At a Ministry of Information press conference, 19 March 2025.
A freedom with rules
After the unspoken red lines of the Assad era, journalism in today’s Syria needs some clear rules, Yara Bader argues.
4 MAY 2025
Yara Bader is head of the Media and Freedoms programme at the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, an organisation she runs together with her husband Mazen Darwish. When we spoke, they were in the process of reestablishing an office in Damascus, after several years of being forced to work from exile in France.
In recent years, SCM has been most known for its work on legal accountability, helping to gather evidence for legal cases in Europe, but press freedom has been central to their mission since before the 2011 revolution.
Yara’s own beginnings were in journalism rather than activism. “Cultural journalism was my area,” she tells us, and she wrote her first articles while she was still in her first year at university, studying dramatic arts.
All journalism in Syria at that time was marked by self-censorship, but the regime’s red lines were not written down, “so it depended on your understanding of Syrian politics,” Yara says.
And this extended to cultural journalism as well. “There were books you were not allowed to speak about,” Yara remembers. “And taboos on gender equality and women’s freedoms.” Again, there were no written rules. “But I’m not sure you could find any article in Syrian media at that time referring to LGBTQ points. Even articles related to something religious, for example the Yazidi community, you wouldn’t find it easily. The Kurdish issue was highly sensitive, even on cultural rights, you know?”
Yara gives an example of when the 2003 film Good Bye, Lenin! was shown during the Damascus Film Festival. The cinema was completely full because all the Mukhabarat secret police arrived, thinking all the old communists would be there, and they found an audience of young people had come.
“And when I tried to write about the film, I had to rewrite it again and again, and in the end I found something suitable, where I could express a bit of what I wanted to say without going too far,” Yara remembers. “The film itself, it’s not that much politically, but it was not easy.”
Joining SCM
Mazen Darwish founded the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression in 2004, and it was some years later when Yara Bader first met him and got involved in their work.
“So Mazen’s office had been shut down by the government on the 13th of September 2009. And then, my friend was telling me about Mazen’s work.” Mazen was looking for someone to work on research about how the Syrian government monitored and controlled cultural freedoms, Yara’s friend Wael explained to her.
“He was saying he wanted to arrange a meeting with Mazen, because Mazen was looking for someone to work on the research, but then this had happened. So I laughed and said, ‘Well, I think it’s a fine time to do the research—let’s have a coffee.’ And he said, ‘You are crazy.’ I said, ‘No, I’m serious.’”
And so Yara and Mazen’s collaboration began, and a year or so later Yara had finished the research, and they were preparing to publish—just as the first events of the Arab Spring were unfolding in Tunisia.
“Then Ben Ali ran away, and everything related to anything took a pause. We entered a new era related to Egypt, to Tunisia, to Syria, to everything. Later in 2011, once again we reviewed the research, to check if we needed to make any adjustment—but we got arrested before publishing.”
Yara still has that study, but no longer wants to publish it. “Never, ever. Because whenever I think of it, something huge happens.”
After the regime shut down SCM in 2009, they’d registered a publishing house as a vehicle for doing their work. “I applied for the registration in my name,” Yara says, “and then SCM was able to continue.”
In reality, everyone there was doing work for SCM, not the publishing house. On 16 February 2012, their office was raided. “And after one hour, in the second round of questioning, they said, ‘We are not going to ask you about the publishing house, which has been working for over a year, and you don’t have any books yet.’ We said, ‘Okay, don’t ask about the publishing house, move on.’”
Thirteen people were arrested in the February 2012 raid. Eight of them, including Yara, were released the following May. The others disappeared into Assad’s network of prisons. One of those released, Ayham Mostafa Ghazzoul was rearrested in November the same year, and was killed under torture four days after his arrest.
Mazen survived almost three and a half years imprisonment before he was released, and both Yara and he escaped to Europe.
Journalism after the Revolution
We turn back to 2011, to the beginning of the revolution. What was that period like for her, as a journalist? As a Syrian?
“It was a moment to be alive, you know? A lot of hopes, a lot of fears. Everyone recognised they were living through something huge, no matter their opinions about what was happening.”
