Janine di Giovanni, whose report on the battle for the Syrian city of Homs appears in Thursday's New York Times, reflects on the experience of reporting from the country in this post for The Lede. She will also respond to selected questions from readers about covering the evolving civil war there. Please post your queries for her in the comment thread below.
PARIS - I took the first of several visits to Syria in June 2012, legally, with a rare journalist's visa, to report from the government side.
I flew from my home in Paris to Beirut, then got a driver and traveled to Syria. Damascus, the world's oldest inhabited city, seemed to carry on business as usual - though there were already the car bombs, and the wounded soldiers in the hospital. I could look out the window of my hotel, the Dama Rose, and see women in bikinis drinking beer to hip-hop music at pool parti es, then see the smoke of bombings in the background. I had worked in the Middle East for two decades since I was a cub reporter, but this was my first time in Syria.
On my second trip, I traveled alone with a driver from Beirut to Damascus, which normally takes about three hours. This time, the checkpoints, sandbagged refuges of soldiers, were so heavy that it took about four. The driver was nervous and we had some difficulty at the border, but finally, I saw the hills outside Damascus where it is said that Cain killed Abel, and I felt relieved that we had made it. The U.N. observers had recently been pulled out, and there were only a few left at the Dama Rose so I decided not to stay there, thinking it might now be more of a security risk.
Instead, I stayed in a small hotel where I felt I would go more unnoticed. It was unnerving. I was the only Westerner. There were some Syrian refugees from Homs who had enough money to stay in a comfortable hotel. It was a bit like “The Shining†- my floor was empty, and, on all my trips, I had the feeling I was being watched, my computer hacked and my phone listened to.
Of course they were. But I worked in Iraq in the Saddam Hussein days, and I am used to getting dressed in the dark in the bathroom and not talking when a waiter comes to the table. Still, my paranoia was high - to say the least. There were a few nights when I put a chair under the lock on my door, which I did in Liberia during the civil war. In Syria, it was for no particular reason other than that I was by myself. Not that those chairs would have done anything if anyone wanted to come get me.
The third trip, which I just returned from, was the most dramatic.
The Ministry of Information gave me permission to work with government soldiers in Homs fighting rebels. It wasn't quite an “embed†- it was more me driving to Homs from Damascus, about two hours, and calling someone on a cellphone who came to pick me up. I have to say that the woman in Homs who organized my trip, a government official, was kind and polite, well dressed and helpful, and did not try to interfere with what I wanted to do. She said it was dangerous, and asked if I wanted to take that risk. I said I would until I felt uncomfortable - that I had been doing this a long time and usually had good instincts.
We drove toward the front line and at some point had to get out and go on foot because it was too dangerous to go by car. We had to climb through bombed-out buildings, glass everywhere, through tunnels that the rebels had previously used - basically punched-in walls of buildings that led to other buildings. It was real urban warfare. The Syrian Army had just pushed the rebels out, so this was now Syrian Army territory.
A few local people were still, living near the front line.
I saw some old women pushing carts of wood or food, and spent some time with a fam ily, and finally reached the soldiers. When I reached their position, there were a group of about a dozen exhausted-looking government soldiers who had been up all night. You realized then that they fight for hours to take the tiniest bit of territory. In this case, they were clearing the Free Syrian Army, the rebels, out of a school.
They welcomed me politely, not used to seeing journalists, and probably not a woman. I can understand some Arabic but don't speak it, so I had an interpreter with me, and the men did not treat me in a menacing way. The commander took me to the closest point to see a rebel sniper nest, about 300 meters away, and within seconds, we heard shooting. I stayed a while with them.
They were polite. And proud. They began to sing pro-Assad songs.
That night, there was very heavy fighting with that small unit - I had wanted to stay but they made me leave because they felt it was too dangerous. But I could hear heavy shelling from my smal l hotel in the center of Homs.
I had a cup of tea with the main commander, whose “office†was an old bombed-out shop. I was given standard soldier fare - heavily sugared tea and a cigarette. He was in his 40s but looked older, and we tried to talk but he looked totally burned out. It struck me that war is always monstrous, no matter what side you are on. Even though I was with men who defend Bashar al-Assad, they believe in what they do. They were fighting, they felt, to stop their country from becoming a “Salafist kingdom.â€
When I asked how many men he had lost, he suddenly grew silent. “Too many,†he said. “All too many. And all too young.â€
The Homs I drove through was wrecked - I had been to Homs two months before, but now it looked more like parts of Grozny or Jenin, where I have also worked.
We stayed in a simple hotel in Homs loaded with Mukhabarat - the feared intelligence service - but for some reason, because I was invited, I did not feel the usual anxiety. We stayed two days and then heard that there was fighting on the outskirts of Damascus, more bombing and another fight in a northern suburb. We wanted to get back and not be locked out of the capital.
Back in Damascus, I checked into my hotel and made some calls. My friends were growing more and more scared. War had come to the capital. I had lived through the siege of Sarajevo, and I remember that in the beginning no one thought it could happen - the road blocks, the electricity turned off, the lack of water and food for nearly four years, along with heavy fighting and shelling. I begged friends of mine there to leave as soon as they could.
