Syria’s decade of conflict: Islamic State’s most wanted
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2021
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Syrian born reporter Lina Sinjab presents a special series from Assignment’s award winning archive on the ten years of civil war in her country.
This week Chloe Hadjimatheou tells the astonishing story of a group of young men from Raqqa, Syria, who chose to resist the so-called Islamic State, which occupied their city in 2014 and made it the capital of their ‘Caliphate’. These extraordinary activists risked everything to oppose ISIS; several were killed, or had family members murdered. ISIS put a bounty on the resistance leaders’ heads forcing them to go into hiding. But the group continued its work, under the banner Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently. Chloe met the group’s founders, who were organising undercover activists in Raqqa from the relative safety of other countries.
As reporter Chloe Hadjimatheou tells Lina, despite the passing of the years these men are still in hiding from the militants who occupied their city in 2014.
(Photo: Four activists from the group working under the banner Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading this program from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:03.5 | I'm Lena Xinjab with a season of memorable programs about my home country, Syria, and a decade |
| 0:09.6 | of civil war. |
| 0:11.1 | Today, Islamic State is most wanted. We meet some teenage activists who outsmart the |
| 0:17.4 | terrorists who seized their city and paid a very high price. |
| 0:29.0 | Hello and welcome to assignment on the BBC World Service. I'm Lena Xinjab with past stories of the civil war from my home country Syria. |
| 0:35.0 | Today's edition of assignment focuses on a group of Syrian teenagers who decided to resist |
| 0:41.0 | when the so-called Islamic State Group took control of their city. |
| 0:45.0 | They became citizen journalists and used the internet to show the reality of life in Raka. |
| 0:51.0 | According to one organization, more than 700 citizen journalists have died in |
| 0:56.6 | Syria in the last decade. And as my colleague Chloe Hadji Mathieu reports, documenting |
| 1:02.4 | events on the ground required an astonishing amount of energy, |
| 1:06.5 | defiance and raw courage. |
| 1:10.8 | This is a story about four friends who took on the so-called Islamic state. |
| 1:15.0 | Young men barely out of their teens who had no real idea what challenging the world's most powerful jihadists would mean. |
| 1:26.0 | Three years later, they're in hiding. |
| 1:28.5 | So many of their friends and family are dead, |
| 1:31.5 | and they've changed beyond recognition. Today their Islamic |
| 1:35.6 | states most wanted. Before Syria fell apart they were pretty ordinary guys. |
| 1:40.8 | We were living a normal life so we were playing football hanging with |
| 1:46.0 | the friends drinking as any teenagers in this world are doing. This is Abdulaziz his 24 year old he wears a baseball cap and tight black jeans that hang low on his backside |
| 2:02.0 | I had big dreams. |
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