Syrians were speaking out, and some in the world’s media were listening. “It was fascinating for us to see all these great journalists coming to Syria, trying to cover what’s happening,” Yara remembers. “Gilles Jacquier, Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik”—the names are all reporters who were killed in Homs in January and February of 2012—Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik were targeted by regime artillery while staying at the media centre in the besieged neighbourhood of Baba Amr , while Gilles Jacquier was assassinated by Assad’s Air Force Intelligence, according to his wife, photojournalist Caroline Poiron.
“Also, how bittersweet it was, to get to know the very courageous, and strong, and well-educated people who shifted from their study as an engineer, or a doctor, or I don’t know what, to be a media fixer or a correspondent, like Mazhar Tayyara, and Bassel Shehadeh, and all other people who were the first people to be targeted by the government,” she says.
Mahzar Tayyara was a videographer and photojournalist, and Bassel Shehadeh was an activist, journalist, and filmmaker. Mahzar was also killed in Homs in February 2012. Bassel was killed there in May of the same year.
Yara kept on writing during this time. “On some platforms, I wrote with my own name, but on other platforms, I wrote with a different name. Officially, I continued from 2013 to the end of 2015 as the correspondent for cultural affairs for Lebanon and Damascus with Al-Quds Al-Arabi.”
And now that Assad is gone? “Actually, this is funny,” says Yara, “I was looking to go back to journalism.”
Yara hadn’t foreseen Assad’s fall. “I thought of all different scenarios, but none of them included the regime going away. It was really difficult to imagine a scenario without the Assad regime.”
She experienced it like a repeat of Ben Ali running away from Tunisia, all those years ago. “Your life goes on like this, and suddenly something shocking—totally shocking—so it was a wonderful day. A day to live for, just to see people coming out of jail after all of these years—truly, it was deserved.”
There is hope in this new era, but also uncertainty. “I don’t know if we are capable emotionally and mentally to process all of this, to find the best reaction. Sometimes you find us very happy, sometimes very worried. Sometimes, everyone will want to go back to Syria today, and then no-one wants to go.”
Yara sees the fight for human rights getting harder, the fight for values she believes in, justice, freedom and democracy. And not just in Syria, but all over the world, questions about the independence of media, and about dealing with propaganda, are fundamental. “We are going back to our basics, to think on it, to work with it.”
Yara comes out of the Syrian revolution, but she believes journalism must reject the role of cheerleader. “Of course, I am happy the regime is not here, but we should not just be happy and point.” She sees a narrowness of views in Syrian media right now. “You can find a lot of people talking, but actually they are mostly from the same viewpoint,” She feels that it’s difficult to get balanced journalism, whether on Syria TV, the Qatari-owned pro-revolution network, or on other big Arabic channels and media platforms.
As an example of the shortcomings of Syria’s news media, Yara points to events on March 1st when Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz instructed the Israeli military to “prepare to defend” the Druze population in the city of Jaramana on the outskirts of Damascus, claiming that the suburb was “currently under attack by the forces of the Syrian regime.”
Yara turned to these Arabic channels to learn more. “And you see, ‘There was a problem in Jaramana, where a few members had a personal fight with some other persons.’ And you feel like there is a gap between the strong statement and the small problem.”
The episode illustrated how a lack of reliable established news sources left people vulnerable to potentially hostile misinformation.
“And you feel you need to go and find out, like, ‘Hey guys, what’s really happened? Why all of this buzz?’ And so people go to social media, and I’m really sorry, but with all my respect to the huge influence it has, social media is social media, it’s not journalism. They don’t have the same rules.”
Yara wants to see a return to journalism with rules, “with professionalism, with the ability to verify information, to check your source, and with multiple sources from different viewpoints,” she says.
“Not every journalist has to be critical,” Yara argues. “But it would be very helpful if you could mention the whole information without cutting any part of it.” She gives an example of reporting that someone has been hit by a car while crossing the street. “You need to mention the light, was it red or green? You cannot just not mention it, you know? Why was this person crossing the street? Was the car fast or slow? I feel now that we are always missing part of the story.”
