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While most reporting on the role of women in the Syrian revolution,
whether from the imperialist media or their "anti-imperialist" echo,
tends to follow the Islamophobic-Orientalist template (ie, women don't
exist), the reality has been sharply different from the very beginning.
Here is just one story of many of revolutionary self-sacrifice by
Syrian women.
MK
The "Gang of Girls" Risks Their Lives to Report From Inside a War Zone
Amid the rubble of Syria, a band of women are risking prison, or worse,
to report, write, and edit the civil war's paper of record.
http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a28194/the-newsroom/
By Christina Asquith
(clip)
"We're the gang of girls. [Assad] would kill us, but he can't find us,"
Waleed says. The "gang of girls" she refers to are her colleagues at
Enab Baladi; a little more than half the staff are women. Many of them
are now refugees, in Turkey and Lebanon, and the rest are in hiding in
Syria—reporting over sporadic Internet connections, giving new and
urgent meaning to the phrase working remotely.
"To be a journalist in Syria is one of the most dangerous professions in
the world," says Sherif Mansour of the New York–based Committee to
Protect Journalists, himself a reader of Enab Baladi. Of the 24 founding
staff members, three top editors have been killed in separate attacks.
Eight reporters have been detained and tortured, and 12 have fled the
country. In Waleed's birthplace, Darayya, 75 percent of the population
has been displaced. By the beginning of 2015, an estimated 200,000
people had been killed in the Syrian civil war, many of them civilians.
The government has been accused of gassing entire towns, suffocating
thousands. An ancient country famous for its Mediterranean coastline,
medieval castles, and relics dating back to the Babylonian period is in
ruins.
But Gaziantep, Turkey, where Waleed and other Enab Baladi staffers are
holed up, is full of its own perils. More than a quarter million Syrian
refugees have poured into this border town since the civil war began. A
city of covered bazaars and wandering tea sellers and the domain over
the centuries of the Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans, and
Ottomans, Gaziantep has increasingly become a staging ground for all
those trying to get into or away from Syria: ISIS jihadis, rebel
fighters, arms contractors, U.S. intelligence operatives. Like a black
hole, the civil war keeps expanding, sucking in anyone at its edges.
In the ensuing void of order and information, Enab Baladi has become one
of the most prominent independent publications of the war. That it's
largely female-staffed is extraordinary. Women are barely represented in
the government or in opposition groups—and certainly not in the Islamist
gangs that control large swaths of the country. Yet the female editors
and reporters have driven deeper coverage of how war affects civilians,
families, and day-to-day life for millions of Syrians. "Women have been
a big part of Enab Baladi since the beginning, and most say it's their
resilience that's kept the paper going," says Jawad Sharbaji, a man and
one of the publication's veteran editors. "They have easier access
inside people's homes, and they can travel more easily and get to places
where men cannot go."
Full: http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a28194/the-newsroom/
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