10 SEPTEMBER 2024
Waad al-Kateab introduces herself as a Syrian filmmaker and activist. “I work in making films, and on the impact that these films generate, and I do this through Action For Sama, which is a campaign we created after my first film, For Sama. We do a lot of work about attacks on health care, about refugee rights, and issues around Syria.”
Waad’s husband Hamza is a Syrian doctor. “My real name is Zahed Katurji, but I’ve been known as Hamza Al-Kateab since 2011, so it’s my revolution name,” he explains. “I worked in east Aleppo city for four years as an A&E doctor, and I was the manager of the last remaining hospital in besieged east Aleppo in 2016, and was responsible for the medical evacuation of injured and civilians there.”
The film For Sama shows how Waad and Hamza and their infant daughter Sama lived through the siege, with Assad regime forces and their Russian allies closing in, bombing and shelling, and deliberately targeting the hospitals that were treating injured civilians.
“For the film, we started the impact campaign called Action For Sama, about war crimes in Syria, particularly attacks on healthcare facilities. Our main tagline, ‘Stop Bombing Hospitals,’ was linked later to war crimes in Ukraine, and in Gaza.” Waad and Hamza also tried to inform people in the UK about why refugees become refugees, and why they came from Syria.
Film is a powerful medium, but even so, the impact they achieved with For Sama was unusual, even in the industry, Waad says. An impact campaign doesn’t normally last even a year after a film is released.
“We found it amazing,” Waad tells us. “If we sometimes feel really tired, or like it’s a dead end, this campaign brings us back to the point of why we survived. And when we talk about this, it’s not just Syria, it’s Ukraine, it’s Gaza. We see similar human experiences around the world today.”
“You can relate the film to so many messages,” Hamza says. “About civilians being caught in conflict, about health care in conflict, and war crimes. And it relates to displacement, and how people end up being refugees. It shows a female perspective on war. It’s about children in war.”
In the first year, groups and organisations came to them from lots of different directions, Hamza remembers. “We had two or three screenings in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which is one of the main public health schools in all Europe, and also in Imperial College, where it became part of the curriculum for some subjects,” he says.
“Since we have witnessed war and been subjected to war crimes, with Waad documenting it and me working in a hospital, a lot of people want to hear this real first-hand experience, to hear what can really work, what can’t work, and what the actual need is.”
And then came the invasion of Ukraine, with similar Russian attacks on healthcare, and Ukrainian groups began inviting them. “They said, ‘this is actually what we live,’ and while each person suffering feels like it’s unique, there are also a lot of similarities,” Hamza says. “The same war criminals using the same tactics, besieging cities, planting fear into civilians, displacing them. And having had a camera there for five years, it brings a lot of perspective.”
At Syria House, King Charles III listens as Waad tells of earthquake rescue efforts by Syria’s White Helmets, 14 February 2023.
Fire Fighting
“Hamza is really running the campaign,” Waad says. “And I take part in events and stuff. We’re a really small team, but we’re supported by amazing partners, and we have relationships with activists with other organisations. As a team we are constantly fire fighting, and we want to be doing more, but then every time we write a quarterly report, we find we’ve done so much.”
At the start, the Action For Sama campaign was supported mainly by Choose Love, a charity working for refugees and displaced people. After the first year, Waad and Hamza registered a CIC, a community interest company. “Forming a CIC rather than a charity helps us more for advocacy,” Hamza explains. Along with Waad and Hamza, the team is made up of Rachael and Vanessa working part time, and Mohamad helping with design. Despite only having funding for part-time working, it feels like people are doing more than full-time, Hamza says.
“Whenever we feel like, oh, it’s going to be quiet, let’s maybe plan a strategy for the next quarter, then for example, a massacre in Syria will be revealed. Or the Ukraine invasion. Or the earthquake in Turkey happens, and that keeps you occupied for six months.” Action For Sama was one of the main organisations involved in setting up Syria House in Trafalgar Square in response to the earthquake.
“The racism against Syrian refugees in Turkey, we were trying to deal with as well,” Waad says. And the recent rioting in the UK was another emergency that directly affected Syrians, but Waad feels the Action For Sama team doesn’t really have the capacity to do much more.
“We haven’t had time to breathe, or reflect, or reset ourselves. But the team is very passionate, and they have their own experience with grief and trauma. I don’t see anything happening without them. We need the extra capacity to recharge, and to be more creative.”
