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The Syria Campaign
We are The Syria Campaign.
We are a growing a movement for Syria built to capture the attention of the public and demand more from our global leaders in government, institutions and the media. We are focussed on campaigns that deliver real impact for Syrians in the country, and around the world. We’re demanding more money – billions more – from the world’s governments for those who need it. We’re pushing to make sure that displaced Syrians get access to the health, education and resources they need. We’re pushing to ban indiscriminate weapons that kill and injure civilians and calling for punishment for those who use them. We’re demanding that the rich countries of the world resettle a fair share of the 3 million Syrians displaced by the conflict. We’ll rally the world’s support behind Syrians solving the problems of the conflict by running hospitals under siege or rescuing non-combatants from the rubble. We’re ending the looting of Syrian artifacts by banning the trade in antiquities. We’re building a massive global constituency so when the time comes, we have the power to get all the parties to the negotiating table and find a way forward for a free and peaceful future for Syria.
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After chemical attack Syria loses attention
A year ago the world was outraged as news of an alleged chemical attack in a Damascus suburb on 21 August 2013 reached the public, and footage of dead and injured Syrians flooded the internet. The UN later confirmed everyone’s worst fears and verified that chemical weapons had been used. At least 500 people were reported to have been killed in the attack, with estimates reaching as high as 1,500 victims.
To US President Obama, this had crossed the line. The public and media outlets felt similarly, with media attention of the Syrian crisis reaching a record high.
Was this political, media and public interest sustained over the ensuing months? Unfortunately not.
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Syrian Refugees Trying to Save Each Other
Mohamad drives with one hand, squinting at the afternoon sun as his phone rings for the fifth time in the past half an hour. The lanky 25-year-old Syrian shrugs the mobile to his ear with one shoulder, scribbling numbers on a Post-it as he repeats them out loud: “$1,000 to Tripoli; $200 to Hiba’s family; $300 to Umm Hanan; $10,000 for the operation.”
We’re in eastern Lebanon, a 90-minute drive from Beirut, a one-hour drive from Damascus, and just five minutes from the Syrian border. Sun beats through the windshield as we thread through the Bekaa Valley, an area known for its poverty, high crime rates, sectarian tensions, and, since 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. I watch Mohamad count out $10,000 in cash.
“It’s for an open-heart surgery,” he tells me. “It took us three months to raise $14,500 for this kid. The operation is tomorrow. Alhamdulillah.”
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Anti-Arab sentiment on the rise in Turkey
On Aug. 18, Gaziantep, a southeastern industrial city close to the Syrian border, was in a state of panic over a rumor that Syrians had poisoned the drinking water. Last month in Gaziantep and other border towns, protests were staged under the banner “We Do Not Want the Syrians.” The protests led to clashes with the police, physical assaults and vandalism against Syrian-owned businesses. Among the slogans heard were “Tayyip resign,” “City residents do not sleep, retake your city” and “We are the people of this town.” The media is full of sad stories about desperate Syrian, Iraqi and Yazidi refugees, but there is almost no coverage of mounting anti-immigrant sentiment or the increasing frequency of violence against immigrants.
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How is the IS different from other groups?
Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution and Steven Simon of the Middle East Institute join Judy Woodruff to discuss the threat the Islamic State poses and how they’re recruiting members, including westerners.
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Media Caught Between Extremes In Mideast
Since the 2011 Arab uprisings, there has been little doubt that enhanced access to information and news contributed to political and social activism, pushing the boundaries of free speech, even for a short period of time, to beyond anything that had been seen regionally.
Today, however, there has been a regression in media growth and censorship shows little signs of receding. Media and free speech in the Middle East today are caught between two extremes: radical extremists and government crackdown.
Free speech and journalism are vital tools to inform the public and hold governments accountable. It gives citizens a medium to ask for their rights. When they feel threatened, dictators and extremists take away freedom of speech because it’s the platform to ask for all other rights like access to information, justice, rule of law and better economic conditions.
When ISIS extremists took over the town of Raqqa last year in northern Syria one of the first things they announced was that any political opposition to ISIS was banned.
Media and freedom of speech are inevitably intertwined.
Indeed, momentum for political reform was catalyzed by the regional uprisings in 2011 but for the most part it produced a reactionary crackdown on media freedom, with a particular focus on the Internet.
Since 2011, Egypt, Libya, Iraq and Syria witnessed Internet shut downs. In Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain bloggers were arrested.
One of the reasons some youths in the region took to the streets across the region three years ago was because their economic and political systems were no longer tolerable. Today, answers to these demands have stalled, if not regressed. They will not go away either.
