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Interesting article about Syria and what is happening to journalists

On May 23, 2012, a 30-year-old Georgetown University law student and former Marine captain, adapting to his newly reduced circumstances as a freelance journalist, crawled under a fence from southern Turkey into northern Syria. Austin Tice had not yet published a single article, but it didn’t matter. Since mass demonstrations had spilled over into a full-scale armed insurgency against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad six months before, Syria was the story that everyone wanted—all the more so because, with the Syrian government keeping a tight lid on visas, hardly any journalists were in the country. Just about the only way inside was to smuggle yourself under the protection of armed rebels, which suited Tice just fine. As a soldier, he already had tours in Afghanistan and Iraq under his belt. Now his ambition was to go back to the region with a fresh pair of eyes and launch a new career as a journalist.

His guide was a bespectacled Syrian-American in his early 50s named Mahmoud—wiry and stubborn, a bit like an older, shorter, Syrian version of Tice himself. After I met him, Mahmoud would show me training videos he had made, one revealing a pro-regime militiaman lying dead at his feet. Tice and Mahmoud bonded quickly, as people do in war zones; Tice would poke fun at Arab procrastination and Mahmoud would call him “White Boy.” Until a few months before, Mahmoud had been leasing out heavy equipment in Atlanta; now he was a soldier in the new Free Syrian Army and on his way to becoming a brigade commander. Things were changing fast, and it was possible to believe that before long the rebels would be in Damascus, and Syria’s creaking Ba’thist regime would be history. Within two days, Tice and Mahmoud had made it to a rebel base in the province of Hama, where Mahmoud had contacts. “Writing like a maniac,” Tice wrote on Twitter, “taking photos, working like crazy.”

Tice turned out to be a gifted journalist. Laid out in scattershot bursts on Flickr and Twitter, mixing descriptions of field maneuvers with the Free Syrian Army and references to country pop, Tice’s information trail made for a thrilling, hard-charging alternative to the flak-jacketed puppetry of much war-zone reporting. He bantered about soccer with rebels in the central Syrian province of Homs, drew on his military background to analyze the weapons and strategy of both sides, and ribbed The New York Times and the rest of the international media for their inability to put a journalist on the ground. (“Srsly guys if any of y’all wanna come down here, I would love some company,” he wrote on Twitter.) Tice’s headstrong, impudent side wasn’t to everyone’s taste—on at least one occasion his rebel hosts had to put him under house arrest for his own safety—but he had the merit of being funny. “Tonight made a good-faith effort to explain gay rights to a fun and well-meaning group of Syrian guys,” he wrote at one point. “Yeah, not the time, not the place.”

In Homs, Mahmoud left to go back north, after which Tice was passed from tiny battalion to tiny battalion, making friends quickly and trusting those he met with his life. By July he had made it to Yabroud, a city north of Damascus, and was writing for The Washington Post. It was around this time, too, that he composed a kind of mission statement as a defense of what he was trying to achieve.

“So that’s why I came here to Syria,” he wrote on his Facebook page, “and it’s why I like being here now, right now, right in the middle of a brutal and still uncertain civil war. Every person in this country fighting for their freedom wakes up every day and goes to sleep every night with the knowledge that death could visit them at any moment. They accept that reality as the price of freedom…. They’re alive in a way that almost no Americans today even know how to be.”

In late July, Tice made it through to Damascus, where for two weeks he fell in with another hospitable group of rebels in the suburb of Darayya. But he couldn’t help worrying about the growing number of attacks on journalists, and worrying as well that his reports on human-rights abuses by the rebels, not just by the regime, might put him in harm’s way. “I don’t want to get murdered in Syria,” he’d written to Mahmoud. He was in Darayya for his 31st birthday, and he was characteristically gung-ho: “Spent the day at an FSA pool party with music by @taylorswift13. They even brought me whiskey. Hands down, best birthday ever.” That would be his final tweet. Two days later, on August 13, Tice apparently left for the Lebanese border and a much-needed vacation. With the exception of a single, deeply ambiguous video which popped up on the Internet six weeks later, nothing has been heard from him since.

Syria is the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. In the last three years at least 60 of them have been killed while covering the conflict there, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Missing from the statistics is anything about the kind of journalist who goes to Syria and why. After the death of Marie Colvin, in a blizzard of Syrian Army shells in Homs in February 2012, much of the Western media drew back from covering the country. Meanwhile, a lightly resourced, laughably paid, almost wholly uninsured cadre of freelancers, often armed with little more than a notebook and a mobile phone, infiltrated Syria anyway. A few were crazy narcissists or war-zone tourists, but most were serious reporters. Four-fifths of all journalists working in Syria, according to one estimate, are freelance and answering to no one but themselves.

Austin Tice was one of these. So was I. Our paths had even crossed. Three weeks before he disappeared, while cooling my heels in the Turkish border town of Antakya, waiting for someone to take me into Syria, I’d asked my hosts at a Free Syrian Army safe house whether any Western journalists had passed this way before. Just one, they said—an American named Austin who had stayed with them for a week. They kept in touch with him on Facebook—he was still inside.

Among the small band of Syria journalists, everyone quickly learns about everyone else. The week before, on another foray into northern Syria, I’d rolled up at a disused soccer field to interview a local rebel commander. I ran into two glazed-looking European journalists sunning themselves outside an impromptu media office. The journalists were Balint Szlanko, a Hungarian, and Vedat Xhymshiti, an Albanian Kosovar. The media office had been heavily shot up by a regime helicopter; that hadn’t stopped Balint and Vedat from sleeping on its roof. The pair had recently shared the roof with another freelancer—an affable, devil-may-care video journalist named Jim Foley, whom one of them had known when reporting in Libya. Foley was a seasoned reporter, and this was his second trip to rebel-held Syria. A month earlier, stranded in the suburbs of Homs, he’d run into Austin Tice. For over a week, according to a Syrian who was with them, the two stayed up late into the night talking about anything and everything. Tice spent much of the time shooting off his mouth about the amateurism of the Free Syrian Army, and Foley had to quiet him down.

All these men would soon be kidnapped. Balint Szlanko thinks he was arrested by a security team working for a powerful rebel militia; Vedat Xhymshiti was taken twice by different groups he believes were Islamic extremists—during the past year and a half, hard-core Islamists under the thin umbrella of al-Qaeda have become a growing presence in the fight against the regime. On each occasion, the men were freed within 24 hours. Jim Foley would not be so lucky. On November 22, he was returning from Syria to the Turkish border with another Western journalist and a Syrian fixer when they stopped off at an Internet café in Binnish, a town in Idlib province that they had been using as their base. It was Thanksgiving and the journalists went online, filing work and chatting with friends. After an hour or so they left the café and flagged down a taxi to take them to the border. Somewhere along the way the taxi was intercepted and the journalists were extracted at gunpoint and driven away. Like Austin Tice, Jim Foley and his companions simply vanished. Despite immense efforts by their families and friends, there has been no real news of them since.

the rest here

http://www.vanityfai.....g-in-syria