As rebels stormed towards Damascus, taking control of a string of cities along the way, NPR international correspondent Ruth Sherlock needed to figure out a way to get to Syria. At home in Rome, she booked a series of flights to Beirut (several fell through) in the hopes of traveling from there to the Syrian border to cover a seismic event that has seemed unthinkable after more than a decade of brutal war: the toppling of Bashar al-Assad.
“I had two hours to pack,” she told Mediaite editor and chief Aidan McLaughlin on this week’s episode of Press Club.
Sherlock has been covering the Middle East for years, first as a correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, the British paper for which she first traveled to Syria during the protests in 2011. Like many who have reported on the last 13 years, she’s cautiously optimistic about the future.
The main rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has mounted an impressive transition effort in the wake of Assad’s escape to Moscow — and even expressed a desire to keep minority groups in Syria – like the Alawites – protected.
“They’ve been really impressive, they’ve secured government buildings here in a way the rebels never did in Tripoli. They’ve kept civil servants from the government from the Assad regime time, they’ve kept senior politicians from that time. They’re trying to have an ordered transition,” she said. “That puts them in a better position than any other country that has had a revolution in recent times. So we just have to hope that it goes somewhere more positive.”
Yet Sherlock knows all too well that Syrians have experienced a sense of false hope before, during protests against Assad that kicked off in 2011.
“There is real terror [within minority communities]. HTS is going to have to work very hard, create so much discipline within its ranks, and then get the rest of the rebel militias disciplined for this all to work.”
In places where HTS has not yet taken control, like some suburbs of Damascus, Sherlock described a chaotic scene. “Constant gunfire, just constant. It’s terrifying. And this place is full of children. It’s the suburbs, there are loads of families.”
While there though, she spoke to a Sunni family who stressed a need for peace. “They said that Syrians across the board have lost so much, [they] cannot cope with the idea of another war. They were optimistic about HTS.”
Sherlock also spoke about her reporting from inside Syria’s notorious Sednaya Prison, the dangers faced by journalists on the ground in Syria, and what day-to-day life is like for reporters there now.
Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
You’ve covered Syria over the years throughout this horrific conflict. Give us a sense of what the mood is like there now.
It is for the moment, much calmer, much less chaotic than the scenes in, for example, Tripoli after the fall of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, or the scenes in Iraq after the US invasion and the collapse of Saddam Hussein. But there’s jubilation. Today in particular was the first Friday prayers after rebels stormed the capital. There were just huge crowds around the Umayyad Mosque. The new Syrian state TV is showing massive protests, massive gatherings across the country with people flying the new flag, the flag with the three stars instead of the two stars that is now going to become the new emblem of Syria. And so you have this jubilation. I went down to Umayyad Square in Damascus a few days ago and it was kind of surreal. You have women, like beautifully dressed women, posing for selfies with rebel fighters. These guys that stormed down from the rural enclave in Idlib that borders Turkey. And it’s a little strange because these guys, a lot of them are from this Islamist group HTS. They have these big beards. They have a certain way that they’re used to behaving. And it’s strange for them to see these ladies come up and want to pose for photos with them. There’s kids that are trying to borrow these guys’ guns to pose for photos. And that was a little scary. This square is full of eight-year-olds carrying Kalashnikovs. I really hope that they’re not loaded. There’s people singing the same songs that we heard in the chants in the mass protests that began in 2011. But back then, those protests were happening in these suburbs of Damascus, we were seeing them in suburbs of Aleppo, and it’s quite surreal to see these demonstrations now, these celebrations, I should say, and those same chants, but in the center of Damascus.
It’s easy to forget how much hope there was in 2011, and how violently that hope was extinguished. And remained extinguished for years. I want to talk about some of the reporting that you’ve been doing. One of the places that you’ve reported from is the Sednaya Prison. Tell us what that is and what you saw there.
