In Aleppo I Only Survive by Looking Syrian. By Francesca Borri.

In Aleppo I only survive by looking Syrian. By Francesca Borri. The Guardian, November 12, 2013.

Borri:

In this war, to be a foreign reporter is to be hunted by Islamists and the regime. My helmet is a veil, my hijab a flak jacket.

 

Since the rise of the Islamist resistance, parts of Syria have become off-limits to journalists – 30 of us are now missing. Today my helmet is a veil, and my flak jacket a hijab. Because the only way to sneak into Aleppo is by looking like a Syrian.

 

Locals here don't refer any more to “liberated areas,” but to east and west Aleppo – they don’t show you pictures of their children, or of siblings killed by the regime, but simply the pictures of beautiful Aleppo before the war. Because nobody is fighting the regime anymore; rebels now fight against each other. And for many of them, the priority is not ousting Bashar al-Assad’s regime, but enforcing sharia law.

 

Aleppo is nothing but hunger and Islam. Dozens of threadbare children, disfigured by leishmaniasis, walk barefoot in the steps of mothers, covered in black from head to toe – all bowl in hand, seeking a mosque for bread, their skin yellowed by typhus. In the narrowest alleys, to dodge mortar fire, boys are on the right with their toy Kalashnikovs, while the left is for girls, already veiled. Jihadi fathers push with their beards, djellabas and suicide belts. In July, Mohammad Kattaa was executed for misusing the name of the prophet. He was 15.

 

And so there are only Syrians now to tell us what’s happening. They work for the major media, and contribute to articles written from New York, Paris and Rome. They are the famous citizen journalists, glorified by those who probably would never trust a citizen dentist.

 

And the outcomes are cases similar to that of Elizabeth O’Bagy, the analyst mentioned by John Kerry during the days of the chemical attack. In fact, she had just published through the Wall Street Journal a piece that essentially made you believe that the rebels were all good guys: that hardliners, here, are but a handful – because the problem for the US is that Assad might be replaced by al-Qaida. A few days later, while Human Rights Watch uncovered evidence of rebels responsible for war crimes against the minorities, it was revealed that O’Bagy was on the payroll of a Syrian lobby group whose goal was to pressure the Obama administration towards intervention. In the Twitter and YouTube era, when many newspapers save on correspondents on the ground by raking up somebody who will summarise for them what's going on in his own backyard, it’s on the O’Bagys that we then base foreign policy, base our wars: on the accounts of a recent graduate, born in 1987.

 

It’s not that the war has become more dangerous. Early on we were with the rebels, and the rebels were those who were fighting for freedom: and we journalists were those who witnessed for the world the crimes of Assad. But we suddenly realised (especially my generation) what a war means when you are not embedded. Today we are also here to witness the crimes of the rebels: and both the rebels and the regime hunt us. This war isn’t more dangerous; it’s only truer: a war where nobody is innocent, where nobody is immune; a war where nobody is welcome – we have all run away.

 

Do we as journalists have any responsibility? Our role is to question. So why are we targeted? Perhaps because many of us were here only for money, only for the single article – here for an award, or a contract, so that for Syrians we became just a matter of business.

 

Or perhaps because when Abdullah Yassin, the activist who made possible the work of many of us, was killed, and killed for protecting us, for bringing to the police two kidnappers, none of us left a flower on his tomb? Or perhaps it is because we have reported only the blood, because it was easier, because it was cheaper – and so we delivered to the world a misleading portrait of this country – that now generates unsteady and mixed-up policies? Perhaps because we all jumped here, in the aftermath of the gas attack, just to vanish in disappointment when Obama opted not to strike?

 

Why, if we are around or not, today do Syrians see no difference? Perhaps because we are but the mirror and expression of the international community, and its cynicism on Syria.

 

A few evenings ago I was on Twitter, when a jet swooped overhead. In a heartbeat, a flurry of followers – many of them, I am afraid, waiting for my last Tweet from under the rubble. And my reaction in that moment was only: Go to hell. And I turned everything off.

Francesca Borri