Syria’s decade of conflict: The battered champions of Aleppo
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 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 she introduces Tim Whewell’s programme from 2016 about what happened to a local football team in Aleppo province in the early years of the civil war:
A fuzzy team photo from the 1980s sent Tim on a journey to track down the football players in the picture; the men who were once the champions of Aleppo province. Mare’a, their small hometown in northern Syria, had by then become a war zone - bombed by the Assad regime, besieged by Islamic State, even subjected to a mustard gas attack. And the civil war had torn through what was once a close knit band of friends - some had become pro-rebel, some pro-regime. They were scattered across Syria and beyond, some were fighting near Mare'a, some were living in refugee camps abroad. In this moving story about how war fractures and divides a community, Tim hears about the ordeals the men had suffered since they won that football cup and asks whether they could ever be reunited?
At the end of the programme, Lina catches up with Tim to find out what’s happened to the team members since 2016.
(Image: Mare’a’s cup-winning football team, 1983. Credit: Mare'a football team’s archive)
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 Sinjab, introducing a collection of edition of Assignment from Syria |
| 0:08.4 | made during the past decade after a peaceful revolution turned into a civil war. |
| 0:14.0 | Today, the battered champions of Aleppo, |
| 0:17.0 | a football team who found themselves on opposing sides of the conflict. Hello, this is assignment here on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:29.0 | I'm Lena Xinjab and I'm hosting a special series of past editions of the program from Syria |
| 0:35.2 | and its 10 years of civil war. Over that time hundreds of thousands have died in |
| 0:40.4 | my home country. Half of the population of 22 million has been displaced. |
| 0:46.4 | The death toll has been extraordinarily high for both professional and citizen journalists. |
| 0:53.0 | So how do you make a documentary about a life in a war zone |
| 0:56.4 | when you are hundreds of miles away? |
| 0:58.8 | A fuzzy team photo from the 1980s |
| 1:01.7 | sent my colleague Tim Hewell on a journey to track down football players from a small town near Aleppo. |
| 1:09.0 | When I first saw the picture I was immediately fascinated. There wasn't anything unusual about it in itself. |
| 1:15.4 | I'm sure you've seen many photos like it. The reason I was so intrigued was because of the really |
| 1:22.3 | weird circumstances I was in at the time and because I had |
| 1:26.2 | to know what happened afterwards to the young men in it. |
| 1:28.9 | It's painful to look at that picture. |
| 1:32.0 | It's really painful because you go through all this |
| 1:36.2 | years what happened. It's very emotional conflicting feelings, okay? Where were we, what we did and what happened to us? |
| 1:47.0 | That's Yasur Al-Haggi, talking to me, Tim Hewell, about the picture. |
| 1:55.0 | It's what inspired this week's assignment here on the BBC World Service. |
... |
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