As a member of Leaders of Tomorrow, a youth led organization based in Jordan, I have seen over 400 people gather earlier this year in the historical city of Petra to debate local politics. One year ago, over 1000 people from all walks of life gathered in downtown to discuss press and publications laws.
Political development is an element of stability but in the short term it is on the sliding scale of US interests. It seems the international community is even willing to see development and reform — including media reform — in the Middle East repressed if they believe states like Egypt are going to produce short-term stability.
Despite Egypt’s crackdown on journalists, civil society organizations and the Muslim Brotherhood, US Secretary of State John Kerry voiced strong support for Egypt’s new president and signaled that the US administration would continue with the flow of military aid.
Still, since 2011, utilizing social networking sites as venues to have debates on social issues, and to influence public opinion pushed the boundaries of free speech beyond anything seen so far. In the past years, mainstream news outlets in the region continued to steer away from serious political scrutiny, the task was left to the burgeoning social media sector where the boundaries between news, comment, and activism had been dismantled.
In early 2011, in Jordan, there were successful digital campaigns on environmental and social issues, including an online petition in 2011 to save over 2,000 trees, marked for felling to make way for a new military academy. The campaign achieved a postponement of the project. In doing so, it became a symbol of the empowering potential of digital activism, especially when combined with offline initiatives and actions.
Digitization has made it difficult for governing regimes to prevent Arabs from seeking stories and news content about their community and country from social media and online news. By using Facebook to interact and join groups, Twitter to join debates and find links and having access to Internet sites across the world, it is now nearly impossible to prevent them from gathering news and information.
But digital divides and censorship remain significant obstacles to building outreach and awareness. The spread of social media as a key vehicle for information sharing has also meant that certain communities off the grid have been excluded from the benefits of technological media.
In June 2013, the government in Jordan blocked access to more than 250 news websites under new legislation causing local protests. What seems clear is that since 2011, media reform in the region has become embedded in the wider struggle for political change.
Self-censorship may also be spreading among citizen journalists, bloggers and online reporters. During a recent press conference to announce the cancellation of his comedy show, Bassem Youssef, Egypt’s satirist declared: “The Program doesn’t have a space. It’s not allowed.”
Today many citizens in the region are also looking around and see failed uprisings filled with sectarian bloodshed. They seek stability and safety; emboldened governments are passing restrictive press legislation and the underlying grievances that spurred the 2011 uprisings are buried yet once again.
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Battle for Baghdad
In early June, Abbas Saddam, a private soldier from a Shia district in Baghdad serving in the 11th Division of the Iraqi army, was transferred from Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province in western Iraq, to Mosul in the north. The fighting started not long after he got there. But on the morning of 10 June the commanding officer told his men to stop shooting, hand over their rifles to the insurgents, take off their uniforms and get out of the city. Before they could obey, their barracks were invaded by a crowd of civilians. ‘They threw stones at us,’ Abbas recalled, ‘and shouted: “We don’t want you in our city! You are Maliki’s sons! You are the sons of mutta! You are Safavids! You are the army of Iran!”’
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Refugee Camp in Jordan: a Do-It-Yourself City
ZAATARI REFUGEE CAMP, Jordan — A young Syrian salesman stopped into Ahmad Bidawi’s barbershop for a shave the other day. Music wafted on fan-cooled air. Outside, on what has become the main commercial strip here in one of the world’s largest refugee camps, workers steered handcarts packed with lumber and kitchen appliances through sunbaked crowds hanging out in front of shops.
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The Ghosts of Iraq
On a morning in late April 2013, Peter Gelling, the Middle East and Africa editor at GlobalPost, arrived at his office on the Boston waterfront to find a story filed by one of his reporters, Tracey Shelton. She was one of the few international reporters then working inside Syria. She had just been to Sheik Maqsoud, a neighborhood on the northern edge of Aleppo. Her emailed file reported that the area had been struck by chemical weapons, possibly sarin gas, two weeks earlier.
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Why So Many Failed Protest Movements?
We’re in the middle of a revolution caused by the … collapse of free market capitalism … an upswing in technical innovation, a surge in … individual freedom and a change … about what freedom means,” avers British journalist Paul Mason, the author of Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere.
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Baghdad Is a Setting, and a Character, Too
ON an evening just a few days before his novel would win a top Arabic literary prize, Ahmed Saadawi was relaxing with his writer friends at a Baghdad cafe, a place so special to him that he had written it into his book.
About an hour after he left, a suicide bomber struck, wounding several of his friends and killing some others. It was a common enough experience for Mr. Saadawi — as it is for anyone who has lived for the last decade in Baghdad, where the simple matter of timing can determine who lives and who dies.
