The Free Syrian Army Press Office would Rather Be Fighting

Chris Shearer is an Australian freeance journalist who has been travelling through southern Turkey. Chris filed this story after entering Syria at the Turkish bordertown of Killis.

Within two minutes of crossing from Turkey into Syria, I’m on the back of a motorbike being given a lift to a Free Syrian Army press office. It turns out to be a forty second ride but I might have missed it otherwise. It’s just a little prefab house across the road from a refugee camp, but it’s here that I’ve been told I can get some basic information and hire a translator.

Inside three guys are quietly staring at their laptops and smoking cigarettes. Another is asleep on a single bed in the corner of the room. None of the three speak much English and the only Arabic I know is don’t shoot, so one of them walks over to the bed and rouses the sleeping guy. He rises slowly with that what the fuck? Oh, right kind of look on his face. When he notices me he nods, wipes his face and comes over to shake my hand. His name is Abdul.

“So, what is it you want to do here?”

I start telling him as he takes a seat behind a desk and lights a cigarette. As soon as I’m done he wearily begins a well-rehearsed speech about how the FSA made a functional border crossing here, which has got nothing to do with what I’ve just said. He stops mid-sentence.

“Uh, give me a moment. I need…” and he mimes washing his face before walking out of the room.

Abdul had been a teacher before the revolution and worked as a media activist during the initial protests against al-Assad. When government soldiers started shooting at protestors, Abdul joined the Aseft al-Shamal (Northern Storm) Brigade and spent eighteen months fighting across the north of Syria. After his brigade took over the border region around Azaz last year he was assigned to the press office to translate documents and show journalists around. He’s been bored out of his mind ever since.

“I like the war. I like the war more than to sit here.”

“I feel that I give my country a lot when I fight. But here, by sitting here we do something like this.” He hands me a stack of western news articles about Syria that he has to translate into Arabic.

Obviously in those early days these guys were keen to show the western world what was happening here and could count on around ten journalists per day in those early months. That has dropped to about one every two days as other crossings have opened and major fighting has moved elsewhere. Apart from some bickering between rebel groups the border region has been relatively safe and since the press office and refugee camp are squeezed right up against the Turkish border they’re risky targets for Assad’s forces.  Mostly journalists come here now to check out the refugee camp.

“Now there is no war here”, Abdul says.

Later in the day he shows me around the refugee camp with an armed escort who says about ten words all day. He points things out with the disinterested attitude of teenager being forced to give a tour of the new house to a distant relative.

“This is the school. It’s a Qu’uran School.”

“This is the bakery.”

“This is a small kitchen.”

I ask him if he knows anyone in the camp I can interview about the conditions. He shrugs and walks over to the closest guys. One of them is a rebel named Sayef who came to the camp two months earlier after being wounded. I interview him in his tent and afterwards he invites us to stay for lunch.

“I’m not keeping from any other work, am I?” I ask Abdul. He shrugs, totally indifferent.

“You want to stay, we stay.”

During lunch there are dull, heavy booms in the distance.

“Do you hear this?” Abdul asks. “Fighters bombing Azaz”

I ask if he’d like to be there, shooting back.

He nods. “The frontline is exciting”, he says with a grin. “It’s boring here.”

He tells me highlights of his time here were speaking briefly with John McCain and smoking a joint a journalist had given him. Talking about weed and girls is the only time he looks like he’s digging our conversation. He asks me how much it is in Australia and asks me to bring him an ounce if I come back. He also asks me to appraise a camera the press office wants to sell. I’m happy to take a look because it’s probably the only useful thing I can do for them.

More news from Syria:

Dodging Bullets With Syrian Rebels Who Love Soccer And Adolf Hitler

Ground Zero - Syria

The Search For Deso Dogg, The German Rapper Turned Jihadi Poster Boy