Run Time: 1 hr 35 mins

Chair

Lindsey Hilsum is Channel 4 News’ International Editor. Her biography, “In Extremis; the Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin” will be published in November. She has covered many of the conflicts of recent times, including Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan. She has also reported on the Trump administration, terror attacks in Europe and refugees, and was Channel 4 News China Correspondent from 2006 to 2008. During the 2004 US assault on Falluja, she was embedded with a frontline marine unit, and in 1994, was the only English-speaking foreign correspondent in Rwanda when the genocide started. She has won awards from the Royal Television Society and BAFTA, aswell as the Charles Wheeler Award and the James Cameron Award, and was the recipient of the 2017 Patron’s Medal from the Royal Geographical Society.  Her writing has been featured in the New York Review of Books,  Granta, the Sunday Times and the Guardian among other publications. Her first book was ‘Sandstorm; Libya in the Time of Revolution’.  Before becoming a journalist, she was an aid worker, initially with OXFAM in Latin America and then with UNICEF in Africa.

Speakers

Scott Gilmore is Staff Attorney at the Center for Justice and Accountability. He is an expert in strategic litigation on behalf of victims of international crimes in national courts, including cases involving genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture, sexual and gender-based violence, universal jurisdiction and foreign sovereign immunity. For the past six years, Mr Gilmore has investigated war crimes and torture in Syria and filed the first-ever war crimes case against the Assad regime for the targeted killing of American journalist Marie Colvin. He has investigated crimes committed against Yezidi, an ethno-religious minority targeted by ISIS, for potential prosecution of Duvalier-era officials in Haiti, and pioneered litigation strategies to challenge cyber-surveillance targeting journalists and human rights defenders. He has a BA from McGill University, a JD from George Washington University Law School (high honours, Order of the Coif), and certification in international human rights and humanitarian law from Oxford University. He was formerly a professional musician in the Indie rock bands A Silver Mt. Zion and Black Ox Orkestar, and a theatre performer in Le Petit Théâtre de l’Absolu.

Paul Conroy is a former soldier who spent seven years with the Royal Artillery. He developed a passion for photography and first became involved in journalism on a mission to the Balkans. He has since worked extensively as both a photojournalist and filmmaker in combat zones around the world, producing footage from conflicts in the Balkans, Iraq, Democratic Republic Congo, Rwanda and most notably Libya and Syria. Paul first met Marie Colvin in March 2003 in Syria. He was attempting to smuggle himself across the Tigris on a raft made of tubes stolen from lorries, with the aim to get into Iraq to cover the final assault on Baghdad. A firm friendship was forged over their many shared interests: sailing, whiskey, and their extraordinary dedication to covering the atrocities of war. Having worked together in Libya in 2011, they were a natural pairing for an assignment to Homs. They were determined to cover the Syrian regime’s brutal crackdown and the devastating impact this was having on civilians. Conroy is the author of Under The Wire. Offering a testimony of war reportage, and a personal account of the final assignment he embarked on with Marie Colvin.

Cat Colvin is Marie’s sister. She and her three children filed a lawsuit against Syria in 2016 in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., alleging that Marie was targeted and killed by the Syrian regime. Cat is the founder of the Marie Colvin Fund, which supports charitable organisation that reflect Marie’s life-long dedication to humanitarian aid, human rights, journalism and education. The fund’s primary donation recipient is the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting at Stony Brook University of Journalism, where Cat serves as a founding Board Member. The mission of the Marie Colvin Centre is to nurture and grow the next generation of overseas reporters, to cement Marie’s legacy by rewarding tenacious overseas reporting with a journalist-in-residence fellowship, and to raise awareness about the need for robust international coverage through the Marie Colvin Distinguished Lecture Series, which has welcomed Christiane Amanpour, Clarissa Ward, Ann Curry, Rukmini Callimachi and Lindsey Hilsum. Cat currently serves as General Counsel and Senior Vice President of a large US-based multinational corporation, where she is responsible for all aspects of legal and regulatory affairs, and architect of her company’s Charitable Giving Programme, which promotes active participation by more than 10,000 employees worldwide in STEM education, humanitarian and environmental causes. After graduating from Yale Unversity, Cat started her career as Programme Director for the Executive Council on Foreign Diplomats, then spent several years working as a professor of Rural Development for United World Colleges at FUNDACEA in Barinas, Venezuela. Cat is a graduate of Fordham University of Law and began her legal career as an associate of International Project Finance at Shearman & Sterling in New York, the law firm that currently represents her in the Colvin v. Syria lawsuit, along with the Center for Justice and accountability. She subsequently worked as a foreign Legal Consultant for Baker & McKenzie in Santiago, Chile, and in house Corporate Counsel for the Independent Film Channel in New York.

Chris Martin is an award-winning director he has made films for all the major UK and US networks as well as a number of feature documentaries (Palestine is still the Issue, War on Democracy)

Award-winning photographer Nish Nalbandian spent three years documenting life and war in Northern Syria from the frontlines to the everyday lives of people struggling to survive amid the ruins. A selection of photographs from this powerful body of work were published in Nalbandian’s critically acclaimed first monograph A Whole World Blind (Daylight, 2016). In 2014, as the situation in Syria escalated and it was becoming too dangerous to stay there, Nalbandian shifted his focus to another story close by: the lives of the nearly three million Syrian refugees still living in southern Turkey. Nalbandian’s humanistic portraits of Syrians in Turkey are published in his second book: A Handful of Dust (Daylight Books, April 2018).

In the book’s introduction, Nalbandian writes: “My intent in this book was not to produce a ‘poor refugee’ story, showing sad pictures of exotic Middle Eastern people living in poverty. I do have some pictures like that. But I challenged myself to show a wide swath of the Syrian population from all walks of life. I do not claim to show a complete picture, just a broad picture of what life is like for these people in this place at this time. I also tried to leave people’s politics and specifics of the war out of it”.

