A new dawn for Syria? Plus: Paul Conroy on reporting from Homs
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Give the gift of scratches from the California Lottery. A little play can make your day. Please play responsibly. Must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim. We came out of the tunnel. It was like coming up into hell. The regime forces were just shelling the neighborhood of Baba Amra with, you know, 152 artillery shells, Grad rockets. We'd just been blasted into this civilian neighborhood. They said, he will start a war. I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars.

I recognize the challenges from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan and beyond. War, hunger, terrorism. I just find bombs and I find dead people. But it's a really scary thing.

I'm Venetia Rainey. I'm Roland Olyphant. And this is Battlelines. It's Monday, the 9th of December 2024. Today, we're going to be focusing on the extraordinary events in Syria. Within the space of just 10 days, rebels have toppled the Assad regime, ending five decades of the family's authoritarian rule.

Dictator Bashar al-Assad has fled to Russia, one of his main backers during the 14 years of war he waged against his own people. And in the streets of Damascus, Hama, Homs and Aleppo, Syrians are celebrating, saying this is a new dawn for their country.

But there are huge questions about what happens next. How will Hayat Tahir al-Sham rule? Should we believe the group's leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jalani, when he says he'll protect minorities? And what does Assad's departure mean for Iran, Israel and the wider region? We're going to try to answer all these questions and more over the next half hour or so. And we also have a fascinating interview with Paul Conroy, the veteran war photographer who was in Syria with Marie Colvin when she was killed. We've been

We've been working really hard to speak to people inside Syria, but the patchy internet and fast-moving events have made it difficult, so we hope to bring you something like that Friday or next week. Instead, let's start by sharing with you what Damascus, the capital of Syria, sounded like yesterday after it became clear that Bashar al-Assad had really gone. Bashar al-Assad

Significance of this moment really can't be understated for the Middle East. As I said, just 10 days ago, the fall of Assad was completely unthinkable. Roland, how did we get here? We could say it's been a 13-year story since the start of the Arab Spring and the uprising that began the civil war in Syria. But really, this has all been over since, I mean, last Wednesday. Last Wednesday, or Wednesday two weeks ago, the rebel alliance...

which was boxed into a small enclave up around Idlib, which is a city in northwestern Syria, where they'd basically been confined since a ceasefire-ish deal in 2020. This was the last real remnant of the rebels that at one point seemed like they were going to topple Assad before the Russian and Iranian intervention in 2015. All they had left really was Idlib, and they've been there for about four years, stuck. And then mid-last week...

suddenly they launched an offensive. They restarted the war. And at first people watching it said, oh, that's a bit interesting. We haven't seen much movement on the Syrian war for a long time. Maybe not that much to write home about given the context of all the bloodshed and chaos we've seen in the Middle East over the past.

But then, within two, three days, I mean less than three days, by Saturday morning, they've basically, they've entered Aleppo. Not only have they entered Aleppo, they've captured all of it and they've conquered the citadel, the huge medieval castle in the middle of the city, which throughout the civil war was a stronghold for the regime. So when Aleppo fell in 2016, it was basically seen as the defeat of the rebels.

Simultaneously, there's another front that started striking south from Idlib, Aleppo's to the east, so they've gone east. Another front started striking straight south down this highway, which basically, if there wasn't a front line, it's the highway that leads straight to Damascus. And they also started making incredible progress. And first they got to a city called Hama. Within a couple of days after that, they got to a city called Homs. And regime forces were simply...

they were falling like ninepins. And at each point where we thought there was a strong point which the regime was going to be able to stop them, held back, and the regime kept on saying, you know, first it was we're withdrawing to more advantageous positions, we're organizing a counterattack and so on. And it soon became clear that they just didn't have an answer to what the rebels had. The rebels...

There's two elements, I think, here to the rebels' success. One is how well-organized they were. They'd obviously learned lessons from Ukraine and other wars we've had recently. They used a lot of drones, not really a thing in the early stages of the Syrian civil war. An awful lot of mobile, you know, young guys on motorbikes with, you know, big, heavy Russian-mounted machine guns on the back. Not particularly innovative, but nonetheless fast-moving. Surprising the regime didn't have an answer to them. But they also had this elite nighttime commando unit.