So she would like Syrian journalists to take a step back, and just give the full total of the information needed. “But also, I’m not sure if the authorities are giving one hundred percent of the information,” she adds.
A lack of transparency
It has been really hard to get news about anything official from the interim government, Yara tells us, and rumours have filled the gap. “And we are not sure if this new authority is using social media as a test tool,” she says. “They leak some rumour in social media and check how people react. If the majority are accepting, yeah, that’s fine, they can go ahead. If there’s a huge ‘No!’ they will come and say, ‘Well, you know, this is social media, this is a rumour, why, there’s nothing like this!’”
Yara points to another example, the Syrian National Dialogue conference that took place towards the end of February. “Seriously, guys?” Yara exclaims. “Forty-eight hours before, you decided to announce the date of the National Dialogue Conference, which has turned from a conference for several days to one day?”
Anticipation had been building for the National Dialogue Conference, which was originally billed as a central part of determining how the country would be governed, with preparatory meetings in a number of regional cities. But the concluding event was rushed, and many felt confused and disillusioned.
“It was going to begin in forty-eight hours, and where was the agenda? Who was going to speak about what? What’s the programme, who’s organising it? No one was able to understand anything.”
Even now, Yara is unsure as to what it was all about. The final statement, “it was nice work in a way,” she says, “thank you so much,” but would it have any authority now, even moral authority? Or was it over and done with?
“A huge part of it was about transitional justice, and a lot of people were discussing this,” she points out. The morning after these discussions, Syria’s Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani addressed the Human Rights Council in Geneva by video link, Yara remembers. “And he announced the establishment of a High Commission to address the cases of the missing and forcibly disappeared.”
But was this a decision coming from the transitional authority, or was it a result of the National Dialogue, Yara wondered? “Because if it was one of the results of the talks, it should be mentioned in the last day’s statement,” she says. “And if it’s not, did you not tell the people who were discussing transitional justice about this? Or you told them and they ignored it?”
So, she feels there is a lack of transparency? “I would say, yes, this is the main headline,” Yara replies.“Yes.”
Syrian to Syrian — media for social cohesion
Before the collapse of the regime, the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression was running an investigative journalism project. It is meant to run three years, but with only two years completed, the third has been paused, at least temporarily, because of the American aid freeze.
“It is about supporting journalists to work on any social investigative reports they choose,” Yara explains. “We asked them for one thing, for individuals from different areas of control in Syria to apply together.” So someone from Damascus might apply with a colleague from Qamishli, perhaps, or Tartus or Suwayda, and they would propose a topic.
SCM offered each team a specialised trainer to work with them on their reports for a year, and then they were published in Arabic and English. “And by the time the regime fell, the relationship between the twenty-four of them, it was amazing, and the work they did, it was very good,” Yara says.
“We were trying to support the idea, which I truly believe in, that sometimes if you are just professional, you can do a fantastic job, no matter what your personal political or religious opinion is.”
The work on social coherence is especially needed, “to get to know our neighbours again,” she believes. “There has been a lot of stereotyping in these years. We need to break it down, to humanise each other again.”
But to do this work needs space, a condition of freedom, and even as she hopes for the best, Yara is unsure of how things will go. “For SCM, we didn’t get our registration yet. We have three colleagues now in Damascus, and one of them is just working to follow up on paperwork, where you should apply, and how the process is going to go, etcetera.”
The Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression is now registering as an NGO in Syria, because even though it’s possible to work without that, they don’t want to risk being shut down. “So it’s better with a registration, to be legal, because we don’t want to go back to undercover work, as in regime times. We should be beyond this. I hope we are beyond this.”
Reconstructing media
The Syrian media sector needs clarity over new rules and regulations, over who makes the rules, and how to hold them accountable. At the time of our interview, the Minister of Information was Mohammad al-Omar, continuing a role he had played earlier in Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s government in Idlib. Since then, a new Minister of Information has been appointed, Hamza Mustafa, previously General Manager of Qatari-owned Syria TV.
To hold the new government accountable, independent media needs to be sustainable. The drastic cuts to American aid funding make this an urgent issue. “We are only affected slightly because we don’t have direct funding,” Yara says, but very many people have been hit, “for work related to democracy and to civil society,” she points out.
