In the Summer of 2012 she squeezed through a gap in the fence on the Turkish border and found herself back in her homeland. This was the first of several dangerous clandestine trips to the North of the country, where she set about documenting the struggle of men, women and children simply trying to stay alive.

Weaving together stories of hardship and brutality with touches of humanity, her new book The Crossing is testimony to the appalling reality that is Syria today. She will be joining us in conversation with Syrian writer and broadcaster, Rana Kabbani, to share her observations and what she has heard from the Syrian people about their hopes and fears for the future.

Samar Yazbek studied Arabic literature before spending a decade as a journalist for various newspapers including Al-Hayat and presenting a cultural programme for Syrian television. In 2010, as a recognition of her fiction writing, the Hay Festival named her as one of the Beirut39, a group of Arab writers under the age of 40. Following the uprising against the Assad regime, Yazbek was forced into exile and now lives in Paris with her daughter.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

A compelling Frontline Club event on Wednesday 25 June showcased film and photographic work from across the globe that revealed both the depth of suffering and the strength of human spirit in some of the world’s most devastating internal conflicts.

Featured at the event was a series of photographs from Tim Freccia in South Sudan, Alvaro Ybarra Zavala in Venezuela, Eman Mohammed in Gaza and Daniel Berehulak in Afghanistan, curated by multimedia photojournalist and filmmaker John D McHugh.

The event culminated in a screening of Ground Zero Syria, a dramatic film by Robert King featuring unprecedented footage of the brutal conflict in Syria, and an impassioned interview with King by The Times journalist Anthony Loyd that offered some chilling conclusions about the future of the conflict.

Robert King and Anthony Loyd at the Frontline Club.

All of the showcased work shared a common theme: that of the determination of each journalist to bring to light the plight of people facing oppression or armed struggle in their home countries, and to reveal the characters of those individuals caught up in some of the world’s most dangerous conflicts.

Among Freccia’s work was a set of portraits of soldiers from the White Army, a ruthless militia group fighting alongside former Vice President Riek Machar in his campaign against the government of South Sudan.

In Freccia’s unique portraits, presented against a white background, he aimed to show through the expressions and postures of his subjects the “humanity present in these characters, for good or bad, which is often neglected”.

Zavala’s photographs were captured in Caracas and San Cristobal in February and March this year as the protests against Venezuela’s government escalated.

A picture of a woman slumped over the coffin of a lost loved one revealed the sacrifices made by the protestors, while another featured a combatant in plastic protective glasses making Molotov cocktails to take into the fray.

Mohammed took up photojournalism at the age of 19. In a narration of her photographs, she explained how she had to overcome cultural barriers to a woman pursuing such a career.

“I thought I had what it took to be a career photographer,” she said. “I was wrong. To gain acceptance in a male dominated field was next to impossible.”

Covering the war in Gaza in 2008-09 and under fire from aerial bomb attacks, the ground “shaking like a swing beneath us”, Mohammed was abandoned by the two male journalists with whom she was travelling. “Terrified, humiliated and feeling sorry for myself”, she learned a valuable lesson.

Mohammed‘s career has been characterised by a constant tension between capturing her own agony and that of others:

“You can freeze, but your camera cannot. If you don’t document history, it never happened.”

Her work included touching portraits of Mohamed Hodr, who along with 22 members of his family lived for several years beneath the rubble of what was once his home.

The only surviving remnant of what was to be a retirement retreat was a jacuzzi, which he hauled up to the roof of his shattered home so that each morning he could give his children a bubble bath.

Berehulak’s work focused on the terrible impact that the rapidly rising use of heroin in Afghanistan is having on the local population. One in 10 urban households in the country has at least one drug user, and in rural areas heroin use is as high as 30 per cent.

A set of photographs of one hospital ward that was admitting 200 children a month for severe malnutrition featured pictures of young children so wrinkled with starvation that they looked more like the elderly than the newly born. At a year-and-a-half, Mohammed weighed just 10 pounds.