The rebels controlled the night. So as soon as the sun went down, their conventional forces stopped fighting. And then this unit who'd been trained for this apparently for months and years, all equipped with night vision goggles, all adapted for fighting in the dark, they went forward. And the regime didn't have apparently any answer. So the rebels were very well prepared. But the flip side is, I think, that there just wasn't any morale there.

on the regime side to fight and resist. And it seems pretty clear that Abu, Muhammad Abu Al Jilani, he's a canny diplomat and political operator. And he clearly made efforts to reach out to a lot of regime commanders in the area. Like the message was clearly put out, melt away, change sides. And that seems to have happened quite a bit. So put it all together, by Saturday evening,

The rebels out of Idlib, they've taken Homs by this point. It's still a good step from Homs to Damascus. But from the south, another rebel group, the remnants of the three Syrian army, burst out of their tiny little enclave, which was on the...

on the Syrian border around a place, no, so the Jordanian border around a place called Al-Hanf. There have also been uprisings in Daraa in the south, which is symbolically the city where the revolution began, but which is regime controlled. And they are charging at Damascus and much closer than the HTS, the guys coming from Idlib. And the two key things, I think, to me that taught me kind of

I remember sitting in bed on Saturday evening, kind of scrolling through my phone. And the two things that told me this was done were, number one, you started seeing civilians coming out and taking over towns and cities before any rebel forces even got there, which meant the fear of the regime had been broken. And the second thing was, there was some of this footage I saw from, allegedly filmed in Damascus, just by a dual carriageway, soldiers taking off their uniforms and putting on civvies.

And that's the sign that something is irreversible at that point. And that was it. Damascus fell. Sunday was a remarkable day. Al-Jilani shows up in the city. He goes to the Umayyad Mosque in the center of Damascus. Basically, him showing up there, it's like William the Conqueror walking into Westminster Cathedral in Damascus.

Westminster Abbey in 1066 or something. There is nothing more that speaks about it is so over for the regime. This is absolutely almost impossible to imagine just a few days ago. And then, of course, there's that kind of symbolism. The other really, the real symbolism about the end of the regime was Sednai Prison, this prison that has been called the

I think it was Amnesty International coined the phrase a human slaughterhouse because of its reputation as basically a torturing and killing ground for opponents of the regime. That was stormed overnight.

Around about 1am on Sunday morning, that's when people were getting in there. We've got the footage. Guys with their AKs trying to shoot the locks off the door. Turns out if you shoot a door lock with your AK, the lock doesn't actually just break like that. So they shot them and you could see them kicking and wrestling, kicking, trying to crowbar. They got them out and then just people coming out of cells.

Another massively symbolic moment. So that's really the story of the past 10 days. Yeah, I think the significance of this moment for Syrians is really, really hard to overstate. This family has been in charge for five decades. Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father, was known for his brutality. Hama, which you mentioned, was...

absolutely bombed to bits back in the 80s and hundreds of thousands of people died. One of the cities that remained quieter during the 2011 uprising because they were scared of what would happen next and rightly so as we saw play out over the next few years.

The Syrian economy is completely stagnated, almost collapsed, shrunk by more than half, in fact, over the last decade or so. And half a million people have been killed that we know of. The UN actually stopped counting deaths in the Syrian civil war after a while because the numbers were so unreliable and they weren't on the ground to be able to verify anything. So places like Sednaya prison, and it's not the only place.

dark hole of a prison in Syria. So many people have just disappeared into these places. People are now looking for relatives who they haven't heard of for years. The scale of the atrocities, as we'll be hearing later from Paul Conroy, that will emerge in the next few months and weeks, I think will be quite shocking.

And I think that very checkered history speaks to why there are such huge celebrations now from Syrians. You know, they really are ecstatic. And this phrase keeps coming up. And that's why we titled the episode around it, This New Dawn for Syria. That's really what people feel like. And I can sympathize with that hope. And myself speaking to other colleagues who were based in the Middle East during the 2010s, and I never went into Syria, but people who did a lot,

We all feel this sense of joy for Syrians and hope that it will lead to a better future. But, you know, there are also so many fears. Anyone who's covered the Middle East over the last decade or so can see how badly some of these uprisings have gone. You know, we look at Libya where they overthrew Muammar Gaddafi and now that place is fractured along so many different lines and there are Islamist groups fighting each other and there's a lot of instability there.

We look at Iraq, they overthrew Saddam Hussein, this long, long time dictator, and things have completely fallen apart there, including a lot of revenge killings between Sunnis and Shias, you know. And we have a similar-ish dynamic in Syria. It is a majority Sunni country, but Bashar al-Assad was part of the Alawite minority. It's about 10% of the population. They're a sort of Shia sect. They're Shia-ish, if I can say that. And they're considered to be apostates by Sunni Muslims, which Hayat Tariq al-Sham, they are Sunni Muslims.

