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Welcome to the archives of Syria Deeply. While we paused regular publication of the site on May 15, 2018, and transitioned some of our coverage to Peacebuilding Deeply, we are happy to serve as an ongoing public resource on the Syrian conflict. We hope you’ll enjoy the reporting and analysis that was produced by our dedicated community of editors contributors.

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BROWSE THE SYRIA DEEPLY ARCHIVES

One on One: David Kenner, Middle East Editor, Foreign Policy

As the security situation in Syria deteriorates, the way editors choose to cover the story changes. For Foreign Policy’s David Kenner, it has meant more coverage from the borders, and an “ethical, legal and moral” refusal to send writers into the country.

Written by Karen Leigh Published on Read time Approx. 3 minutes

Here, he takes us through the process behind the magazine’s Syria coverage, how he verifies content and this week’s “big themes.”

I’m a Middle East editor, so for me it’s not just Syria: also Egypt, Yemen, Iraq. Some weeks all I do is Syria. I have an RSS feed and it’s about 1,500 articles, and I go through all of those on Monday mornings and figure out what the big themes are of the week and what the big stories are going to be, and then I think about what to commission. This week it’s ISIS and its relationship with Zarqawi and al-Qaida central. We’re not looking for the daily news; it’s the broad themes of the conflict that I’m trying to explain to a lay audience. What do you make of ISIS, and how are they the same or different from Jabhat al-Nusra? It’s that level that I’m trying to explain, and not who controls this town today.

Obviously the big shift as when this really did become a violent conflict versus protesters being shot by the regime, and then the influx of Islamists changed our coverage a lot. That’s probably the most central change. In the past few months, the infighting has been important, and I want to cover that more going forward. One thing that strikes me is we’ve done less coverage on the state of play on the ground. We’re not really, and haven’t been, running stories on rebels making gains in Aleppo or such and such is happening in Latakia. The battle lines are shifting, but the big picture is pretty static, and I see this as a real stalemate. We’ve been looking for stories that explain the big picture as it currently stands and trying to understand who all these players are.

The problem is that so much coverage has been defined by the lack of access. We had an article in our last print issue about journalists trying to go in and get the story but limited by the fact that a half mile away, they would be at risk of kidnapping and death. That’s a creative way of us trying to explain the fog of war around Syria. Lack of knowledge is a huge problem with editing Syria, finding writers who know the subject and the country. How do you get someone who knows what ISIS is thinking on any given day? It’s a black box, and every little kernel of information you just try to understand as best as you can.

We have not done a lot of stuff from inside the country recently. Partly that’s because it’s too dangerous to commission writers. Ethically, legally, morally, I’m not going to send someone into Syria right now. That has greatly changed our coverage. It’s meant we cover a lot more of the border areas, western Iraq, Lebanon, southern Turkey. How do I know the stories and sources are legitimate? I have a bunch of writers who I trust and commission pieces from, over and over again. Those are the people I’ve worked with over a number of years. I know them on a personal level. And that ameliorates that problem. That does mean that there are lots of people in the country whose stories we’re not getting, precisely because I can’t verify their work. But everything we publish on Syria, I know we can stand by.

Other stuff we do is not the on the ground reporting, it’s relying on YouTube videos and we publish people like Aaron Zelin or Hassan Hassan, who watch these things come out of Syria on a daily basis. They’d be the first to admit that’s no substitute for on the ground reporting, but the Syrian conflict is unique in how we tell the story.

I would love to cover what’s going on in northern Syria right now. We try to keep our readers apprised of what’s happening. It can seem like this never-ending stream of misery, with one day indistinguishable from the rest. It’s our job to show that there are real people and issues still at stake here.

Syria goes in cycles. There’ll be long periods of time where the Syria stuff won’t do very well in terms of readership, but then there’ll be a spike and renewed interest with something like the chemical weapons attack. We still run stuff, though. The other thing that hooks readers is when the story intercepts with the U.S. in some way: anything that shows readers that this isn’t some immensely foreign conflict in some faraway land. My criteria isn’t the number of eyeballs: it’s whether it’s an important story.

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