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Lebanon on the brink
Political gridlock, economic torpor and the machinations of pro-Syrian Hizbollah – the non-state regional superpower – have once more pushed the crossroads of the Middle East to the edge of collapse
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Artists at war: inside PLO’s info department
The Palestinian Revolution was fought with posters and films as well as rocks and bullets. As a new exhibition opens, Nicholas Blincoe looks at the work of the PLO’s information department
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Back to square one for Egypt’s media?
In the sprawling desert west of Cairo, a huge complex of studios for the Arab world’s largest media market beams content to NileSat, the Egyptian state-owned satellite provider. Despite the size of the market and all the strata of its consumers, not to mention the dynamism of uprisings that have unseated two presidents, the structure and nature of Egypt’s media landscape remains fairly unchanged compared to three years ago.
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Girl Scouts & A Safeway Store in Refugee Camp
“On a sunny afternoon in the dusty, overcrowded Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, a group of Syrian girls recites a familiar pledge and hope to change their future. The youngsters promise to serve God and country, to help people at all times and live by the laws of the Girl Scouts.”
Listen to this NPR radio report by Deborah Amos.
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Yehia Ghanem: From Cage To Exile
Yehia Ghanem, one of Egypt’s most respected journalists, is living in exile in New York, separated from his family and uncertain of his future. If he returns to Egypt, he faces two years of hard labor in prison after a sham trial that convicted several dozen Egyptians with connections to international NGO’s of illegally taking money from foreigners. A Dart Center exclusive.
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Syria’s uprising within an uprising
It was bound to happen, this uprising within an uprising against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a transnational ultraconservative Islamist group that ostensibly fights alongside Syria’s disparate rebel groups but more often intimidates, antagonises, or opposes most of them, including other conservative Islamists.
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The enlightened king of Iraq
Faisal I was humane, far-sighted, distinguished — and rather dishy, shows Ali A. Allawi in his hefty if loosely-written biography.
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WikiLeaks and the Espionage Act of 1917
Can Congress make it a crime for journalists to publish classified information? A thorough article by Emily Peterson on threats that face journalists and their industry for the use of classified documents published by whistleblowers.
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Covert Drone War
In this investigation, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism tracks CIA drone strikes and other US covert actions in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Browse through stories on operations, analysis of drone use, complete data sets and more.
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LOST
In this Internews published story, award-winning foreign correspondent Janine di Giovanni travelled to Lebanon where she found that one of the most urgent needs of refugees is information.
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Road to Raqqa
“ON BOTH sides of the fragile border that divides Syria and Iraq runs Al-Hamad, the great Syrian desert, a large semi-arid plain. It runs from the outskirts of Baghdad through the Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Ramadi into Syria, where it proceeds beneath the historical territory of the Kurds to the Syrian cities of Deir ez Zur and Raqqa. Across the desert, and along the Euphrates river, run pipelines that draw gas and oil from the depths to the cities that ring it. Otherwise the desert is quiet, and empty.”
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Not Losing the Arab Awakening
“Looking back to the “first” Arab Awakening, which began in the mid-19th century, can be illuminating. That awakening took the form of an intellectual revolution in which a wide array of Arab thinkers started questioning the control of distant Ottoman despots over their nations and criticizing their own limited contact with the outside world. Their calls for intellectual, economic, and political change laid the groundwork for a new Arab world, eventually resulting in a wave of independence struggles in the 1940s and 1950s.”
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Half a Billion Clicks Can’t be Wrong
“It is important to note two critical things about this ranking. The first is that it focuses on change in coverage of conflict, not the raw volume of that coverage itself. It is obviously not news that Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria are all still undergoing intense conflict — the policymaking question is whether they are getting any better (at least in the eyes of the news media). Thus, Syria, which ranks No. 2 out of all countries in terms of total raw volume of conflict, actually had the greatest decrease in coverage of that conflict in 2013 (despite a major chemical weapons attack in August 2013) and thus is green in the map above. The second thing to keep in mind is that this ranking combines all forms of conflict, both domestic and foreign. France’s significant increase in conflict comes from a combination of domestic strife from increasing immigrant unrest, anti-Semitism, class wars, and societal fractionalization — but also its foreign military interventions in Africa, from Mali to Central African Republic.”
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The Arab world into the unknown
In this piece, Peter Harling and Sarah Birke reflect on the state of the Arab world after a confounding 2013 that saw, for many, the dissipation of the enthusiasm of the 2011 uprisings. Harling is Senior MENA advisor at the International Crisis Group; Birke is a Middle East Correspondent for The Economist.
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