Zyad Mahameed finally has the job he always wanted. In his previous role in the media team for the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, he often thought about the Syrian state news agency – an Assad regime mouthpiece he considered his opposition – and what he would do if he was in charge there. Now he is.
As an appointee of the HTS-led caretaker government, his position is at present temporary but his plans for the Syrian Arab News Agency (Sana) stretch far into the future.
“The short-term goal here is to retrain the journalists and have real, professional staff,” Mahameed said. “The long-term goal is to make Sana a proper international news agency. It can be a governmental agency, sure – but not a mouthpiece of the regime.”
The 32-year-old, who had grown accustomed to producing slick drone videos and documentaries in rebel-held Idlib, was shocked to arrive in Damascus and find the agency using computers with decades-old software. The Damascus bureau had just two ageing video-cameras, he said. He wants to change things, and fast.
But whether this rebooted agency could eventually be able to publish criticism of Syria’s new transitional government led by HTS remains in question. “We don’t know yet. We can neither confirm nor deny,” Mahameed said, with a cryptic smile.
A longtime Sana journalist, Mazen Eyoun, described his employer of over two decades as “the tongue of the government”. The Assad regime was well versed in propaganda: in addition to state mouthpieces like Sana and television channels that called dissidents terrorists, the former dictatorship had increasingly looked to sympathetic influencers and bloggers in an effort to massage its image.
A month after Bashar al-Assad fled the country his family had ruled for over half a century, the offices of the state-owned Ba’ath party newspaper are now a dusty construction site, slowly transforming to accommodate the headquarters of Syria’s new information ministry. Figures such as Mahameed have been appointed by the transitional government to lead some of the same propaganda organs that had labelled them as terrorists – while uncertainty reigns for those who had worked there, who fear a range of outcomes, from being accused of allegiance to the Assad regime and out of a job to prosecution for embedding with its troops during the long civil war.
The Assad years were terrible for journalists: Reporters Without Borders (RSF) recorded the deaths of 181 at the hands of the regime and its allies since the anti-government uprising began in 2011, with many more disappearing into prisons. During its previous incarnation as al-Nusra front, HTS kidnapped eight journalists and killed six, according to RSF.
The broadcaster whose job it was to announce the end of the Assad era on state television, news anchor Houssam Hijazi, describes that as the proudest moment in his career. He had arrived at the place he had worked for decades just hours after Assad fled and delivered the prepared statement given to him by rebel commanders, making just a few corrections to the language.
The same president he now calls a “killer” – who, he said, he had to quash the urge to punch during a live broadcast from an infamous rally in 2012 – was finally gone. “Sometimes I felt sad, sometimes ashamed. I knew the news we broadcast was fake,” he said.
In his sonorous newsreader’s voice, Hijazi narrated the events of that morning when he declared: “Freedom has risen over Syria just as the sun is rising this morning,” with the green and red flag of the Syrian rebels spread across his desk. Hijazi said he had checked before going on air that members of Syria’s intelligence services were gone, fearing the military officials putting the channel on the air every day would return and jail him. The hands of an engineer who crafted a title card announcing the end of the Assad regime had shaken as he put it together, he said.
Hijazi, who said he had opposed Assad’s rule, said he wasn’t sure what might come next for him. The HTS-led caretaker government had offered state television employees work at a private opposition channel based in Turkey, he said, but he had declined this.
He worries he could simply be off air and out of a job, along with the 4,000 people he estimates had worked for state broadcasters, and who are currently without pay.
“They can’t fire that many government employees without a reason, but this is the challenge,” Hijazi said. “These newcomers don’t have experience in television broadcasting, it’s all social media now,” he added, fearing the new government might decline to relaunch state television altogether.
Syria’s growing independent media sector, which suffered brutality and surveillance at the hands of the former regime, meanwhile wants to see genuine press freedom. A coalition of outlets has demanded the abolition of the information ministry, legal protections for free speech, and trials for those who persecuted journalists under Assad.
Eyoun and Hijazi said they believed they were unlikely to face prosecution for their work, but while they had heard promises of a freer press, so far this meant little. “We’re waiting for actions, not words,” said Hijazi.
Mahameed said: “The Syrian people are yet to experience free expression, and so they need time to be able to practise it.”
Eyoun, who for his job at Sana had rewritten statements issued by the Syrian presidency, said he was looking forward to escaping the decades of repeating what he called “the wooden language” of regime success. He had tussled with an editor about how they described anti-government protesters, he said, but was terrified to say anything about those targeted by Assad.
He had returned to work a week after the fall of Assad after getting a call from his boss to tell him it was safe to come back. On his first day back, Eyoun had found himself alone in the office. He sat down at his desk, opened one of the laptops that had survived some light looting, and wondered what to do.
He recounted proudly his first professional act of freedom: switching the logo on the agency’s social media channels to the flag used during Syria’s uprising against the regime.
