The pioneers rebuilding Syria’s fragile news ecosystem: “The media needs to break these walls between people”

When she learnt that Bashar al-Assad had fled Damascus, Syrian journalist Kholoud Helmi was “over the moon.” Like so many other colleagues, she had almost lost hope after 14 years of civil war. She had set up the newspaper Enab Baladi in 2011, soon after the outbreak of protests calling for more democratic freedoms in the country.

In her home town of Darayya, on the edges of the Syrian capital Damascus, she reported on the killings of protestors and on the arbitrary arrests that were taking place. The paper was printed and distributed in secret, but the growing repression meant Helmi and her colleagues were forced to flee the country in 2014. By the time she left, many of her friends had been killed, including her brother, for his involvement in the protests. 

Enab Baladi has continued to publish news online and even a printed Sunday newspaper to this day. It retains its headquarters in Istanbul with staff also based in Germany and the UK, where Helmi lives as a refugee. The newspaper reopened its Damascus office in January. 

In the days following Assad’s fall, everyday Syrians were “really hungry to hear independent media,” Helmi says. “They were rushing to journalists who were walking in the streets with microphones and speaking up. People were so thrilled to practice this very new thing.” 

The Committee to Protect Journalists’ programme director Carlos Martínez de la Serna says it was “heartwarming to see journalists – both Syrian and foreign – flooding the country.” These moments offered one vision of how journalism could be regarded in the new Syria: free to operate and valued by the population.

The sense of euphoria has now given way to the realisation of the hardships facing Syria. This piece looks at these prospects with the help of Helmi and Loujein Haj Youssef, also an award-winning journalist and the co-founder of Radio Rozana.

A radio station operating from exile

Radio Rozana hasn’t fully returned to Syria. But its co-founder Loujein Haj Youssef recently visited Damascus to assess if it’s time to open a newsroom there. The outlet hopes to make a decision by the end of the year. A pending government decision on awarding them an FM licence will be pivotal to this move. 

Well-funded networks such as Al Araby, owned by Qatari media conglomerate Fadaat Media, have their FM licences already, as does Al Jazeera, Haj Youssef says. But independent newsrooms like Radio Rozana are struggling to obtain this essential permit. The station was launched in Paris in 2013 with the help of French and Danish nonprofits. Its founders were several journalists who had fled Syria after the start of the civil war. 

In an interview with Swiss media NGO Hirondelle, co-founder Lina Chawaf said that she “was repeatedly threatened with arrest [and the] killing” of her children in the early days of the uprisings for refusing to air government propaganda at Arabesque, the popular radio station where she worked. 

Throughout Syria’s civil war, Radio Rozana continued to operate in exile from Paris and Turkey just over the border from northwestern Syria.

Haj Youssef says that journalists like herself are viewed with suspicion by the transitional government led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al-Qaeda affiliate which led the ouster of President Assad. She is aware of the authorities keeping tabs on the different media organisations and their affiliations.

During her recent visit to Damascus, Haj Youssef was stopped by public officials who questioned Radio Rozana’s journalism. They asked about references to HTS’s designation by many governments as a terrorist organisation and inquired on why harassment in Alawite villages was reported. 

“They are not very happy, but they didn’t say, ‘We will not let you do your work,’”  she says. “I explained our role and said that we will not stop doing this and will not negotiate about this.” 

Haj Youssef says she would rather be exiled than compromise her journalistic principles.

Access and the role of influencers

Over the years, Radio Rozana has worked with around 200 journalists and freelancers across the country. But it now finds it difficult to work with journalists from areas that were under Assad’s control. Due to HTS’s lingering hostility towards these regions, many of these journalists are frustrated at being denied questions at press conferences or interviews with government figures. Meanwhile, well-resourced Qatari-based outlets including Al Jazeera, Al Araby and Syria TV are afforded more freedom to operate.

The new authorities also afford preferential treatment to social media influencers. The transitional government is leaning a lot on these news influencers, with whom it was used to working in the north of the country, in order to get its messages out. They are not all HTS supporters, Haj Youssef says, but neither do they follow journalistic standards. They dutifully share news in a way that suits the authorities and are sometimes put forward as sources or even correspondents for independent media organisations.

Haj Youssef recalls her exchange with a government official around the lack of accreditation given to professional independent journalists: “He said, ‘Okay, now you can [instead] go and ask some of the revolution supporters from the [ranks of] citizen journalists. You can choose one, and you will work with them.’”

She says many of these citizen journalists have now been placed in some of the leading newspapers, TV channels and former government news outlets. Despite their reservations, Radio Rozana sometimes works with these citizen journalists, despite their lack of training or ties to the regions in which they are reporting because they can get closer to the stories.

This is not a new phenomenon. The Guardian reported in January on how the Assad government also worked with sympathetic influencers “in an effort to massage its image.” 

Journalists who once worked at the Syrian Arab News Agency under Assad fear how they will be seen now the agency has changed hands. A former HTS media worker who now heads up the agency told the paper’s Ruth Michaelson and Obaida Hamad: “We can neither confirm nor deny” whether it will have the leeway to publish criticism of the government.

Press freedom in Syria

Journalism is now in a very different position from the one in which it was during the civil war, when pro-government forces fought a range of armed groups, including ISIS and other Islamist groups including HTS, and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army. 

Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed and millions more were displaced. Journalists were not exempt from the violence. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) 161 journalists and media workers were killed between 2011 and 2014.

But while journalists are more hopeful, experts remain concerned about press freedom under the new regime. Only one of the five journalists who were in prison as of December has been released. The remaining four are missing as are four others. 

