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Live from Syria

She often travels alone, she doesn’t use fixers, and she reports from the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. Rania Abouzeid is an award-winning freelance journalist who frequently travels inside Syria to write about the three-front war between the Assad regime, the moderate opposition, and the Islamist groups. On Tuesday, she spoke at the New America Foundation about the conflict and her experiences in Syria.  She is now reporting mostly for The New Yorker and Al Jazeera America.

When the protests first began in the beginning of 2011, Abouzeid was covering the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt. By February of that year, she was in Damascus covering the demonstrations and walking alongside the Syrian men and women who peacefully protested President Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian regime. Even as the protests took a violent turn after the government crackdown, Abouzeid said that very few people flinched when bullets were fired. And from the moment the Syrian people took to the streets, it was clear the conflict was going to be existential on both sides. The people of Syria finally had a platform to advocate for change and they weren’t going to back down without a fight. Unfortunately, that fight continues 35 months later, and with a whole new dynamic. Read more