“Nearly every potential lifeline is strained or broken here,” said Berehulak in his narration. “Women are kept away from everyone except those in their immediate family.

“Farmers can’t grow crops because of mines, and doctors can’t get to children until the situation is already severe. Women can’t nourish their own children [because of the heroin use].”

At the country’s premier children’s hospital in Kabul, a five-year-old boy weighing just 20 pounds was being treated on a bench because the infusion line wouldn’t reach to a bed. The drug problem, said the director of demand reduction at the ministry of health, is a tsunami for his country.

Ground Zero Syria

Screened in the second half of the event, King’s film gave a unique insight into the fighters of the opposition Free Syrian Army (FSA) in their efforts to survive the brutal attacks of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

“For six to seven months we didn’t even think about picking up weapons,” said one.

“We started out with olive branches, but [in the end] the only option was to take up arms and put him [Assad] out of office.”

At a field hospital in Al-Qusayr, southwest of Homs near the border with Lebanon, a young boy looked forlornly up at the camera with a single streak of blood spilling from the corner of his mouth. Across the ward, another child’s guts were bursting through his sundered stomach.

“If I die when I help people it is good for me,” said a doctor at the hospital. “I’m a doctor, I must help people.”

At the Dar al-Shifa field hospital in Aleppo, Dr Osman, a physician at the hospital, explained how he had nightmares about amputating children’s limbs, but each day resisted the urge to return to normal life because there was no one else to help these people.

According to Osman, about 80 per cent of the patients at Dar al-Shifa are civilians. At the time of the interview, the hospital had already been bombed five times, with another 15 bombings nearby.

“The Syrian regime considers medical staff as a perfect target, as a military target,” he said.  “When you kill one doctor it is better than killing a thousand fighters.”

In November 2012, King was there when the hospital was hit yet again, but still hope was not vanquished.

“Dar al-Shifa is not a building, it’s not a machine; it’s people, it’s doctors, nurses,” said Osman, speaking amidst the rubble.

“We will continue. We will build this hospital again and we will work again.”

In one striking scene, Dr Abaman, a former veterinarian working as an assistant physician at the hospital, appealed directly to the camera, emotion cracking his voice:

“We have enough shown TV. Do something. Do something. We are suffering here alone.”

The film also featured the tragic burning of Aleppo’s market, a world heritage site and one of the world’s best-preserved souks.

King asked Ahmed Alhaji, who had witnessed the fire, to explain what he had seen.

“I saw a lot of things that make me cry,” he said. “I saw Assad destroy our history. My heart is broken, I was crying blood.”

Towards the end of the film, King asked an FSA fighter what he thought of the West’s Syria policy. The West’s inaction before – and even after – evidence came to light of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, he said, was a sign to Assad that:

“Whatever you want to do, go ahead and do it. You want to kill 100,000 people that’s okay; you want to drop 100,000 tonnes of bombs that’s fine. Chemical weapons? Just keep 20–30 per cent of them.”

Most of the characters featured in the film, said King, are now dead.

Beyond the obvious perils of filming during an almost constant artillery bombardment, King faced his own challenges in shooting the film, not least the very lack of engagement from the West and its media that was alluded to by the film’s characters.

“I had to reassess why I was risking my life to cover slaughter,” said King in the Q&A with Loyd.

“I’d been there for four months and had photographed 5,000 dead bodies and nobody cared. No one would buy my photographs, so I started shooting video.”

The politics within Syria were also a source of frustration for King. He saw a shipment of powdered milk he had helped facilitate first held up in customs and then less than welcomed by those who had been benefiting from the black market in the product.

Those people who had helped him gain access to the country started to try to influence his material and, when he refused, banned him from going back.

“In the first year I figured that their politics were holding up the medical needs of the community,” said King. “Then they wanted to control the message.”