And I think we have to be clear-headed about, you know, Golani is saying, oh, I'm going to protect the minorities. We don't know how much of that is a front. And I think it's reasonable to expect that the Alawite minority and Christians and other people who've collaborated, I suppose, with the regime over the last few years to save their own necks or just because they want to live a normal life, those people probably do have something to fear. Lots of questions, but...

I think the historic examples are not good. There's very often a hangover from revolutions. I think the way the past several days has played out is almost, it's almost textbook. A while ago we had the German political scientist Marcel Drussus on here talking literally about

How Tyrants Fall. It's a fascinating book. I highly recommend you go and read it. What just happened, it ticks all the boxes, right? The sudden melting away of the army, the fleeing, everything down to the euphoria and the looting, and then the storming of his residence and the utterly predictable revelations of disgusting corrupt wealth, the massive garage full of cars and all of this.

So it's textbook. And yes, absolutely. Revolutions always have a headache. You know, this is this is, I think, fair to say, you know, a moment of euphoria that an awful lot of Syrians just want to savor. But no one is no one is asleep, I think, to those to those questions. Yeah. And I think Joe Biden, when he gave a speech yesterday, he reflected some of those fears. You know, he said we will remain vigilant. Make no mistake.

Some of the rebel groups that took down Assad have their own grim record of terrorism and human right abuses. We've taken note of statements by the leaders of these rebel groups in recent days, and they're saying the right things now.

But as they take on greater responsibility, we will assess not just their words, but their actions. We're hearing talk in the UK of trying to reclass them from the UK terrorist list. There's clearly signs that the West want to work with these people. We also heard from Donald Trump. He wrote in big capital letters on social media, this is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved.

whether he'll be able to avoid getting involved is another matter. Roland, can you tell us a bit more about Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and what we know about Jalani? So Hayat Tahrir al-Sham are, as you said, they're a Sunni Islamist group. It's a very complicated history. They are in their way, they were originally themselves kind of an alliance of groups. One of those groups was an outfit called al-Nusra, who were the official al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. When

When they rebranded and joined this alliance that became Hayat al-Hirar Sham, Jalani, who was the leader of the group, publicly broke with al-Qaeda, went on to fight with a lot of the al-Qaeda members who weren't happy with that. He's playing that up.

big time now as I'm no longer one of them I was not you know it was always a kind of alliance of convenience thing with them he's and you can see it in the way he's dressed and the rebranding is quite comprehensive he stopped wearing in the FBI wanted poster or the State Department's wanted poster for him there he is in his kind of

in a headscarf looking, you know, with a long beard looking a bit Osama bin Laden-y, if you like. Nowadays, he doesn't really wear a headscarf. He prefers plain green fatigues. He looks a bit more Fidel Castro or even Volodymyr Zelensky. And I do wonder whether his kind of preference for a military green fleece and a plain pair of combat trousers is...

He's a reflection of him thinking about, you know, OK, how do I send this appeal both to the West and to other Syrians to message that actually we are, we're about a movement of national liberation. We're not about international jihad anymore. He made a very public point of sending his troops to protect Syria.

Christian areas of Aleppo when they captured it. We understand from Kurdish sources that it's HTS who attempted to

to create safe corridors for the Kurdish enclaves in Aleppo. And that, in a way, HDS intervening between the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces, who control northeast Syria, and another faction also in the Lib called the Syrian National Army. Confusingly, that's not the actual Syrian army. They're a rebel group. They are backed by Turkey, just like HDS are, but they are viewed as much more a direct enemy.

proxy of Turkey, and they have launched an offensive against the Kurdish-led SDF while all this is going on. So there's another whole battle that's going on right now, quite intensively, with airstrikes and everything up in northeast Syria right now, which we haven't talked about. The Kurdish sources say HDS are kind of the moderating factor there. So he's sending this message of, I am a unifier. I'm someone who not only can all members of

Syrian society work with, I remember, I'm someone who the West can work with. See, I think, you know, the Russians have already said, well, we've got assurances that he's not going to kick our military out. I don't know how true that is, but you've already seen kind of in Russian rhetoric, the term rebels is mis-terrorist is what they used to call them and now being called the opposition.

And you've also seen Iranian officials, the Iranians and the Russians, back their sad to the fall. They were absolutely key in a lot of the fighting. Now talking about how we'll work with whoever is governing Syria and we'll have a peaceful transfer of power and all of this. Now that might be a pipe dream, it might be pie in the sky, it might be face-saving, but this is a guy, whether or not you believe that his transformation from international jihadist

to kind of progressive national leader is genuine or not. He's definitely a guy who's got the political nous and the diplomatic nous to position himself as a figurehead and a leader in waiting. Now, there'll be a lot of people in Syria and around the world who will be wanting to judge his actions, not his words. And you do have to remember that there's a lot of people who sided with the regime or preferred to be

under the regime because they didn't want to live under that kind of Islamist outfit, if you see what I mean. So huge, huge questions.

