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4 days ago
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After 21 years, the day Farouk feared had finally come. An envelope sealed with red wax made its way through the faded hallways of Syria’s national news agency, Sana, and landed on his desk. Inside was what employees called a penalty, the contents of which could range from a reprimand from the editors to a summons to one of Syria’s brutal security branches.
“I found a mistake before the article was published and I brought it to the editors’ attention. I thought this would be a good thing but they punished me,” Farouk, a journalist on Sana’s foreign news desk, said under a pseudonym.
Farouk was lucky: he faced only an administrative consequence. Other co-workers had not been so fortunate.
One day in 2014, Mohanned Abdelrahman was in the break room chatting with other colleagues as he prepared tea. During the conversation, it dawned on him that all of the employees in the group were from the same religious sect, something that could arouse the suspicion of authorities who were paranoid about any forms of community organising. Quickly, the group disbanded and headed back to their offices.
A week later, he and the other employees found an envelope with the feared red seal on their desks. Inside was a summons to Branch 235, AKA the Palestinian branch, one of the country’s most infamous detention centres, where Abdelrahman and other employees would be kept and interrogated for the next 15 days.
Abdelrahman and his colleagues recounted their respective arrests while seated around a desk in Sana’s foreign news department 10 days after the fall of the Assad regime, seemingly still dazed that they could speak freely.
For the past 13 years, journalists had not been allowed to report freely as their news agency was on the frontline of the Assad regime’s propaganda effort.
The Sana homepage, not updated since Assad’s ousting on 8 December, still bore the last headline issued by the Assad regime. “President al-Assad assumes his work, national and constitutional duties”, the news ticker read, despite the dictator’s flight to Moscow a few hours earlier.
The news agency’s coverage in the days before the toppling of the Assad regime claimed all was well within Syria. As rebels advanced on Damascus, Sana said they were merely staging photo ops. It spoke of “strategic redeployments” while Syrian government forces abandoned their posts en masse.
Sana journalists were not brainwashed; they knew that the opposition was making inroads against regime forces. But years of Orwellian control and censorship within the newsroom had left them unable to write the truth.
Abdelrahman said: “They would tell you that the yoghurt was black and you were not allowed to say it’s white. They made you feel scared that you would be punished, so you wouldn’t try to add anything new to articles.”
Throughout the civil war, Sana parroted regime lines, making itself key to the Syrian and Russian disinformation campaign. Its articles called the Syrian Civil Defence, known as the White Helmets, organ-harvesting agents of al-Qaida. While more than 90% of Syrians were living below the poverty line, the news agency reported on the installation of eco-buses in Damascus.
To ensure journalists did not write anything that contradicted the regime’s line, Syrian intelligence agents planted informants in the office to observe reporters. “You didn’t know who was the one among us writing reports on their fellow employees. They reported when you got into work, when you left, how long you spent in the bathroom,” Abdelrahman said.
Journalists’ social media profiles were monitored. A status that expressed any dissenting view, or even a “like” on a suspicious comment, would attract the attention of authorities.
The consequences for journalists who dared to deviate from the state’s line could be deadly. Reporters recalled a colleague who was detained for three months and tortured daily, suspended from a pipe in a grotesque stress position. Another was severely tortured after it was discovered he had been sending footage of opposition protests in south Syria to Al Jazeera.
Almost all Sana journalists had stories about being detained. Alleged offences included tarnishing the reputation of Syria, organising revolutionary activities, working on behalf of Israel and working on behalf of Iran.
Under the threat of bodily harm, journalists were asked to deny the reality they saw with their eyes and instead believe the press releases sent to them by the regime’s PR teams. As economic conditions deteriorated, the Syrian regime would plant more and more egregious statistics and figures in their articles.
The Assad regime was most sensitive towards the economic stories, acutely aware of growing discontent. “There was a blackout on any real information. The numbers coming from the ministry of industry and economy were pulled out of thin air,” said Adnan al-Akhras, a home news reporter.
Journalists also had to contend with the organisation’s fearsome bureaucracy and onerous editorial standards. If a journalist was dispatched to cover a story abroad, they would first have to seek the permission of their editor, who would need to get the permission of the managing editor, who would report to the editor-in-chief, who would have to ask the minister of information. By the time all the permissions had been secured, the story was long over.
Foreign news journalists relied on wire agencies such as Sputnik and Xinhua for their copy. However, there were strict editorial policies in place that sometimes even exceeded those of the Assad regime’s foreign patrons.
Journalists were obliged to change copy from Russia’s Sputnik news agency to make it stricter. For example, Russian media’s mention of “Ukraine’s army” would be changed to “neo-Nazi forces” in Sana’s stories.
“We would joke that we were the real Moscow, not them,” Abdelrahman said, adding that in recent years journalists on the foreign desk could only write about Cuba, Iran, Russia and Venezuela.
As journalists researched their stories, they were asked to collect any negative articles about the Assad regime that appeared in the foreign press. They would copy and paste these stories into an email, sign their names and send it off to a special account given to them by the palace. Where those emails went, the journalists had no idea – they never received a reply.
As life in Syria grew harsher, so did the work at Sana. Monthly salaries at the news agency hovered at about 150,000 Syrian pounds (£9). The stories grew more outrageous in contrast to the country’s growing poverty, absurd even to their authors.
“We had a phrase: ‘Let the owner of the donkey tie it where he would like’,” said Ibrahim, a Sana journalist who asked to be identified only by his first name.
Journalists were not allowed to quit. They could present their resignation to a special committee, which invariably would deny the request. They were not allowed to travel. If they tried, their name would flash across the border guard’s screens and they would be sent back home. Sana journalists were considered as having access to sensitive information and so would have to apply for special security permissions to leave Syria – “which we never got”, Abdelrahman said.
Despite the years of repression, journalists at Sana returned to work two days after the fall of the Assad regime. Home news reporters gathered and began to excitedly pitch ideas for future articles: the new marketplaces springing up in the post-Assad era; the rise of the dollar; tracing the disappearance of camera footage from regime prisons.
Still, after years of strict control, journalists seemed unsure how to proceed.
“We hope we will have freedom as journalists and that none of us will be arrested any more,” Abdelrahman said, glancing at a media officer from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel group that led the ousting of Assad, who had been given the task of helping reorganise the state news agency.
