and all of the
equipment was destroyed, so Salou set up a new operation called
the Free Syrian News Agency.
He has since built a large network of unpaid informants. Us-
ing cheap Sony Cyber-shot cameras, they have documented the
spread of the fighting from Damascus toward Aleppo and Homs.
He is perhaps best known for his precise documentation of the
Ghouta chemical attack, where he and 13 colleagues were able
to identify many of the victims long before the United Nations
arrived on the scene.
47
THE NEW REP UBLIC OCTOBER 2 1, 2013
Although many of his colleagues cover the revolution only from
the rebel side, Salou insists on broadcasting rebel misdeeds as well
those perpetrated by the regime. When a rebel unit was accused
of summarily executing Syrian army soldiers, the Free Syrian News
Agency carried a report on the alleged crime.
Last year, Salou held a conference for female revolutionaries in
the city of Rakka. The site of the conference was controlled by
the opposition, but the fact that women were included rankled
members of ISIS, who later grew angry with Salou for his efforts
to tally the number of regime soldiers killed by rebels. Salou was
arrested for the third time in his life, although kidnapped may
be a more accurate term, since ISIS has no authority to arrest
anyone. He was released only when an FSA commander inter-
vened on his behalf.
In July, Salou fled Syria for the Turkish city of Antakya with his
wife and children. He has received death threats, and in Reyhan-
li, where he travels regularly for work, he said that he has been
trailed by ISIS sympathizers. Im sentenced to death from both
sides, he said. By the regime and by ISIS. If either finds me,
they will kill me.
UNLIKE FOREIGN JOURNALISTS, WHO HAVE THE OPTION OF
covering the civil war, many Syrian citizen journalists told me
that they felt the war had been thrust upon themthat if they
dont publicize its atrocities, no one will. Other people might
forget, but we can never forget, Salou told me. Our duty is to
be witnesses.
On one of my last afternoons in Hatay, I took the bus back
to Reyhanli. The sun had set, and Wassim was beginning
his daysprawled out on his leather couch, smoking his ciga-
rillos and sifting through a glut of incoming videos. Lulu was
sitting on his shins.
I asked Wassim if he felt like he was making a difference. He
frowned. In the beginning, I thought that, if I showed people
what was happening in Syria, that theyd have no choice but to
look, he said. And they did. Now there are many videos, every
day, of shelling and fighting and sieges and gunfire. Its too many
videos, I think.
Wassim did not exempt himself from blameafter all, he had
done his part to flood the market. But he argued that citizen
journalists would have to get better at choosing which photo-
graphs and videos to run. It was possible, he thought. At the
beginning, they had known nothing of journalismonly to point
a camera and press upload. The sad part, he added, is that
the revolution is so big, and so long, that it is making experts
of us all.
Matthew Shaer is the author of THE SINKING OF THE BOUNTY.
Copyright of New Republic is the property of TNR II, LLC and its content may not be copied
or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express
written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.