Asked by members of the audience whether his work could be used to try the perpetrators of the violence, King expressed his frustration with the absence of a more effective international legal system:

“If there was an international court of law that could hold people accountable for their war crimes . . . but why give my stuff to some organisation that fantasises that it can prosecute people?”

Loyd and King agreed that the future for the country is bleak and the potential fallout dire.

“The war launched against Al Qaeda was one thing,” said Loyd, wearing a cast around his leg after sustaining gunshot injuries in the latest of many reporting trips to Syria.

“Now something far worse [Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS)] has taken up a huge block of the Middle East running almost to the Mediterranean, and the West is aghast as to how to deal with the situation.

“Syria has raised a huge question mark and nobody knows what to do.”

King is convinced that chemical weapons have been smuggled out of Syria and have already reached Western European capitals. Asked whether he was planning to go back to Syria, he said:

“I don’t have to go to Syria. It’s done. It’s here. It’s over. I’m going to sit and wait.”

Return to Homs follows two close friends and young revolutionaries as their beloved city is taken over by the army. Basset is a local football star, the goalkeeper for the Syrian national team who also became an iconic singer in the revolution, and Ossama is a media activist and pacifist.

The intimate portrait shows how they transform from peaceful protestors by August 2011 into rebel insurgents in August 2013 as Homs is turned into a bombed-out ghost town. The film directed by Talal Derki was previewed at the Frontline Club on Friday 13 June and a Q&A with producer Orwa Nyrabia via Skype followed.

Nyrabia started by explaining that he wanted to find the right production strategy and position the film in the right way from the start:

“For the way that really fits its nature . . . we [wanted] people to follow our protagonists and not only to watch from a distance, with the alienation of distance as they watch on the news. Syria today, it’s a far away world between al-Qaeda and some lunatic dictator. . . . [We were] trying to get the world to connect to our reality rather than only to the stereotyped media image.”

An audience member asked how the local people had been affected by the conflict in Syria and how it had radicalised them.

“The world media did not manage to accept the boring news of a peaceful revolution and really were calling on all the rebels for sexier news. . . . A lot of the media pressure that was taking place was being initiated towards Syria asking where is al-Qaeda because the news was boring. And in that sense what happened was disastrous because it was all about appropriation to al-Qaeda or whatever is a similar thing and it was all in supporting favour of Assad who claimed it was a sectarian revolt.”

“Syrians were left alone and we reach what happened yesterday and the day before in Iraq. We get the point where nobody wanted to give weapons to the Syrian opposition, the Free Syrian Army and any of its branches because the weapons might fall into the wrong hands. . . . When you stand aside and watch from afar . . . and try to count many Salafists are there and how many non-Salafists are there . . . today the wrong hands went for themselves and got the better weapons and now they will have their following because people need those weapons; . . . they will follow the people who have the weapons and who can arm people to protect themselves or to try to achieve whatever their schemes are or agenda is.”

Nyrabia said that he could understand why Basset was pushed so far away from his peaceful beginnings when pressured for such an extended amount of time:

“Of course after all this time in the siege, as much as any others in the siege he is definitely more radical than before. But who am I to judge someone, a human being . . . after all this pain . . . and really agonising experience. I am being radicalised in my European exile (or residency) so I cannot imagine how bad I would be if I was still in Syria.”

What about the role of Salafists in Syria? Another audience member asked.

“What’s happening now should be a big alarm to the world. This inaction, standing in silence saying lets leave them because we don’t understand al-Qaeda versus Assad. . . . There’s a total of 750 lines of subtitles in the film, something like 10,000 words. . . . Once in the film the word Salafist was mentioned. . . . It’s not a priority in the film, it’s a priority in the stereotype, in the prejudice. We had no Salafists until the end of the shooting of the film. . . . They were no more conservative or more radical but just our own local neighbourhood inhabitants. What’s been happening the past year to 18 months with a lot of anger from my side now is this major international investment in not doing anything and that is the best empowerment to both Assad and al-Qaeda.”

