Syria (and Beyond) Feature: Missing the Stories Behind the Numbers

Baba Amr in Homs

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Saturday was a bloody day in Syria. The Local Coordinating Committees of Syria report that 42 people died at the hands of the Syrian "security" forces:

"17 martyrs were killed in Homs, seven in Idlib, 14 in Daraa, two in Zabadani in Damascus Suburbs and one martyr each of Saraqeb and Deir Ezzor.

The town of Sahen el Golan, in Daraas province, is reportedly completely surrounded by security forces. Several districts of Hama are under siege, and electricity has been cut. Widespread arrests are reported in multiple suburbs around Damascus, and the LCCS has posted several video galleries today alone, showing widespread, large, and enthusiastic protests nationwide.

Eight defectors also reportedly were killed, though it is unclear where or how.

And so the "new normal", now not so new given that the phrase was coined this summer, continues. I noted at the end of the bloody Friday that preceded the bloody Saturday:

But what is happening in Syria? Often missing in the "more deaths" headline of mainstream media keeps running, is an effective analysis. In Homs, besieged for months, the brutality of attacks in Baba Amr marks yet another escalation, or perhaps even a sign of a desperate regime that has run out of tools besides shells and bullets. In Hama, we see yet more signs that the city may be facing a similar fate. In the Damascus suburbs, the strength of the security forces in the streets suggests that the Assad regime is desperate to keep the protests from moving further into the capital. The reports from Deir Ez Zor in the northeast of the hardest crackdown against protestersin several months, suggests that the regime is worried that if it does not continue to rotate its targets, then it will lose control.

On a day when the media struggled to keep up with the story in Egypt, despite their relatively large presence, coverage of Syria and Bahrain has been marginal. A Syrian activist voiced his displeasure at the coverage, then turned to an outlet like EA to maintain the profile of the story.

Regimes like Iran and Syria developed a simple strategy when faced with unrest: remove the international media, crack down on the protests, and accuse anyone critical of the regime of having a strategy of "velvet revolution". Facing that strategy, the mainstream media has had to rely on eyewitness reports and the accounts of activists. But with the challenge of collecting an verifying those reports, coverage of the Syrian conflict can often take the easy path of "body counts". There is a safety speaking in this generality of death.

This approach whitewashes important details, never seeing the crucial information that helps provide insight into the nature of the conflict. When an important video emerges --- perhaps showing protests in Aleppo or tanks attacking a city for the first time --- that may not be noted, let alone considered picked up by the media. In contrast, when the UN announces that 5000 people have died, then the headline is written.

That is not to say, of course, that the UN announcement is not worthy of front-page mention. But it confirms what we already know, it is a conservative estimate, and it does not provide a window into the current state of affairs. In short, the "news" may not be news at all, only a summary of what has already come and gone.

The consequences? First of all, this plays into a sense of "conflict fatigue". A general audience is buffeted with shocking numbers and grim summaries of conflicts of which they have little understanding, little at personal stake, and even less confidence that they have any ability to fix the situation. A headline of 5000 dead or risks of sectarian violence just plays to a "been there, heard that" reaction. And that is unlikely to yield insight into the complexities of events, let alone possible resolutions.

At the end of the day, it would be easier to use reports from "known" entities and established media, but in Syria, that is not possible because the Syrian regime doesn't want it to be possible, and the media can play into that hand.. Yet it is not impossible to cover the news from a place like Syria. In fact, so many of the predictions and breaking news that EA has published about Syria --- or in other locations like Libya or Bahrain --- has become accepted knowledge weeks or months later. We often have to rely on eyewitness accounts, but these are supported by a lot of work to establish that those claims are reliable.

Syria is far more complicated, and possibly more hopeful, than the media is reporting. The shifting sands of protests and crackdowns point towards a conflict that is far from static, far from predetermined, and far out of the total control of the Syria regime. This is often lost while the world (and, granted, sometimes EA) focuses on Homs and Hama, places where little hope is apparent. And yet Friday's intense attack against Baba Amr suggests that the regime is desperate to do something --- anything --- to win, and it continues to fail to do so. The sectarian strife is real, but it is far from the pervading narrative of this conflict, even if the danger is that it will come to be dominant if the Syrian regime pushes for that strife.

In physics, and anthropology, there is a well-known and fundamental law --- by observing something, you change it. Well, the opposite is also true: by ignoring something, it stays the same. If it misses the significance of the protests, the details of the troop movements, and the day-to-day developments, the media is less knowledgeable about the big picture. And that is not a bystander's failure, for it is that coverage that lays the groundwork for the international conversation about Syria, as well as some of the internal discussion.

The story in Syria is too important to get wrong.