The Guerrilla Journalists Defying ISIS One Video at a Time

One of the Human Rights Foundation's goals is to support courageous human rights activists around the world, to connect them to people who can help, and find ways to give them a bigger voice. Today we'd like to share an update about Abdalaziz Alhamza, a Syrian activist who founded Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, a campaign that exposes the atrocities committed by the Assad regime and ISIS. After Abdalaziz spoke at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2016, we invited him to join HRF at the SXSW festival in Austin, where he met and was interviewed by WIRED. Their profile of his work was just published as Abdalaziz's documentary City of Ghosts opens in theaters nationwide. Read an excerpt of the WIRED story below and the full article here.
 

The Guerrilla Journalists Defying ISIS One Video at a Time

By Issie Lapowsky

July 7, 2017

It's 8:30 a.m. on a blindingly sunny Texas morning in March, and most of Austin is still passed out. Abdalaziz Alhamza—Aziz for short—is one exception. The night before, the 25-year-old had salsa-danced and chain-smoked into the early morning hours with his fellow millennials who flock to this city each year for the 24-7 party that is the South by Southwest music, tech, and film festival.

Alhamza snagged only about four hours of sleep, so when he emerges bleary-eyed from the bathroom of his Airbnb the next morning with pillow marks still etched on his bearded face and a t-shirt that reads F*CK YOU hugging his scrawny torso, he looks, understandably, less than thrilled to find me sitting on the couch waiting to talk to him. “Give me one second,” he mutters before scurrying upstairs to collect himself.

He descends minutes later, this time in thick black glasses and a black hoodie with two faces embroidered on it in white thread. On one side is the unmistakable profile of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. On the other is the visage of some nameless ISIS fighter, with a high turban and long beard. Above their faces it reads “WANTED,” and it looks, at a distance, like one of those novelty sweatshirts you might find hanging outside a boardwalk gift shop. It’s not until Alhamza joins me on the couch that I finally make out the full message. It doesn’t say “WANTED.” It says “WANTED by.” As in: The man wearing this hoodie is on the run.

“My friend made this for me,” Alhamza says, glancing down at his chest. It’s clever, because it’s true. Though he doesn’t quite look the part, sitting here rubbing sleep from his eyes, Alhamza is, in fact, a wanted man, targeted by both the Assad regime and ISIS’s international army of zealots. His crime: Telling the world about what’s really happening in his ravaged hometown of Raqqa, Syria. [...]

[In] April 2014, Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently was born. A team of about 17 anonymous correspondents inside Raqqa began collecting videos: starving civilians waiting in bread lines, a man tied to a cross being driven through the streets, dead bodies strewn around the town square. The videos were sent clandestinely via satellite internet to about 10 correspondents stationed at safe houses in Turkey and Germany, including Alhamza, who would then share them on Facebook and Twitter in Arabic and eventually, English.

Inside Raqqa, where internet access is prohibited, the team would graffiti walls around town with messages like, “Down with ISIS,” and distribute pamphlets disguised as ISIS magazines aimed at dissuading people from joining ISIS’s ranks. “They became their own publisher and a source for multiple other publishers,” says Thor Halvorssen, CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, who met Alhamza in the group’s early days. “It would have been impossible for RBSS to do the things that they do without social media.” [...]

A crowd is already forming around the Cinépolis Chelsea Theater for a New York screening of City of Ghosts in mid-April, when Alhamza rushes into the nearby donut shop where we were supposed to meet an hour before, apologizing profusely. He’d lain down at his hotel for a catnap and overslept. Dressed in a black flat brim hat and black zip-up hoodie with leather panels, he blends in with the hipster-chic crowd at the Tribeca Film Festival. In audience Q&As and at after parties following screenings, he’s been in high demand, with New York film types taking his hand in theirs and promising to do their best to get City of Ghosts nominated for an Oscar. It’s exhausting work being the star of a film, but Alhamza isn’t complaining. Getting the attention of American journalists—and audiences—is kind of the point of this whole risky venture.

Alhamza whisks me down the block and into the theater where the film has already begun, and tells me he’ll meet me after. For the next hour and a half, the audience is immersed in the horrors he and the other members of RBSS have endured now for years. We meet a masked reporter inside Raqqa who types messages to the group by candlelight. [...]

As I watch the film, it’s hard for me to square the image of the sleepy kid I met in Austin with the real life hero up on the screen. As Halvorssen put it, “This guy that looks like the character from Where’s Waldo is really a comic book hero.” [...]

Nestled among the well-heeled film festival crowd, Alhamza remains a wanted man who could be targeted even in the US. As he walks the streets of New York during the festival, he’s trailed by a bald, beefy security guard hired by the film studio. Alhamza initially resisted Heineman’s insistence on the extra security. He doesn’t want another person dying to protect him.

Inside the theater, the movie’s credits begin to roll, and several hundred audience members rise to their feet. I turn around to see Alhamza, iPhone in hand, filming the whole thing. There’s no happy ending here, but at least now the world is watching.

Read the rest of the article on WIRED.