Return to Homs premiered as the opening film of the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam in November 2013; won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at Sundance Film Festival 2014 (among others) and will be released by Journeyman Pictures in Picturehouse Cinemas across the UK from Friday 27 June.
 

On Thursday 24 April, the Frontline Club welcomed a full house to a screening of Aleppo. Notes from the Dark. It was followed by an insightful Q&A with directors Michal Przedlacki and Wojciech Szumowski, which touched on the misrepresentation of the conflict in Western media and the possibility of a foreign peacekeeping intervention.

The unique and powerful film aims to document, in the words of Przedlacki, the “fate of ordinary people in extraordinary, dreadful times”, and gives voice to an assortment of Aleppo residents experiencing the daily hardships of life in a war zone.

Created from over 200 hours of footage, Aleppo. Notes from the Dark paints a complex and unique portrait of the Syrian people through a panorama of personal accounts, including those of a doctor at a makeshift field hospital and an Islamic cleric devoted to the pursuit of zakat (alms). Filmed over a period of 44 days, the film communicates the position of its subjects with regard to the state of the Syrian Revolution, their lives prior to the conflict and their expectations and hopes for the future of their homeland.

From left to right: Marta, Wojciech Szumowski andMichal Przedlacki

Humanitarian aid worker and photographer Przedlacki and filmmaker Szumowski commented on the film’s origins, born out of a mutual desire to provide evidence of the extensive bloodshed inflicted on the Syrian people:

“We decided to take the risk and go together to Aleppo. Not for news, not for three days, not for a week, but to stay there for two months in order to properly document and follow the fate of ordinary people. . . . We decided that we had to tell this story . . . there was too little information about Syria.”

An audience member questioned the lack of screen time dedicated to the narratives of Christian Syrians, Szumowski responded (with the help of a translator):

“We think that it would not be optimal to put Christians and Muslims in opposition, I think this is a mistake that we make in the West. Christians amount to 6% of Syrian society, and in the film we have shown the (positive) attitude of Muslims towards Christians. Both Muslims and Christians are Syrian citizens, and we would not like to divide them.”

A second audience member enquired as to whether the conflict in Syria had the potential to radicalise those involved, and the extent to which this would pose a threat to the West. Przedlacki responded:

“To understand why we have seen the influence of foreign extremists we need to understand the despair that Syria has faced, . . . the Syrians have a feeling that the world is letting them burn. . . . We are now ‘drinking the beer that we brewed ourselves’.”

The question of the West’s role in supporting a resolution to the conflict was likewise raised. Szumowski proposed the following:

“The first thing that the West can do is to tell an honest story. I have been following the information that has been in the media about Syria very closely, and I have the impression that there are some deformations of the real situation…. Placing terrorism in the headlines is already a sort of lie… and giving it precedence over everything else distorts the situation… So first it would be to tell the truth, and second it would be to use solidarity”

Przedlacki added:

“Our film is a protest against the ‘civilisation of indifference’. . . . Each one of us can do something. We made a film . . . some of you can write about the film, or can support Save the Children or a humanitarian organisation. . . . This is not some imaginary world. All of this has happened.”

Another audience member warmly thanked the filmmakers for bringing such a pressing situation to light, and enquired as to the extent of Russian involvement in the eyes of the opposition fighters. Szumowski recalled interactions with residents of the Syrian city:

“The people that we met in Aleppo kept talking about Russian mercenaries. . . . We heard tales that some of the aircrafts are being piloted by soldiers from North Korea. . . . It is almost as if the war is not between Syrians but between other nationalities as well.”

Szumowski likewise commented on outsider interests, highlighting the Russian base with access to the Mediterranean Sea as a clear motive for their involvement.