Perhaps Action For Sama have more freedom to speak out than some larger organisations, we suggest? “I would prefer to have a bigger team with more funding,” Hamza laughs. “But yes, in Turkey, we knew NGOs there wanted to speak up, but they were worried about maintaining access, or about registrations in Turkey. In the UK, we’re not worried that Companies House will shut us down because we’ve made a statement. So in a worst case scenario, what happens? One of us won’t get a visa for travelling there? We have lived through worse.”
And that lived experience gives their voice more power on other related issues. “We don’t need to make things prettier, or to think twice about what we need to say,” Hamza says. “Also now, with attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza, we said it was a war crime to commit it in Syria and Ukraine, so it is a war crime in Palestine.”
Waad agrees. “As much as this is important for policymakers, it’s essential for a normal audience, for people who just maybe follow us on Instagram,” she says. “We are building recognition of who we are and what we’ve been through, and people can really accept this from us, as Hamza said, even if they might disagree otherwise. We are able to break through in so many conversations because we are talking about what we lived through.”
The Power of Film
Since For Sama, Waad has made two more documentary features. We Dare to Dream is about refugee athletes from Iran, Syria, South Sudan and Cameroon, all striving to take part in the Tokyo Olympics during the Covid pandemic. And Death Without Mercy was filmed in the days after the 2023 earthquake, following two Syrian families as they searched for their loved ones.
“The films that I managed to do, they give us a key to open so many doors,” Waad says. “The films allow people to feel like they are connected with us, like they understand, so they feel a responsibility to do something. Even in some of these Parliament meetings or policy meetings, I feel they connect with us in a different way. And for this reason, I feel we have a responsibility. For example, on Palestine, even when we felt like it was too traumatising to look at what’s going on, we had to because we have a platform, and we have unique access to policy makers.”
When For Sama was first released in 2019, Waad particularly wanted to hold a screening for MPs in Parliament, but this proved hard to organise. Eventually, Damian Collins, a Conservative MP at the time, hosted a small screening in Portcullis House. Alison McGovern from Labour also attended, and Andrew Mitchell from the Conservatives took part in the discussion after the film. It was not a full house.
“I remember being, no, I’m not going to say disappointed, but I remember that the number of people who came, it was just not as I expected it to be,” Waad tells us. “In the following months, I was approached by many MPs who came to see the film in different ways, but the Parliament screening, it wasn’t exactly what I hoped for. Some MPs, they sent one of their staff or they passed by for three minutes, and left. They didn’t engage with the experience. It was something we learned from. We understood not to have high expectations of policymakers.”
Waad has found that reaching MPs requires knocking hard on each door, and maybe reaching out to them by other routes. “Two or three people came to me, saying ‘my father is an MP,’ or a cousin or something, ‘and I’ve forced them to sit down and watch the film with me,’” Waad remembers. “Working on such a difficult subject as Syria, you need to not look at the result stage by stage, and you have to keep trying. Maybe that screening didn’t do what I hoped, but at the same time, maybe it brought the film’s name to people, so when their families or their friends or others talked about this, they felt it’s something important.”
“One of the first engagements we had in Parliament was an event in memory of Jo Cox,” Hamza remembers. “And we’ve also done some APPG meetings. We’ve done something with the Halo Trust about landmines and the White Helmets. Maybe five people showed up. And we had a few events with charities in Parliament. To be honest, when we’re going to do something in Parliament, I don’t have very big expectations, because every month there are different things happening there, and people will be busy.”
And after a couple of years, it felt like Syria wasn’t big on the UK agenda anymore, Hamza adds. Still, new evidence continues to be revealed of the crimes of the Syrian regime. “So we keep highlighting those,” he says. “We feel it’s really important for people not to forget.”
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan meets Afraa Hashem, Waad and Hamza, at Syria House, 14 February 2023.
The Earthquake
After the earthquake, Action For Sama and The Syria Campaign were approached by the Asfari Foundation to be part of organising Syria House in Trafalgar Square.
“We knew we had to make things warm and welcoming, and we also knew that we wanted to bring some reality to the situation,” Hamza says. And that’s when we thought, we need to bring photos. We need to get videos up, even if it’s shocking or traumatising. But people need to see that. You know, this is the reality, and the reality is even worse.”
“It was very shocking for us to go through this again in a different way, and it was disappointing how Syria was left alone in this,” Waad says. “We know that there were attempts to do things, but for all the calls from the White Helmets, from our organisation and partners who we worked with, it was not the kind of response that we needed.”