The massive question he faces immediately inside Syria is how do you bridge these divisions? We've already talked about the Kurds in the northeast, so they control the northeast corner of the country. It's also home to about 900 U.S. forces. They're deeply allied with the West, but they're absolutely deadly enemies of Turkey. Turkey is attacking them. He's going to have to make a decision about whether he's going to side with them.

or whether he's going to try and bring these guys into his kind of vaguely unified federalized Syria. Then you've got the Free Syrian Army who came up from the south into Damascus. They have much stronger links to America than to Turkey. They're more secular than his Islamist outfits. And then you have over in Latakia on the coast, that's the heartland of the Alawites, the sect that the Assad's a member of.

How do you reach out to those people? How do you control those people? Is it a matter of armed occupation or not? And above all of this, you've got the Israelis moving into parts across from the Golan Heights. You've got the Iranians wondering how they can maintain their interests there. And you've got the Russians all wondering what they can do. And the Americans are present as well. So a massive, massive mess. I wouldn't want to be making any predictions about what comes next.

Yeah, and I think you nod to the sort of huge number of regional actors that are involved. And for anyone listening who's interested in Russia's very specific role in this, and of course, that's where Assad has fled for asylum. I encourage you to listen to Ukraine the latest because we'll be covering that in depth in today's episode.

A few notes then on the other sort of regional actors and the impact that all of this has on them. Israel, Roland, as you mentioned, has taken the opportunity perhaps to retake a buffer zone in the Golan Heights, the occupied Golan Heights. They've been occupied since 1973. Netanyahu said he was doing it for the safety of Israel, sort of invoking this memory of October the 7th. We don't want to have any terrorist or hostile actors right on our

border. But he also said, this is the important part, he also said, oh, that the peace deal we had with Syria after the 1973 war, that's annulled because the regime we signed that with, like 30, 40, 50, however many years ago now, has collapsed, which is quite a pretty bold thing to say. Yeah, so he's taken this extra bit of land and we'll see whether that becomes permanent. In Lebanon, we're seeing refugees queuing at the border, trying to return to Syria.

Probably that will be true in Turkey, Jordan as well. We've got these huge refugee populations that become very established over the last decade across the Middle East and have become the source of poverty as well as economic activity in some places. They'll all be returning and trying to find out what's left of their homes. They'll also be part of the sort of melee that Hayat al-Sham has to deal with. Jordan will be looking on very worried. It wants security. It was never happy with the Arab Spring revolutions. They have a monarchy there. They want peace.

at all costs, the status quo to sort of remain. So they'll be worried about all these actors suddenly being unleashed again and what that means for them. And as you say, Turkey has supported some of the rebel groups in the north and they'll be looking to see what kind of relations they'll have with this new group. So it's a really...

messy picture one we'll continue to keep looking at on this podcast but we'll wrap it up there for now fast moving events and I'm sure things will have changed by the time we get to the end of the week coming up after the break we're going to be speaking to the renowned British war photographer Paul Conroy to hear his reflections on the fall of Assad nearly 13 years after the Syrian regime injured him and killed his colleague reporter Marie Colvin stay with us

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We're joined now by the photographer Paul Conroy, who worked an awful lot in Syria in the early days of the war and was very badly wounded in 2012 in a regime attack in the city of Homs in which his colleague, the Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin, was killed. Paul, watching everything that's happened over the past week, it must have been...

Pretty emotional for you, I suppose. What's your reaction to what we've just seen? It's bittersweet, really, because, I mean, Syria's never been a story that's gone away for me. Ever since I came out and Marie was killed, I've always tried to keep up on it and tried to, you know, you know what the news is like, trying to keep it as a story, keep it alive as a story. It's always difficult when the cameras are pointing the other way.

So watching it, I've been as amazed as everybody else at the speed it's happening. You know, everyone who's interested was kind of aware that because of Russia's situation with Ukraine, Hezbollah with Israel, and Iran having problems, that his support was kind of weakening, but never for a moment imagined it would happen this fast. And to be honest, I've just been...

celebrating along with them I think it's been so long coming for the Syrians you know 50 54 years under that family that mafia family rule and for it to fall like it has you know I I think that allowed their moments in the sun their moments of joy there's a lot of work ahead but for me you know I've got friends out there who've been there for 14 years going through this

And if they're happy, I'm happy. You know, it's quite amazing to watch. Last week, before we knew that this rebel offensive was going to bring down the regime, but they captured Homs, which is, of course, where you were shelled when Marie was killed. You wrote on Blue Sky that day, remembering all my friends from Homs who looked after us in the dark days of 2012 when Marie was killed. We were also badly wounded. You never gave up on us.