The filmmakers were asked to detail the extent to which the residents of Aleppo that they came into contact with demonstrated support for the suggestion of a Western military intervention.
Przedlacki offered a response and articulated his proposal for a peaceful resolution to the fighting, drawing on his work with humanitarian response programmes in diverse regions, including Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia and Pakistan:

“Every option should be considered in order to stop the bloodshed in Syria. . . . We have a dictator that is creating a bloodbath for his own Syrian nation. . . . If diplomatic means are not working then there should be an initiative of the Arab countries to intervene, and the Western role would be to support such an initiative. . . . I don’t really believe that we would see American boots on the ground.”

An audience member pressed Przedlacki on which Arab countries would be involved in this initiative:

“The Arab League itself. In 2012, they agreed to have a peacekeeping operation, which was then stopped by the Russians. . . . Imagine how many people could have lived . . . if this had happened.”

Szumowski expressed greater concern at the extent of mis-information in the West, and demonstrated a reluctance to endorse Przedlacki’s backing of foreign military intervention:

“I am an artist, a creator, not a politician. I think that force is the absolute last resort. I think the most important thing is informing the society openly and honestly about what is going on in Syria.”

Szumowski closed the discussion by recalling the inaction of Allied troops during the Second World War with regards to intervening to prevent the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, pointing out the West’s current complicity in the situation in Syria owing to its failure to act:

“We are committing a similar sin now when we are not talking about Syria. This is something that neither me, nor my friend (Przedlacki) can accept.”

To find out more about Aleppo. Notes from the Dark, the film’s Twitter page is available here.

Interview given by Przedlacki to BBC World News about Aleppo. Notes from the Dark,  on 25 April 2014. Courtesy of BBC:

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View the trailer of Aleppo. Notes from the Dark here:

[vimeo clip_id=”88060806″ width=”630″ height=”354″]

This screening was supported by the Polish Cultural Institute London.

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In the summer of 2013, Michal Przedlacki and Wojciech Szumowski spent 44 days in Aleppo, documenting the lives of ordinary citizens in extraordinary circumstances. The film’s protagonists talk openly about the Syrian revolution, their lives before the conflict erupted and their dreams for the future.

Mohammad Sayeed, a journalist from Aleppo Media Center, documents the disastrous situation in the city. Imam Qasim, an Islamic cleric in one of the poor neighbourhoods, tries to help neighbours affected by the war. Dr. Ammar Zakaria, a former Syrian officer, is a doctor at one of the makeshift field hospitals, struggling to save the lives of the wounded. Abu Mahia delivers free bread to some of most affected families in the city.

Aleppo. Notes from the Dark offers a unique and poignant account of life in Aleppo from the perspective of seven of its residents.

Directed by Michal Przedlacki and Wojciech Szumowski
Duration: 90′
Year: 2014

This screening is supported by the Polish Cultural Institute London:

On February 19 at the Frontline Club, a panel chaired by international editor at Channel 4 News Lindsey Hilsum, discussed the current state of rebel fractions and the rise of ISIS in Syria.

Kim Sengupta, Lindsey Hilsum and Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi discuss Syria and ISIS at the Frontline Club

Hilsum started of by asking what happened to the FSA, which was so prominent during the first months of the Syrian rebellion?

Kim Sengupta, defence and diplomatic correspondent at The Independent said:

“There are more brigades, battalions that nominally at least will say that they belong to the FSA but as an organisation it is still very much based in Istanbul. It’s got probably more influence than before but not an awful lot on the ground.”

How did ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) rise to become one of the most prominent groups?

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University focusing on developments in Syria and Iraq:

“On the ground what happened was that Jabhat al-Nusra people accepted [leader of ISIS Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi’s argument [that al-Nusra was merely an extension of ISI and therefore should merge] and accordingly they switched over from Jabhat al-Nusra to declare themselves ISIS.”

Al-Tamimi explained the ideology of ISIS:

“Ultimately they [ISIS and al-Nusra] share the same ideological program. ISIS emphasises much more the goal of establishing a caliphate…Beginning in Iraq and Syria which then should not only encompass the entire Muslim world but the whole world, including London and such places… This globalist emphasis, which ISIS does, in contrast with al-Nusra, means that this appeals so much to foreign fighters.”

http://twitter.com/Alexwhi/status/436260104787484672

Raffaello Pantucci, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) said that many foreign fighters are unaware of the complicated environment they are going into:

“One of the things that isn’t so clear to individuals that seem to be going out there to fight is I think they miss the point about how confusing a battle field this really is and how shifting it really is. And how these allegiances on the ground are changing almost daily.

