Crossing the border, running the risk

Emma Beals, 33, has been covering the war in Syria for two years now. But every time the New Zealand-born freelance journalist gets ready to cross the border from Turkey, where she lives, into the conflict zone, she turns into an “insane, panicky mess”.

“It’s morbid as all hell, but it’s a good process because you’re actually being realistic about the risk you’re taking,” she says over Skype. “But by the time you’ve done all that, you’re in a bit of a panic. You think, ‘What am I doing, this is the stupidest idea, maybe I should just not go, I don’t have to do this’.”

But there’s only so much you can prepare for. “In the Middle East, everybody says ‘insha’Allah’, which means ‘God willing’,” says Beals. “Once you’ve crossed the border, everything is insha’Allah, basically. … after that, you’re in the hands of God.”

It’s hard, if not impossible, to apply a risk-benefit analysis to conflict reporting – especially in a country as deadly as Syria, where at least 65 journalists have been killed since the civil war began in 2011.

But as Beals tells it, she couldn’t not cover Syria: the impulse to witness history in the making trumped a lopsided list of pros and cons.

“I can justify it on the basis that this is absolutely a story that needs to be told; that I happen to have the connections and the passion for it … that I want to be doing it, that I’ve lived a good life, la la,” she says. “But, rationally, there isn’t a way to justify going into Syria.”

LISTEN to Mediawatch interview Emma Beals about Frontline Freelance Register, which she helped establish to protect the interests of professional, independent journalists working in conflict zones:

Beals started following the conflict there while working as a journalist in London. “You know how some places just capture your imagination in the way that others don’t? I fell in love with Syria.”

Her first trip there, in 2012, was tentative. “I met people in the area, and hung around to see what the situation was, and assess what I might do. The next time I went out, I took it a bit further. I didn’t just turn up and hurtle into Syria in a taxi and hope for the best.”

Beals spent so much time living “a divided life” between Syria and London that she eventually decided to base herself on the border in southern Turkey so as to cover the conflict full-time.

The “career and lifestyle change” was a no-brainer, she says, in part because the war is “so full-on”, so changeable, so hard to understand that “you do have to be completely immersed in it” to do it justice. But, as “quite a risk-averse person”, she spent the best part of two years preparing for the move.

A friend who had fought in a war helped prepare her for the harsh reality of what she was likely to see and experience. “He was very brutal with me; he sat me down every couple of weeks to say ‘You can stop now if you want, there’s no turning back once you’ve seen some of these things’.”

Beals also took a hostile environments training course before she “ever set foot anywhere near Syria”, in which she learned first aid, bush craft, how to handle herself at hostile checkpoints or in a kidnapping situation.

“Doing a role-play of kidnapping makes you think, ‘I’m going somewhere where that’s an option’,” she says. “If you completely lose your shit in a role-play, then perhaps going somewhere where that might actually happen to you is maybe not the best idea.”

“Your gut is everything and you have to listen to it. If it says no, then you don’t go. You have to trust the people that you’re working with. You have to have a policy of yes means yes, and no means no, and you should always go with the opinion of the least-brave person even when it’s a pain in the arse.”

Preparing herself to cover the conflict took considerable investment of both time and money, but she’s critical of those who don’t take the same precautions. Living on the border, she sees plenty of them – often young, sometimes looking for a career change, with “this romanticised idea of what war reporting is … [and] an EasyJet flight from London they got for 150 quid”.

“We see some insane people turning up with no money and getting a taxi to God knows where and throwing themselves at the mercy of a bunch of people they’ve never met …

“They don’t think it through, and they don’t have the right training or the proper gear, because it’s expensive. … But I’d argue if you don’t want it bad enough to save up for some first aid training and a bulletproof vest, and to spend two or three years on the border meeting people and learning about the war, then you don’t want it bad enough to take the risk.”

And the risk is very real in Syria, the most deadly country in the world for journalists on the job. Kidnapping is a “huge problem”, says Beals: less than two months ago, two Times journalists were kidnapped, beaten and shot at by a Syrian rebel gang, only just escaping with their lives.

As such, many foreign media organisations have pulled their correspondents out of harm’s way, relying instead on coverage from freelancers like Beals, for whom they are not liable. “I don’t have a corporate lawyer who says ‘Oh no, we’re not doing that’. The big institutions have other things to consider. If one of their correspondents gets kidnapped, they get scared about liability, the insurer freaks out and their premiums go up.”

But the other side of the coin, Beals doesn’t have the backing of a large media organisation in the worst-case scenario. About 30 foreign correspondents have been kidnapped since the conflict began, she says, and some have been incarcerated for as long as two and a half years.

“My blood runs cold at the very thought of it … if a bomb lands on my head, I don’t know anything about it. There’s some bizarre, morbid comfort in that.”

Some have had their release paid for – a problematic solution, she says, in that it incentivises kidnappers. “If you’re the next person to cross the border in an economy where there’s been essentially no economy for coming up four years, you have a price tag on your head.”

 I was just sitting in the back seat thinking ‘These people are going to put you in a basement and cut off your head and it’s going to be terrible’

She was made painfully aware of the danger on a trip to Aleppo last August. Al Qaeda-backed militants were starting to take over the rebel-held north, and kidnappings had been reported a few months earlier, but in Aleppo, the situation seemed stable.

“I thought ‘I can cope with this, this is all right’. And then I turned on Facebook one day and found a friend had been kidnapped and I turned on Facebook the next day and another friend had been kidnapped, both on their way to or in the city I was in – at which point I completely mentally imploded and basically sat in the foetal position and smoked for 24 hours.”

She called for a ride home, but by then, the militants had taken over the last of the roads to Turkey. “We ended up getting stopped by them.” She pauses. “I just – I was just sitting in the back seat thinking ‘These people are going to put you in a basement and cut off your head and it’s going to be terrible’.”

They didn’t, and it wasn’t, but she was terrified. “I got to Turkey and my friend just ran into my hotel room and sort of tackled me and said ‘I’ve never been so happy to see anyone’. I said ‘You don’t understand, I’ve never been so happy to be anywhere’ … It was ridiculous.”

She pauses again. “But I was all right in the end, thank God.”