Access to information is another challenge, as she’s already touched on. And safety? “I truly, deeply hope we don’t find ourselves again with any problems related to the safety of journalists.”
And then, building capacity. “The people who had to leave, to Turkey, to Europe, they had a chance to develop their experience, and they received training, and worked with different media outlets, but those who worked in areas controlled by the government, they didn’t have the same chances, so there is a bit of a gap, and a lot of work is needed to raise capacity equally.”
Syrian state TV has not resumed broadcasting since the fall of the regime. At the same time, a lot of people who used to work in what was rebel-held Idlib are now working from Damascus. “So, people need to get to know each other,” Yara suggests. “We should not look on everyone who worked in state TV as a shabiha, for example.”
Yara is also concerned about women’s participation. “I hope it can be better than we fear,” she says.
And finally, on technological developments, Syria was blocked from technology, first by the regime’s need for control, and then by sanctions. “You had fourteen years of double-trouble blockage.”
What regional differences does Yara see in Syria for independent media, we ask? “So, what happens in Damascus is understood, it’s a capital,” she says. “But we are truly afraid it’s going to turn into some kind of green zone, like in Iraq. We don’t want this scenario. We hope for all Syria to be to be green, and to have some kind of freedom for civil participation, for media coverage, for diversity, for women’s participation, for everything.”
The conflict affected some areas more than others. “Homs, for example, the type of conflict has affected socially so much, not only buildings. Socially, it’s a very tense situation. And Idlib is another scenario. Now, very few articles are coming from Idlib. And in Latakia and Tartus, there are no buildings knocked down, but socially, it has its own problems.”
Internationally, there is still a will to support media and freedom, Yara believes, but Syria is in a bad place. Every sector needs to rebuild—health, education, housing—as well as everything to do with media.
“What I’m saying is, everyone has a part to do,” Yara elaborates. “So the authorities should announce that, ‘the official information is going to be published here,’ and to handle it the proper way. So, you need to give people a clear, complete press statement, and you need to give the journalists their time to handle this press statement, time to question you, and you should present them with a full, complete answer.”
For journalists, she says, “We should work with them on getting the right information, how to find different sources, protecting your source, etcetera.”
For Syrian media organisations, what she hopes for is not necessarily a Syrian equivalent to the BBC, “like, the old version of the BBC, or CNN, I’m not talking about having Edward R Murrow again, you know?” But she hopes to see a certain degree of institutional capacity being developed.
“One day, hopefully, we will have a media outlet that has a legal person just for legal review, and for fact-checking review,” she says. “This is a dream to come, but again, we are dreamers.”
For one news organisation to fully cover all of Syria would need a lot of funding. “As far as I know, Syria TV and Al-Araby Al-Jadeed now have their reporters in different areas, trying to cover different areas’ stories as much as they can,” she says, referring to the two channels owned by Fadaat Media Group, headquartered in Doha, Qatar.
“But after 15 years, after all of this great experience from Syrian journalists, civil journalists, media workers, citizen journalists who developed truly a good experience, and did the hard work, and some of them paid a huge price, I think we can dream of this.”
She has seen a burst of hope, and of people’s willingness to work again inside Syria. It’s refreshing,” she says. “It’s something similar to 2011, the international moment.” But with that she also worries about people taking things for granted, and this moment of opportunity passing by.
“We have received so many requests to support this initiative, and that initiative, they want to make a website, they want to make a news platform, and from different areas, not only Damascus, which is fantastic,” she says. “But we are trying to find enough financial support to respond to all of these needs, and to handle the problem related to different capacities.”
For example, one group initiative for a news platform proposed a budget of around seventy or eighty thousand euros, “for us, a huge amount,” and another group proposed, “give us ten thousand, and we will do one, two, three, four, five things.” Yara’s response was, “Guys, it doesn’t work like this—let’s take a step back.”
People really want to work, Yara says. They want to learn, and they need the resources to work freely, and with confidence. “And we need time.”
Notes
Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression
https://scm.bz
Reports by SCM’s investigative journalism project
https://scm.bz/en/category/journalist-house/investigative-reports/
