The Growing Danger of Reporting from Syria

BBC correspondent Paul Wood has been awarded the David Bloom award for his reporting from inside Syria. He talks with host Lisa Mullins about the growing complexity of the Syrian conflict, and the difficulties correspondents face as they try to verify the accounts of those caught up in the fighting.

The first hurdle reporters must cross is getting into Syria. Some slip across the border from Lebanon.

“You can pay smugglers who then bribe Syrian security men and Syrian soldiers. You can go with fighters and you can go with activists. We’ve tended to go with activists or fighters. We’ve never paid so far. I think I would trust someone more who is doing it for ideological reasons,” Wood says.

Wood explains that it’s getting more difficult to cross the border from Lebanon into Syria. The opposition believe the Syrian army has put 15,000 soldiers on the border and 11 tanks, he says.

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Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World, a coproduction of the BBC’s World Service PRI and WGBH in Boston. A United Nations official said today that the conflict in Syria is now a civil war. UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous told reporters that the Syrian government is fighting to regain control in parts of the country. Throughout this conflict the Syrian government has kept most foreign reporters out of the country. And those who are allowed in have their movements closely monitored. The BBC’s Paul Wood has slipped into Syria undercover several times on the past 18 months. He tells us the Syrian conflict has been morphing into a complex struggle.

Paul Wood: If you cast your mind back a year now or 18 months actually at the beginning of the Syrian uprising, it seemed a pretty simple story then of people rising up against what was regarded as a very nasty regime, a regime which had not allowed its people freedom over forty years, and something therefore which countries like the United States felt it and ambiguously support. Now things are a little darker there. People are worried that if the rebels, the Free Army are armed, will that mean somewhere down the line that they commit a massacre of the Alawites, the minority who rule Syria. And there’s always a sense of paralysis by the outside world, and yet a feeling of great moral pressure to do something because of these terrible massacres that we’re seeing, because of these heavy weapons against civilian populations. Syria is a very, very difficult problem.

Mullins: Well that must come into such stark relief when you’re on a ground in Syria and you gone there correct me if I’m wrong, four times is it?

Wood: We were smuggled four times across the border from Lebanon going there covertly and to state the obvious without visas. And three times into the city of Homs. We couldn’t get into Homs the last time. There’s no more opposition presence in Baba Amr where we went on the previous three visits. We were trying to get a place called [xx] but it was just impossible.

Mullins: So without disclosing anything obviously for the reporting trips in jeopardy, can you tell us how you’re able to move around because you must have the help of the civilians or members of the Free Syrian Army. Does it work that way?

Wood: People use a combination of different things. You can pay smugglers who then bribe Syrian security men and Syrian soldiers. You can get away fighters, you can get with activists. We’ve tended to go with activists or fighters. We’ve never paid so far. I would think I would try somebody more who was doing it for ideological reasons. You sneak between Syrian checkpoints. You go around them. It’s getting very, very difficult to cross now. The opposition believes that the Syrian army has put 1,500 soldiers onto that border and eleven tanks. And on the way out we were stuck for about a week in the orchard which crossed the border and they used as cover for the smugglers. Being randomly mooted by the Syrian army with these fighters and we were just living off on ripe apricots in the orchards. And nothing had moved across that border for a week, no casualties act, no weapons in. And as we were sneaking out our scouts could see the lakes of Syrian Army patrols, about 100-150 meters away in the orchards. And I’m not ashamed to say my legs were literally weak with fear as we made that crossing. If they had spotted us I think they would open fire. It would have been very, very difficult.

Mullins: So what did you do?

Wood: Well we managed to sneak out. We’ve been waiting for a week. That was we felt the need to move. It wasn’t particularly good sitting in that orchard. And we were the first people to cross out I think for about a week. And similarly, moving around in the country was difficult. We didn’t know but there was apparently a shipment of antitank weapons. The kind of weapons which could really change the balance on the ground, which we were told had come in from Lebanon. So we were driving down this one road, which is the only road we could go down the highway around Homs. You can’t go through the countryside there because it’s Alawites and Shiite villages. And there were soldiers about every 150 meters randomly stopping vehicles. And we thought, “Well, now we’re going to get caught.” And the activists and the fighters we were with were somewhat taken aback by this heavy presence on the road. They’ve never seen anything like it. So again we got stuck for a week at the other end of that road. We couldn’t move back on the road because of the heavy military presence on it. So all of that gives you an idea that when the Free Army talks -I think there was a piece in the Washington Post a couple of days ago about how well the Free Army is doing, but they’re not doing so well. You don’t have to hide out for a week here or a week there.

Mullins: So when you rely so much by necessity I guess on activists, those in the Free Syrian Army, these are the rebels, how do you know who you can trust, and how do you verify the things that you’re told? Maybe give us an example Paul of one particular fact of the story that you are trying to prove before you could report it.

Wood: As for verifying things, and that’s the reason why we take these extreme risks or reasonably large risks to go there so that we see things for ourselves. I remember when Baba Amr fell back in the first week of March. People were screaming out, going around the official checkpoints, walking for days on foot to avoid the army checkpoints with the orchards and what not. We had all these people screaming at us, “They’re slaughtering us. They’re murdering us. They’re cutting out our throats. There are bodies in the orchards.” My default position in having covered about a dozen wars is to be extremely cynical, to disbelieve everything initially until it was absolutely proved to me. We’re here in this stuff for days, and I wasn’t reporting it because it didn’t seem to me to be the absolutely incontrovertible proof which we needed. Maybe it was hysteria. Maybe it was rumor being retold as fact. Maybe it was propaganda. But we found one family who said two days ago they had survived one of these massacres. The father, the head of the house had been working in the fields and hid and was watching from merely a hundred meters away as they took out his brother, a couple of other male relatives and his twelve year old son. And we questioned every member of the family. Their stories were consistent. I think I’m always embarrassed to say we stayed there four or five hours asking them, “Tell us again, tell us again, tell us again.” And then I said as we left, “God is watching. And if you are lying to us it will be a very bad thing,” which is a terrible thing to say because undoubtedly they’d gone through this. But I was so terrified of getting it wrong. This was one of the early massacres which now unfortunately is becoming routine.

Mullins: Let’s hear a little bit of that reporting you’re mentioning now. This is a report you filed in March.

[recording of the report]

Wood: On Friday troops took 36 men and boys from one district they say killing them all.

[Woman speaking in Syrian language]

Wood: My son’s throat was cut she says. He was twelve.

[Man speaking in Syrian language]

Wood: One soldier held each down with a boot, another came with a knife, says her husband. He was hiding 15 meters away. I could hear their screams, he says.

Can such horror stories be true?

[end of recording]

Mullins: Oh boy. That leaves you in such a position where you have to verify this kind of thing. Could you ever have almost equal access to pro Syrian civilians?

Wood: No and we collectively at the BBC and its journalists need to make a big effort to try to get more of the other side of this story. But I think the Syrian government is almost doing itself a disservice because President Assad is still there because he has support. And people support him because they are afraid of what might happen if a revolution, which appears a semi-led revolution succeeds will revenge against the Alawites, the Shiites, the Christians. These minorities are sticking Assad for fear that something worse will come afterwards. And I think that is an entirely reasonable point of view to reflect. And journalists need to do that, but they need to be the official faces to get in to be able to accomplish that. And those

[crosstalk]

Wood:possible, but they are restricted, yeah.

Mullins: Paul Wood of the BBC. Thank you.

Wood: Thank you.

Mullins: The BBC’s Paul Wood who has reported undercover in Syria four times in the past 18 months. He hopes to go back.

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