“When the earthquake happened, our main fury was towards the UN because they could have helped in facilitating rescue teams,” Hamza says. “We needed to take that frustration to policymakers here in the UK, whether MPs or the Government itself. And we tried to do it in a couple of events.”
After taking part in organising Syria House, Waad and Hamza were invited to Ten Downing Street with people who worked on the earthquake response. “We had a lot of conversations, some with MPs, with some government officials, and also with some of the UK rescue teams that were in Turkey,” Hamza remembers. “And we spoke about Syria, and what the Syrian people really needed. We just tried to deliver the frustration that we all felt about the response in northwest Syria.”
Waad remembers being there together with Sawsan from Madaniya, and other Syrians, and them all feeling abandoned and let down. “We were very hesitant to talk to these people,” she tells us. “It was very traumatising for us to say, you know, ‘guys, you were there, and the border was there, why didn’t you go?’ We didn’t want it to feel like we’re blaming them, because we know it was not their own decision.” Still, Waad had wanted to know if they were aware of what happened.
“One of the women who was on a rescue team, she told us, ‘We were feeling very bad because we knew that over this border, there are people, and we were not allowed to go,’ and hearing that from these people, it was just enough to feel a little bit like we were not so alone,” Waad says.
“We know, we understand policy, we understand how everything plays around different things. We don’t agree. We don’t appreciate it. But we know that these rescue people who were there, they were doing everything they could. We hoped things would be different. We hoped that they would be allowed to go into Syria. But unfortunately, it’s a bigger conversation.”
Both Waad and Hamza had family members in the earthquake area, and were very lucky not to lose anyone. The earthquake was personal for them, and for all Syrians, she says. “And the trauma that we all faced was just too big to process within that time. You have to react very quickly, even when you’re not sure you know what to do. It was really difficult. You don’t have the time to grieve or just feel what’s going on.”
Syria House was very important for Syrians in the UK to be able to find a place to grieve together, to feel that they were not alone. And for Waad, making her film about the earthquake was also very important.
“I wasn’t sure if I could do it, because of the amount of hardship and painful stories that we had to go through with this.” The film Death Without Mercy premiered at the Sheffield documentary festival, and again Waad has a new way to knock on doors, to tell people to remember, tell them to act. “And I’m really looking forward to learning from everything we’ve done in For Sama and in the other film, We Dare to Dream, to do things better for this story and for this change.”
The Message
“Syria is a responsibility for everyone, because what’s going on there doesn’t just affect Syria,” Waad says, when we ask her what MPs in the new Parliament need to hear. “Syria affects these values that we all carry, especially here in the UK.”
To MPs she says that sometimes doing even a little bit on their part could really affect a lot in Syria. “We’ve seen this, so we need to build the connection, to reopen channels personally. As Syrian civil society, as a community, we need to be more effective, and MPs have to take responsibility and act. We can explain, because we know, and we can help them do better.”
“People working in Parliament, they should know that if it’s not in the media anymore, that doesn’t mean it’s not happening,” Hamza says. “All the UK has stood for — the Syrian people’s rights against dictatorship, for democracy and against war crimes, against chemical weapons attacks — all of these issues haven’t gone away. The same dictatorship, responsible for the same massacres, the same war crimes, it is still there, unaccountable. War crimes committed in Syria were repeated in Ukraine. Accountability has to start somewhere to prevent such war crimes from happening again and again.”
“One of the most urgent things we need from the UK government is accountability on war crimes,” Waad says. “So many other governments like Germany or France have acted on this. The UK is really, really late. And it is in the interest of UK security,” she adds.
“People and governments work well together when they’re united by principles,” Hamza argues. “The UK public interest is aligned with all the Syrian demands, for democratic freedom, accountability for war crimes, even for safe returns for people who want to go back to Syria without fear of being arrested or killed. But we need to make this clear. That’s the work that we need to do, whether for the MPs or for the general public.”
Waad feels there is a lot of hope in the UK now, despite the recent riots. “With these recent events, there was a lot of fear and uncertainty for refugees, for Muslims, and for others in the UK. But at the same time, these amazing protests that were protecting people, and the government statements taking these events seriously, they were very reassuring for us,” she says. “For me personally, it was very optimistic, so I really hope to see more people taking responsibility toward what’s going on.”
Action For Sama’s website: https://www.actionforsama.com/