Sednaya Prison is this huge complex on a hill just outside Damascus, and it is synonymous with fear for Syrians. We went with a lady that we’re working with here as a fixer and she just couldn’t believe that we were walking into Sednaya Prison, because this place was somewhere you didn’t even talk about, even if you had relatives detained, you did not talk about that to anybody. This was a place where anybody who was suspected of being with the opposition or being a rebel fighter or even a peaceful activist against the regime was disappeared into. And it’s estimated that, the real numbers are not yet clear, but as many as 20,000 people may have disappeared into these prisons. This is not a prison where you’re put on trial and jailed for a certain time. You’re taken by the regime, by one of its web of many intelligence agencies that operated across the country. And then your family doesn’t know where you are, doesn’t know where you’ve been taken even, and often has to pay huge sums of money, huge bribes to find out where you are. And these are sham trials, you might be sentenced in a trial that last five minutes and has no lawyer. And then people have disappeared. So we went there. We’ve been there twice. We went there just a couple of days after the regime fell. And it was extraordinary because it was empty of prisoners. They were released in the moments after the rebels reached Damascus. They shot open their locks on the cell doors and let everybody out. But now it’s full of family members of people who haven’t been found, of people who were there, and now they’re missing. And these families were desperately hoping that there might be some underground cells, some other wing of the prison that wasn’t known about where they might still be alive. But unfortunately, we’re now realizing that that’s not the case. And today we went back with somebody who’d been inside that prison. Incredibly brave guy to do that. He fled like everybody else, six days ago, seven days ago. And now he came back with us. He showed us around. He showed us his cell. He talked about being in solitary confinement. He took us down to this rancid room, one meter by two meters, where he was kept for days with no light, alone. It was absolutely terrifying. And then I said to him, people refer to this prison as ‘the slaughterhouse’. What does that mean? He said, no, no, no, the cells are upstairs. The slaughterhouse is on the first floor. I said, can you take us? And what he means by the slaughterhouse, what we’re starting to understand, is that it seems as though this prison was a factory for mass executions. So we interviewed three prisoners today, after speaking to this guy, we met two other Sednaya prisoners, and they all had remarkably similar accounts. And the picture they paint is terrifying. It’s every Saturday, prisoners names being called, those prisoners being put into cells starved of food and water for three days, beaten into submission on the last day in front of other prisoners and then taken down. None of the people we spoke to witnessed executions, but they all heard exactly the same sounds. And they concluded that maybe they were hung. And they heard the table being pulled out from underneath them in the moment that they were killed, they were hung by a noose on a table and these tables were ripped away. Anyway, we don’t know that for sure, but we do know that many, many people died there. And there’s still a lot more news to come out about what truly happened there.
You also had this fascinating dispatch for NPR about an American who was found wandering around barefoot on the streets of Damascus who had also been imprisoned. Tell us about that.
Yeah, these are the surreal scenes that you get just after a regime collapses. Someone posted on social media a video with this person lying under a blanket resting that is clearly foreign. And this guy says in the video, we have someone who says they’re American. Basically, it was a broadcast for help, like we don’t know what to do. He named the area in Damascus. We rushed there and we ended up meeting some of the guys who found him. And it was surreal. They described this American guy walking down the street barefoot. They gave him food. They gave him water. And then Mouaz Moustafa from the Syrian Emergency Task Force aid group actually got there before us, that’s an American aid group, and they ended up taking care of him. And with the help of HTS, the new leadership here, who was extremely collaborative, took him back to the foreign ministry. And today he’s been handed over to the U.S. military so he can go home. He said that he came to Syria on a pilgrimage, that he’s a Christian and that he walked from Lebanon across the border to Damascus, where he was detained by the regime and held in a prison for seven months. And he was freed with the others when the rebels came and let everybody out of the prisons. His mom, my colleague at NPR reached out to his mom in Missouri who called his return ‘a Christmas miracle’.
Let’s go back to the start of the conflict. Protests broke out against Assad’s government in 2011, and he responded with this brutal crackdown that escalated into a civil war. You reported on this at the time. What did you see on the ground there? When did you go to Syria and what were you covering?
