Palmer spoke with Syria Deeply about how the Assad government’s restrictions on access are affecting the narrative being spun around the war.

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The Syrian government has an information ministry through which we must work. In the past, they’d give us press credentials, and then we’d go into Syria, and they wouldn’t give us any access at all to senior regime members, or political, military or security figures, so we would almost inevitably end up covering the opposition. It was a totally self-destructive  and preposterous media policy.

My [female] producer and I have a theory that women blend in more readily and are less scrutinized. We hooked up with a female activist and made it into Moadimiyeh before Christmas, and spent a couple of days there, moving around in one of Damascus’s most deserted suburbs, under constant fire from the military.

To get there, we slipped away from our Syrian information ministry minder and took a public minibus wearing our hijabs, and we filmed all that night, around the town. We talked to the fighters who were guarding the area (they were mostly local men who had joined the opposition) and the remaining civilian population. About 20 percent of the population was left; the rest had all moved away and many, of course, had been killed. We thought we would slip back through the military roadblocks into Damascus the next morning, because it was a Friday and the ministry would never realize we’d been missing. But then we woke up and found that the military had closed all roads to Damascus for a sweep, so we were stuck.

That night, staying in the home of the activist’s family, we came under shell fire. It made for a good television story, but it was very dangerous and very sad. The people in Moadimiyeh were essentially sitting ducks. The next day we got back to Damascus,  but we did not cut or air the story until we were out of the country, for our safety and for the safety of the people who had hosted us.

We did that story secretly because the Syrian government wouldn’t legally let us into Moadimiyeh. It’s typical. They turn down most requests that could be controversial. Every time we go, we ask, can we embed with the army? Can we talk to this minister? And they say no, absolutely not.

However, they do have a roster of things that are sanctioned, which can sound institutional or boring on paper, but are nevertheless interesting to do because access is so limited on the government side that any glimpse of anything adds detail to a complex picture of a very messy war. For example, when we went to the military hospital, there was an opportunity to talk to soldiers about what they’d seen on the battlefield.

The regime’s media policy is very much handicapped by the fact that the people trying to manage it have never worked with the modern media world; they have always worked with the tame [government-controlled] press. Whenever we have gone to speak to a regional official or institution, the local press have been trotted into observe. These Syrian journalists would even be brought in to film me working. And I’d look at them and think, some of you are totally hip to what journalism is all about. And some of you are stuck in a Soviet policy from the 1960s.

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This last time, things had changed. We were able to get access to civilians being armed by the Assad government and allowed to film them, and we were able to go without a minder to sit with those people and hear how they lived and perceived the war. It was as important as sneaking off to Moadimiyeh to be under fire with opposition fighters and sympathizers. And it was something that had always been off limits to us.

I can’t tell whether the government has become more enlightened and realized that if they grant this access, it gives them better press. But I am hoping it’s the beginning of the Assad government giving access to allow us to give a more complete and balanced picture of this extremely sad civil war.

The Red Cross and Syrian Arab Red Crescent are doing unbelievable work trying to get medical and humanitarian aid to opposition and government areas that are hit. But I have it from the highest authorities in both organizations that they were not allowed to go into the areas that were attacked by chemical weapons on Aug. 21 despite numerous requests. They needed regime permission to move into the affected suburbs through Syrian military checkpoints, and they were saying to the regime, “We must be allowed to help, most people don’t have atropine, they don’t have what they need to combat the gas.” But the medical teams were were stymied. They were kept out in the hours and days that followed that chemical attack. In order to operate, the Red Cross and Red Crescent have to play ball with the Assad government. If we’d been able to go with them and seen them turned away, it would have added more circumstantial evidence to the perpetrators of that attack.

Syrian government officials denied that they were turned away. One of them, the deputy foreign minister, actually called the Red Crescent liars. I think the regime was keeping them out on purpose because they didn’t want to have neutral witnesses at the scene. Those attacks were not observed by anybody except the residents in those neighborhoods. Any government, unless they’d carried out the attack, would have moved heaven and earth to get any kind of medical care in there, and this one blocked it. To me it was a powerful indictment of the government, a powerful piece of circumstantial evidence that no one ever captured.

I love Damascus. I find the Syrian people very hospitable, laughing people, full of humor and wit. On Mt. Qaboun, there was a wonderful road that wound its way up the side of the mountain, and it was lined with restaurants and terraces. You could go up there and watch the city lights come on. And the food was fabulous. The singers. It was one of those things that Syrians did in the evening. That whole thing is shut down now. It’s a military zone where the army has set up observation and communications positions, and, it is said, also mortar and mission positions. It’s symbolic of the fact that the joy and the beauty and fun of Syria has just been snuffed out.