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Syria
I first visited Syria in 2009, and spent my first night there in Aleppo. I was a backpacker, and spent several days taking in the sights of the city before making my way southwards. I fell in love with Syria so much that I twice renewed my visa and lived in Damascus for two months.
The next time I went back, in August 2012, was a much more melancholic experience. I spent two weeks in and ...
Sheikh Abu Maryam sits in a crisp, white jalabiya in the living room of his first floor apartment in the northern Syrian village of Marea. His beard is short, and his hair tightly clipped as he sits, cross legged, on the floor. He has just been walking the streets of Marea in a demonstration against the al-Assad regime which ...
It was getting dark as we arrive in Jadeideh, an old Christian neighbourhood in Aleppo's UNESCO-listed Old City. The chants of Allahu akbar ("God is greatest") were incessant with the shooting. The Free Syrian Army had commandeered an old, recently renovated Damascene house to serve as ...
It's the planes that scare me. You can hear them, you some times spot them, and you have no idea where their terror will fall. That waiting game, that I first experienced in the desert of Libya almost a year and a half ago.
On August 10, I arrived in Aleppo to the same Free Syrian Army base that I had been at the day before. In the courtyard, a huge hole had appeared over night. Four bombs had ...
We jump out of the car and run across a "sniper alley", darting through a hole in the opposite wall. What this wall once protected is now nothing but rubble, across which we scramble. Our heads are low as we run, hunched up and through another wall, across a road strewn with detritus, through another hole and bounding over mounds of rubble. We climb a makeshift ...