But why ISIS and not other groups?

Pantucci:

“…What’s worrying is that ISIS has a more globalist rhetoric… a lot of these people who are going out there are not going…because they want to become involved in terrorist activity and have any intention in coming back here to conduct some sort of terrorist attack… but what’s worrying is the groups they are joining and the people they will meet … may have different ideas and may be able to persuade them to have these different ideas.”

Lindsey Hilsum, Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi and Malik Al-Abdeh discuss ISIS and Syria at the Frontline Club

Malik Al-Abdeh, a British-Syrian freelance journalist based between London and Antakya, attempted to simplify the confusing environment:

“If you go to these places you realise that it’s all about money, it’s about local power brokers. How else do you explain why al-Nusra and ISIS don’t like each other? They’re two gangs that don’t get along.”

@Alexwhi: #Syria is like wild west, and extremist Islamist #ISIS group brings order to areas it controls, @malikalabdeh says @frontlineclub

— Hammad (@hammadsarfraz) February 19, 2014

A question from the audience asked what should the west and other powers be doing?

Al-Tamimi:

“It’s all just become so fragmented now…I think that either you accept the idea of wanting a total victory and then you’ve got to have some kind of international force brought in in the aftermath, to train some kind of army to bring some kind of stability and that will take a very very long time…a timescale of decades…or are you going to go with a de facto partition of the country and some kind of ceasefire?”

Sengupta said that it is actually too late for the west to intervene; the time has passed:

“If you don’t want to support a population against a regime, don’t entice them to rise up which is what Britain and France, in particular did… have been doing consistently and then they have failed abjectly to support what was left of the so-called secular groups and moderate groups and thus we have seen the triumph of ISIS and other extremist groups.”

Pantucci:

“I think that there was a moment where the west could actually do something to affect a difference, I think that moment has passed quite a long time ago and I don’t know if there is a huge amount that they could actually control about this situation anymore.

“…I think the one plan that they’ve got is how do we mitigate the threat that’s going to come back to us. And that’s why … the focus here is on the foreign fighters.. I don’t think there’s a plan for an end state of how we want it to look. I think they want to make it as less bad as possible.”

Watch and listen to the full discussion below:

As fierce fighting continues in Syria, the death toll according to the United Nations has now reached at least 93,000 and the number of refugees fleeing the country has exceeded 1.5 million.

On the ground, assaults are being conducted on all sides and we have seen increased intervention from other parties, such as Hezbollah. On the international stage efforts are being made to bring all parties to the table and the debate about arming rebels is still raging.

We will be joined by five journalists who have covered the situation in Syria extensively since the uprising began in early 2011. They will be discussing recent developments, on the ground and on the international stage, and asking what changes we could see in coming months.

Chaired by Lyse Doucet, BBC Chief International Correspondent.

The panel:

Dr Halla Diyab is an award-winning screen-writer, producer, broadcaster and the founder and the director of Liberty Media Productions.

Anthony Loyd is an award-winning war correspondent and writer. He is currently roving foreign correspondent for The Times. He has travelled to Syria eight times in the past 15 months to cover the conflict. A former army officer, he served in Northern Ireland and the First Gulf War. He left the army in 1991. He is the author of My War Gone By I Miss It So.

James Harkin has been covering the conflict in Syria from all sides for the last two years, from Damascus, Homs and Aleppo and for The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, The Nation, the Guardian and a range of papers throughout Europe. He is director of the think-tank analysing new media and social change, Flockwatching.

Patrick Cockburn has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979, first for the Financial Times, then for The Independent. He has covered the conflict in Syria extensively since protests began in 2011. He is author of several books including The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq and Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq.