I’ve been to Syria on multiple occasions in many different ways. One of the first couple of times I was going in on a tourist visa, I actually have an Italian passport and the regime didn’t see the Italians as a threat. So I went in with a British friend who’s a theater director and has nothing to do with journalism. And she has British passport, and they obsessively interrogated her for hours at the border. But she was a good decoy. Because she was just a theater director.
We went in and that allowed me to sneak off with some insanely brave activists, who really were risking their lives and awful torture if they were caught, to take me to Douma, the suburb of Damascus, where there were protests against the regime unfolding. So I watched with my own eyes as these people came out in the streets, unveiled the rebel opposition flag, and then gunfire would start. Soldiers would start firing on multiple occasions. In one occasion in Mezzeh in Damascus, there’s a huge protest, hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And when the soldiers started firing, we all ran. And an incredibly brave woman took me by the hand and brought me to her apartment. And it was terrifying. The soldiers were chasing us. And had they found a foreign journalist, I don’t know what would have happened to me, but it would have certainly been awful for the people I was with. So they hid me in their children’s room under a pile of cuddly toys. And the soldier banged on the door, and they opened it and they said, no, no, no, it’s just women here. And he poked his head into the kid’s room. And I was there but he didn’t see me, thankfully. And then the shooting started outside in the street. And it did feel like it was more targeted shooting, as if they were trying to actually hit the men that were left on the street. I then went into Syria on the rebel opposition side on many occasions through Turkey, smuggled across the border, running across an expanse of open land to meet with smugglers to the rebel side or hiking over the mountains into the Latakia province. There’s many occasions. Aleppo, Idlib. I spent time with Ahrar al-Sham, which is one of the groups that later merged to become parts of HTS, Tahrir al-Sham, which is the group that now controls Damascus and Syria, well much of Syria anyways. Because it’s not that simple, as you know.
When you first traveled to Syria, how dangerous was it for journalists?
There have been occasions where it’s been extremely, extremely dangerous. The risk of kidnap is very high. My now-husband was kidnapped in Syria for ten days, it was hell on earth. He managed to escape which was incredible. That was near Damascus, crossing the border from Lebanon. I’ve had several narrow escapes with kidnapping. On one occasion, we were in Yabrud, which is a town on the outskirts of Damascus. And we were in a hospital interviewing some patients who’d been wounded in a car bomb. This was an opposition-held town, and the guys that were showing us around were peace activists, and they really wanted us there. But there were some quite hardline Islamists there. It was the early days of ISIS, and we were in this hospital and the doctors had a rule, no weapons in the hospital. But these Moroccan guys came in with big beards and big arms. And they just looked at us with so much hatred. And one of our fixers overheard them talking about basically wanting to take us. So he grabbed my colleague, Sam Terling, the photographer, and I mid-interview, just grabbed us, pushed us as fast as he could out of the hospital, threw us into the car, took us to a friend’s house and put us in the attic of his friend’s house, went to change the car and then moved us to three different locations and then got us out the next day. But that’s because the risk was really very high. Also, airstrikes. I remember being in Aleppo when the regime and Russia were bombarding, Russia was hitting that city with airstrikes. The regime was dropping barrel bombs, these barrels full of TNT that would make these huge explosions, dropped from helicopters completely random. You can’t precisely target with a barrel bomb. And I remember lying in this person’s house at night thinking, God, we just have to hope that we’re not going to get hit. So, yeah, it has been dicey. And of course, many journalists, unfortunately, have died in this conflict. Many journalists that were killed by ISIS were friends and acquaintances of mine. We’ve lost lots of colleagues in this war. And Marie Colvin was a close friend of mine who worked for The Sunday Times. She died in Baba Amr in Homs. And we now know that the Syrian regime was targeting her position. This was an intentional murder. Jim Foley, Peter Kassig, the list just goes on of journalists that have been killed brutally.
