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Vivid Dispatches From Syria\'s Front Lines

September 25, 2012, 6:25 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY

Eighteen months have passed since an adviser to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria scolded a BBC correspondent in Damascus for reporting that video posted on YouTube by activists appeared to contradict official accounts of a crackdown on protesters broadcast on state-run television. “The events are happening in Syria,” Bouthaina Shaaban insisted, one week into the uprising, “therefore, it's Syrian television who tells the truth, nobody else.”

Now that the Syrian government has lost its monopoly on the flow of information - and on the use of violence to impose its will - the Assad government has become somewhat more willing to grant limited access to foreign correspondents to report on the battle for control of Syria's largest cities.

One of those correspondents, Bill Neely, the International Editor for Britain's ITV News, filed a remarkable video report this week from Homs, where parts of the city are still held by armed rebels, six months after the Free Syrian Army retreated from the district of Baba Amr under heavy bombardment.

Mr. Neely, a Belfast native who began his career covering sectarian violence by Christian militias, explained on the ITV News Web site that the government snipers he met in Homs were just 50 yards away from the rebels, in a ruined neighborhood where “the front line has moved no more than five hundred yards,” since May. “One hundred yards a month, at a cost of hundreds of lives. A day ago, five Syrian soldiers were killed here.”

After he returned to Damascus from the front line in Homs, Mr. Neely reported on Twitter that Assad loyalists were still fighting to retake parts of the capital from the rebels on Tuesday.< /p>

Lyse Doucet, a Canadian correspondent and anchor who is in Damascus for BBC News, filed two reports this week, one from a village in the western region of Latakia, the heartland of the president's Alawite sect, and a second from the capital.

Her first report showed mourners at the funeral of a government soldier in an Alawite village fiercely loyal to the president, where one man told her: “There are two sides. The conflict is severe and villainâ€" and we don't like it. We don't like it, we don't want it, but we are forced, we are compelled to do it.”

Writing on Twitter after she returned to Damascus from Latakia on Sunday, Ms. Doucet reported hearing explosions, one of them just outside her hotel.

Images of the security forces scrambling to respond to the explosion outside the Damascus Four Seasons Hotel, and of a man being detai ned and head-butted by a security officer, were included in Ms. Doucet's second report, broadcast on Tuesday.

Ms. Doucet's most recent report also showed that the government still restricts the movement of foreign journalists quite heavily. Her crew managed to film the security forces blocking her from reporting in a northern district of the capital and then sending a fighter in plain clothes to listen in on her interview with a fruit seller near a government checkpoint.

On Tuesday, the Guardian published a portrait of “the bloody stalemate” in Syria's largest city, Aleppo, reported from behind rebel lines in recent weeks by the correspondent Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. The reporter's journey to that front line was featured in a long video report broadcast last week by PBS.