And many never made it through. Thank you all. Enjoy the sweet taste of freedom. Could you take us back to those days? Because I think you've also talked about how when you look at these TV pictures, you don't see a faceless jihadist or something like that. You see the person who gave you some shoes, the person who tended you in hospital. Can you walk us through what happened back then and what you remember?

Yeah, so we finished in Libya, Marie and I, and then all eyes were on Syria and in particular Homs, which at that point in January was surrounded by Bashar al-Assad's brothers, Makhaw, the 4th Division. And it was like a ring of steel and everybody was saying, you can't get in, you know, there's no way in. And me and Marie were like, well, we're going to give it a go.

So we kind of befriended the FSA in Beirut. It was quite a process. Met up with the FSA. They kind of vetted us, checked that they actually wanted us going in. That's the Free Syrian Army. The Free Syrian Army, which were very new at that point. You know, they were just essentially deserters from Assad's forces who didn't want to fire on civilians.

So once we got the clean through, then we kind of went through the Bacar Valley over the mountains from Lebanon into Syria. And from the moment you set foot in Syria, it was a different ballgame entirely. In Libya, we could run around and go to the front and come back. Once you were in Syria, you were in regime territory. And it took about three, four days traveling at night in the backs of trucks or motorbikes to actually get anywhere near Homs.

because there were Hezbollah checkpoints and government-controlled checkpoints, neither of which we wanted to bump into. We then stayed a couple of days in a place called Al-Bweda, where they told us they'd take us through a tunnel to get into Homs. Now, I had an image of a little tunnel kind of under the road, because the road was floodlit and patrolled.

that we'd kind of go under the road and pop out 50 meters later as as you would imagine a tunnel under a road was the tunnel was actually three miles long and it was a concrete sewer tunnel that you could just about stand up in we walked down that for three miles there was very little oxygen

It was baking hot. It was about 10 meters below ground, so the heat buildup was intense. And it was just the worst thing I've ever done, that tunnel. We came out of the tunnel and we came, it kind of, it was like coming up into hell. It was just exploding around us. The regime forces were just shelling the neighborhood of Baba Amra.

with, you know, 152 artillery shells, Grad rockets, all the big, heavy, wide area battlefield weapons you can imagine were just being blasted into this civilian neighborhood. And initially, you know, we arrived at night. There wasn't a building that wasn't touched. And we just thought there was no one there. We thought, oh, we've come into a deserted neighborhood.

but when you started looking you'd see these pale little faces kind of peering out of the rubble and you know the next day when we finally got some information 25 000 people were hiding in the rubble and these buildings but they would start at like 5 36 a.m and they would start shelling and that shell and would go on till 10 11 12 o'clock at night it never really stopped it always decreased a little bit

And you can imagine, you know, being a parent with a child or an elderly person in these situations. It was beyond belief. We then, we thought, right, okay, let's go to the field clinic. It was run by a guy called Dr. Muhammad Muhammad, who was quite famous. He'd been, he'd done a lot of YouTube videos where he was calling on the world for help. He was trying to point out what was happening.

And to get to the field clinic, we had to just run. You had to just run the gauntlet. There were snipers on all of the tall buildings. There were incoming mortars and shells and rockets. And it was literally about six of us got together, got to the corner of the road, ran across the road, explosions everywhere, you know, sniper bullets hitting the ground. And it was intense activity. We arrived at the field hospital, which was...

I think it was this, Dr. Muhammad's seventh field hospital he'd run. All the others had been blown up during the course of the last six weeks. And it was a kid's nursery. There was like mobiles hanging up there and cots pushed into the corner. But against all the sides of the walls, they were just stacking dead bodies. It was too dangerous to take the dead out to bury them.

So they were being kept there till nighttime when I think they'd try and bury them. But the floor was, you know, people mopping the blood up off the floor, people being treated with no anesthetics. There was nothing. They were essentially using first aid kits. They were using, they had no oxygen, no x-rays, their bandages and scissors and pins. That was the level of their hospital.

From there, we went to the widow's basement, which was so cool because it's where all the women who'd lost husbands, who'd lost their fathers, they had children. It was one of the few basements in Homs, in Baba Amra. And it was just about a couple of hundred people crammed into this basement. And it was the most pitiful, awful sight ever.