Risks to journalists remain high, says the CPJ’s programme director Carlos Martínez de la Serna, with those in northern Syria and southern Syria “facing the greatest risks including abduction, detention, or murder.” Turkey’s military actions have killed Kurdish journalists in the country while “Israel has also become one of the violators of press freedom in Syria,” De la Serna says.

Press freedom must be a priority moving forward, says de la Serna: “The new Syrian authorities need to protect journalist safety and hold Assad’s media persecutors to account, and allow journalists safe access to information and locations to cover events, without risking being detained or questioned for their work.”

Rebuilding the country

Both Radio Rozana’s Haj Youssef and Enab Baladi’s Helmi say independent media outlets like theirs have a huge role to play in aiding the country’s transition to its next phase. 

Despite the end to the civil war, sectarianism and tension between various communities is high. In early March, hundreds of civilians from the Alawite religious minority were targeted and killed following attacks on government forces by Assad’s supporters.

Before these attacks, rumours had been spreading on social media on which communities were under threat, something that compounded fear and distrust between communities. 

Helmi says it is up to responsible news media to “help de-escalate conflicts, provide accurate information, and counter inflammatory narratives,” a task which some have risen to. But other outlets, she says, have only “exacerbated fear and uncertainty”, making things worse. Without reliable news outlets, Helmi is “really worried” that Syrians “might dive deep into a civil war.”

Haj Youssef echoes this dire warning and stresses that journalists have a major role to play in reducing mutual fear between communities. “It’s like a competition [to see] who feels fear more, which is very bad. The media needs to break these walls between people,” she says.

Syria’s sectarian conflict has built those walls. “In Damascus, they don't know anything about what happened in Idlib for these 10 years,” says Haj Youssef. “People don't know anything about each other. We need to rebuild the [channels of] information, to introduce Syrian people to each other.”

This requires articles which include perspectives from different parts of the country. “[We need to show] that people in these places are affected [like] people in those places,”she says.

Funding under threat

According to a UN Development Programme report, 90% of Syrians are living in poverty, with extreme poverty affecting up to two-thirds of the population, and one-in-four are unemployed. 

In this challenging context, a reader revenue model is almost unthinkable. Regular Syrians “are not able to fund free or independent media themselves,” says Helmi. “I don’t think anybody is going to pay for a newspaper. They will pay for their daily bread [instead].”

However, audience engagement has seen a notable uptick since the fall of Assad, Helmi says. Previously, most of Enab Baladi’s online readership was attributed to IP addresses in Turkey, Egypt or Saudi Arabia, with some people using VPNs from within the country. Much of this traffic has now shifted to Syria.

In the absence of financial support from the general public, both Radio Rozana and Enab Baladi rely on foundations and international donors. Enab Baladi receives financial support from a wide range of donors. 

One of these funders is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which receives 95% of its funding from the US Congress. NED has said these funds were “inexplicably cut off” as part of sweeping cuts to federal budgets, halting support for its nearly 2,000 supported projects worldwide. The organisation informed Enab Baladi that they must wait until further notice. The outlet has also had two projects suspended by development organisation IREX. 

According to Helmi, several other Syrian news outlets have closed or lost funding due to the recent USAID cuts, including Radio Al Kul and Aleppo Today.

Uncertainty around funding is impacting Radio Rozana’s decision to relocate to Damascus. “We are an NGO. To transfer from Turkey to inside Syria would cost a lot of money,” says Haj Youssef. She believes many of Radio Rozana’s donors are re-assessing their commitment to Syria in the wake of Assad’s fall.

De la Serna, from the CPJ, says that “lack of funding is one of the critical issues Syrian independent media face” as many outlets like Enab Baladi and Radio Rozana contemplate a return from exile.

The future of Syrian journalism

Central to the future success of journalism in Syria is how freedom of speech will be respected by Syria's new authorities. 

Freedom of opinion, expression and the press has been explicitly guaranteed by a constitutional declaration guiding a five-year transition period, which is welcome news to Syrian media. At the same time, “denying, praising, justifying or downplaying [the Assad regime’s] crimes,” is forbidden, suggesting freedom of speech is not absolute and what is permitted will be open to interpretation.

As a result of its uncompromising journalism, Helmi says Enab Baladi has managed to upset all holders of power: “I proudly say that we’ve been the enemy of every single person or de facto authority inside Syria. We had tensions with HTS inside Idlib and the Northwest.” 

Helmi says that HTS once burned copies of her newspaper simply for discussing the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris.

With Syria’s interim government courting Western approval to lift crippling economic sanctions, enforcing press freedom could send a positive signal. But as international attention dwindles, journalists fear that news media could face more restrictions and even outright repression. Haj Youssef is worried that the government will simply “rebuild the same structure” that powered Assad’s regime and will restrict freedom of the press under the pretense of building “civil peace.”

Similarly, the need to move the country forward shouldn’t be used as an excuse to gloss over the country’s record of attacking journalists, De la Serna says. “Impunity is one of the critical issues that needs to be tackled by the new Syrian administration, which has promised free media and more protection of journalists,” he says.

With poverty afflicting the country, tensions between communities flaring, and its territory being bombed and occupied by regional powers, it’s not clear whether press freedom will be a priority for the government or if the population as a whole will demand it. But for now Enab Baladi and Radio Rozana are replanting the seeds of a dynamic news ecosystem in Syria that will be vital for the country’s future.

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Both Enab Baladi and Radio Rozana are signatories to a policy brief declaring what needs to be done to strengthen the media ecosystem in Syria. It directs its recommendations to the new government, to donors, to the media sector itself and to civil society.