As a student majoring in journalism at a local community college I had become Facebook friends with a 16-year-old boy from Homs who spoke in riddles about black snow (which he later said referred to bullets) and listening to music through headphones all night in order to drown out the noises that kept him awake.
Living all my life in America I had never even imagined the things I began to learn about life in Syria under the Assad regime.
When my young friend introduced me to the English speaking revolution pages I was horrified at the stories, photos and videos being shared by a multitude of courageous citizen journalists that revealed unspeakable violence and cruelty.
I marveled as hundreds, thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets with Arabic chants I could not understand, united in purpose, song and dance until suddenly it all turned to chaos as people ran for their lives.
Young men appeared in videos frantically carrying the bodies of friends whose lives had been snuffed out in an instant as the well placed bullets of Assad’s snipers had penetrated their skulls.
When my young friend begged me to tell the people of America what was happening to them I was overwhelmed. Who was I and why would anyone even care about what I had to say?
It can be a difficult thing to get even people you know to stop focusing on the complexities of their own lives long enough to look at what is happening on the other side of the world, let alone care. But I knew I had to try.
I realized early on that to get Americans to care about what was happening to Syrians I needed to be able to tell their stories, to show that in spite of the differences of language and culture, Syrians were people just like us.
But for every story coming out of Syria from the people who found themselves under fire on the streets, there was an alternate story being fabricated by the media inside Syria that is strictly controlled by the Assad regime.
Unarmed civilians were being portrayed as foreign terrorists in order to justify their execution style murders.
Fake news stories were being broadcast that either manipulated facts on the ground, or staged them in order to support the regime’s propaganda.
When Syrian army soldiers began to defy Assad’s orders to shoot at unarmed civilians, they were executed before they could defect and their deaths were blamed on the rebels and the regime’s fabricated “foreign terrorists”.
Those who preferred credible sources for news coverage of events inside Syria looked to media outlets they knew were not simply cogs in the regime’s propaganda machine… and Orient News Arabic was one of them.
As the Syrian Revolution marked its first anniversary, then second, third and fourth years, what began as a fairly simple rebellion by the people against a brutal and corrupt regime became fraught with complexities and it became difficult to unravel truth from a twisted narrative of subjective analysis, propaganda and conspiracy theories.
In the West, many observers began to put their own spin on what was happening in Syria based on whatever sources they chose to garner their information from.
The English speaking western world was sorely in need of a media clearinghouse that would provide credible information about Syria, and the idea for Orient News English was born.
Launched in October of 2015, Orient News English has successfully shared breaking stories and daily news reports in addition to interviews and stories from inside Syria as well as from those struggling to survive and rebuild their lives outside of their homeland.
Orient’s dedicated staff scours the internet daily looking for stories related to all aspects of what it means to be Syrian in these increasingly troubled times.
In addition to gathering news from a wide range of sources, Orient writers from numerous countries contribute original pieces on a variety of subjects related to Syria.
Orient journalists in different locations inside Syria share news via video reports and Syriaspora articles tell the stories of refugees now living in countries all over the world as a result of the Syrian diaspora that has morphed into the largest humanitarian crisis of the century.
In the past six years Syria has gone from being a little known country in the Middle East to being the number one news topic of media outlets around the world.
As Orient News TV celebrates another anniversary, it continues to be dedicated to covering the Syrian people’s struggle for dignity, justice and freedom and are honored to be entrusted with keeping you, our viewers and readers, updated and informed.
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