You could imagine. But Marie was on fire at this point. She just looked and this was, you know, this was what she did. She told the story of war through the eyes really of the most vulnerable and the most vulnerable are generally the women and the children. So, you know, she wrote that story, you know, and it was just so, so powerful, the piece that she got out, you know, and hopefully the pictures did it some justice.

During this period, they were just trying to keep us alive long enough to get these stories out because it was just lethal. And a lot of the guys who took us in, every day we found them, they were killed. The other guy was killed. Some of the activists and the journalists we were working with in the media center, they'd go out and just not come back. And the situation was deteriorating daily, constantly.

Till it got to the point after we filed the widow's basement story, it got to the point where I just said to Marie, I said, look, mate, we're unlikely to be able to file another story. You know, this is, I think we've pushed our luck a little too far here. Let's, you know, do what we can. Let's try and do some interviews, you know, with the TV. We discussed it with the activists and the local journalists.

And that night we did BBC Channel 4, and then we did a piece with CNN, Anderson Cooper, in which Marie described a kind of awful scene of a baby hit with shrapnel in her stomach who just died because they couldn't get it to the field hospital, where I think it would have died anyway. And after that, that was the last interview. And at 6am the next morning, we were going to go to the...

Back to the field hospital to try and get one more story before we were going to try and get out. But, you know, we both knew getting out was not going to happen, really. And that's when the first shell landed, or the first rocket. It was about 50 metres, 100 metres away to one side and another hit 50 metres, 100 to the other side.

Then when the second explosions came about 30 seconds later, I knew exactly what was happening. They were bracketing. They were walking the shells in, adjusting the fire. And I knew 30 seconds later we were going to be hit. And sure enough, a rocket hit the top of the building, causing a couple of the floors to come in. Another one then hit the back of the building, which blew the back off.

And then it was chaos in the place and people were shouting, get out, get out. And I was kind of saying the opposite. I was saying, get in, stay in. You know, in a situation like that, any wall is protection. You don't want to be in the open. But Marie and Remy, French photographer who was also in there, they ran towards the door and a shell landed, a rocket landed just in front of them, killed them instantly.

And I didn't realize I'd been hit. I was kind of, I was still standing. I couldn't hear a thing that the noise of the explosion kind of deafened me temporarily. And I had the sensation that something had hit my leg. So I reached down and felt it. And as I did, my hand just went, put my hand on my inner thigh and my left leg, and it just came out the other side of my leg. It went straight through.

And I knew that I had to get, you know, all my tourniquet and all my Eiffach, my first aid kit had been blown away. So all I had was a scarf, which I wrapped around my leg and just put a make-do tourniquet on. But then they started shelling again. And I fell over outside, fell next to Marie and Remy. And I had to lay there. I think it was about 15, 20 minutes while he carried on shelling.

I was laying in a massive pool of my own blood, so the tourniquet hadn't worked. I was still bleeding out. So I reached into the rubble and found an Ethernet cable, which I wrapped around my leg and then cranked up with a piece of wood, and I think I stopped the bleeding then. And then they just came out and grabbed me and pulled me back into what remained of the house, the other journalists and activists who were in there.

and put a cigarette in my mouth, lit it, and said, wait, you know, until when the shelling's over, we'll get you back to the field clinic. We'll get you to the field clinic. Maybe 10 minutes later, they threw me in the back of a pickup truck and drove me to the field clinic. And there's Dr. Mohammed, our mate Dr. Mo. And he just looks at me and he's like,

what's the problem, Paul? And I went, I appear to have a hole in my leg. And he kind of had a look and he went, oh, so you have. And he goes, hang on. And he walks off and gets a hacksaw. And he goes, I'll cut it off. And I go, pardon? I said, have you got any painkillers? And he went, we've got paracetamol. And I was like, you could have cut my leg off on paracetamol. And he went, it's for the best. And I was like, oh, no, no, no, no.

No, I said, we won't be doing that. You know, try and fix it. And if I live, great. And it has to be cut off, then that's okay. But I'm not having to chop my leg off with a hacksaw on two paracetamol. So, yeah, I mean, but they looked after us. Then they took us to a room. Edith Bouvier, she was really injured, badly injured. Wael, our translator, was badly injured. And for four or five days,

The regime carried on their attempt at killing us. They kind of knew we'd survived because they put some kind of videos of us on YouTube saying, you know, we're trapped in Homs, blah, blah, blah. So the regime knew that we hadn't been killed. You know, for four or five days, they just shelled the life out of the building we were in to finish the job. You know, they hadn't finished the job.