Do you feel safe there now? What’s the sense like for reporters on the ground?
It’s so hard to tell right now. Right now, it does feel safe. NPR encourages to move with security advisors. But so far, everyone has been incredibly welcoming. And you go into HTS government buildings, this Islamist group, but they really are trying to show that they’re changing their stripes. And it’s quite incredible the access we get. Wherever we go, they’ve been quite organized, they’ve given us all press cards, and those press cards work. I’ve been getting into Bashar al Assad’s presidential palace. Yesterday, I went to Branch 85 at the state security prison. Incredible scenes in prisons with amazing drawings on them made by prisoners and rooms full of files, documents, important documents. And at the moment, people are welcoming and friendly wherever we go. But we know that these are very, very early days. And let’s not kid ourselves that it was like this in Libya to some extent in the early days after the fall of Gadhafi, there were these moments of heady excitement and joy and hope. And I really hope that this is different. I really hope that this brings something better for Syrians. But I really feel the need to reserve judgment because I don’t think we know at this point how it’s going to go.
That is the big question now: what happens next for Syria. How would you describe this loose coalition of groups that led the toppling of Assad?
Good question with a complicated answer. There are many, many different factions here. The people who took Damascus are rebels who came up from Daraa, in southern Syria, from Homs, from Hama. Mostly, this all began in Idlib, in this province on the border with Turkey. And undoubtedly, Turkey has a major sway over lots of these groups. The chief organization here is this group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. They were born out of groups that had links with Al Qaida. Julani, the head of HTS, was himself affiliated with Al Qaida. But they’ve since worked quite hard to disavow those links. And what’s quite interesting is you can say, sure, they would say that. They would say they don’t hold these beliefs anymore. But there is some evidence here. If you look at how they ran Idlib, this province with a major city in it, for the last few years, they’ve controlled this area. And in that time, they have tried to reach out to minority groups, communities like villages and towns that have Shia, Alawites in them, that’s another minority sect, and they have tried to build bridges with these groups in the years leading up to this offensive. This was a long-planned offensive and they have become more disciplined. They trained, they developed themselves, their weapons, their fighting skills and also their diplomacy. And they were very smart with how they did it. They took Aleppo and they were very clear that Christians should continue to be able to pray. They’re trying to strike all these different deals. The question is, how long can they hold this together? And because there is a plethora of different factions and we’re already seeing the push and pull. Julani, the leader, he’s been saying there shouldn’t be vengeance, there shouldn’t be sectarian killings. But there has been some incidences of sectarian killings and revenge killings around the country. And now already he’s facing resistance from different factions of these rebels, with some saying, are you kidding me? Are we going to let these guys, these people who imprisoned us, killed us, terrorized us for two decades, are we really letting them off scot-free? And so then they put out another statement, HTS put out another statement saying, no, no, no, those who are responsible for war crimes will be punished. And they’re trying to toe this line between saying what many Syrians want to hear, because people want peace, and what the West wants to hear, and what people here who’ve suffered, who want revenge want to hear. And it’s a really difficult struggle. And it’s going to be tough to see whether they can do it. At the moment, HTS, the thing they really need is the US and other countries to remove them from the terrorism list. So they are doing everything they can to promote themselves in the right way.
I’ve been impressed by how diplomatic they are, how much their rhetoric has appealed to the West. Some statements I’ve seen sound like they were written by an HR manager. One of the HTS military commanders just did an interview with The Economist where he had a meeting with Alawites in Latakia. And he promised that they would be safe, that they would be treated well. I’m seeing Christmas trees being put up in cities like Aleppo and Homs, which as someone with Syrian Christian roots, I found quite heartening after years of watching the country on fire. When you talk to Syrians on the ground, are they optimistic about the future of the country and about it maintaining some sort of national cohesion? Are they scared about what’s next? Or are they just still in this period of jubilation because Assad, who has terrorized the country for years now, has fallen?