Photojournalist and filmmaker Paul Conroy joined Channel 4 News’ international editor Lindsey Hilsum at the Frontline Club on 6 June, to give a personal account of his experiences in Syria, detailed in his new book Under the wire: Marie Colvin’s Final Assignment.

Encouraged by his friends, Conroy wrote the book as he recovered from serious injuries suffered while reporting the siege of Homs in February 2012.

“In a way I was bringing Marie [Colvin] back to life, revisiting everything…but all of the time that I was writing this, I knew there is going to come a day – one day – when I am going to have to write that chapter.”

Along with French photojournalist Remi Ochlik, Sunday Times foreign affairs correspondent Marie Colvin was killed, and French journalist Edith Bouvier was seriously injured when a make-shift media centre came under intense fire from government forces, in the rebel-controlled district of Baba Amr.

Lindsey Hilsum and Paul Conroy in conversation. Photo credit: Millicent Teasdale

Without a doubt, said Conroy, the media centre was a deliberate target. Reading an excerpt from his book, he described the room as:

“. . . the headquarters of a hunted and starving band of outlaws, bound together by their desire to survive . . . targets of a murderous regime. They were the media and this was their temporary home.”

Hilsum asked him about the role of a “camera as shield”. While fighting his way out of the city and after field surgery to his injured leg, he continued to film footage of his fellow wounded:

“I had a flip cam; all my other cameras had been blown up. I felt a bit useless . . . but I thought I might be able to get something out of what’s happened.”

He added that during the attack his laptop was demolished and few images from his camera were recovered after it was found and returned. Conroy then explained how he escaped through a secret tunnel with the help of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Commentators have subsequently expressed opinions that this help has made his views biased in favour of the rebel group. On this, Conroy said:

“Anyone who says I was a cheerleader for the FSA has got to suck it up really – they saved my life. I actually saw, because of those guys, what was happening.”

“That is why we went, that is why Marie died, that is why Remi died . . . Syrian activists who stood on rooftops and were blown to pieces . . . and everyone else who has died out there, and suffered and been maimed and wounded. There is no reason the world shouldn’t know this.”

With the death toll now estimated at 80,000 by the UN, there is little hope of a conclusive resolution anytime soon. The Syrian conflict threatens to destabilise the region further, against a backdrop of cynicism towards diplomatic efforts.

Audience members asked about the implications of a lack of international support, which may have caused more radical groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra (JAN) to gain power. It is a reflection of how much the situation has changed since his time in Baba Amr, Conroy said, when the lone “jihadist” who showed up was kidnapped and escorted to Lebanon by the FSA.

Now, JAN has become a “definite presence” in the country:

“The Jihadists are a powerful fighting force and if you look at the situation, for years now Syrians have sat there and nobody has lifted a finger.”

Conroy has worked in combat zones around the world – the Balkans, Iraq, Congo, Rwanda, Libya and Syria – as well as spending seven years with the Royal Artillery as a soldier. His friendship with Marie Colvin goes back to 2003, when he made an ill-fated attempt to raft himself into Iraq to cover the final assault on Baghdad. Colvin, well known for not working well with photographers, was rather impressed by his efforts and the two struck up a friendship over their shared loves of sailing and whiskey. The two worked together in Libya in 2011 before being paired to cover Homs.

In spite of this adventurous background and the risks he has taken, one of his most serious injuries came a little over a month ago in Exeter. When walking down the High Street he was hit with a projectile after walking away from an altercation with a man. He now has a titanium plate holding up part of his face.

Hilsum told the audience she was shocked at the time to get a message saying he might lose an eye.

Conroy said: “I could not honestly have worn a patch could I?”

On the same day as this event, the Frontline Club published its white paper, Newsgathering Safety and the Welfare of Freelancers.

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/newsreview/features/article1267580.ece

You can watch the event or listen to the podcast below:

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/in-conversation-with-paul