And all this time, you know, there was very little food in Baba Amra. All the water tanks on the roofs had been hit, so there was no water really. It was icy, so they had to, you know, if you wanted water, you melted snow or melted ice. And they were just giving us what they had. You know, I'll never forget them. That was just a time when there was nothing. We were injured. We were essentially dying.

They stuck with us. They fed us. They gave us what medications they could find. They brought us cigarettes. On the final day, it just got so bad that they came in. They said, right, we have to get out now. The regime are coming in. If they find us, we're all dead. They're coming in. They threw us in the back of pickup trucks. And that's when Abu Laila looked at me and I had no shoes. My shoes had got blown off or pulled off or cut off.

So this guy just took his own training shoes off and bent down and put them on my feet so I didn't have to escape barefoot. Put us in the truck and we just drove through the front line. We just drove at it and we thought we either make it or we don't. And a lot of people didn't. You know, a lot of people were killed on that insane drive through. We just punched through their lines till we got back to the tunnel that we'd come in on where they literally tied the rope around me, dropped me down this hole,

and at the bottom and remember there was there were women and children like kind of hiding all in this tunnel and they cut down a motorbike made a little mini motorbike to transport people through the tunnel and they said get on it and i was gonna can't get on it you know there's women and kids here they they really should be going before me and they were like no absolutely not and they said you know we've been trying to tell the world

about what's happening here. You know, they're obviously not listening. We need you to get out and tell the story. And so that was a kind of deal made at the time. You know, they get me out, I tell the story, which is why

For the last 12, 13 years, I may have been sounding a bit like an old stock record telling their story, but, you know, they got me out. That isn't the kind of thing you take lightly. Do you know what happened to Dr. Muhammad and to Abu Laila? Abu Laila was killed. I know that. I got that news a few years ago. Dr. Muhammad, at the time we made the film Under the Wire, Dr. Muhammad had been out, had a baby,

and had gone back into Syria. I think he was in Idlib, treating people in Idlib. And obviously now that there's an opportunity, I'm already starting to think about going back and looking for some of the people who saw us through these times. You'll be looking to catch up with him? Yeah, yeah. You've given us a very visceral description of the incredible violence of Israel

This is the early stages of the war, remember? So it started in 2011. This is in 2012. It went on for a long time. And you've also described very convincingly, you know, what you're convinced was the regime's attempt to murder you and Marie and the other journalists. Do you have a sense of justice after what happened on Sunday with the fall of the Assad regime?

I think seeing the regime fall, obviously, is a joy. I think we've been cheated. You know, when I saw that he'd arrived in Moscow, I figured he would. You know, I didn't think he was... He's not the character to make a last stand and go out in a blaze, you know. So I didn't think he was going to be in the palace in Damascus, surrounded by his loyalist guards. I figured...

So there is a sense of justice in the fact that, you know, Syria is now free, but I would like to have seen him answer for what he did to the Syrian people. You know, there are so many. I think at this point in time, we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg, you know, with going into the prisons and the documents, you know, that I think what is to follow is going to be eye-wateringly difficult.

But I think, you know, he took the coward's way out. He's gone to Moscow with his family. Paul, thank you very much. My co-presenter, Venetia Rainey, sitting here has been listening. Anything you'd like to ask? Yeah, I'm just wondering, and thank you so much for sharing that story with us. It's really powerful to hear, I guess, as well, the lengths that journalists went to get that story out. I wonder if you feel that the world abandoned Syria over these 13, 14 years now.

because all the sort of red lines that were crossed that America is going to back up. And their fate was kind of just abandoned. Assad just stayed in power. And actually the rest of the Arab world was starting to embrace him last year, wasn't it? Yeah, that was my biggest fear that they would, you know, they would normalize the situation and welcome him back into the fold. I think really what was so painful is when the chemical weapons were used.

And it was proved they were used and there were red lines drawn. And when nothing happened, I think that was the signal where, hey, actually, the press aren't here. We've used chemical weapons. There's been no real sanction or punishment. And I think at that point, it's almost as if the West kind of washed their hands of Syria and that

really did allow for other state players, you know, for Iran, for Hezbollah. That's when Russia came in. Turkey became heavily involved. And I think we gave up our place at the table with Syria. And for Assad, it was carry on. It was business as usual. And that was really hard to watch because we knew just because it wasn't in the headlines, it wasn't happening.

