Sunday Times 2
New Syria newspaper fights ‘lies of war’
View(s):ALEPPO, Syria (AFP) -Truth is said to be the first casualty of war, but Khaled al-Khatib and a small group of journalists running a new newspaper in Syria’s rebel-held territories are determined to keep the patient alive.
Suria Al-Hurra (Syria the Free), their month-old weekly, is seeking to become an important source of information for what goes on in the war-torn country — refusing to bend the facts, no matter the pressure to do so.
Khaled al-Khatib the chief editor of Suria Al-Hurra (Free Syria) poses with the newspaper in Aleppo
“We are nobody’s mouthpiece; we are journalists,” Khatib, the 30-year-old chief editor and former Aleppo University geography professor, defiantly tells AFP. “We will never publish anything we’re not 100-percent certain is true. Many times people try to manipulate us.”
Such adherence to normal journalistic standards is risky in a country that, before its March 2011 uprising erupted, harboured a tame press that obediently vaunted the merits of now-beleaguered President Bashar al-Assad.
Regime elements — notably Assad’s fiercely loyal shabiha militia — take exception to Suria Al-Hurra’s aims. So do some rebels, who want to see the paper act as a propaganda tool in their struggle. “So far no one has turned up in the newsroom trying to intimidate or kidnap us,” Khatib says.
“But on our Facebook page
(https://www.facebook.com/soria.alhoura, in Arabic) there was a shabiha who said that if he found us one day he would break our feet and our hands and then kill us.”The danger is real enough that Khatib doesn’t want to broadcast the location of the office from which he and five reporters work in a village in northern Aleppo province.
Even with the rebels, who know the location, relations are not always smooth. “There are some leaders of different katibas (rebel fighting units) that have come to us to say they don’t want to deal with us because in our paper we criticised some errors they made in the FSA (Free Syrian Army),” the editor says.
The office is a modest one, located in an old post office. A heater sits in the middle of a carpet-covered floor to stave off the freezing winter air. There are a few portable computers and a filing cabinet.
And there is a caricature of Assad, dressed as a super hero who is vainly trying to stop a Syria-shaped boot from squashing him flat. Suria Al-Hurra publishes all sorts of news and features — from what is happening on the battlefield, in local communities and the byzantine world of revolutionary politics to information on how the outside world is reacting to what is happening in Syria, including translations from the foreign press. Wealthy Syrian donors, mostly ones who have fled to neighbouring Turkey and other countries, provide the funds supporting the newspaper.
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