About the photographer

Nish Nalbandian working in Aleppo, Syria. Photo courtesy of Richard Charles Harvey

Documentary photographer Nish Nalbandian has photographed in more than 35 countries worldwide, in a variety of situations and environments, from wars to sporting events, cities to remote deserts. His work has appeared in such diverse outlets as The Human Rights Watch World Report, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, The New Yorker, Bag News National Geographic Traveler, and New Scientist. His first monograph, A Whole World Blind:War and Life In Northern Syria (Daylight Books, 2016) received critical acclaim in such outlets as Smithsonian Magazine, The Daily Beast, Vice, American Photo, Square Mile Magazine, Lensculture and The New York Review of Books. Nalbandian’s work has been shown in the New York Photo Festival, Powerhouse Arena, and IPA Best in Show in New York, and in exhibitions around the world.He has received many honours, including: Applied Art’s 2014 ‘Best Portrait Series’ Award (Portraits of the Syrian Opposition); American Photography AP30 (Aleppo Struggles On); First Prize, IPA (International Photography Awards) Editorial/Conflict (Aleppo Struggles On); Silver Medal, ND Awards (Special – Panoramic, Panoramic Photographs in and around Aleppo); Honourable Mention, ND Awards, Special PhotojournalismStory (Aleppo Struggles On); and Lensculture’s Top 50 Emerging Talent Award for 2014. For more information, go to: http://www.nishnalbandian.com/

Matthew Cassel 

Matthew Cassel is an award-winning filmmaker and multimedia journalist based in the Mediterranean region. For more than a decade he has documented stories of people facing conflict and persecution in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and beyond. He works mainly as a one-person video crew, filming, producing and editing short and long-form documentary content for various publications.

Learn more here.

One such area, the Damascus suburbs of East Ghouta, is the target of renewed violence, with over a hundred civilians dying daily to chemical weapon attacks and regime airstrikes. Compounding these attacks, the state of siege East Ghouta faces has prevented food or medical supplies from entering the region, leaving hundreds of thousands malnourished and vulnerable. Finally, reports are surfacing that the Syrian regime forces are pursuing a policy of targeting doctors, nurses and other medical workers, denying treatment to an already beleaguered population.

All of these crises raise troubling questions about the nature of East Ghouta’s previous designation as a “de-escalation zone” by the Russia-sponsored Astana peace negotiations, and what this seemingly-inevitable eradication of the last bastions of Syria’s popular opposition means for the shape of a potential peace outcome.

The Frontline Club has invited a panel of experts to dissect what the events that have transpired in East Ghouta reveal about a pattern of human rights violations that have come to define the Syrian civil war.

Chair

Jeremy Bowen BBC Middle East correspondent from 1995 and Middle East editor since 2005, award-winning journalist Jeremy Bowen has spent much of the past two years documenting the game-changing moments in the history of the Middle East.

Speakers

Dr Abdulkarim Ekzayez is a Syrian medical doctor and an epidemiologist. His work at Chatham House focuses on the public health impacts of conflict, as well as challenges around the protection of healthcare in conflict, both issues he has experienced first-hand in Syria. Dr Ekzayez researches health workers as military targets and is personally working with other Syrian and British medics and activists to support humanitarian efforts in Eastern Ghouta. He is a regular contributor to several medical and civil society institutions in Syria, and has been active in advocacy for Syria through media and conferences. He is a trustee member of two NGOs, Shafak and Eye to the Future.

Dr Idrees Ahmad is a Lecturer in Digital Journalism at the University of Stirling and a former research fellow at the University of Denver’s Center for Middle East Studies. He is the author of The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). He writes for The Observer, The Nation, and a wide variety of other publications. He is now working on a book on the war of narratives over Syria. Idrees has appeared as an on-air analyst on Al Jazeera, the BBC, TRT World, RAI TV, Radio Open Source and several Pacifica Radio channels.

Leila Al-Shami has worked with the human rights movement in Syria and across in the Middle East. She is the co-author of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (Pluto, 2016, 2018) and a founding member of Tahrir-ICN, a network that aimed to connect anti-authoritarian struggles across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

Photo: Civilians escape from explosion site after Assad Regime’s forces strike over the de-conflict zone, Ein Tarma Town of Eastern Ghouta region of Damascus, Syria on 22 August, 2017 [Alaa Mohammad/Anadolu Agency]

Rania’s new book is published to mark the anniversary of the outbreak of  protests in Syria. Cinematically crafted, it weaves a tapestry of rebels and exiles, radical Islamists and their victims amid the deadliest conflict of the century thus far.

Extending back to the first protests in Damascus in 2011, and based on more than five years of clandestine reporting on the frontlines of the war, No Turning Back presents an unforgettable portrait of a shattered country that “has ceased to exist as a unified state except in memories and on maps.”

Rania Abouzeid is a journalist with well over fifteen years experience in the Middle East and South Asia. A print and television journalist, fluent in Arabic, she has won numerous international journalism awards including the 2014 Frontline Club Print Awards and the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. Rania regularly writes for the New Yorker and National Geographic and she has been published in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, The Australian, CSM, and a host of other outlets.

Lyse Doucet is an award winning Chief International Correspondent and Senior Presenter for BBC World News television and BBC World Service Radio. She is regularly deployed to anchor special news coverage from the field and interview world leaders. Lyse also reports across the BBC including for BBC Newsnight. She played a key role in the BBC’s coverage of the “Arab Spring” across the Middle East and North Africa and has covered all the major stories in the region for the past 20 years.