Rerun: #473 Khabat Abbas (Jan 2022)

Longform

Education, Arts, Books, News

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2023

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Khabat Abbas is an independent journalist and video producer from northeastern Syria, and the winner of the 2021 Kurt Schork News Fixer Award. ”I can see from my experience that there is a gap between the editors, who are kind of elites in their luxury offices, and the amazing journalists who are in the field, who all sympathize with what they are seeing on the ground and want to cover [it], but they have to satisfy the editors. And this is how we end up having little gaps in the ways of covering in general. It's not a matter of like, they shaped it in this way. The problem, I think, it’s bigger. How this industry is working, how this industry is deciding what they should cover.” Show notes: @khabat_abas Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism 34:00 "'Belief Allows Us to Move Forward,' Said One Female Soldier in Battle Against ISIS" (ABC News • July 2017) 40:00 "The Former 'Caliphate Capital' Is Haunted by Fears of an ISIS Comeback" (Washington Post • May 2020) 43:00 "How ISIS Women and Their Children Are Being Left Stranded in the Desert" (Washington Post • Dec 2019) 43:00 "ISIS at a Crossroads" (Washington Post • Dec 2019) 43:00 "After the ISIS Caliphate: Thousands of Islamic State Fighters Captured in Syria Face Uncertain Fate" (Washington Post • Dec 2019) 51:00 "'This Is Ethnic Cleansing': A Dispatch from Kurdish Syria" (New York Review of Books • Oct 2019) 51:00 "For Kurds on the Syrian Front Line There’s No Ceasefire" (The Daily Beast • Nov 2019) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the Longform Podcast. I am Evan Ratliffe. We're off this week for
0:14.8	the holidays, so we are replaying an episode. It's my conversation with Habbat Abbas,
0:21.6	a reporter from the Kurdish region of northeastern Syria. Habbat reported extensively on the
0:28.3	Syrian Civil War and on the various conflicts that spiraled out from that war, including the fight
0:33.9	against ISIS and the aftermath of that. In addition to her own reporting, she has also worked with
0:40.6	international news outlets as what's sometimes called, quote, news fixer. Someone who helps journalists
0:48.2	who show up there looking for a story, trying to tell the story of a place to find and report their
0:55.5	articles, their news reports, their audio video, you name it. And a lot of international reporting
1:00.8	that you read here in sea would be utterly impossible without the assistance of a local journalist.
1:05.9	And Habbat is actually one of the best on the planet at this. She's worked with ABC, the Washington
1:12.1	Post, Der Spiegel, the Sunday Times, many, many European outlets, TV and print. She's a brilliant
1:19.1	journalist in her own right. We talked about her work and then we talked about living and operating
1:25.0	in a war zone, what it's like to stay when the rest of the crew goes home. And it's a conversation
1:32.6	that I really wanted to have for a long time. And I really enjoyed talking to her about it.
1:36.6	So happy all the days, everyone. We will be back with a new episode next week. And here's Habbat
1:43.0	of us. Habbat, welcome to the show. Welcome to the long form podcast. Thank you, Eva.
1:52.4	And you're in Berlin right now, is that that's right? Yes, I am in Berlin waiting for the border
1:58.3	between Rojava and Kurdistan to be open to go back home. And what took you to Berlin in this moment
2:05.5	in the first place? So basically, I get a scholarship with a reporter without border in 2020,
2:11.5	but because of the pandemic, I couldn't come around. I've been here in Berlin from May until September.
2:20.5	And when while I was here, the training, it was four months. So it's finished, but the American
2:26.8	was drawing from Afghanistan happened. And we could see how the women are, what they are facing
	...

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