In this five part series, BBC World incorporates animation to tell the story of a group of Syrian teenagers who decided to resist when the so-called Islamic State group took control of their city. They became citizen journalists and used the internet to show the reality of life in Raqqa. They are the founders of the page "Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently".
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More than twenty days had passed since the start of their long journey to Europe, but not one went by without Somar and his sisters daydreaming about their parents following them to Germany. This was well before they made it there themselves.
Their failure to mobilize international support (through the Edirne demonstration, read Part II) to grant them safe and legal entry to Europe had accentuated their nostalgia for home. A frustrated and overburdened Somar began attaching a degree of legitimacy to the idea of getting smuggled.
The investigator in Syria had made the drive perhaps a hundred times, always in the same battered truck, never with any cargo. It was forty miles to the border, through eleven rebel checkpoints, where the soldiers had come to think of him as a local, a lawyer whose wartime misfortunes included a commute on their section of the road. Sometimes he brought them snacks or water, and he made sure to thank them for protecting civilians like himself. Now, on a summer afternoon, he loaded the truck with more than a hundred thousand captured Syrian government documents, which had been buried in pits and hidden in caves and abandoned homes.
He set out at sunset. To the fighters manning the checkpoints, it was as if he were invisible. Three reconnaissance vehicles had driven ahead, and one confirmed by radio what the investigator hoped to hear: no new checkpoints. Typically, the border was sealed, but soldiers from the neighboring country waved him through. He drove until he reached a Western embassy, where he dropped off the cargo for secure transfer to Chris Engels, an American lawyer. Engels expected the papers to include evidence linking high-level Syrian officials to mass atrocities. After a decade spent training international criminal-justice practitioners in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Cambodia, Engels now leads the regime-crimes unit of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, an independent investigative body founded in 2012, in response to the Syrian war.
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