It’s so interesting. Today we were in a suburb of Damascus interviewing these Sednaya prisoners. And we sat and we had lunch with a family. And they are a moderate Sunni Muslim family. And they were saying that they want what they described as a secular state. They want a way for all communities to live here. And they said, Syrians across the board have lost so much, we cannot cope with the idea of another war. We do not want some kind of conflict for Sunni Muslim supremacy in Syria. But having said that, they were very optimistic about HTS, and they want HTS to come to that part of Damascus, because at the moment that part of Damascus is not controlled HTS, it’s controlled by another faction. And the problem with that is that they are not disciplined. And we heard that today. Constant gunfire, just constant. It’s terrifying. Those bullets come down, they kill people. And this place is full of children. It’s the suburbs, there’s loads of families. And they were saying, we just can’t wait for HTS to come here because they are disciplined. They’re telling people not to fire in the air. We want some kind of order. And for now, HTS is succeeding in promoting that idea of bringing order. However, on the flipside I should say, when we came into Syria, there was much more traffic going out than coming in from Lebanon. And we went and interviewed people in that long queue and they were mostly Shia and Alawis and they were terrified. They had families with their kids about two, three years old who’d slept in the dirt on the dusty side of the road by the border because they were so afraid. They just wanted to get out. They didn’t have any money, don’t know where they’re going to go, maybe a camp, but they just don’t feel safe. And we’re hearing from Lebanon of Alawis who are hiding out in apartments now, overcrowded apartments, and they’re getting news on Facebook of sectarian killings. And a lot of these are not necessarily confirmed. Some of them have been proven to be not true. But there’s real terror. So HTS is going to have to work very hard and create so much discipline within its ranks and then get the rest of those rebel militias disciplined for this all to work.
Because historically in conflicts like this, when a leader is toppled, particularly one, like Assad, who belongs to a minority group in Syria, there’s fear of sectarian violence targeted at the group the leader belonged to.
Yeah. And in the earlier days of this war, I had terrible interviews with people who said there were sectarian killings on both sides. And I remember one interview I did in this village, al Houla, where this guy was talking to me while hiding behind a rock. And his whole family had just been murdered, like slaughtered with knives in his house. And he was hiding, so afraid, he didn’t have anywhere to go. And he thought these guys were still hunting around, looking for him. And sectarian killings like that happened on both sides. Alawite villages suffered this, Sunni villages suffered this. There is a history here of this happening. And then historically in the country, if my memory serves me well, before the Assad regime ruled and the Alawite minority, the Assad sort of funneled them into the military, gave them jobs in the military, they tend to take up senior positions in the army, which further fueled the sectarian violence. But before that, Alawites were kind of subjugated in Syria by the Sunni majority. So there’s such a long history here of violence and pressure and tension between these communities. But there’s also now a real desire for this to work. People really, really, really want this to work and they want this war to end. They want to be able to live their lives. And I was reading the other day, somebody said, we shouldn’t be so negative just because we’re informed by the revolutions of 2011 and how they went, other revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya. Just because they essentially failed, let Syrians have this moment. Like you said, it was 54 years of dictatorship. It’s way too early to say, this is going to be a huge failure. But equally, we just have to see how this goes, because although they’ve been really impressive, they’ve secured government buildings here in a way the rebels never did in Tripoli. They’ve kept civil servants from the government from the Assad regime time, they’ve kept senior politicians from that time. They’re trying to have an ordered transition. And like you said earlier, the city fell almost without a fight. So all of that puts them in a much better position than any other country that has had a revolution in recent times has been. So we just have to hope that it goes somewhere more positive.
Obviously part of Assad’s appeal and his ability to hold a grip on at least Damascus over the last ten years has been based on instilling fear in the Alawite minority that if he were gone, no one would protect them. So they’re going to have to do a lot of work to convince these groups that they’re going to be safe in a new Syria.
