Besieged

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.3 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2018

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Over the last seven years as many as a million people in Syria lived under siege, 400,000 of them in Eastern Ghouta alone. Some were trapped for more than four years of bombardment, sniping and near starvation. The walls that stopped them fleeing also prevented many of their stories leaking to the outside world. They could not leave and journalists, along with aid workers and human rights groups, could not get in. Over recent years, Mike Thomson has been using internet links and social media to get inside these isolated and often forgotten places. He has garnered compelling and moving interviews with residents in some of the hardest to reach places. We hear from long besieged Daraya, Eastern Ghouta, and IS surrounded Yarmouk to Eastern Aleppo, Madaya, Homs and Raqqa. With great fortitude and bravery many people told Mike their stories as bombs shook the walls around them. The result is extraordinary picture of everyday life in some of the most frightening and devastated places on earth. Yet amid the grim accounts of death, loss and destruction are inspiring examples of resilience, courage and hope. Most of these besieged areas have now been overrun and evacuated, but this programme ensures that what they went through will not be forgotten.

Transcript

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0:00.0	To many, sieges invoke pictures of beleaguered medieval castles surrounded by knights
0:17.4	waiting to storm the walls. Yet they're also a very modern tool of war, nowhere more so than in Syria, where such tactics
0:26.6	have brought untold misery to more than a million people during the course of the seven-year
0:32.0	conflict.
0:33.0	I'm Mike Thompson and this is the BBC World Service.
0:37.0	In besieged, you'll be hearing from Syrian communities
0:41.0	that were cut off from the outside world for years.
0:45.0	Finding out the everyday reality of life under siege and how this cruel strategy has helped turn the tide of the war.
0:55.0	The siege fuels the latent hatred in your heart,
0:59.0	especially against whoever put you under siege,
1:02.0	and raises it to the worst level.
1:06.5	You don't even consider the death of the latter to be revenge enough, for death from starvation and slowly is not like any other death.
1:17.0	Isolation, endless hunger, snipers and air strikes breed a helpless, hopeless, inescapable fear.
1:27.0	The siege that traps those inside mutes their voices too, leaving the world outside, death to their plight.
1:35.0	The life and their siege here looks like if you are stuck in the sea and you can't swim, you can't
1:42.3	breathe and other fishes around you are tearing you.
1:47.0	I'd be sitting by myself and seeing someplace being shelled and I'm thinking why are they bombing this place?
1:57.0	And sometimes I hear that someone has died because he was injured and I'm thinking,
2:02.0	why did he die? did he do given that those I
2:06.8	talked to over the last few years were living under siege I could only reach
2:11.4	them via crackly phone lines and patchy social media links,
2:16.0	but the enormous value of their words transcends the bleeps and hisses on the line.
	...

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