It carried on happening. And yeah, the last few years, seeing them kind of being normalized and brought back into the fold with the Arab League, and that was very painful to watch. And, you know, you felt like you'd just been banging your head against the wall for so long. And now this was happening. Did it shake your faith in journalism? I mean, you described how, you know, you made this deal, we'll get you out and you tell the world. And Marie's whole kind of driving...

kind of thought idea philosophy about you know telling the world what's happening for the most vulnerable people um and i suppose a lot of us you know do this job and imagine that that makes a difference did it did it make you question the value of you know what what we all do of course we would like to have you know prevented what we were seeing in homes happening by showing the world you know the idea is you go there and you go hey well this is really bad have a look at this

world goes, that is really bad. Let's do something to stop it. When that doesn't happen, of course, it's, oh my God, you know, you can't say you never knew. I think I have a slightly longer term look at things now because over the years, I've been testifying at war crimes tribunals.

Submitting evidence, especially on the Syria case. And, you know, hopefully in the long term, there's some advantage to what we do. That record, that document and that bearing witness, you know, will have a longer term payoff when it comes to people hopefully answering questions.

some questions and you know evidence is always evidence so yes it's this art and of course we'd always like to see a result of what we do and think what we do will somehow make a difference but then I can soul myself with the maybe in 10 years time it will be of some use again. Paul Conroy thank you so much for sharing your story. All right thanks for having us mate cheers.

That was such a fascinating chat, Roland. Have you worked with Paul a lot before? So I first met Paul. This is a mad story in a way. It was 2019 and it was when ISIS had been, it was the very end of ISIS. They'd been boxed into this little town called Begouz down on the Euphrates.

And we thought they were going to fall imminently, but it went on and on and on. So we had our Middle East correspondent, Josie Ansell, was there for about three weeks, became exhausted, had to withdraw. We sent our guy from Jerusalem, Rafa Sanchez, three weeks, became exhausted, had to withdraw. It's my turn. I went in. And the way he did it is you'd go to Kurdistan, northern Iraq, and you'd cross the river there on a ferry into Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria called Rojava.

So I get there and it's, I've never really done that much reporting in that part of the world. And you're on your kind of, on your toes, kind of a bit nervous about what you're going to get. But you're also on the lookout for competition. It's a double-edged sword meeting other journalists on the road. It's like, it's good because you've got an ally. You're on the right track, but there's also an ally and they're potentially like the people you need. And you're going to help each other out. On the other hand, you're like, oh God, damn. So I get into this...

the Iraqi side of the border. I'm sitting in the waiting room doing my paperwork. And then there's this really weird crew there. And there's this extremely glamorous young lady with long blonde hair, looking fantastic. And some other hipster dudes around her and stuff. And I'm looking at them thinking, oh God, it's Vice News, isn't it? Typical. Cool looking at them. The one person who stood out of this crew was this...

kind of old, craggy-faced, scouse man who everything about him said veteran war reporter. So this is a really weird set-up. I thought, this is mad. Is this an annoying vice crew who's going to stamp around everywhere, kind of doing their aren't-we-crazy stuff? Oh, God, how am I going to cope with this? Are we getting a minibus to go across the ferry? I was sitting next to this

this man is like how are you um it turns out it's paul conroy and he's been hired and and it's not a vice crew it's joss is it just stone this jazz musician and she decided she was going to do a singer gig in every single country on the planet right and she'd hired paul to be a photographer so to tick syria off the list they were just going across the ferry

into Rojava to do a gig there so she could say she'd sung in Syria. It was Paul's first time backing out. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I was like, you're the Paul Conroy. He goes, yeah, I haven't been back since. I was like, are you? He's like, yeah, better not. Would you mind not publishing the fact I'm here because the regime? I was like, yeah, yeah, don't worry, mate. Absolutely mad. That's where I met him for the first time. And I think

I think you got a sense there what an amazingly collegiate

absolute joy he is to meet on the road. Yeah, it was an absolutely fascinating discussion. I remember being in Beirut during that red lines that Paul mentioned when Obama, it became clear that Obama wasn't going to do anything. And it was just such a seismic moment in Lebanon. I think everyone was half hoping that Obama wouldn't bomb Syria because of the chaos and hell it would unleash into Lebanon. The spillover of the conflict had already, you know, put ISIS on the border, sent over waves of Syrian refugees, and

But there was also this sense of, OK, no one's going to do anything about Assad. We've crossed that line now. That's all for this week's episode of Battle Lines. We'll be back again on Friday. Battle Lines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles. The producer is Jolene Goffin.

To stay on top of all of our news, analysis and dispatches from the ground in Israel and Gaza, subscribe to The Telegraph or sign up to Dispatches, which brings stories from our award-winning foreign correspondents straight to your inbox. We also have a live blog on our website where you can follow updates as they come in throughout the day, including insights from contributors to this podcast. If you appreciated the show, please consider following Battlelines on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave a review as it helps others find the show.

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