The piece that most angered the Syrian regime, that had regime officials threatening to kill me, imprison me, was a piece I did for The Daily Telegraph when I worked for them about how Alawites have suffered maybe, at that time, more than any other group in Syria, because the Syrian regime funnels them to the front lines. It thought it could trust Alawites more than Sunnis, so it appointed them in frontline positions. So you go to these villages in Latakia, that’s what I’m planning to do in the coming days, you go to these villages and every door was, at least when I did this piece, marked with an X, a black X, because it’s like a village of women. The men have been killed. Proportionally, the number of people that have been killed fighting is incredibly high among the Alawite community. And so we are also seeing really big, pro-opposition celebrations in Latakia now as well. So whilst, yes, the regime cultivated this idea that everybody would kill the Alawites, there’s also the flipside here that they suffered, too. So maybe they’re open to something new as well.
I want to talk about how a reporting trip like this happens. Were you in Beirut when you got word that you would be traveling to Syria to cover this?
No. We recently relocated to Rome. I have three small children, a ten-month-old, a two-year-old and a five-year-old. And we left Lebanon last year. We relocated somewhere safer for them. And so we were about to go to Turkey. I had worked incredibly hard to try to get access across the Turkish border. And it was Moustafa, who I mentioned earlier from the Syrian Emergency Task Force, he has connections there and was lobbying the Turkish government to get us across. So on Sunday, I was due to fly to Turkey to then wait it out to try to get across the border because Aleppo had fallen, Hama had fallen, but Damascus as of Saturday, we didn’t know that the regime would no longer have a presence on the border with Lebanon. So we were going to Turkey. And then I woke up that morning to find that Damascus was falling and it was open. So we really immediately just switched and said, let’s go to Beirut. So I booked the first flight. That was hard. There was a lot of people booking flights. I booked four flights, I waitlisted myself on four flights. And then luckily one came through. I had two hours to pack. It’s hard when you have small children. That’s a whole other conversation about foreign correspondending and small children. It changes this whole situation, you have to handle childcare. It’s really tough. But we got there, to Beirut. I was ready to just storm across the border the next morning. Monday morning, I got there Sunday evening. But NPR has security procedures and I understand why.
Saved you in the hospital that one time, the fixer.
Well, I didn’t have a security adviser on that. It was just our fixer who was worth his weight in gold.
Yeah, seriously.
Which is another thing about foreign correspondent-ing, you really are only as good as your fixer as a foreign correspondent. But we got there. We had to organize bulletproof jackets, make sure we had enough for the driver, for our fixer, for our producer, for me, there’s a bunch of protocols you have to follow. Then we had to wait for the security guy to arrive the next morning. He did, at 6:30 on Tuesday morning, he landed. So we picked him up and woke up to the news that Israel had intensely bombarded the border areas a little further south of us and may have come within a few kilometers of the Damascus-Beirut Highway, and we understood that there were Humvees, Israeli Humvees in that area. It suddenly seemed as though it wasn’t possible to go, and our drivers from Damascus canceled. So they said we’re not coming to the Lebanese border today. So we all go up to the border and check it out. By the time we got to the border, it transpired that the Israelis actually were in a bit of a different area and that it was safe to go. So my driver on the road knew someone else who was willing to come pick us up from the border. And it was extraordinary, we just crossed, and it was very weird. Imagine getting into a country but there is no border control. The passport office was empty on the Syrian side. The customs office was empty on the Syrian side. There were a couple of rebels with guns and they just sort of waved at us. And then we just drove into Damascus and there were tanks, discarded soldiers uniforms, that kind of scene. And the thing you really notice is the air. It was awful. The air is so that you feel that you’re smoking 40 a day here because the intensity of the Israeli bombardment. All around the city it has created this thick, smoggy dust. You just don’t think about what you’re breathing.
I want to get a sense of what the day-to-day is like for a reporter on the ground there. So when you wake up, depending on what story you’re going after that day, what does a day look like?
