IN the mid-2000s, my sister was living in Damascus and I planned a visit to her and then a trip to Lebanon, together. But I could not secure a visa to Syria, ostensibly because I was a journalist, something I did not disclose in my application, choosing instead to describe myself accurately as a freelance writer. Someone from the embassy called. I had not submitted my CV, but he knew when I had worked at this newspaper as a leader writer. He said they’d get back to me. When I called to follow up, a very kind Pakistani staff member told me they did not grant visas to journalists, even to folks vowing not to practise again.

In an unfortunate turn of events, my sister could not apply for a visa to Lebanon, so we would joke about waving to each other across the border.

My sister and I wanted to inherit our parents’ love affair with the Levant, where it was easy to drive between countries without visa issues. My father, who experienced wars in Pakistan, considered buying a flat in Beirut in the 1970s because he described it as a peaceful country.

A few months after that trip to Lebanon, I moved to Dubai to work at a large Arab news organisation, managing their English-language operations. I landed at a crazy time — smack in the middle of the Arab Spring, months after Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, then Tunisia’s president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s ouster, both events following mass civilian uprisings that would spread across the region, igniting hope and fury. I hit the ground running, relearning about the region from an Arab perspective, from various Arab colleagues, each with their set of ‘Great Game’ theories. I had to reset my language too, knowing who got to be called a rebel, terrorist, hero. Israel was always, and remains, the enemy.

They are mere pawns in someone’s theory.

The war in Syria was unfolding on our screens. Twitter was Twitter and not yet the cesspool of hatred it has become. NPR’s Andy Carvin was a legend for being a “one-man Twitter bureau” crowd-sourcing and verifying during this turbulent period in the Middle East. I’ve always wanted to meet him to discuss how he made the decisions he did to tweet out graphic images of children from Syria, for example. Social media disrupted our roles as the gatekeepers of information.

This is long before fake news or misinformation became common parlance. We’d post a video from Hama only to learn later it was from Homs. Verification often took a back seat to speed. We had to beat the other news media outlets in breaking news — the advantage was that ours were the few news organisations with a long presence in Syria, but this didn’t make working there easier. The Syrian regime was notoriously difficult to, and about, journalists. Reporters returning to Dubai were showing clear signs of PTSD and spoke of horrific things they’d seen, but were also keen to return to the war zone. They all worried about their Syrian colleagues and sources’ safety.

We heard about a producer in our TV newsroom who watched live as a reporter pointed to her aunt crying as she held the body of her son. She completed her shift. We all went the next day to condole with her and returned to our desks where my Syrian colleague said she dreaded the same happening to her. My colleagues from Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Palestine often talked about families dying violent deaths. They’d barely get to mourn because someone had to take the news out.

Many people don’t fully grasp what it is like to work in a newsroom during war in your country or someone else’s. The constant exposure to violence, sounds of war, and also keeping your head above water as you wait to hear from your colleague with information, putting their well-being and yours aside to write the news while also navigating editorial policies of a fast-changing landscape, where changing leadership means a change in positions. Bashar or HTS or someone else was a necessary evil one day, and an inconvenient truth the next.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights in May said it documented the killing of 717 journalists and media workers since March 2011, including 53 who died due to torture.

We will hear about Syria as a chessboard of power and politics. Oded Yinon’s 1982 plan about a greater Israel has surfaced in some discussions. Everyone has an angle, a theory about this game or that, but the voices of the people most impacted by the decades of civil unrest don’t feature; they are mere pawns in someone’s theory.

I have no theory, but ask you to think about my former Syrian colleagues wherever they are, some celebrating this freedom, others uncertain, all mourning loved ones and afraid to hope that something better awaits.

The writer is a journalism instructor.
X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, December 15th, 2024