It’s so fluid at the moment because it’s such an insane plethora of stories. The first challenge is deciding what to do, because I do dig into the past of this awful regime, like documents at Sednaya Prison, or any of the other intelligence branches, or the fact that it was a narco-state, there was drug smuggling. I have a colleague who found a Captagon factory. Or do you focus on agents in the formation of the new government or the protests or the demonstrations or go to the destroyed suburbs of Damascus or head out elsewhere? So the first step is deciding what you’re going to do. And our days are so varied, but they are extremely long. We’re starting at like six, seven in the morning. I’ve been here four days. It feels like I’ve been here forever.
Are all the reporters staying in the same hotel, or are you spread out?
We are spread out, but there’s a few main ones. A lot of the networks that have security advisers want us to be in this one district of Damascus because it has easy escape routes. If things go wrong, there’s two highways that get you out of the capital. So because of that, a lot of the networks are in this hotel and then another one down the road. But then you have reporters scattered across the city. You have others in the old Christian quarters, which are much more beautiful, I have to say. But it’s a beautiful city. It’s just intense days. Yesterday, between filing, you’re trying to balance reporting and then carving out the time to actually get the piece on-air, pitching it, and doing it. So it’s not a great answer. It’s just that every single day is so varied and frantic. The first day we got here, we drove to pick up our fixer who we’d never met before. This is someone that was arranged really in the airport, as I was trying to travel. We met her, got to know her in the car on the way to Sednaya Prison to interview people in prison and their families. But that was the day we crossed from Lebanon. We crossed from Lebanon, went straight to pick up our fixer, went to Sednaya Prison. So we’d already had a long day by that point, interviewed everybody, got back to the hotel, and then turned the piece. And then the next day, you’re going out and going to Umayyad Square, and meeting all these people who are celebrating the situation. We went to the palace belonging to Bashar al-Assad, and saw the opulence in which he lived in. So it’s just about deciding what your priorities are and where to go.
Are the restaurants open? Can you eat out?
We don’t really have the time, to be honest. I’ve been going to bed at 3 a.m. every night, and waking up at seven. So I’m operating on about four hours of sleep.
I hope NPR is aware of how hard you’re working out there.
It’s not just me. This is normal. This is just the way it is on these kind of stories. And so in terms of restaurants, thank goodness, after the first day, the hotel here opened its restaurant. So there’s food in the hotel. So we grab something whilst we’re scripting. But yeah, I would love to get to another hotel. The best thing about this is that it’s a huge reunion. This morning, I bumped into a guy I haven’t seen in ten years. And the last time I saw him, we were in Libya together on a story, and there was a MIC 42 fighter plane, one of these old Russian planes flying in to drop a bomb kind of where we were. And we pegged there was a bunch of rebels on the frontline in the desert. And we ran into the desert as fast as we could, as far away from the crowd of people in the massive petrol tanker that was also there. And we just ran into the sand, hit the dune, and this guy turns to me and goes, I don’t get paid enough to do this.
So last question. What are you looking to do next? What’s the next story in Syria for you, short-term or long-term? What’s on the docket?
The next thing we’re trying to do is get to Latakia. You mentioned The Economist piece. I do think it’s really important to go there. And I should say, I’m working in a team. We have a big team here. So we have the luxury of covering the news, but also covering features. So we have a correspondent that’s going to go up to Aleppo, which is really important, Syria’s second city. We have correspondents traveling to all different areas. So we have the luxury now to go and talk to Alawites, as you were saying, about how Syria could work for them in the future. And I want to go and meet these women that I reported on for that other piece. I did that remotely because access wasn’t possible. And I want to go and meet these families and talk to them about how they’ve experienced this war, because actually we haven’t heard their stories because it was so hard for Western media to speak honestly with people in regime-held Syria. You could have been detained for speaking to Western media and phones were tapped. So you couldn’t really talk to anyone on the phone. The regime wasn’t giving you visas. So these are, to me, the unheard stories of the Syrian war. I want to go and build a record of what they went through and also look at what their future might look like now.